Check out the site today to see Hammock’s Custom Media Craft blog and our work with the Marines Corps League featured.

My sweet mother rarely sends me an e-mail without a semicolon in it. She loves that little piece of punctuation. I'll give her credit though; 99 percent of the time she uses it correctly.

For writers and editors, the semicolon is a must for adding variety to our words. But not everyone is a fan of the "supercomma" as it's called by some. Is it stronger than a comma? Weaker than a period? Kinda.

Here are four common (and correct) ways to use a semicolon:

Then: But the words you see printed on the page are only part of the tale. Those of us trained as writers and editors (and many in the general population) usually think that a "story" is told with written or spoken words.

But just think how a verbally told story is enhanced by these factors:

• The speaker - His or her history and association with the story


• The setting - The difference between a sterile conference room and an outdoor amphitheater


• Emotion in the voice


• The speaker's motions, or lack thereof

Similarly, your sense of a magazine article is also enhanced by its setting -- the page layout.

I talked to our design team recently about the importance of white space in magazine design. I've marked up a spread with their comments on Flickr.

Mad Men, which won a Golden Globe for its first season, focuses on a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the early 1960s. It chronicles what workplaces were like when smoking, drinking and womanizing were all part of the work culture. Mad Men also gives a pretty good glimpse into the creative process of developing ad campaigns.

At Hammock, we are particularly interested in advertising agencies because in addition to creative development, media buyers reside in those shops. Media buyers and their clients buy the advertising that we run in several Hammock-published magazines. Hammock manages the sale of advertising as part of the services we provide to clients.

My most senior colleague in the world of advertising, Dennis Connaughton, corporate general manager at the James G. Elliott Co., is far too young to have worked in advertising in the early 60s, but he does have more than 30 years of experience in working for agencies, as well as experience on the client side for Chevrolet, and even as a former publisher of Field & Stream.

I work with Dennis on the sale of NFIB's MyBusiness magazine to media buyers. Dennis’ perspective is particularly useful to all of our clients who carry advertising in their publications. The current advertising environment has changed dramatically in the past five years, not to mention the past 30 years.

So I decided to ask Dennis whether he’d be willing to give us a perspective on the changing dynamics of advertising over the course of his career. I doubted he would share many tales of drinking or smoking or womanizing. (If that's what you're looking for, you may want to stop reading now, and buy the first season of Mad Men on Amazon instead.)

Otherwise, tune into a Q&A podcast with Dennis here (Just over 22 minutes, 10.3 MB, mp3).

I could start telling you a tale with "It was a dark and stormy night." Or I could hand you a photograph of a lightning strike across a black midnight sky.

But what if I took it one step further and I played for you a two-minute video of the thunderstorm that rolled through town recently? You'd see the darkness and the lightning, you'd hear the thunder and you'd have no doubt about the severity of the storm.