Everything has a formula: finding square roots, closing sales calls, creating nice-smelling shampoo. And I don’t mean to burst any bubbles here, but so does writing. Web page: headline, subhead, 200 to 300 words of body copy. Sales letter: greeting, introductory paragraph, features and benefits, call to action, closing. Script for a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie: Read on …

The below essay is from my friend and brilliant fellow copywriter, Monica Taylor, who sick and couch-ridden around the holidays, spent an entire week doing nothing but watching Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movies.

I love this essay. Thanks, Monica.

What I learned from the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas movies. A week of them.

By Monica Taylor

1. If you are a hard-nosed, flinty career woman, you need to go to a small town in Washington/Vermont/Connecticut, where …

2. You will be trying to report on a news story/get to your wedding/call your editor when …

3. Fate intervenes in the shape of a man who wears a Carhartt/L.L.Bean/denim jacket and is a

1. Sad widower/trucker/secretly an artist
2. Sad widower/writer/secretly a trucker
3. Sad single dad with an abnormally normal 12-year-old daughter
4. An angel

4. You will not like this man. You will have words. You will end up having to share a hotel room/train car/theatre seats/truck cab against your will. Oh, and he hates you, too.

5. There will be a huge misunderstanding, where you will look like a jerk, he looks like a liar, your friends in NYC will beg you to come back to your career, and you will go.

6. Everything good lives in that little town in Washington/Vermont/Connecticut, and everything bad lives in NYC.

7. The people in these small towns (seaside, usually) are charmingly odd, but not mentally ill. Children wear woolen newsboy caps. There is always a gazebo.

8. Having a career is a very, very, very bad thing. Especially if you are a woman. It makes you flinty and miserable. To be happy, you have to live in the small town and go to the gazebo.

9. The fated men are sure and quiet, and they fall in love first. They do not have commitment issues. The women have big commitment issues. They run away at least two to three times before the end of the movie.

10. If the fated man is not an angel, Peter Falk is the angel. And he will bring you together.

11. If there is no angel, there has to be some other magic. A ghost, a star, a coincidence of epic size. Good, big magic. No magic, no movie.

I learned a lot.

Being a newspaper subscriber is kind of like owning a 15-year-old dog. You don’t know exactly when the experience is going to end, but you might want to hold off on buying another bag of kibble.

I am by no means a Luddite. I’m an avid Internet enthusiast and, in fact, earn much of my living writing for the Web. But I’m also a lifelong newspaper reader. You know, print newspapers. So when I hear talk of several cities possibly going “without a daily print paper by 2010” – and that the New York Times could respond to its financial struggles by shuttering my beloved Boston Globe – I get a little teary.

Now I’ll admit, the “newspaper-industry-is-dying” angle has been done to, well, death in recent years. As Slate.com’s Jack Shafer points out, “The only reason we’re so well-informed about journalists’ suffering is they have easy access to a megaphone.”

Nonetheless, I’m going to miss the old dinosaur. And my seven-month-old daughter has helped drive home this point by waking up at 5:30 each morning. I trudge down two flights of stairs, cranky baby in my arms, in the slim hope that my Globe will be resting on my front porch. It never is – not at that hour.

My only solution is to plop my laptop on the breakfast table and call up boston.com. But it’s just not the same. It’s no fun reading the comics. I can’t divvy up the reading with my wife – me, the sports; her, the front page. And every session is a dance with disaster, with my mug of coffee on one side of the laptop and a bowl of baby cereal on the other. (Not to mention the ever-present threat of baby spit-up.)

Yeah, I’m sounding like an old man. But I’m a loyal guy. And if that means going down with the sinking ship that is print newspapers, so be it.

Are you going to miss the ritual of the daily newspaper? Share your thoughts.

I’m not trying to be all high and mighty here, but I don’t eat fast food. Even if it didn’t give me searing stomach pains, everything about it just depresses me. The mindless trading of quality for quantity, the dull-eyed shuffle to the counter, the … oh, you know!

I could go on, and as a devotee of farmers’ markets and Trader Joe’s, I often do. But as much as I hate to admit it, Burger King’s new advertising campaign is pretty damn brilliant. And for once, it’s not targeted at children. (Another day, another soapbox.)

So what did they do? They infiltrated Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, where you can sacrifice friendships for Whoppers. Literally, you burn images of your friends for a $3 coupon. 

Sound disturbing? It is. But it’s also tapping into the collective irritation of so many insincere “friend” requests. I know if I were eating Whoppers, there are at least a handful of people on my Facebook page I’d trade for one. And as Burger King knows, I’m not alone in this feeling. 

The Big Money‘s Chadwick Matlin breaks down how it’s done – and why it’s been so effective. Take a look.

My friend, colleague and strategist to the stars (okay, strategist to regular businesses) Rich Nadworny of Digalicious sent me this Seth Godin post, which seems very worth reposting. It’s 14 good rules about email marketing.

I particularly like #14: “Just because you have someone’s email address doesn’t mean you have the right to email them.” I wish someone would tell that to Ejner Andersen, who is always writing to me with heartfelt hope that I “assist him with a favour that will sincerely benefit the both of us and all parties involved.”

