Content That Works

Recently a wine-buff friend of mine poured a glass of pricey Bordeaux for me. "How about that aroma?" he asked. I had to confess to him that my sense of smell has deteriorated a lot. "I usually smell good, but I don’t smell well," I quipped.

And this is where the debate starts.

6 Steps to a Productive Session

Also known as "stream of consciousness writing," free writing is not that different from those grade-school exercises where the teacher would ask you to take out a piece of paper and write whatever you wanted on a topic until she called time. I used to hate it when my teacher would snatch up my paper before I was done, but what I didn't realize then was that free writing isn't about producing perfect prose. It's about collecting and connecting your thoughts, and silencing that critical voice inside that keeps you from fully expressing yourself.

The Roper Public Affairs and Media/Custom Publishing Council study -- Americans' Relationship With Customer Publications and the Companies That Provide Them -- was released in March. The 2009 report is an update to a study conducted in 2005 and an examination into Americans' thoughts and feelings about electronic publications.

Adobe InDesign, the program we use to lay out the pages of all of the publications we publish here at Hammock, gave up immediately when I just typed the mega-word into a four-column page. Instead of helping me figure out the best place to break the word, it just made all the words in that text box disappear (Thanks, InDesign). So I’m on my own. Here’s how I would do it: