Facttactic's online PR journal

Ever struggled with how to best structure your writing? Here are some style guides that may be useful. Some are free online tools; some are available to purchase online …

For journalists and freelance writers:

• The Guardian has a detailed style guide on its website.
• The Economist has some good guidelines online here.
• The Chicago Manual of Style is online as a subscription service.
• The Associated Press Stylebook is a well known tool for journalists and can be purchased here.

For technical writers:

• Read Me First, an IT style guide from Sun: it’s been online for a while now and not all pages are online but it’s a great online resource if you don’t have ready access to a style guide.
• The 2011 IBM style guide comes out next month and at a reasonable price.
• Microsoft’s Manual of Style (3rd Edition) is worth consulting from time to time, but it’s 7 years old now and so not worth purchasing — and no word, that I’ve seen, about when Edition 4 (currently being written) comes out.

For legal writing, here is the New Zealand Law Foundation’s guide.

For academic writing, the APA style guide is often used. Waikato University has key APA guidelines on its site.

For business writing, the Gregg Reference Manual is well known in the United States and can be purchased here.

For scientific writing:

• The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing is an online searchable tool.
• Oxford University Press has a web page of styles
• NASA has 100 pages online about grammar, punctuation, and capitalisation!

(0) Comments | Tags: Education, Journalism, style guides, Technical writing, Writing

We have a new page up on the site highlighting Facttactic’s project management services; and in the next few days we’re publishing client testimonials on another new page on the site. Just some mid-winter site upgrades we hope will be of use to you.

(0) Comments | Tags: project management

Congrats to the organisers of the TCANZ conference for 2010 … great speakers, good turnout, comfy, well-serviced venue and interesting discussions.

Read a summary of each of the main talks here under ‘Recent Posts’.

The write-ups come from Sarah Maddox, a tech writer from Atlassian in Sydney and one of the speakers at the event, who blogged her way through the two days as the rest of us sat and listened to the speakers. Thanks, Sarah, for getting it all down for the record and for access to some really useful tech writer resources.

(Note: if you’re reading this post some time in the future [!], the posts will likely have moved on from ‘Recent Posts’ — search for “TCANZ” in Sarah’s blog ‘ffeathers’. All the conference posts are tagged.)

(1) Comment | Tags: Intranet, Technical writing, Wiki

A bit of light-hearted language nonsense here, but apparently the following is a real sentence!

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Wikipedia explains.

(0) Comments | Tags: Language, Writing

Mamihlapinatapai … well, I guess you already know it’s a word from the Yaghan language (Tierra del Fuego), but what does it mean?! It’s a … “look shared by two people, each wishing the other would initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”

We won’t be squeezing it into a media release any time soon, but we like it and think it deserves its place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word” and its reputation as one of the hardest words to translate.

(0) Comments | Tags: Language, Writing

Following on from our previous post on PR measurement, here’s a great piece from 2009 from American PR guy Don Bartholomew on five things to forget and five things to learn when measuring PR work.

(1) Comment | Tags: Measurement, PR, PR tools, Public Relations

Didn’t make the just-completed PRINZ annual conference this year, but this conference take-out is a useful reference: Six golden rules for media and PR measurement.

(0) Comments | Tags: Measurement, PR, PR tools, Public Relations

Here are some numbers: online advertising now accounts for around 10 percent of the total advertising spend in New Zealand; and the total online advertising spend for the first quarter of 2010 was $53.32m, up 12.31 per cent from the previous quarter.

It’s a not dissimilar level to the global online spend, with the Internet increasing its share of the global ad market from 10.5 per cent in 2008 to 12.6 per cent in 2009, (overtaking magazines for the first time) and expected to increase to more than 17 percent in 2012, according to communication firm ZenithOptimedia.

Put that alongside a trend visible mainly in the United States so far, where wealthy sponsors are starting to back online community newspapers to fill holes in local news coverage caused by shrinking newsrooms at traditional papers, and a pronounced swing to online communications is becoming clearly visible.

Or perhaps, more accurately, the value of online communication is being recognised and understood.

Do you get your news by picking up a paper from the dairy on the way to work, or is it easier to do some surfing at morning tea from your desk? Do you find products and services in magazines and newspapers or on TV; or do you turn to the net as your first port of call?

And, more importantly, where are your customers finding out about you? Online, online, online.

(0) Comments | Tags: Advertising, Customers, Internet

The world’s oldest profession has long been a euphemism for a very particular job but now a London researcher has found that technical writing is right up there, having traced the history of the user manual to a 4BC Babylonian clay tablet that details a step-by-step “guide to inducing dreams”.

And … not quite so old, but full of contemporary history, this Wired photo essay of classic instruction manuals from the 1960s is a good read, especially if you are looking for the air-con on a spy plane or the start button on a nuclear power plant.

(0) Comments | Tags: Technical writing

We spend a lot of our time as a business working out ways to communicate our clients’ core values and messages in different representations to different audiences. In light of that, I enjoyed this article about a circus troupe of Colombian street kids who now tour the world and thrill people with their skills, and in particular a quote from their trainer, who said: “What we do is change the representation of these kids … because when somebody who before maybe sniffed glue or begged on a corner is suddenly doing a double somersault, you’re not looking any more at a poor, illiterate delinquent, but you’re saying, ‘Wow, that’s a double somersault.’?”

(0) Comments | Tags: Branding, Perception, Reputation management