Noun string are, as you might suppose, a series of nouns. Here’s one:

competitive price options

That’s easy to understand. The nouns competitive and price serve as adjectives to modify options.

Deciphering noun strings gets tougher with each noun you toss into the string.

Alternative regulated competitive price options

Postoperative recuperation program procedure indicator sheet

In a noun string, the writer uses a series of nouns as adjectives to modify the final noun. That’s what makes a noun string tough to read: At each noun the reader hesitates, wondering if he should understand this as a noun or as a …

When I begin editing a client’s draft, I invariably find these two duos of confusion:

Since used to mean because

Like used to mean such as

Let’s look at each of these pairs of confusion.
Since or Because?

• Since refers to time:

It’s been years since I’ve eaten s’mores!

• Because refers to consequence:

I avoid s’mores because of my marshmallow allergy.

Oh, yes, it does make a difference.

Look at these two nearly-identical sentences about Rafe’s love life. Changing just one word changes the sentence’s meaning.

Since he broke up with flaxen-haired Dominique, Rafe’s dated brunettes.

…

What is Social Media?
Social Media is a vehicle to share information with a broad audience twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In addition to being any form of online publication or presence that allows users to engage in multi-directional conversations, it is a way to build relationships with the public. Online tools allow businesses to keep in touch with customers and easily update them on what’s new, whether it is products, services, events, an interesting insight or a new hire to the team. Basically, Social Media is the “wave of the now.”
What to know about Social Media
Social Media …

Well, we finally made it to Facebook. Just like any other small business, we struggled with the decision of whether or not to have a presence in Facebook. It’s free to start; it’s simple to use… but the reality is that it’s an investment of internal resources—mostly time. But given the staggering statistics of how much Facebook is used, we decided to give it a shot. Here’s how we did it.
1. We decided on content
We took this as an opportunity to have a balance of work-related posts and fun/personal ones with the goal of showing the world who we are …

You take care to send email messages that are grammatically correct and well formatted. But did you know that what you send isn’t always what your recipient sees? In some cases, what you send can deliver a different impression than you intended.
GMail
Here’s a message I wrote up in my Gmail account and sent to myself (to three of my other email addresses).  The photo I attached is of my collie, the smiling Archee McLeash.

Yahoo!
My GMail-generated email landed in my Yahoo! email account with the photo up top. The whole email looked like …

Your marketing writing doesn’t need to be all sell, sell, sell.  Your writing can speak to your customers pre-sale and then post-sale.

I’ve mentioned before the differences between marketing writing and technical writing. You can use both on your web site, in your newsletters, and in various communications to customers and potential customers.
Think “Post-Sale”
After you sell your product or service to a customer—the work was performed and paid for—he still needs to hear from you.

Depending on your business, your customer needs instructions or opinion. If you sell garage door openers, provide installation and how-to-use instructions. If you sell mortgages or cosmetic …

Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, LinkedIn, Flikr, Photobucket, Ning, Xanga, WordPress, …. The list of social media platforms goes on and on.  Some overlap with each other, others have no channels of compatibility, and most of the services that would allow you to synchronize the content of multiple services are annoyingly piecemeal.

Enter Ping.fm.

Ping.fm has compiled a list of 40 blogging sites, social networks, online status recorders, social bookmarking services, and photo sharing sites - each and every one of which can be updated individually or in groups from within the Ping.fm interface.

See a service you don’t yet use?  Ping.fm will …

I belong to a few groups on LinkedIn. This last week, I’ve been amazed to see group members pose questions written using initial capital letters. Here are a couple of examples, altered slightly to avoid too explicit finger-pointing:

What’s A Reasonable Hourly Rate For…..?

Best Service for Access to On Line Publications?

Not only are initial capitals incorrect within a sentence, they are not easy to read. And (not that there are correct places to write incorrectly), this was on LinkedIn, where a professional should want to appear at her or his best!

So let’s review the …

This week’s vein of Online Ore can be found at http://drop.io/

Drop.io is a free online file sharing service with visual twist.  It has all the speed of an FTP transfer, but you can view images, share files and add comments directly from your web browser.

Quick sort options let you view lists by date added or type of file, and drop.io comes with easy to select pre-built templates optimized for sharing through twitter, presenting material in presentations, working in collaboration, or make the content exclusively available to friends or paying clients.

Wendy Wentzel, one of MB/I’s crackerjack designers …

Often enough, we use the word don’t and do not in our writing.  They’re real words, they convey clear meaning, I’ve got nothing against them.

Yet, often enough, your reader will skip over the “not” part, and think you’re saying “do.”  Here are some tips to help you say No and be sure your reader hears you.
Vocabulary choice
Replace don’t with a precise and unambiguous word. Here are just a few excellent candidates for the job of saying No: Avoid, ban, block, delete, exclude, forbid, hinder, obstruct, omit, prevent, prohibit, reject and stop.

Avoid submerging your toaster in water.    is …