Take 5 minutes, and read this: 8 powerful speech techniques used by Barack Obama Good sales copy, in the words of the prophet, is salesmanship in text. And make no mistake, all those techniques ARE salesmanship. Every one, from the repetitions to the tone to the focus on story, is designed to sell you – in this case, sell you on Barack Obama. Of course, to the crowd in front of him on election night, the sell was easy. To the people it...

Normally, I’ll block off 2 weeks for writing a sales letter. This is so I’ve got enough time for research, thinking through a few different approaches and have a gap of a couple of days at the end where I can put the letter in a drawer, forget about it, and then come back fresh for a final edit. But sometimes, I don’t have that luxury. On Sunday I was approached for an 11th-hour job – the launch was happening on...

Read this: Workplace discrimination prompts ‘whitened’ job applications Does it seem familiar? It’s fairly common knowledge that there’s a bias in favour of white people in the employment market, but here’s something you may not know: it’s not just bigotry. In fact, it’s rational. Tim Harford talks through the psychology behind this in The Logic Of Life. In the experiment, students were divided into 2...