Good morning, friends!

A halfhearted breeze is meandering through Tiny-House Office today, because Boston has finally swerved into the Spring HOV Lane.

It was dicey there for a while. But now the infuriatingly arctic month of April is growing ever tiny in the rearview mirror, which means those of us in Boston have approximately 30 minutes to enjoy this glorious weather before gears shift again and we start complaining about the heat.

New England: I love you. You're perfect. Now change.

It's boring to talk about the weather. ("Tedious observations about the weather are expected to dominate the conversations of uninteresting people for the next 24 to 48 hours, boredom experts warned today." —Andy Borowitz)

...or is it?

I've spent one full week of the past two sealed inside airplanes and hotels. So today I have a renewed appreciation of a meandering breeze shuffling my desk papers.

This past week on the road I talked about the importance of checking in with all your senses in your writing. Because invoking more than one sense in your communication adds color (literally, figuratively) that can make your writing come alive.

Our default as writers is often to communicate just what we see—the way a news reporter might cover interstate traffic during a morning commute. That reporter just notes (colorlessly) the volume of cars—never how all those vehicles sound. Or smell. Or feel.

Maybe that's a bad example. Because that would be a little weird to talk about commuter smell?

But it's not weird for us to talk about more than what we see.

In Boston this week, I talked in part about how much we marketers can learn from the spare but tactile writing in E.B. White's Charlotte's Web. (A book I think is mis-shelved in the children's section: It's a solid read for adults, too.)

BUT: I didn't share my favorite Charlotte's Web paragraph—the setup is too much to explain—but I'm giving it to you now. And it's about the weather:

The melancholy crickets. The little anxious sapling. E.B. air-drops us into the pending fall using all his E.B. senses. His is not a dry, colorless weather report.

Well, Marketing: I love you. You're perfect. But we've gotta change, too.

The best marketing writing can easily get more colorful. A simple pro tip: Just add ONE more sense.

Like:

From Doug Kessler's bio on the website of marketing agency Velocity: "Doug is a displaced Yank who started his career at Ogilvy & Mather. Soap and fabric softener bored him rigid."

>> How bored was he? Bored rigid.

About Jacoline Vinke on the travel site Truffle Pig: "After spending a childhood in the Netherlands plotting her departure for warmer climes from the back of a rain-soaked bicycle...Jacoline finally landed in Greece in 1998, with a toddler, a one-month old baby, a Greek husband, and a determination never to go back to an office job."

>> Can you feel the cold rain on Jacoline's young, furious face as she was strapped into the back of that bike? Props for mixing actual baggage (family) and metaphorical baggage (resolve), too.

From @FieldNotesBrand on Twitter: "THIS WEEK: Pushed a ton of pixels. Eyeballed a kaleidoscope of Pantone chips. Pulled a mess of bezier curves. Ran so many formulas. Kerned a lot of pairs. Plotted one big-ass experiment. Named a thing. Renamed that thing. Tore into packaging ideas. Never stopping shipping. Beer time."

>> Feel the industry and celebration of a fertile week?

Here are your 5 takeaways:

Just. Add. One. More. Sense.

The defense rests. No further questions, your honor.

K.M Weiland identifies four boring opening lines and suggests ways to make them more interesting. She's talking to novelists, but good writing is good writing, you know? My favorite (and on-point for this TA #8) is "The Weather Line."

Basic: "It was a bright and sunny day."
Not basic: "It was a bright and sunny day, just the kind of day I was supposed to die in."

Whoa. Damn, girl: That pulls you in like that final Time of My Life scene in Dirty Dancing. See the full list here.

1 ½ .
One caution about "color" in writing: Don't use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue, says Elmore Leonard in his well-known book on writing, which somehow I never read until literally a week ago.

"The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with 'she asseverated,' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary."

Most Q&A interviews are pretty standard. I love it when they go off the rails a little, like my friend Nick Usborne and I do here.

We debate style guides. (I think they're critical; they make Nick want to stab himself in his (very wrong) eyeball with a ballpoint pen.)

We bicker about the best place for a company to test and hone tone of voice. (I say email; Nick says social media.)

My favorite question came at the end, when Nick asked about writers' being replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I don't think we should all be depositing poop emojis in our drawers at the notion that artificially intelligent robots are coming to take over all of our writing jobs.

Instead of freaking out, we need to freshen up the guest room and give the robots a place to lay their thermoplastic heads and close their soulless eyes. Let's welcome them with open arms.

Why? Full-metal interview is here.

At MarketingProfs, we've been talking a lot about tone of voice—or how the personality and character of businesses come through in the words they use.

Most companies spend shipping containers full of time documenting the visual attributes of a brand and a shot-glass-full on documenting tone of voice. Skype, for example, published a 66-page PDF detailing the use of speech bubbles and Pantone colors... yet dedicated a mere 2 pages on voice. Okay.

Anyway, my two favorite style guides produced by companies come from HubSpot and Uberflip.

The lovely Beth Dunn was the midwife for the former; my friend Hana Abaza (now at Shopify) produced the latter. Squeeze all the inspiration you can out of these:

Last week I announced the names of our MarketingProfs B2B Forum keynotes and shared why we picked them. And for the Very. First. Time I used video (shot in my Tiny House) to do it.

I'm kind of scared of video. The only way to neutralize your fears is to run straight at them.

Check out Baby's First Video here.

Nine-year-old Alice Kassnove's suggested captions for the New Yorker's weekly contest exploded online when her aunt posted her captions to Twitter. That inspired the magazine to film this how-to video with her, in which the little writer chews thoughtfully on a Sharpie and live-captions a series of magazine cartoons.

Two things to love about this:

Her answer reminded me of E.B. White's comment on humor: "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."

Watch Alice's real-time captioning here.

I'm about as impatient a person as they come. I like to go fast. I like speed. Most of us do.

But here's the problem: Some things do need a slower, more thoughtful approach. There's magic in knowing which moments to embrace as Slow Moments.

How do we recognize those critical "slow moments" that we need to embrace if we want to live our best lives? That's what I tackle as a post + framework on my blog.

Does it resonate? Or nah?

I'd love any and all feedback. Read the whole enchilada.

I love the concept of a story kiosk so much. Waiting-room marketers (is that a job?) (probably no)... you need to get this. I'm thinking hospitals. Airports. The DMV wait I'm literally LOLing at that last idea. Anyway, do you have a waiting area? Get in on this.

This app lets you (or your audience!) listen to your articles (and this newsletter!) like they are podcasts. (Thanks to my friend Jon Burkhart for this rec.)