(copyright) John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/AP

I’m not a runner. But for several reasons, the Boston Marathon holds a special place in my heart.

Back when I lived on Commonwealth Avenue in Brookline, I watched Johnny Kelly go by.  In Boston, Johnny Kelly was a legend. Over his lifetime he ran 61 Boston Marathons and won two of them.

By the time I saw him he was an old man. But out of deference, the police held the route open until he went by.

My husband Jack ran 14 marathons after the age of 50, four of them Bostons.  He ran his last one at 73.

For a few years we lived in Hopkinton, where the race starts. We’d get up early and walk down to the Common to watch the runners take off.  One year while we lived there Jack and my son Brian ran together.

But for me, the marathon isn’t about the crowds. It’s about thousands of personal stories. It’s about all those individual, back-of-the-pack runners who keep on running no matter how tough Heartbreak Hill is or how much everything hurts.

That’s why on Monday the image that seared itself onto my retinas was the older man who was passing near the spot where the first bomb exploded just as it went off.

For hours, the only video you saw was the man reacting to the shock wave, wobbling, and falling, after which the camera jerked upward to follow the smoke.  No one mentioned who the man was or what happened to him..

But today at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross we found out. He was 78-year-old Bill Iffrig of Washington. President Obama  saluted Iffrig, saying that just as Iffrig had “picked himself up and kept on running” after he was hit, the city of Boston would do the same.

Jack’s running career was ended by Alzheimer’s, which made him furious.  Though he wasn’t much of a Bible reader, he did love the verse from Isaiah that reads, “They who wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

When he died, we read that passage at his memorial service. He’d have loved it.

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Flickr Creative Commons Image “The Lightning” by mhdhasan

Not long before he died, a scientist friend objected to the title of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” on the grounds that grass has spears, not leaves.

“But,” said Whitman, “Spears of Grass would not have been the same to me.”

Indeed it wouldn’t.

Mark Twain called the difference between the almost-right word and the one right one “the difference between the lightning bug and the lightening.”

How to find it

Start by asking who cares and why, so you can speak directly to them.

When you start to write, don’t try to find all the right words in your first draft unless you want to a) go crazy or b) never finish. Get your thoughts down as fast as you can, preferably in one go, and put the thing aside for a day.

The next day, revise, this time looking for the right words: the  strongest, most compelling words you can come up with. Start with the obvious: the dictionary, the thesaurus, the visual thesaurus. Google. Look on Amazon.com and see if book titles help.

Let one source lead to another. Make lists, try things out and see how they sound.

How do you know when you’re on the right track?

The right word is not necessarily literal. (See “spears of grass” above.) It’s subjective, imaginative, seen through human eyes and sensibilities.

The right word erases the distance between the writer and the reader. It aims for closeness.

The right word is often the simplest.

The right word creates an image we can picture.

Make people feel

Most important, the right word makes the reader feel something, whether you’re writing about evolution, sports cars, or lipstick.

Let’s say you’re trying to explain a scientific concept. You could aim to make people feel:
•    wow! now I understand
•    I never thought of it that way
•    I never thought I cared, but now I want to know more

What if you’re doing an opinion piece on something controversial? Here you don’t want agreement, you want to stir up discussion. You want people to think and react:
•    I never thought of it that way, but maybe . . .
•    that’s only part of the story
•    what total bullshit

If you’re trying to entertain, the feelings you want are obvious, but how to get them isn’t – comedy is hard, as any comedian will tell you. But the reaction you want is
•    that’s hysterical
•    that’s pretty offensive, but still funny
•    Yikes!
You’re writing about climate change or economic threats?
•    That’s truly scary
•    Ug!
•    I had no idea things were that bad
•    What can I do about this?
You’re trying to sell something
•    That’s beautiful
•    That’s elegant
•    I WANT THAT
Finally, read what you’ve written out loud. Do you know who you’re talking to? Will it grab them?

The process will probably take more than one revision and if you’re on deadline that might be hard. But when you succeed – Wow.

Do you have your own ways of finding the right words? Share them in the Comments. Tweet to this post and subscribe above! 

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FlickrCreativeCommons Image by Starr Gazer

Actor Alan Alda, who’s also a science nut, once used a walk with his 5-year-old grandson to explain evolution. Later, he heard the boy asking his older sister about something he didn’t understand.

“Why don’t you ask Grandpa?” she said.

Answered the boy, “I’ll never make that mistake again.”

Find out below what Alda did next.

Specialists in any field — medicine, math, finance, whatever — who want to communicate with lay people have to not just get people interested but keep them interested.

Here are 6 ways to do it.

1) Tell human stories

A year ago, few of us had ever heard of Myelodysplastic Syndrome .  ABC’s “Good Morning America” host Robin Roberts’ battle with the disease changed that.

Because Roberts’ story gave the devastating disease a human face, we were interested enough to learn that MDS is a blood disorder that can result from treatment for another cancer — in Roberts’ case, breast cancer. The treatment for it is a painful bone marrow transplant.

When  Roberts came back to work this week, the sister who provided the transplant was on the GMA set in New York, and more than 6 million people were watching.

The story even got on-air calls from President Obama and Hilary Clinton.

2) Use metaphors and comparisons. 

Once past childhood, all of us learn new things by comparing them to things we already understand. If we’re told it’s hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, we know not to go outside barefoot.

When we hear that the meteor that fell on Siberia exploded with the force of 20 atomic bombs, was the size of a bus, and was momentarily brighter than the sun, we were not only awed but scared. What if one fell here?

When we read that a Greenland glacier calved a chunk of ice the size of Manhattan, we can imagine being in a boat nearby.

For science journalists, metaphors are a stock in trade.

Paleontologist Brian Switek, who says he fell in love with dinosaurs at the age of five, writes blog posts crammed full of metaphors. In one piece Switek calls the Molly fish found in aquariums “a sexual parasite . . .  like an unpleasant exe or an irritating hitchhiker.”

More extended metaphors work too. In this New Yorker piece, surgeon Atul Gawande tells us what hospitals could learn from The Cheesecake Factory about cost control.

Easily understood words, friendly tone

Specialized fields are by definition complex. Which means the words you use to talk about them to non-specialists should be short, clear and engaging, but not simplistic.

Good technology writing, for instance, is friendly and approachable, like a conversation with an intelligent friend.  It assumes your listener is both curious and bright enough to understand what you’re saying.

Use humor, but use it carefully.

In the rarified world of peer-reviewed journals, humor is a No No. As one California professor wrote,

“Because science writing is objective rather than subjective . . . you will be penalized for the use of humor. . . Humor and emotive criticism usually get in the way of a clear message.”

Whatever the professor meant by “emotive criticism”, we probably have to accept that peer-reviewed journals are not likely to be funny.

But there’s still plenty of room for wit in non-academic writing about science . Read anything by Steve Silberman  or Brian Switek.

The one thing to avoid is condescension.

In an article called “The Unwritten Rules of [science] Journalism,”   science writer Adam Ruben wrote

“Remember that ordinary people [italics mine] cannot understand units of measurement. Therefore, you should always explain measurements in relation to familiar objects, such as the length of a football field or the number of something that would fit within the period at the end of this sentence.”

Writer Soren Wheeler took offense.

“The people I want to reach are not dumb, they just don’t think about these things all day long. So putting things in terms of something people can understand? Nothing could be closer to the core of what I do, what I love doing.”

Use graphics or video

Last year, determined to find ways to, as he put it, “explain hard things in plain ways,” Alan Alda started something called “The Flame Challenge.” The challenge was for scientists to explain fire in terms an 11-year-old could understand.

After scientists reviewed the entries for accuracy, they were judged by 11-year-olds.

The hands-down winner was Ben Ames, a graduate student in quantum optics who wrote, narrated, animated, and composed every element of the film included the song at the end. (Don’t miss this one.)

This year’s challenge? Explain time – a question posed by a 9-year-old.

Finally, speak to one person — and aim for the heart.

