Sample Testimonial Quotes

As Sylviane Diouf points out, “Of the dozen deported Africans who left testimonies of their lives, only [Olaudah] Equiano, [Mahommah Gardo] Baquaqua, and [Ottobah] Cugoano referred to the Middle Passage.”36 Eight of the ten narratives collected in Philip Curtin’s Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans From the Era of the Slave Trade (1967) recount experiences of the Middle Passage. “They give us some notion of the feelings and attitudes of many millions whose feelings and attitudes are unrecorded,” writes Curtin. “Imperfect as the sample may be, it is the only view we can recover of the slave trade as seen by the slaves themselves.”37 Ten years after Curtin’s work, the scholar Terry Alford would exhume from the bowels of oblivion the events of the life of Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, published as Prince among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the American South.

it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.

WordPress Site If done right, a self-hosted WordPress site can act as your online business card for your freelance SEO writing services.  You can refer potential clients to it for a listing of your services and rates, plus to see your writing samples and client testimonials.   Details on how to set up a self-hosted Wordpress site are beyond the scope of this book, but it’s easy to do.  In a nutshell, all you do is purchase a domain name, purchase web hosting, install Wordpress on your site, and customize it the way you want it. If you are interested in setting up your own website for your business, sign up for the Money Machine Inner Circle (it’s FREE!) and you’ll get instant access to a free report listing exactly which services I recommend for setting up your site.  Especially if you’re new to the world of setting up a website, this will save you a ton of time since you won’t have to waste time researching which services are the best or easiest to use for a non-techie. A basic website should have the following pages: Home Page This is where you describe your freelance SEO writing services, and even include a testimonial or two once you’ve worked with clients for a while. Samples Page Use this page to show off the sample articles that you’ve written. About Page This is where you explain who you are, your experience (if any), and why someone should hire you. Contact Page This is where you set up a simple contact form that visitors to your website can use to get in touch with you. Action Steps 1. On days 1 and 2, make sure you have a reliable computer, access to high-speed internet, and a PayPal account set up.  If you don’t have

A good transitional call to action can do three powerful things for your brand: 1.​Stake a claim to your territory. If you want to be known as the leader in a certain territory, stake a claim to that territory before the competition beats you to it. Creating a PDF, a video series, or anything else that positions you as the expert is a great way to establish authority. 2.​Create reciprocity. I’ve never worried about giving away too much free information. In fact, the more generous a brand is, the more reciprocity they create. All relationships are give-and-take, and the more you give to your customers, the more likely they will be to give something back in the future. Give freely. 3.​Position yourself as the guide. When you help your customers solve a problem, even for free, you position yourself as the guide. The next time they encounter a problem in that area of their lives, they will look to you for help. Transitional calls to action come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few ideas to create transitional calls to action of your own: •​Free information: Create a white paper or free PDF educating customers about your field of expertise. This will position you as a guide in your customer’s story and create reciprocity. Educational videos, podcasts, webinars, and even live events are great transitional calls to action that on-ramp customers toward a purchase. •​Testimonials: Creating a video or PDF including testimonials from happy clients creates a story map in the minds of potential customers. When they see others experience a successful ending to their story, they will want that same ending for themselves. •​Samples: If you can give away free samples of your product, do it. Offering a customer the ability to test-drive a car, taste your seasoning, sample your music, or read a few pages of your book are great ways to introduce potential customers to your products. •​Free trial: Offering a limited-time free trial works as a risk-removal policy that helps to on-ramp your customers. Once they try your product, they may not be able to live without it.

Looking at sample five — "The car . . . was a blue Ford" we might again encounter Bertrand Russell's two-head paradox. It seems a blue Ford exists "in" the head of the witness, but whether the blue Ford also existed "outside" that head remains unsure. Even outside tricky psychology labs, ordinary perception has become problematical due to the whole sad history of eye-witness testimony frequently breaking down in court. Or does the "external universe" (including the blue Ford) exist in some super-Head somewhere? It seems that the translation into E-Prime — "I recall the car . . . as a blue Ford" better accords with the experiential level of our existence in space-time than the two heads and other paradoxes we might encounter in Standard English.

DAY 12: BUILD A SIMPLE SPEAKER ONE-SHEET Now that your flagship presentation has some texture and shape, you can summarize it on a speaker one-sheet. Local networking groups, chambers of commerce, and association chapters often want to see this before booking you to speak in front of your hand-selected target market of prospects. Lay out a simple one-sheet in Microsoft Word, or pay a little extra for a designer to format it more professionally. The building blocks are: 1.  One or more Topics/Programs 2.  Target Audience(s) 3.  Benefits (especially in headlines and program titles) 4.  Your Mini-Biography 5.  Your Sample Client List 6.  Testimonial clips about the quality of your programs 7.  Your Contact Information

What will you find in these pages? Juror Chloe Aridjis writes: ‘Ruminative narratives and more boisterous ones; some raw and instinctive, others crafted and scholarly; narratives that interweave highbrow and popular culture, others that possess a poetic stillness or otherworldly aura; works in which the author creates an elaborate alternative reality, and those in which the author is the construct him or herself. The Spanish language is being put to use in new and thrilling ways.’ And Rodrigo Fresán: ‘The adjective “interesting” is an ambiguous one. The expression, “May you live an interesting life” – apocryphally attributed to China by Westerners for many years – has been seen as either a curse or a blessing, but always as something worthy of attention. Beyond the obvious blessings, the quality of the writing, it seems to me that the additional forward-looking appeal of this selection is an eloquent sampling of how one can write in the proper direction/intention for a generation, yes, cursed by the excesses of life online and the easy and base temptations of the so-called literatura del yo – which young people think is a new trend, but is in fact very, very far from that – the compulsion for testimonial, fictions of the self that inevitably crash because they’re going too fast, or going too slow. I like to believe that here you’ll find a resistance to an era’s passing fad, and find instead the commitment to what is timeless and destined to continue engaging what has always nourished and given rise to good fiction: telling the story of a unique world, finding the form and style necessary to explore it, and make it known. In short: welcome to the work of decidedly interesting writers.