September2014
Said and done: the dialogue dilemma
When writing a piece with a lot of dialogue, whether it’s a journalistic article full of quotes or a story in which plenty of conversation takes place among several characters, one of the most irritating obstacles for the writer is their reliance on the word ‘said’.
As dialogue switches back and forth, writers will inevitably (more…)
It’s all about ‘you’
The second person subject pronoun is an interesting one in English. We throw it about pretty liberally, and it can have very different meanings. Indeed, some languages have as many as five words for ‘you’, whereas we use just the one.
Here are some ways that English speakers consistently use the word, and how (more…)
Honesty is the best policy
At Pressroom, we are committed to helping brands make the most of their digital strategies. With one of the largest trends of the moment being openness and engagement with customers, a timely piece of research has suggested that honesty really is the best policy.
An extensive new study by Intent HQ into data gathering and advertising personalisation has shown that (more…)
Big firms first to exploit Spotify’s new service
Spotify has started rolling out its video ads formats and the world’s biggest brands have been the first to jump on board.
The formats, which the digital music provider states offers brands an exclusive level of service to cater to engaged audiences, operates across both desktop and mobile platforms. Offering sponsored sessions that users can decide to engage with (more…)
Organic traffic remains largest source of web visits
Recent research has shown that visits from organic search query results is the biggest source of website traffic.
The findings, which marked organic visits against traffic from paid search campaigns and social media accounts, showed that in every sector (more…)
Secure sites ‘offer no difference’ to rank
Industry research has suggested that HTTPS sites do not have better search rankings than HTTP pages.
This backs up Google’s insistence that a tweaking of its algorithms would not have a wide-ranging effect.
Earlier this year, the search (more…)
Five linguistic devices you use but don’t know the name for
Writers and orators often use figures of speech for emphasis, or simply to inject some creativity into otherwise dry words, but how often do they know the technical terms for what they are doing?
Here are five techniques that we all recognise, but are rarely able to correctly (more…)
This year’s engine updates affecting SEO
At Pressroom, we like to monitor the world of search engine optimisation (SEO) closely. It helps us to know what is going on, informs us of the new ideas and strategies being used, and perhaps most importantly, lets us know what is not working anymore. As such, keeping an eye on Google is always necessary.
The last few months have been no (more…)
Police buffalo fish: the grammar of gibberish
Since English has so many words that can take several lexical categories (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), it is actually possible to create grammatically correct and potentially meaningful sentences just by repeating the same word two or more times.
For example, the word ‘fish’ can refer to both (more…)