Good science writing is like a talk with a friend — warm, informal and conversational. and if it’s to connect, it has to connect with the emotions.  

People remember what makes them feel – which is another way of saying that the way to our heads is through our hearts.

So. How to write about science and other specialized fields?

• Remember what it’s like not to know all the answers, or even any of them.
• Give a friendly, step-by-step explanation
• Include the “So what?” Why should people care?
• Make your audience curious enough to want to know more.

How would you explain your specialty to an 11-year-old?Comment above.

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African Dung Beetle, Flickr Image

Let’s say you’re a scientist or an IT professional who has to write something from time to time – say an article or a speech. Or you’re a communications person in a scientific or IT organization who writes press releases and web copy.

Here’s a quiz: What’s the only reason to write anything, from a scientific paper to a press release to a fairy tale?

• a) to explain
• b) to entertain
• c) to motivate
• d) none of the above.

The answer is d), none of the above.

The only reason to write anything is to get someone to read it. No one has ever felt obliged to read anything, except a homework assignment.

Even if you’re the leading scientist in your field, your peers don’t have to read what you write. And when you speak, they don’t have to listen.

Which is why the best introduction ever written was, “Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was ….”  That one phrase makes us wonder, What’s going to happen? When was it? Where? Who did it happen to?

And Bam, we’re into the story.

Scientists accustomed to the conventions of academic papers often sniff at “popular” science writing on the grounds that it’s incomplete or inaccurate. But the best science writing is not only accurate; it’s first-rate as storytelling. Even better, because it’s readable by ordinary mortals, it helps to spread scientific knowledge.

Ed Jong  is one of the best science writers in the game.

Take a look at his lead on how the humble dung beetle uses starlight to navigate:

From all across the galaxy, the light of billions of stars finds its way to Earth, passes through our atmosphere, and enters the eyes of a small South African beetle rolling a ball of dung. . .  With two of its four eyes, it gazes into the guts of our galaxy, and uses starlight to find its way home.

Or listen to PhD dinosaur expert Brian Switek  on dinosaurs’ hands:

For a long time, artists illustrated dinosaurs like Velociraptor with their palms down—what many paleontologists now call the curse of the “bunny hands.” But as paleontologists re-examined and revised dinosaur skeletons, they found that dinosaurs like Velociraptor held their hands so that their palms faced each other in a more bird-like arrangement. Dinosaurs were clappers, not slappers.

In the same interview, Brian explains that squid have both “arms” and “tentacles” and they’re not the same.

Who knew?

How does he decide what to write about in his blog?

Switek says, “I look for ideas or studies that either make me go, ‘Really? That’s awesome!’ or, alternatively, ‘WTF?’”

Pretty good criteria.

While it’s harder to find scintillating copy about IT than about science, here’s a blog post by Lisa Caas in a blog from Naked Security that starts:

What’s essentially illegible, fuses characters together into melted blobs of unrecognizable goo, and occasionally tells you to go f**k yourself?

I don’t know, Lisa, tell us. Of course, it’s the CAPTCHA. Who  invented that devilish thing, anyway? (And by the way, we’re not talking about “technical writing” here; that’s a different animal altogether.)

Finally, a little-known scientific factoid about Groundhog Day, which is tomorrow, February 2.

We all know Groundhog Day is when Pennsylvania’s Punxatawny Phil either does or doesn’t see his shadow.

But it remained for EarthSky to tell us why February 2 was chosen as the day.  Give up?  Because it’s halfway between the Winter and Spring Solstices.

Really? Awesome!

Do you write about science or technology? What’s your biggest challenge? Share it in the Comments! 

The post The secret revealed: How to make science and IT writing compelling! appeared first on The Writer's Clinic.

I’m not much of a jazz fan. But when Dave Brubeck died last week I remembered a joke his son, Chris, once told about rhythm.

At the time, I was singing in a small chorus in Wilton, Connecticut that performed everything from madrigals to pop. But for one concert we did a Brubeck piece full of odd time signatures like 7/8: 7 eighth notes to the measure.