And just out of curiosity, how many of you out there actually know who Seth Godin is? And if you also know Ejner, please tell him to stop emailing me.  

1. Don’t send the same email to large numbers of people.

2. If you have more than a few people to contact, you’ll be tempted to copy and paste or mail merge. Don’t. You’ll get caught. It shows. If it’s important enough for someone to read, it’s important enough for you to rewrite.

3. Careful with the salutation. Don’t write, “Dear Claudia,” if you don’t usually write “Dear” at the beginning of *all* your emails.

4. Don’t mush the salutation together with the rest of the note. If I had a dollar for every email that started, “Joe, When experts come together…” That’s not personal. That’s lazy merging. See rule 1.

5. Don’t send HTML or pictures. Personal email doesn’t, why are you?

6. Don’t talk like a press release. Talk like a person. A person is reading this, so why are you talking like that?

7. Be short. The purpose of an email is not to sell the person on anything other than writing back. If you don’t have a personal, interesting way to start a conversation, don’t write.

8. Don’t send an email only when you really need something. That’s not personal, that’s selfish.

9. Do you have a signature with a phone number in it? *Your* phone number? If you don’t trust me enough to give me your real phone number, I don’t trust you enough to read your mail.

10. Don’t mark your email urgent. Urgent to you is not urgent to me.

11. Don’t lie in your subject line, and don’t be cute. You’re not clever enough to be cute. Just be honest.

12. Following up on an impersonal spam email is twice as dumb as sending the first one. Invest the time to do it right the first time.

13. Anticipated, personal and relevant permission mail will always dramatically outperform greedy short-term spam. I promise.

14. Just because you have someone’s email address doesn’t mean you have the right to email them.

Well, maybe it’s the spirit of the New Year, but today I actually bypassed the article on bad celebrity drivers for something that’s relevant to what we do here at The Hired Pens. 

I felt an immediate kinship with the writer of “I Hate You, Blue-Tux-Wearing Viagra Guy!” Like Farhad Manjoo, I don’t have cable TV. Why bother when I have Netflix and now hulu.com, a website where I can watch shows like The Office and The Daily Show for free? 

Wait, free? How do they make money!?

That’s where the brilliant title of this article comes in. They make money by forcing you to watch two to three Web commercials per episode. And 100% of the time they involve, to quote from the article, a “mischievous smile, powder-blue tux, roses, dancing, four-hour erection.” (Click on “Anniversary.”)

100% of the time? Really?

Well, sort of. What advertisers are doing — please stop! — is buying airtime for the entire show. So what’s the solution? I have some Viagra-inspired ideas for any brands that may be listening:  

1. Understand our needs: If we’re watching TV on hulu, we’re probably pretty young. This means unless we’re in a May/December romance, we have no use for Viagra.
2. Spice things up: Quit buying ad time for the entire show — but if you must, at least show us three different spots.
3. Keep it fresh! Remember: 90% of your audience has ADD … and 90 other vices/devices vying for our attention.
4. We know when you’re faking: Don’t try to pass off a truncated version of a TV commercial as a Web spot. You’re not fooling anyone.  
5. Treat us with respect: Lines like “The pizza way to snack” for Totino’s Pizza Rolls makes us feel like you think we’re stupid. And we’re not. We have a lot of buying power, so put some powerful creative behind your ads and we’ll listen. 

Okay, now you tell us: Which Web spots just drive you insane? And which ones are really great? Or just so bad they’re good …

We all have words and phrases we hate; in fact, our Dec. 1 post about it generated more comments than any other post we’ve written. 

Well, as I was reading the Boston Globe recently (yes, I still read a real newspaper, delivered to my porch each morning by a real paper boy), I came across an article that warmed my heart. 

Turns out we have an ally with Lake Superior State University, which annually publishes a “List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.” 

Not surprisingly, buzzwords about the economy and the environment made up about half the list. The Palin family was responsible for the rest. Here are a few of our favorites, including the feedback they inspired. 

GREEN

If I see one more corporation declare itself ‘green,’ I’m going to start burning tires in my backyard.

–Ed Hardiman, Bristow, Va.

(Hey Ed, check out Boston’s Down to Earth expo this April to see companies that are truly green … uh, sustainable.) 

MAVERICK

You know it’s time to banish this word when even the Maverick family, who descended from the rancher who inspired the term, says it’s being mis-used.

–Scott Urbanowski, Kentwood, Mich.

FIRST DUDE (paging Mr. Palin) 

Skateboard English is not an appropriate way to refer to the spouse of a high-ranking public official.

–Paul Ruschmann, Canton, Mich.

WALL STREET/MAIN STREET

I know that with the “Wall Street” collapse, the comparison is convenient, but really, let’s find another way to talk about everyman or the middle class, or even, heaven forbid, “Joe the Plumber.“

–Stacey, Knoxville, Tenn.

DESPERATE SEARCH

Every time the news can’t find something intelligent to report, they start on a “desperate search” for someone, somewhere.

–Rick A. Hyatt, Saratoga, Wyo.

So what words from 2009 would you put on the list?