Category: Contentions
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Medium Day topics
Medium recently announced a call for Medium Day, which takes place August 12. When I wrote my first post for Medium, over a decade ago, I was in between graduating college and my first job at Pivotal Labs (and even tried to make Medium a part of its content strategy). I received an invitation to…
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Contentions: Track your rewriting
When I edited my book Creative Doing with Rachel and the Holloway team, we worked together mostly in two different documents. Cumulatively, there were 3,016 suggested changes and 240 comments across both documents. Those numbers sound reasonable to me, though I wouldn’t be shocked if that’s an underestimate; we spent a lot of time on…
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The only way to change someone’s mind
“Getting a prospect to admit their “mistake” borders on the impossible. All you’ll do is irritate or antagonize your prospect. That is not the way to persuade them to buy from you.… No, the prospect won’t change their mind, but they will be delighted to make a new decision, based on new information,” writes Zig…
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Getting to know a business
If you’ve ever wanted to start a company, or write a book, or make something meaningful, it helps to go through the process as the person who’s paying for it. If you’re starting a company, figure out your potential competitors and see if you can work with them as a customer. If you want to…
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Contentions: Names set expectations
What’s the difference between a book, an ebook, a digital book, a pamphlet, a booklet, a brochure, and a bulletin? By strict definition, they share a lot of common traits. They are all documents that hold words on them. The main difference is what each word leads a person to expect. For example, a book…
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Contentions: Long live typing
Author Luke Burgis puts forward the question, is typing dead? Luke had tried a new AI voice dictation app. From a text generation perspective, both language learning models and voice dictation seem more efficient. I did the same a few years ago, which I covered for Forge here. An excerpt: In dictating this piece, I…
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Fan non-fiction
Fan non-fiction is a book, article, or text about real facts, people and events, conveyed through the characters, stories, and lore of a particular novel, film, etc. It’s a great way to get someone interested in learning about a topic that would’ve otherwise bored them immensely. Elvia Wilk writes, “First I point—then, you notice my…
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A deliverable is just an artifact
Project deliverables—a final draft, an app in production, a strategy or plan, etc.—are great. They’re not easy to make, and they only exist because a person or group of people gave a ton of emotional energy to breathe life into them. We focus on the project deliverable because we can see and touch it. We’ve…
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Contentions: What A.I. will not disrupt in marketing, editing, and writing
Some friends of mine have recently asked me, “What do you think of A.I.’s implications for your field of work?” I work professionally in marketing, editing, and writing. I also wrote a book, and I write every day at my blog. My initial response was to discuss the difference between text generation and writing, though…
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Fictional brands
The fictional brands archive is one of the most intriguing directories I’ve come across in a long time. Merchandise from these fictional brands have occasionally made their way into the physical world, which is always fun.