Now nearly all music, from Bach to rock, is written in either duple or triple rhythm – usually 2/4, 4/4 or 3/4 – with the first note of every measure accented.

Sometimes  composers use more than one time signature within the same piece.  Sometimes they use syncopation – accents off the beat – to add even more rhythmic interest.

But most of the time you’re still in a familiar meter. Here’s Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus in classic 4/4 time.

So even for lifelong singers, the 7/8 time signature in this Brubeck piece felt weird. We didn’t get it.

Finally Brubeck’s son Chris, who was conducting, said, “My father always says it’s easy to get 7/8 time. You just go one, two, three, four, five, six, sev-en.”

For a minute we just looked at him. Then we laughed. Because, of course, he had just counted not 7 beats but 8, which is familiar territory.

Rhythm isn’t so much heard as felt. It’s visceral.  You might not know why “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” is boring, but you know it is.

Dave Brubeck explored new rhythms because he was bored with the old ones. He found ideas everywhere.

In Turkey he picked up a rhythm from street musicians that became “Blue Rondo a la Turk.”

Because his music doesn’t “swing,” we have to work a little harder to get it, as we do with good writing. But the rewards are greater than with same  old, same old.

• Vary sentence length, from single words (like Stop!) and sentence fragments to longer ones. No longer than 30, though.
• Use verbs with zing.
• Use punctuation.
• If it’s appropriate for what you’re writing, use dialogue.
• Use color, in both senses of the word.
• Use surprise.
• Read what you’ve written out loud, which will show up monotonous, sing-song rhythms instantly.
• Read other writers’ work out loud, especially poetry, to see how the writer achieve her effects.

Finally – Sing! And if you can’t do that, listen to great music. After all, there’s no better season.

The post Does your writing have rhythm? Take a lesson from Brubeck appeared first on The Writer's Clinic.

At last. The Big Spenders have stopped writing checks, The People have spoken, the East Coast is picking itself up after Hurricane Sandy, and we can all get back to writing.

Today we’re going to talk about those little grains of grammar called commas and periods.

Stop! You’re reaching for the delete key?

You think you won’t lose your job or land that juicy assignment if you can’t punctuate?

Well, consider the magazine cover header that read, “Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.” Makes you  wonder what happened to that editor — not to mention the dog.

Or think of the telegram that meant to say “Not getting any better. Come at once,” but instead read “Not getting any. Better come at once.”

“My parents, Ayn Rand and God”

Sci-fi writer Teresa Nielsen Hayden invented an apocryphal book dedication that read: “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God”  to show that without a comma after Rand, it looks like Rand had sex with God. Not likely, since Rand was an atheist.

I have a client who despairs because her PR staffers use commas either like table salt or like cayenne pepper – liberally or in all the wrong places. These are bright people who handle most parts of their jobs well; they just have a tiny block when it comes to punctuation.

The result is that the manager spends a couple hours of her day editing their work before it goes out the door – and fuming.

Put commas where you’d pause?

How do we decide where to put the commas, anyway?

The conventional wisdom is to put them wherever you’d pause, and although there are other places to use commas, that one has a basis in history.  An early version of the comma was invented to help ancient Greek actors deliver their lines.

Why? Because long after oral language was written down, words were copied letter for letter, with  no punctuation, capitalization or even spacing between them.  Which made it hard for the actors to read the plays.

(Imagine that last sentence as “whichmadeithardfortheactorstoreadtheplays” )

But around 200 B.C. by Aristophanes of Bysantium developed a system of dots telling actors when to breathe as they delivered their  lines.

Medieval European monks, probably tired of wondering how to make sense of the Scripture they copied, made more changes in the system of little marks.

But it was the printing press that brought punctuation into common use. If books were to be read by ordinary people, they had to be written in a form that made them understandable – which meant they needed punctuation.

The stroke, the colon, and the period

For a while, printers used the stroke (/) to set off word groups, the colon ( : ) to set off distinct pauses, and the period (.) to end sentences.

Eventually the comma replace the stroke, and the semicolon snuck into use to confound writers ever since.

