Like many of you, we were aware “the dog days of summer” referred to a stretch of the season when life moves at a languid pace. However, it was only recently while perusing The Old Farmer’s Almanac that we learned the term’s actual dates (July 3-August 11) and meaning (which is much more astrological than we’d imagined). The end of summer’s dog days lines up, more or less, with the two-year anniversary of A Better Way to Say That. To celebrate—a nicer motivation than “to fill space”—we’d like to share 24 observations, ideas, opinions, and other thought-varieties that have been on our mind grapes since we started sending you this newsletter 24 months ago.

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In many ways, “know your audience” is the comms world’s version of “profit = revenue - cost.” ... To be fair, few people in any line of work would argue that knowing their audience doesn’t matter. They just don’t know what they don’t know, or they put too much faith in what they think they know.

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[You] may have heard that the math doesn’t seem to be working. As Uber’s COO Andrew Macdonald recently told Business Insider, “[It’s] very hard to draw a line between one of those [AI usage] stats and say, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful customer features.’” ... [His] message should be a wakeup call for small and medium organizations that have outsourced their strategy and production to Claude & Co.

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[One] thing we’ve learned over the years is that, despite what SEMRush dashboards and Neil Patel ebooks would have you believe, SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t rocket science.... In fact, improving your website’s SEO is often simpler than you might imagine. That’s because it has more in common with a library catalogue than the esoteric sorcery to which it’s often compared.

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Slack, Asana, Teams, Monday, Signal, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, email: what do all of these platforms have in common?   If you juggle multiple projects, someone is probably sending you messages on all of them. Right at this very moment, perhaps. Here are some tips for managing the onslaught.

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Public communications is unlike molecular biology in many ways, but we’d like to suggest the most obvious difference is the level of linguistic complexity required.

Not every organization has to acknowledge "these uncertain times." But if you're going to join that conversation, it's wise to offer people something more than empty therapyspeak.

Guessing about what the future holds is an amusing and low-risk pastime—most of the time, newspapers won’t write stories about you admitting you were wrong—but we still think it’s best to be realistic. We also believe it’s important to have a sense of humor about these things. Because have you seen the world out there? So, having established the parameters of  “practical” and “fun,”  here are the themes that (we hope) will define communications in 2026:

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[The] forces that defined the past year—the AIfication of everything, the Trump Administration’s crusade to reshape the world, the ultra-personalized emptiness of digital life—still seem to have a head of steam. When they’ll run out is anyone’s guess. So here’s a prediction for the new year: people are going to start valuing a human touch a lot more.

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If the 2010s were an era of diversity in media, the 2020s are one of consolidation. This presents obvious challenges when trying to get small or medium organizations mentioned in the news. Success depends on riding the waves that already exist, instead of trying to make new ones.

Press releases sometimes feel like relics from a simpler, more innocent time. Much like fax machines, most people are aware they continue to exist. What’s less clear: who actually uses these things in 2025? And for what purpose?

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The ability to not sound like you were just lobotomized by a team of nonprofit execs with MBAs has become a way to stand out. It's “riskier” in a sense, because it’s easier for people to tell what you’re actually saying—and potentially criticize it. On the other hand, nobody’s listening to the jargon jockeys anymore.

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