by Sue Horner | Aug 23, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Son #1 was absolutely stunned this morning when I read to him a piece that one of his favourite bands was going to be playing in Toronto in October. His shock came from the fact that the newspaper scooped the Internet. That’s right, he had not yet heard of the...
by Sue Horner | Aug 20, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Feeling battered today after returning from Montreal last night — going there took five hours, coming home took seven, because the highway had been closed for many, many hours after an accident. Although the section was opened by the time we got there,...
by Sue Horner | Aug 16, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Ran across some amusing words this week: Whale client: From MarketingSherpa’s tale of how a small company reeled in a big client, “How CPG marketer’s guerrilla campaign landed coveted space on Whole Foods’ shelves.” (Free access for a...
by Sue Horner | Aug 14, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I’ve been the first to complain about customer DISservice, so let me give credit when it’s due: The Bay (or should I say HBC) did right by this customer. My latest statement came in showing $10.20 due. It was an odd amount and I thought, “What on...
by Sue Horner | Aug 3, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Dan Santow (a senior VP at PR firm Edelman) had a great post on his blog Word Wise about words that people latch onto and use “until their meaning and power dies.” His list of “words that have fallen into the death trap” includes some pet...
by Sue Horner | Aug 2, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
My dog is known to police. I found this out from a hanging door tag left by the local Humane Society while I was out. “Please call the officer below re: incident involving ‘Jake’,” it said. Uh oh! While I was away one weekend, Jake had stayed...
by Sue Horner | Aug 1, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
No wonder employees find it hard to understand company “leaders” (the new word for managers, apparently). The latest “BigExec-speak” I ran into this week: Action as a verb, as in, “We’ll action those areas.” Ugh. Criticality....
by Sue Horner | Jul 30, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Last week, a client questioned my use of a comma, which I explained was as a visual pause and an indicator of a change of thought, not a serial comma (as in “red, white, and blue,” where the comma after “white” is not necessary). It seems these...
by Sue Horner | Jul 27, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
What a coincidence! The latest issue of Daphne Gray-Grant’s weekly Power Writing Tips newsletter (for people “who want to write better, faster”) also talks about the pompous way people sometimes want to be quoted, similar to my last post: “But...
by Sue Horner | Jul 25, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
A colleague shared this great term for an affliction common in the corporate world: source remorse editing. That’s when you get a terrific, meaningful, human quote from someone for a corporate use, say a newsletter. During the approval process, your contact sees...