What about the period — or as the Brits call it, the full stop?

English teachers used to command that unless periods were found at the end of a string of words containing a subject and a verb, they were incorrect. Verboten. As welcome as bedbugs.

To fragment or not to fragment?

Inflexible of them, considering that we’ve been communicating in fragments since cave men used grunts.

The Bible used fragments. So did Dickens.

The trick is to know what you want them to do: end a thought or add punch?

How do you learn how to use punctuation so you won’t look like a dummy or drive your boss crazy?

There are a bazillion grammar guides, most of them too boring for (sorry) words.

Some fun (really!) grammar guides

But some aren’t.  One is Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl: Quick and dirty tips for better writing, which covers not only grammar but usage.   Fogarty has a tip-a-day blog that makes absorbing the rules painless.

Fogarty has a companion book, a podcast, and even apps for smart phones.

Also  online, there’s the University of North Carolina’s “The Writing Center,”    that helpfully tells you how to use “connecting words” called “fanboys” – For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet and So – so you can avoid writing clunkers like, “My hamster loved to play, I gave him a hula hoop.”

In the bookstore and on Kindle there’s Lynn Truss’s famous “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” which by now has sold 3 million copies. Try reading that and not laughing.

There’s “Spunk & Bite,” an irreverent updating of the hoary Strunk and White.  Subtitled “A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style,” it covers commas, periods and all manner of other matters to make your writing sing.

Author Arthur Plotnik says he has one special gift: He sees dead writing.

What else can you do?

Find someone whose writing you admire and read closely to see how s/he does it. Even better, copy a chunk of it word for word (including punctuation) to see how it’s put together.

Finally, find a good editor to give your writing a spit shine.  Full disclosure: I do that. 

Have any badly punctuated howlers to share? Tell us in the comments below!

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Creativity
some rights reserved by JeanBaptisteparis

‘If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving you don’t actually live longer, it just seems longer.’

Sometime today you’re going to get bored. And it won’t be pretty.

You’re going to feel foggy. Anxious. Even scared.

When we’re bored the clock doesn’t  move. We feel trapped. We’ll do anything to get un-bored.

We eat.

We Tweet.

We text.

We turn on iTunes or watch mindless TV.

We have sex. (Okay,  that one’s good.)

In short, we find boredom so uncomfortable we’ll look for anything to keep from going nuts.

Erich Fromm, who noted that man is the only animal that can be bored, called boredom “perhaps the most important source of aggression and destructiveness.”

Maybe that’s why the other big alternative to being bored is drinking- a hazard to which writers seem especially prone.

How especially prone?

Well, of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes. Not to mention lesser scribblers like Hunter Thompson, Stephen King, Kingsley Amis, John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, and a hundred more.

There’s even a book of writers’ drink recipes, including Hemingway’s Mojito, Faulkner’s mint juleps and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s gin.

But  — and this is huge — there’s another way.  A way so surprising it’s never mentioned.

Like the dreamer’s brain, the bored brain is anything but quiet. Circuits fire and different parts of the cortex link up as it wages an all-out battle to be productive. It remembers. It daydreams. It time travels. It plots. It creates scenarios.

Most important, it forms new connections.

Because the bored brain imagines what could be, boredom becomes not just the precursor to creativity but essential to it.  When people are bored they look for changes to the way things are, and the way they’ve been done a thousand times before.

Which is why the answer to boredom is NOT distraction. 

It’s to live with the boredom long enough to let the brain create new ideas – ideas that can take flight.  

Need convincing? Take a look at Boredom: A Lively History

In it, author Peter Toohey describes 3,000 years of humans coping with boredom, from Australian Aborigines, to Romans, to today’s artists. The audience for the book, says Amazon.com,  is “anyone interested in what goes on when nothing happens.”

What do you think? Can you see yourself sinking into boredom for a while to come up with creative ideas?

Comment below.

The post The shocking, unknown secret of creativity appeared first on The Writer's Clinic.

Flickr image by Lace Market

Do you have a signature story? Something that makes people open your posts, listen to you speak, read your articles?

