About Sentence Case

What we believe in

✓ ONLY THE BEST WILL DO. We focus on maximising your audience’s experience when they interact with you. As creative thinkers, we can suggest solutions to problems and turn negatives into positives.

✓ ONTO IT. We’ll quickly understand your organisational goals and your audience’s needs. We’re good to work with, efficient and dedicated. We’re well known for our level of attention to detail and our “peripheral vision”.

✓ TIME IS PRECIOUS. We can turn around work rapidly if there’s a bottleneck. We’ve done the hard yards in busy agencies where deadlines are god.

✓ WITH YOU. We’ll do our utmost to help you achieve your strategic goals. Dedicated people, in a team, can achieve anything they set their minds to.

About Sentence Case owner Alex Staines

“I started Sentence Case because I love being self-employed. I relish working with organisations that are eager to take advantage of marketing opportunities in the digital space. I enjoy collaborating with innovators in design, development and marketing, and seeing the results for clients.

“I’m obsessed with quality. ‘Only the best will do’ is a catchcry I identify with. ‘Good enough’ is not even close. Creativity, determination, and dedication to getting the details right are in my blood.”

– Alex Staines

I’ve worked in most areas of the media business: tour promoter, magazine editor, website manager for a government agency, proofreader of the most technical publications imaginable, to name a few. I’ve enjoyed the big gigs, like working in the newsrooms of multinational media companies, or helping set up a new government agency.

I rapidly adapt to different clients and sectors, and media from smoke signals to complex websites. I’ve tasted most of the flavours of New Zealand society firsthand. This means I can write in the language of your audience, whether they be chippies or chemists, dancers or doctors. I bring creative writing talent, organisational skills, and down-to-earth pragmatism to projects.

How it all began

I was born in Auckland near Mount St John in the 1960s. Both my parents were journalists. My mother, who understood fashion, wrote the dressmaking pages for the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. My father, who had been a Fleet Street cub reporter, emerged from active service in World War II to work as a sub-editor on The Straits Times, then The Sydney Morning Herald, The Auckland Star and later, in senior roles at the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.

I can vividly remember my father – who had retained his credentials as a correspondent for several English papers – getting up in the middle of the night to file stories to London over our telephone in a slow, loud voice. At the printing works in Shortland Street, I was permitted to crouch on a catwalk in the near-dark, above the thundering presses. The smells: hot metal, paper, ink and tobacco.

I wrote my first story aged six and entered it in a bank-sponsored competition. It won. I was hooked.

Less is more

I have a simple approach to life, centred round being good to people, being honest and working hard. My expertise as a copywriter is the result of continuous education and experience.

The Sentence Case ecosystem

We’re in a collaborative partnership with experts in graphic and web design, web and app development, local hosting, and email system implementation to provide comprehensive digital project options for medium to large business clients.

See what we’ve been up to on the work front.

Writing as a craft

Writing for a living truly is 99 per cent perspiration and 1 per cent inspiration, to borrow a famous quote by Thomas Edison, who knew what a “lightbulb” moment was. Many career writers are playful about the demands of their craft and art:

 

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

– Ernest Hemingway