Welp, here we are at the end of 2014 with a brand new year peeking out over the horizon. If you’re like us, you’re thinking about your business adventures from the past 12 months and planning on how to make 2015 blow 2014 right out of the water.

Here are a few tips that can help:

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Happy holidays!

Let’s get this festive Questions for a Language Ninja party started with a few topics that really bother her questions from her legions of devoted fans:

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One of the most internationally ubiquitous weapons, the Russian AK-47, has undergone a little makeover. The assault rifle was developed in the 1940s in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died almost exactly one year ago. Prior to his death, the weapons engineer wrote of his “spiritual pain” in wondering if the AK-47 has done more harm than good. Although Kalashnikov’s intentions to invent a weapon of defense may have been noble, it’s impossible to determine if the weapon has wrought more destruction than it has ever defended, given the AK-47’s uncontrolled global distribution.

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This familiar passage from Dante’s Inferno might as well become the new slogan of Waterstones, a major UK book retailer that recently garnered major media attention when an American tourist was locked in their Trafalgar Square bookstore after they closed up for the night. While our hapless hero used the Internet in the upstairs section, the staff apparently clocked out, locked up and went home. Unsure of what to do, he eventually tweeted his situation from his smartphone, and was instantly flooded with book recommendations from concerned tweeters who wanted to make sure he had enough quality reading to square him away for the night. Heaven forbid he would end up with something sub-par to read! He became an overnight Twitter sensation and was retweeted more than 12,000 times by the following afternoon. The tourist was freed after a couple of hours, which, unfortunately, he did not use to peruse the length of Fahrenheit 451 or delight in the witty prose of Jonathan Safran Foer. “I people-watched from the window,” he later said in an interview. To each his own. 

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Commodities have been on my mind as of late. I’m not talking about the “Trading Spaces” kind, but rather those that are mistaken for commodities when they’re actually not — especially services. This all came about when a client of mine requested that we chat about a new direction for his company’s blogs. We’d been focusing on some of the graphic design elements of the company’s service offering and hadn’t received much feedback as of late, so when I was contacted to discuss details, I got excited. Feedback and client involvement is a strong component in effective, targeted content.

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Rake up the excess on your old blog, and rake in new connections.

Ah, fall: my favorite time of year. I’m not a full-fledged drive-thru maven in yoga pants with an uncontrolled addiction to #PSLs, but I do love a touch of fall flavor. Interestingly, autumn is really a season of decay in some senses: the leaves wither and fall, the air turns colder, and warm ovens turn the harvest’s bounty into pie after pie.

Even though this season is about things falling away, it’s still impossibly joyful for many people. Perhaps it’s our collective recognition of the fact that when things wither and die, they will come back renewed after a winter of rest. Whatever it is, we can’t get enough of fall. And perhaps the world of business writing, copy, and marketing could use a touch a pumpkin spice.

Here are a few lessons we can all glean from some of fall’s most cherished pastimes and traditions. This is an excellent time of year to do a bit of “cleaning house,” just as we pack away the shorts and bring out the sweaters with October’s first chill.  

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Everywhere you look, advice on SEO marketing and increasing site traffic are all “blah blah blah” about the all-powerful content. How to improve your content. How to create engaging content. How what you thought was good content at one time is now no longer acceptable because of reasons. (And, on a related note, how to spiff up existing content.)

At the frontline of content creation stands blogging. Blogs started out as the business equivalent of a “Dear Readers,” but let’s be honest: most blog posts these days have almost nothing to do with actual writing anymore. They’re all about cross-marketing and the multimedia experience, or how many images to include and at what resolution and which designer can hook you up with a really swell infographic.

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Phew. It feels good to get that off my chest.

I feel I’m bit of a fraud. I’m a writer and a wordsmith; I was raised to love words and the complex emotions, ideas, and concepts that they can convey. And yet, I believe I am an active participant in a trend that is contributing to the destruction of not just the English language, but written language in general. What is this scourge in which I am a willing (if guilty) participant? It’s the cutest scourge EVAR! Emojis.

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