I know a little boy who does.

Yesterday I was watching a hummingbird drink from a feeder with 3-year-old Tucker, who lives across the street. Suddenly Tucker said, “Do you know why hummingbirds hum?”

“I don’t know, Tucker. Why?”

“Because they don’t know the words!” said Tucker, hooting at his own joke.

The rest of the day, his Mom told me, Tucker told his hummingbird joke to everyone he saw. For a little while, it became his signature story because he loved the reaction it got.

For New York Times columnist Gail Collins, the tale of Mitt Romney’s dog Seamus spending a drive to Canada on the roof of the family car became her signature story.

She worked it into her columns so often that The Atlantic Wire once called it her “crate-gate crusade.”

But Collins didn’t write about Seamus strictly for laughs. She used it to illustrate her opinion – opinion being the operative word — about Romney’s character.

The story triggered T-shirts, websites, PETA protests, and even a New Yorker cover with Rick Santorum as Seamus.

Predictably, Democrats laughed and Republicans yelled foul. One republican columnist wrote that Collins ought to play fair and “grow up.”

She didn’t stop. She was making a point, and the naysayers be damned.

Signature stories are usually funny, though they can also be tough, moving or inspirational. 

The one thing they have to do is make a point.  Which means they have to have a point of view. They must take a stand.

Nobody ever doubted what Ronald Reagan stood for, and part of the reason was that he had a signature story.  He made his positions clear.

Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan tells a story about the time Reagan was listening to a reluctant senator explaining why he wasn’t supporting a bill the President wanted.

“I’d jump out of a plane for you,” said the senator, testifying to his loyalty.

In vintage style, Reagan responded,”Jump.” He got the senator’s vote.

Do you have a signature story? How did you develop it, and does it get the results you want?

 Comment below!

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Have you ever written a 6-word story?

A few months ago, Dutch freelancer Peter van der Stoep of LinkedIn‘s Freelance Writers Connection invited members to do just that. Hundreds of people have taken him up on the invitation.  More than 550 have Favorited the project on Facebook.

A lot of the submissions are fun. But the most striking thing about them is that at least half of them aren’t stories!

Why not? Because a story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. And it has to make something happen.

So “Angry. Cool down. Calmer. And Relax” doesn’t work.

“He waited. She never came back”  does.

The 6-word story craze began in the 1990s, based on the often-told story that Hemingway wrote “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” to prove a point. Naturally, he’s supposed to have written it on a napkin at the Algonquin Club, but who knows?

But in 2006, when Wired.com invited sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers to produce their own 6-word stories, the idea took off.

The same year, smithmag.net, which calls itself “The Home of the Six Word Memoir,” invited readers to write 6-word memoirs. A couple of years later, about 1,000 of them were published in a book called  “Not Quite What I Was Planning” .  Three sequels followed.

Okay, you’re saying, but so what? I’m a serious writer; I’m not playing games. I write press releases (speeches/articles/blog posts/memos from the CEO), for God’s sake.

Agreed. But whatever you write — you’ve heard this  somewhere before, yes?  — needs to tell a story. If it doesn’t, nobody will listen and nobody will care.

Your goal is not to use as few words as possible; it’s to use only as many of the right words as it takes to tell your story – which means the ones that will be convincing.

Whether it’s a press release, a memo from the CEO, an article, or a speech, figure out what the story is and why your audience should care.

Here are some examples from the Wired and smithmag projects that show how it can be done.

• Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.  David Brin
• Longed for him. Got him. Shit. Margaret Atwood
• Kirby had never eaten toes before. – Kevin Smith
• Dorothy: “Fuck it, I’ll stay here.” – Steven Meretzky
• The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly. Orson Scott Card
• Couldn’t cope so I wrote songs Aimee Mann
• Well, I thought it was funny. Stephen Colbert
• I asked. They answered. I wrote.  Sebastian Junger
• Found true love, married someone else.
• And a few extras . . . 
• Woman Seeks Men–High Pain Threshold
• Aging late bloomer yearns for do-over.
• (and my favorite) Still lost on road less traveled

Have your own 6-word story? Share a comment below! 

