Posts

What Does a Technical Writer do?

What is a Technical Writer? The vague answer would be: “somebody who writes boring texts”. Vague but not at all inaccurate. Unfortunately. You know the documentation that comes with your new appliance? Or the one explaining the safety rules on a train? Or, yet, the documents explaining how to use a software API? All of them have been written by a technical writer. Useful and important documentation but, easy to admit, not the most exciting content out there. Nothing that takes your breath away or is a page-turner.

Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 7 minutes Read

How to Describe Coffee

How do you communicate a flavor? How do you tell others what coffee tastes like? How can you write about coffee in a way that is understandable by the average coffee drinker? These and other similar questions are common whether you are opening a coffee business or are a coffee lover that wants to know what coffee to buy next. Describing coffee is a translation of what one experiences while drinking it to somebody who still hasn’t. It is of supreme importance in copywriting and content marketing, for obvious reasons: a coffee that is described in good detail, with words that can be understood by anybody, can more easily be found interesting by potential customers, and lead to “converting them” into buyers.

Sunday, November 21, 2021 | 9 minutes Read

What's SEO for? What's in it for me?

Those questions seem silly for the experienced marketer but sure aren’t for the medium-small business owner. They are by far the two most asked to me when interviewing potential clients. And, also by far, the two hardest to explain to the uninitiated. I get you. Why writing a bunch of words or tweaking the UI of your website should make you excited? Why would you need to invest in those “words” to get a return (the ROI, return of investment) that is above what you initially spent?

Wednesday, February 10, 2021 | 10 minutes Read

Why I became a food writer

I’ve written about how I became a food writer previously. In that article there’s the not-so-short story of how it dawned on me that I liked food and was knowledgeable enough to write about it, as a full-time job. Becoming a food writer explains the “how” of me becoming a food writer. This article tells the “why”. If you’re just interested in my advice on how to become a food writer, go read the previous article and skip this one. No hard feelings, I understand.

Monday, January 18, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

6 Things Every Freelance Writer Must Know in 2021

Freelance writing is a weird profession. It has no diploma or master you can attain in order to call yourself a writer. It’s much like an art, as a painter or sculptor, but it has no academia that can teach you to be a freelance writer. A general writer, or a journalist, yes. But a freelance writer must know a distinct set of skills to be called so. It is not just about writing. It is mostly about writing a good, error-free, engaging and well-researched piece. But not only.

Sunday, January 3, 2021 | 9 minutes Read

Top Tools I Use For Freelance Writing

Professional copywriters, and freelance writers in general, have many opinions about the “best” tools to use for writing. Some swear by Word, others can’t live without Grammarly, others will never manage to write anything without checking the thesaurus every phrase (I’ve been there…). No matter your niche, what you write the most about, every freelance writer has to use some tools to help in writing better, edit more quickly and keep track of the work to do. It’s far from a simple choice, with so many options available, most freely. Which is why I thought of writing about my top tools I use for freelance writing.

Tuesday, December 8, 2020 | 11 minutes Read

Decoding Coffee Descriptions

Coffee descriptions have left many drinkers baffled. I bet half of consumers barely read them. Understandably. Many descriptions are either too vague (“sweet and strong”) or seem unrealistic (“lemon meringue with undertones of sandalwood”). Fact being, the vast majority of us are not trained nor take time to train in tasting what we ingest. We simply find something tasty, understand in general what we like, and learn to favor sweet over savoury, or fatty over bitter and so on. Generally speaking, we only taste superficially what we eat and drink. And why wouldn’t we? We aren’t food critics or sommeliers, we just want to enjoy a good dish or beverage. Nothing wrong with that.

Sunday, November 1, 2020 | 8 minutes Read

How to Write About Coffee

How to tell a taste? A smell? A mouthfeel? How do you communicate what your taste buds are telling you to a person that is not with you, not even in your country or even on the same continent as you? It appears to be impossible. And to actually describe what one’s tasting in all its complexity may well be impossible. But we try anyway. Writing about coffee entails describing it. Making yourself understood by those who never tasted the same coffee as you. Perhaps some who have never had the chance to try even a similar coffee. Food writing and coffee in particular is a hard task. Coffee has plenty of different taste profiles, more so than wine; it goes without saying that the most difficult aspect of writing about coffee is making the taste profile comprehensible to the readers. But before this, it is important to clarify a few aspects of coffee and the coffee culture.

Friday, October 2, 2020 | 9 minutes Read

Why The Fountain Pen Creator?

I struggled a lot on deciding a name for this website and a sort of nickname for my career as a content writer (creator, as I prefer but more on this later). Most suggested to simply go with your full name or create a complete new persona, not connected to yourself in any way. I rejected the latter as I wanted to give a personal image of myself and be immediately honest with the website visitors. I wanted to be “me”, not some entity.

Friday, September 18, 2020 | 5 minutes Read

How to Become a Food Writer With No Experience

Is there anybody out there that doesn’t love food? No, I guess not. Me neither. So it was a pretty obvious choice to start writing about something I love as well. But of course that alone won’t do it. There are countless of writers that review food, restaurants, new places and talk about how they got into sourdough bread making. How can you break out as a food writer without any experience?

Friday, August 14, 2020 | 12 minutes Read

7 Tips to Make your Website Better

I always say that a website is never finished. You build it, after probably countless hours of planning, developing and testing, and launch it. But it doesn’t end there. There will always be that font that doesn’t quite fit the theme, that image that isn’t as good quality as we wanted, it is never as speedy as it could and so on. A website is like a creature that lives and necessitates care and attention from time to time.

Thursday, April 2, 2020 | 8 minutes Read