Holtz Communications + Technology

I recently read a post taking issue with the number of blog posts that employ lists. You know the posts I’m talking about. Just today, Mashable offered, “Six Slick Ways to Customize Your Kicks Online.” Problogger recently offered, “5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence.” Copyblogger offers, “6 Questions to Ask Before You Spend a Dime on Graphic Design.”

Jay Dolan, author of “The Anti-Social Media” blog, argues…

Update, July 27: I’ve added a statement I just received from Anne Wiley at the bottom of the post.

Early this month, Liam FitzPatrick, who manages Change and Internal Communication for Bell Pottinger, argued in a post titled “Who Cares About Writing Skills?” that good writing should not be a requirement for professional communicators. Specifically, he wrote:

To be honest I don???t think being a good…

A tweet directed me to a TechCrunch guest post titled, “Dear Authors, Your Next Book Should be an App, not an iBook.”

While the post’s author, 21-year-old startup exec Cody Brown, doesn’t exactly make the case that books are dead, he does suggest that authors eyeing the iPad as a platform for their books are “missing the point:”

What do you think would have happened if George Orwell had…

Not everyone agrees, but I’ve always loved newspaper headlines that employ the art of the pun.

Not every headline writer should try their hand at this technique. A special skill-set is required to pull off a really dynamite pun. Most headline puns are stretches, ill-conceived or repetitive. (Many travel writers have worn out their welcome with headlines like Czech It Out and…

Last week, after seeing some particularly egregious corporate jargon, I queried my Twitter followers about their least favorite jargon. Here are the responses I got:

• Leveraging low-cost locations (as a euphemism for moving US jobs overseas)
• Class-leading
• Value-added (One of Dave Fleet’s 10 most irritating PR phrases)
• A value-add proposition
• Impact (used as a verb)
• Synergy
• Leveraging synergies
• Working as designed
• Bandwidth (as in “I don’t have the bandwidth to help…

Maybe I’m just getting old and curmudgeonly, but I find myself growing increasingly irked when I read blog posts and tweets from communicators and PR practitioners that feature incorrect punctuation in the word “its.” My sensitivity to this error may be increasing but it seems to be occurring more and more often.

It doesn’t bother me all that much when I see the mistake in the…