The post How (and why!) to write a 6-word story appeared first on The Writer's Clinic.

If you live on either coast of the U.S. and buy food, chances are you’ve been to Trader Joe’s.

If you have, you’re probably a regular. And if you’re a regular,  you probably enjoy shopping there; their stores are just plain cool.

But did you ever think Trader Joe’s could make you a better blogger?

Here are 5 things Trader Joe’s does that every blogger should copy.

1) Make what you offer fun.

At Trader Joe’s, the “Captain and Crew” – they’re the store manager and checkers – wear Hawaiian shirts and smile a lot.

(Caution: Don’t wear a Hawaiian shirt yourself when you go or other shoppers will ask  you where things are.)

Instead of using a PA system they ring gongs, which their website calls “a kind of Morse code. One bell lets our Crew know when to open another register. Two bells mean there are questions that need to be answered at a checkout. Three bells call over a manager-type person.”

You get the feeling crew members are enjoying their gigs and are happy to help you. When you’re happy, you buy more.

When you do that, readers will come back for more – and are more likely to think of you when they need help.

2) Make everything you offer bear your own distinctive brand.

Joe’s sells some everyday basics, but mostly they buy unusual products –  wherever possible directly from suppliers – and brand them with their own label.

As a blogger, you need to be just as serious about branding yourself. Pick your niche, let the world know what it is, and stay with it.

Mine is helping people be better writers – especially people who hate to write or don’t have time – or doing it for them.  Hence, “The Writer’s Clinic,” subtitled “wit and wisdom for wordsmiths.”

(I’m thinking of taking off the “for wordsmiths,” even though I like the alliteration, since people who hate to write don’t think of themselves as wordsmiths.)

3) Offer stuff nobody else is offering .

Last time I shopped at Joe’s they had a white bean humus with basil that was terrific. I’m a good cook and usually make my own humus, but this just looked good – and it was.

Your writing is something nobody else offers because it’s yours alone. Capitalize on that. Develop your own voice, make it distinctive, and never deviate from it.

4) Give out freebies.

Lots of stores do this, but some do it only sporadically.  You might get the equivalent of lunch one day and nothing for another week.

Joe’s has a spot that’s dedicated to freebies, often cooked right there, and it’s always open. Once they were giving away tiny tamales called tomalitos with salsa.  I never buy frozen dinners, but I bought a package of those.

For bloggers, the equivalent is the free e-book you offer people for subscribing. (Yes, I know I don’t have one yet. Coming soon !)

Uberblogger Jon Morrow  likes to call this being “insanely generous,” and it’s a great policy. Give people great stuff for nothing and when you offer things for sale they’re more likely to buy.

5) Do a great newsletter.

Joe’s is called “Fearless Flyer” and it’s actually fun to read. It’s the J. Peterman catalogue without the attitude.

Joe’s describes the newsletter, which is print and distributed by direct mail, as “a cross between Consumer Reports and Mad Magazine . . . kind of like a newsletter, a catalog and a bit of a comic book all at the same time.”

And by the way, it’s well written as well as fun.

For bloggers, the equivalent is having a regular e-newsletter that complements your blog and website.

Your e-newsletter has the advantage of landing right in prospects’ mailboxes as often as you send it.  Once every week or two is about right.

It reminds them of you and what you do regularly and directs them to your website to find out more.

6) Don’t try to compete with the big guys.

You’d never confuse Trader Joe’s with Whole Foods or Stop & Shop, which carry everything.  Joe’s has defined its niche and doesn’t stray from it.

If you’re a sole proprietor, you can’t complete with the big PR agencies, and that’s a good thing. You offer the expert, personal service they can’t offer.

So establish yourself as what Blue Penguin Chief Michael Katz  calls “the friendly expert” in your field.

Do what it takes to make customers love you, keep them aware of you in a friendly, low-key way, and the rest will take care of itself.

What do you think? Do you shop at Trader Joe’s? Share your thoughts in a comment.

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