A complex sentence is made up of two clauses: one independent clause (a simple sentence) which can stand on its own, and one dependent clause that would simply be a fragment if left alone. The dependent clause also contains the subordinating conjunction (the word which ties the two clauses together). Subordinating conjunctions are words such as “because,” “although,” “if,” “when,” “unless,” etc. Are you still awake?
A common error occurs with this type of sentence though because there seems to be confusion on where exactly to pencil in the pesky little comma. The rule is simple:
Three thousand members in your Facebook group! You’re following 5,000 on Twitter! You’re well on your way to social media nirvana, right?
Maybe.
The low barrier to entry for most popular social media tools today means that anyone can be in the game. But it also makes it very easy to abuse your audience, perhaps resulting in the opposite of what you intend.
Each year between March 1 and May 31, Keep American Beautiful sponsors the Great American Clean Up to encourage community involvement in keeping America Beautiful.
According to the kab.org website:
In 2007, Great American Cleanup volunteers collected 200 million pounds of litter and debris; planted 4.6 million trees, flowers and bulbs; cleaned 178,000 miles or roads, streets and highways; and diverted more than 70.6 million plastic (PET) bottles and more than 2.2 million scrap tires from the waste stream.
This Saturday, May 17, some of us from Hammock Inc. have volunteered to clean up along McCrory Lane and Charlotte Pike in western Davidson County.
Working on lots of long-term magazine projects, we don’t select new fonts all that often, particularly when it comes to body copy. In general, you choose a font for the body copy of your publication, and you stick with it, unless it’s time for a big redesign. And a lot of times, you still stick with it after a redesign.
Because a body copy font is such a long-term commitment, we are very careful when we’re choosing one. I sat down with our design team recently to get their insights on what makes a great body copy font for a magazine.
Today, I received an email from a client wanting to know when she would receive the postage estimate for her magazine. Usually, postal estimates are one of the last things clients want to receive. Checks have to be requested, approved, written, signed and Fed Exed to the USPS Postmaster by a certain date. Often, after the magazines are mailed, excess postage accumulates in the account. The post office will not refund this money, but only hold it for future mailings with no interest paid.
But a year or so ago, Hammock helped this client switch to the USPS CAPS (Central Automated Payment Services) system for submitting postage to the postmaster for her association’s magazines. Using CAPS, a client sets up a trust or debit account for payment of postage.
One or two days before the postage is due in the account, the client is given an actual expense for postage, and her money can be deposited in the account the next day. There is no overage for accounting errors added to the amount as there is with an estimate.
For the above client, it has worked really well. She is included in a co-mailing pool with other magazines that utilize CAPS. Not only are her postal costs reduced because of shared freight charges, the magazines get to local post offices quicker and into the hands of her members. Plus the balance in her account at the end of the mailing is $0.
It can be cumbersome and time-consuming to navigate the postal system, but we have helped many clients achieve similar efficiencies. We serve as a bit of a translator for the intricacies of the postal system for our clients.
We love to tell great stories. We love to hear them, too. That’s why our ears are always perked for good ones. And sometimes, good stories come in the form of podcasts.
In a nutshell, a podcast is an audio file, distributed over the Internet, which is ready for playback on your computer or a portable MP3 player.
Although they started out as a way to distribute radio-type shows, podcasts are also being used to market new products, distribute class lessons to students and share news. Podcasting and other forms of social media like blogging and photo-sharing are popular and effective ways of telling a story. And a growing group of associations are embracing the trend as a new and popular way reach out to their members and potential members.
Here are a few good ones we’ve noticed recently.
We send all kinds of files back and forth to clients and vendors every day — Word documents, spreadsheets, images, PDFs — whatever you can imagine! But the need to email photos isn’t exclusive to custom media companies. We frequently send and receive electronic files with people who aren’t members of a creative profession — and of course with our friends and families. We’ve found that outside of the small circle of us who regularly use electronic images in the course of our business, the proliferation of point-and-shoot digital cameras has led to some bad habits as we try to share images.
Make sure you are sending your electronic images in the best way using these tips.
Just last week, my mind was having a little battle between the words “maximum” and “maximal,” and it was driving me crazy. I had typed each word out a few dozen times as I wrote and rewrote a story. I had stared at them both for so long that they no longer even looked like words to me. So, to end the battle, I turned to the best resource I know for answering tough grammar questions: my colleagues here at Hammock.
To me, there is no better resource than the smart folks around me for hammering out the proper use of a hyphen. We talk about it over lunch, from opposite ends of the hallway. And, as you’ve heard us mention before, we use Instant Messenger to talk about pronouns and dependent clauses as much as we use it to discuss last night’s episode of LOST.
But when some of us are up to our necks in a project or out of the office for lunch (or sleep), where do we go when our deepest thoughts about the subjunctive mood just won’t rest?
Online, you’ll find us logged on to:
Off the shelf, you might find us grabbing:
There are dozens of other great resources out there. What’s your favorite?
Bill’s post earlier this week celebrated all that we love about magazines and their punny, punny headlines. But you’ll notice here (“How to Write Headlines for the Web”) we’re playing it straight. And there’s good reason for that.
When you’re titling articles, posts and features online, your headline has to do a lot more than look pretty and act clever. Since headlines may show up as links, and often help with search engine results, they have to cut to the chase: Just tell us what the page is about.
Our client’s magazines were being delayed once they entered the Bulk Mail Center. The magazines were entering a facility that served a large area of the heavily populated northeastern United States, but the magazines weren’t making it to our client’s members’ homes for three or four weeks. They were being transported from postal facility to postal facility to postal facility until they reached the local post office for delivery.
While participating in a webinar on postal concerns, I learned about a company that co-mails magazines together. We worked out a plan where:
Plus, the client paid less in postage or postal freight.