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Don’t Be a Wise Guy (or Gal)
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- December 20, 2024
No CommentsLately I’ve been hearing more and more abuse of the suffix “wise” by people trying to make themselves sound more important. During the recent World Series, a TV announcer reassured us that New York Yankees ace pitcher Gerrit Cole hadn’t changed “demeanor-wise” after giving up a game changing grand slam to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
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Ditch the Duplicatives
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- November 27, 2024
Just when I thought we were eradicating cliches like “space” and “low-hanging fruit” and “it is what it is” from business communication, a new scourge has surfaced – the duplicative. That’s when you add redundant words to a simple phrase to make it sound more important. Stop doing it! I don’t have stats to back
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Suffer from Completion Anxiety?
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- October 15, 2024
During the peak of my marathon running days, there were plenty of times I’d be facing a 20-mile training run on a humid Sunday morning. My legs were still heavy from my Friday speed workout, plus I often had a slight hangover and some annoying minor injuries. Sweating out the next 2-1/2 hours alone with
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What March Madness Teaches About Our Biases
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- March 25, 2024
With the first week of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament (aka #MarchMadness) in the books, many of you are lamenting your “busted brackets.” Don’t feel bad. An estimated 30 million people painstakingly fill out their tournament picks every year, and there has never been a verified perfect bracket. The closest to perfection came in 2019, when a
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Why It’s Hard to Edit Our Own Writing?
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- March 7, 2024
Simple steps for breaking through Whether you have three books to your credit or agonize over a monthly blog post, there are at least a dozen reasons why it can be challenging to edit our own writing effectively. How many of these traps below sound like you? If you answered, yes to three or more,
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Irregardless, I Could Care Less
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- February 7, 2024
Most of you are armed with grammar apps, spell checkers and AI. But we’re still seeing plenty of grammatical fumbles in your submissions. Take the word “irregardless.” It’s frequently misused because it appears in most dictionaries and sounds more imposing than simply saying “regardless. ” By adding the prefix “ir” (which means “not”) to a
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Does Word Count Matter?
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- December 14, 2023
Rarely a week goes by when a nervous financial professional doesn’t reach to me for help with a last-minute guest column for the business media. With a deadline bearing down, the thrill of being a guest contributor has been replaced by the anxiety of “what am I going to write about and how will I/we
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When to Use i.e. Instead of e.g.
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- November 18, 2023
Sometimes I regret that I didn’t take Latin in high school. But there was only one Latin teacher to choose from in our small school. Supposedly he was a monster, i.e., he was a brutal grader, with a bad temper and breath to match. Still, it would have been good to know the derivation of
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Overcoming ‘Smartest Kid in the Class Syndrome’ When Writing or Speaking
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- September 12, 2022
One of the best things about my work is that I get to work with some of the smartest, hardest working and most insightful thought leaders in the financial advisory world. One of the worst things about my work is that I work with some of the smartest, most insightful leaders in the financial advisory
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Writing in a Rut? Slow Down to Go Faster
- by: Hank Berkowitz
- August 3, 2022
Last month’s post about faster, clearer writing, generated a fair amount of feedback. Several readers asked how to get started when you’re staring at a blank screen or simply dreading the process of “putting pen to paper”? We get this question often during the Dog Days of summer because everyone’s on vacation, thinking about vacation
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