Bruce M. Anderson

By request, here’s a follow-up to my previous post on dashes and hyphens. That post covered how to create them; here’s how to use them. — Em Dash — When writing in U.S. English, use an em dash to indicate a break in thought — like this. You can use one or two em dashes in a single sentence, but more than two is overkill. Notice my em dash has a space before and a space after. That’s Associated Press style. Most other style guides—The Chicago Manual of Style and The American Psychological Association Publication Manual, for example—tell you NOT to include those spaces. – En Dash – When writing in British English, use a spaced en dash to indicate a break in thought – like this. When an en dash is used this way, it always gets spaces. Again, you can use one or two – but please not three – per sentence. In the U.S., some style guides, such as Chicago and APA, tell you to use an en dash in ranges and sports scores: The art fair took place August 3–5. Paula will order 10–12 cheesecakes for the party. The Biloxi Shuckers beat the Montgomery Biscuits, 2–0. In these cases, as you can see, there are no spaces around the en dash. Then there’s my favorite use of the en dash🤓 When you have an open compound (e.g., Los Angeles, ice cream, high school), use an en dash to connect it to another word or a prefix: Los Angeles–based office, ice cream–themed decorations, post–high school education. - Hyphen - AP style calls for hyphens where Chicago and APA call for en dashes, as AP doesn’t use en dashes. Also, use a hyphen to join simpler compound modifiers (Sheboygan-based, dog-themed) to connect some prefixes (co-worker, anti-cat, post-workout), and when writing about Spider-Man. Does this cover all possible uses? Of course not. But most people have stopped reading by now.

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🌀 "We sometimes forget that we are more than our economic output. That our days are more than the input to some company's bottom line." — Bree Groff On this week’s episode of Hello Monday, I talk with Bree about her new book Today Was Fun, and the radical idea at its heart: Work should feel good because it’s how we’re spending our lives. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation: ✅ The myth of loving what you do Generations were promised that passion would lead to fulfilling work—but for many, that promise hasn’t panned out. Worse, it’s become a justification for burnout. ✅ Friction isn't failure—it's fuel Fun at work doesn't mean ping-pong tables. It means autonomy, connection, creative tension. The stuff machines can’t do. ✅ Try a “Do Nothing Day” No meetings, no emails, no reports. (I once went for a four-hour walk.) These are the days that often lead to breakthroughs. ✅ Build trust, add mischief You don’t have to be a “fun” person to make work more joyful. Try music, a reversed meeting day, or a shared team picnic. Small moves matter. The biggest lesson? 👉 You don’t have to buy into extremes. You get to define what a good day looks like. Find it here: 🎥 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gwbUM5rY   🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gbApx_SR   🎧  Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gtptWAGA #HelloMonday #FutureOfWork #Leadership #EmployeeExperience #BreeGroff #WorkplaceCulture #MeaningfulWork

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Journalists receive too many follow-ups asking the same tired question: “Just checking you received my release?” I often like to say that a meaningful follow-up should sweeten the deal. If you’re jumping back into a journalist’s inbox, bring something new with you... a different angle, a fresh data point, a case study or some exclusive insight that didn’t make the original pitch. Show that you’ve thought about why this story should matter to their audience right now. Oh, one more thing... a single follow-up email is usually enough. If it adds value, it will land. If it doesn’t, a second nudge is unlikely to change that.

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Just got a very basic email pitch noting "off the record" at the top. Folks, this is not how journalism works. In case anyone needs a reminder: reporters get to choose if we want to agree to OTR or not. It is reserved for sensitive sources; PR pitches about some company's shiny new thing are not that.

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The most painful moment in PR. Stakeholder wants headlines. Budget is “we’ll see.” The brief is vague. The story is… not. “We need visibility.” “Top-tier media.” “Thought leadership.” What’s new? Silence. Then comes the line every PR professional knows by heart: “Just make it interesting.” 😬 PR isn’t magic. It’s strategy, timing, substance… and occasionally explaining that being alive isn’t news. Back to reframing reality.

