Gregory Ciotti

"100 Ways to Improve Your Writing" is a book you’ve probably seen in passing, but haven’t read; it's the source of this famous excerpt on varying sentence length: http://i.imgur.com/8usNRMy.png Provost is one of the finest writing teachers around. All of his books are accessible, apply to fiction and non-fiction, and are themselves well written. The passage above is a personal favorite of...

Authors Dixon, Toman, and DeLisi and other researchers at the CEB use data collected from hundreds of companies and over 100,000 customers to bust a few common customer service myths, namely that “delight” is vastly overrated. They claim reduced effort is the biggest driver of customer loyalty. The second half of the book outlines ways to reduce effort across the entire customer experience. I...

"The Best Service is No Service" is authored by Bill Price, former Global VP of Customer Service at Amazon. He wrote the book to encourage companies to challenge the demand for support, rather than just coping. By finding, flagging, and fixing "dumb contacts," companies can have more fruitful conversations with their customers, increasing loyalty. Lots of practical frameworks in this one,...

"Revising Prose" can get a little pricey depending on where you buy it, so I figured I'd offer a short summary. The book is built around Lanham's "Paramedic Method" for fixing bloated writing. The Paramedic Method seems to have changed over the years, but primarily consists of six steps: (1.) Highlight the prepositions. (2.) Highlight the “is” verb forms. (3.) Find the action. (Who is kicking...

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