Fresh reminders this weekend that life is short, and as I blogged about recently, you need to find beauty in each day: a cousin just found out she has ovarian cancer after it had spread to her lungs. a good friend’s mother, diagnosed recently with a brain tumour and given a few months to live, [...]
Monthly Archives: April 2007
The wrong way to sell
There’s a horrible ad airing on the radio these days for the Toronto Rhinoplasty Clinic (they do nose jobs). It starts off talking about how many friends you have, how you’re the favourite child and how good you feel about yourself, or words to that effect — and then slaps you in the face with [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog Leave a comment
Where to find a great speechwriter
One of the best presentations I’ve been to in a long time happened last week, and I apologize for taking so long to blog about it. The topic was “How to make a speech sound like music to their ears” and the speaker was IABC colleague John Watkis. John is a freelance speechwriter specializing in [...]
Special level of Hell reserved for spammers
The first wave of comment spam was actually mildly amusing, but in past weeks it has just become incredibly tiresome. The top two types of content in the comment spam left on my blog are various generic and brand-name drugs and alluring words related to porn. I know there are ways to avoid having to [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog Leave a comment
Virginia Tech
Two things about the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech: 1. I have a son in university, and it chills me to think the same thing could have happened in his school. My heartfelt sympathy to the families and friends of students killed or injured; for those left behind, life will never ever be the same. [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog Leave a comment
Find beauty in each day
A post by Seth Godin led me to the transcript of a discussion on April 9 with Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten. The topic was an experiment Gene conducted to discover if violinist Josh Bell (incognito in a baseball cap) and his Stradivarius playing in a transit station could stop busy commuters rushing to work. [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog 3 Comments
Can’t proofread? Have someone else read your work
It’s difficult to proofread your own writing. You’re familiar with the words and you can easily slide right over small mistakes. But don’t let difficulty stop you! I just received the monthly newsletter from my professional association. The front page article included two run-on sentences, a missing word, a missing apostrophe and a few other [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog 2 Comments
Resist the lure of your own writing
Writers should never fall in love with their own words, because the pleasure in capturing exactly what you wanted to say can disappear faster than a jerky treat in front of a Lab. I was reminded of this when my client called with the bad news that Big Executive wanted a (last-minute) rewrite of a [...]
Little touches make the difference to your customers
Happy Easter! Although the calendar says it is officially spring, the local weather is decidedly unspringlike — factoring in windchill, it felt like minus 9 C (about 15 F) on my one-hour walk this morning with my dog. So although I have put away my skis for the season, it reminds me that I promised [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog Leave a comment
Workopolis and effective advertising
You may have heard the recent radio ads for Workopolis (“Canada’s biggest job site”), featuring various people talking about “the job that changed my life.” I think this is a great series, with both inspiring tales of jobs that led to interesting careers and inspiring tales of bad jobs that led to a change of [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog 4 Comments