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Most writers don’t fail because of bad ideas. They fail because their writing is too damn heavy. In the 1920s, Edwin Perkins had a thriving little mail-order business( that he ran out of the back room of the local post office). One of his bestsellers? A liquid concentrate called Fruit Smack. But there was a problem. Shipping glass bottles was expensive. They broke. They leaked. Customers complained. Instead of giving up, Perkins reimagined the product. What if the flavor could be condensed into powder? Small, light, and easy to ship. That pivot created Kool-Aid. A product so simple kids could mix it themselves. Cheap. Portable. Scalable. What does this have to do with writing? Your ideas are the “Fruit Smack.” If they’re too heavy, too complicated, too hard to deliver—your readers won’t stick around. The fix. Do what Perkins did. Strip it down. Make it portable. Create writing so clear and easy to consume that anyone can “mix it themselves.” Because great businesses—and great writing—aren’t built on complexity. They’re built on ideas packaged so well, they spread. So next time you write, ask yourself: Have I made this easy enough for my reader to consume every word. Every sentence. Every paragraph.

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I have a confession: I’m a professional editor who freezes when I sit down to write creatively.   I’m lucky to make a living doing what I love—taking content and making it better, paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the rhythm of editing. There’s no greater satisfaction, in my professional or personal life, than making sentences sing.   But when it comes to writing something purely creative, just for me? I freeze.   My editor brain refuses to sit down and shut up and let me be messy. It wants every sentence to be perfect as I write it. It insists that the first draft should read like a final pass. “Why wouldn’t it?” it argues. “You’re an editor. You know what good writing looks like.”   But that’s not how creativity works. And that's certainly not what I would tell any other creative writer.   Writing needs room to be raw and unsure. To sound a little off at first. But it’s hard to give myself that space when my professional instincts are trained on precision and polish.   So, editors who write: How do you do it? How do you quiet the critic and let the creator take the lead? What are your writing rituals, your craft book recommendations? What is your ugly-first-draft encouragement? Give me your tips! #amwriting #amediting #writingtips #creativewriting #editing #copyediting

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Most content agencies hire writers first and find clients second. We built our agency model backward by design. An Army of Writers started by identifying sectors where content quality directly impacts business outcomes, industries where deep expertise creates measurable competitive advantage for our clients. We then spent years vetting and recruiting writers with legitimate credentials in those specific sectors. People who mastered healthcare, technology, finance, or manufacturing first and also have a knack for translating that expertise into powerful content. This approach means we focus exclusively on sectors where we've built genuine depth. If a project falls outside our areas of expertise, we're transparent about that rather than stretching beyond what we can deliver exceptionally well. The result is a team of 340 writers who produce work that sounds like it came from inside your organization because, in a sense, it did. They've worked in your world and understand what resonates with your audience. And therein lies the competitive advantage of partnering with An Army of Writers.

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Writers & industry professionals are starting to ask if the romantasy trend is going to cool down—or if it's too late to start writing it. Maybe for some it's a hope the trend will pass, but if so, bad news ahead. I recently spoke with Alex Newton of K-lytics about what he's seeing in the Amazon marketplace (Kindle specifically). Here are the high-level takeaways: 🔹 Romantasy is no fad. K-lytics’ decade of Kindle data shows that genre waves last 5-10 years, and romantasy is a factor in many Kindle bestsellers—enough to reshape the sci-fi & fantasy charts. 🔹 More generally, romance rules Amazon: 61% of 2025’s top 100 bestsellers are romance, with most other hits adding a “romance-plus” subplot. 🔹 Algorithms amplify winners. Amazon’s “sell-more-of-what-sells” loop concentrates attention. Success favors stories that remix proven tropes—see Rebecca Yarros’s FOURTH WING. 🔹 Next niche to watch: contemporary Western romance, led by Elsie Silver.

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Planning your marketing budget for 2026? Don't forget to factor in thought leadership. Work with a PR pro to develop content by collaborating with your thought leaders to ghostwrite contributed articles, blog posts and more. Thought leadership isn't new, but it IS getting more attention. Why? 🔹 It's now ranked as the third most important decision driver for buyers (up from ranking 20th in the previous year) 🔹 73% say that an organization’s thought-leadership content is a more trustworthy way to assess capabilities versus marketing materials 🔹 More than half (54%) of buyers surveyed said a solution provider “that consistently produces high-quality thought-leadership content has prompted them to research the organization’s offers or capabilities” Having a dedicated resource to manage an ongoing program consistently - versus a one-off effort here and there - can yield bigger benefits in terms of visibility and sales. Public relations practitioners are often experienced in not only interviewing thought leaders and writing the content, but also placing it as earned media in publications like industry trade journals. We know that this helps position B2B companies as experts in their space, and it's also an essential factor in whether they'll appear in search results (be it traditional SEO or AI-driven search/GEO). So, don't put it off. If you haven't started dedicating time and resources to a consistent, ongoing thought leadership effort, 2026 can be the year you kick it off and begin to see the benefits. #B2BPR #ThoughtLeadership

