Usually, I’m very disciplined about writing. After walking my dog in the morning, I’m at my desk at 9 a.m. I turn the sound off so I’m not distracted by the whirr of arriving tweets, or the siren song of e-mail in my in-box. I don’t even listen to music so I can concentrate. So [...]
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Secrets & six strings
Here are some interesting items I came across this week: PostSecret.com: Frank Warren started PostSecret.com as a community art project. Since November 2004, he has received more than 150,000 postcards, each sent anonymously and containing that person’s secret. The web site receives more than six million visitors a month, viewing the shocking, soulful and laugh-out-loud [...]
Love is a 4-letter word
Has anyone read Four Letter Word: Original Love Letters (edited by Joshua Knelman and Rosalind Porter)? Although one reviewer said it “unleashes the romantic in all of us,” I didn’t find it that way at all. Confession: I am a hopeless romantic. Actually, make that hopeFUL romantic. So I looked forward to reading this collection, [...]
We heart Best Buy CEO
Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn had the communicators at the IABC conference in San Francisco in June in the palm of his hand, as I mentioned talking about highlights of the conference. He seals the deal with this interview in the The New York Times published August 15. If you haven’t seen it yet, go [...]
Make surveys make sense
Customer/employee surveys are important. I know this, and I try to go along with companies who take the time to survey me as a customer. But they need to do a better job of asking questions that are both within the customer’s ability to answer and that they can do something with. Take my bank, [...]
Expressive language v.4
Here are more great examples of words eloquently or imaginatively written for the enjoyment of readers: “The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries.” – Joshua Wolf Shenk in The Atlantic, “What Makes Us Happy?” “I’m at home a lot, begging for quiet from a child who has the same need for [...]
Zappos CEO gets it
It’s so refreshing when a CEO sends out something that actually sounds like a human being might have said/written it. That was the case when Zappos‘ CEO, Tony Hsieh, issued an announcement July 22 about Amazon buying Zappos. I liked that he apologized “for the occasional use of formal-sounding language,” saying that “parts of it [...]
Hit or miss(ed) opportunities
A thank you card arrived today in my mail, signed by someone I had never heard of. Turns out she is part of my local library’s summer reading program, just one of the programs the library notes it is able to run thanks to me and other donors to their literacy efforts. “Ella” carefully printed [...]
Watch out for jargon
When interviewing someone for an employee newsletter article, I always ask the meaning of unusual terms, acronyms (a word, like OPEC, formed from the initial letters of other words) and initialisms (a group of initial letters pronounced individually, like CBC). People often reply, “Everyone knows what it means” because they are insiders familiar with the [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog Tagged Communications, Newsletters, Words, Writing tips Leave a comment