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Marcia Riefer Johnston

Marcia Riefer Johnston

Marcia Riefer Johnston is the author of Word Up! How to Write Powerful Sentences and Paragraphs (And Everything You Build from Them) and You Can Say That Again: 750 Redundant Phrases to Think Twice About. As a former member of the CMI team, she served as Managing Editor of Content Strategy. She has run a technical-writing business for … a long time. She taught technical writing in the Engineering School at Cornell University and studied literature and creative writing in the Syracuse University Masters program under Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Follow her on Twitter @MarciaRJohnston. For more, see Writing.Rocks.

Stories By Marcia Riefer Johnston

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Agile Content Development: Five Companies Tell How They Do It

April 30, 2015
For many brands, Agile methodology is now more than the way software gets developed. It’s the way things get done, period. How does content development fit into that model? Five pros share their insights.
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Is Your Metadata Sending Love Notes to the Future?

April 20, 2015
Mid-20th-century newspapers couldn’t be expected to create the kind of metadata that some people call “a love note to the future.” Today’s content producers know better.
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Intelligent Content — What Does 'Structurally Rich' Mean?

April 9, 2015
Find out why “structurally rich” comes first in the classic definition of intelligent content.
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Restructuring the Modern Content Marketer

February 26, 2015
Do you hear Change knocking? Don’t be afraid. Open the door. You'll see Scott Abel, smiling. At you.
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The Power of Consistent Content Structure: A Health Care Story

February 19, 2015
When several hospitals in Portland, Oregon, standardized the structure of their hospital-discharge form, they improved patient care while reducing hospitals’ financial risk. Find out how they did it.
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IBM’s James Mathewson on Making Marketing Content Intelligent

January 26, 2015
Scott Abel interviews James Mathewson, the Global Program Director for Search and Structured Content Strategy at IBM, about the role of intelligent content in marketing.
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A Case Study in Intelligent Content: The Language of Content Strategy

January 7, 2015
Bite-sized. Organized. Consistent. Guy Kawasaki uses those terms to describe The Language of Content Strategy. It’s a book, a card deck, and a website. It’s more than the sum of its products. It’s a case study in intelligent content.
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Intelligent Content: The Elephant and Its Parts

December 17, 2014
When it comes to intelligent content, don’t be like a blind man describing an elephant, mistaking one part for the whole. You need a sense of all the parts to see the whole critter. Discover the six parts that make up the full picture of intelligent content.