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The 5 Ws and H (Who, What, Where, When,why and How) are fundamentals in journalism.However, these questions can also be applied to everyday life, helping us clarify and understand various situations. Asking these questions can help to identify the root cause of a problem. Clarifying the 5 Ws and H can indicate to take firm decisions

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A few years ago, I was checking the links on my writing samples page (a good practice for writers to do periodically) and found that all of the blog posts I’d written for a former client were gone.   Dozens of articles I was proud of—that were the main clips I had demonstrating expertise in a particular industry—just disappeared, overnight. I couldn’t even find them on the Wayback Machine.   I signed up for Authory soon after that.   One of the great things about having a freelance writing business is that it’s relatively easy to keep overhead low. A lot of freelance expenses and tools you see people talk about aren’t *really* necessary. If you want to keep your business lean, it’s pretty easy.   But Authory is the paid tool I find myself recommending to other writers the most.   There are a couple of main benefits I get from it that make the cost worth it: 1.    The most straightforward: it saves all those writing samples.   Over the years, current and former clients will do content audits and updates that involve removing your work from the web (or updating it with someone else's name). It’s inevitable. It happens to all of us, no matter how good your work is. If you don’t have them saved somewhere, you risk losing all evidence of your hard work. 2.    It keeps them looking professional.   Even if you have your work saved in old Word or Google Docs, it just doesn’t look as impressive or professional to share them with prospects in that format. Authory maintains whatever images the piece was originally published with, and keeps the look slick and official. Sharing an Authory link looks a lot better than sending over the same article as a Word attachment.   3.    It makes it easy to search all your old work.   Putting together a list of relevant samples for prospects used to take me *much* longer. I’d have to try and remember what I wrote, or go searching through old folders on my desktop or in Google Drive. With all my work saved in Authory, I can search keywords there and bring up all the articles that touch on a topic. It makes the process of putting together a list of relevant samples much faster and easier.   I’m not being paid by Authory or anything (although I’ll drop my referral link in the comments for anyone considering it), I just genuinely find it to be valuable. I still see writers sometimes bemoaning clips they’ve lost. I know that feeling too well, and want to help others avoid it.  

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"Trust the version of yourself who wrote the first draft." That's a piece of advice I received early on in my writing career, and it's why I recoil when folks so openly share that they use AI in their writing process "just to get the first draft out of the way." There's raw honesty in a first draft that we, as writers, can lose by the final draft if we shave down too many of our work's edges. A first draft is where you sift through your junkyard of ideas to uncover the gems that will become central to your work. Without a first draft, your work's greatest potential is left unmined: you're left only with your easiest, most accessible hunches. How do you expect to arrive at a final draft that's representative of you if you skip the part where you lay the foundation? And, forgive me for being embarrassingly sincere on LinkedIn.com of all places... but if you don't delight in the ideological excavation process -- if that thrill isn't what's compelling you to write in the first place -- what's this whole thing even about for you? I reject the premise that AI is evolving the craft of writing, and I refuse to forfeit the necessity of an iterative writing process for the illusion of efficiency. (And hey! If you, too, value the craft of writing and want to invest in having More Quality Writing for your myriad professional purposes... hit me up! I'm a writer and narrative designer with a hefty background in theatre, gaming, and immersive experiences -- but, above all, I'm a nimble storyteller who can aim my love of language in whatever direction best suits your needs. ✨)

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Free quick writing tip: Often, sentences that begin with, “As” become stronger if you eliminate “as” and start with the next word. Examples: “As I turned the corner, I saw my former boss, but he didn’t recognize me.” VS. “I turned the corner and saw my former boss, but he didn’t recognize me.” Here’s another one… “As I scanned the horizon, looking for an answer, I saw no other way.” VS. “I scanned the horizon, looking for an answer. I saw no other way.” Why use more words than you need? Check your sentences beginning with “As…” and see if a little extra magic emerges if you delete that little two-letter word.

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We can stop asking if thought leadership works. Survey says, it does: Only 3% of respondents to the iResearch Services Thought Leadership Survey said thought leadership isn’t driving measurable outcomes. But we need to keep asking: how are we measuring success? Until we agree on how to measure it, we’re stuck chasing clicks and calling it strategy. That’s why we introduced the 4 R’s Framework—to help teams move from soft signals to something that holds up in the boardroom. Thought leadership works. Now it’s time to show how, and why.

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