by Sue Horner | Nov 1, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Merriam-Webster added a staggering 455 new words to the dictionary in October. Some aren’t exactly new (hasn’t dad bod been a thing for a while?), but are newly welcomed to the inner sanctum of the dictionary world. Many did not relate exactly to the pandemic, either,...
by Sue Horner | Oct 22, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
If your company looks “male, pale and stale” at the top, there’s a lot you as a communication or PR person can do about it. That’s according to participants in the Diversity in PR conference I attended recently. Right now, most of us are in Diversity 1.0....
by Sue Horner | Oct 9, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The latest “What happens on the internet every minute” is out courtesy of Domo.com, and oh my, we are online a lot. (Click on the image to get a better view of it.) Every minute, enough people are watching YouTube videos to add up to more than 694,000 hours. Every...
by Sue Horner | Oct 1, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The idea of love locks is charming. They are small padlocks, often with names or initials etched into them, attached to a bridge, railing or fence as a symbol of love. Awww. While they may lift lovers’ spirits, though, love locks can drag structures down. In 2015,...
by Sue Horner | Sep 24, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Don’t you appreciate when people use creative ways to help you understand something complicated? This is especially welcome as we continue grappling with COVID-19. These days, scientists are explaining how vaccines or preventive measures work, the perfect situation...
by Sue Horner | Sep 17, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
When I heard that three COVID-19 vaccines were getting new names, and when I saw the names, I thought it was a joke. But no, apparently it’s true. Health Canada has “authorized brand name changes” for the vaccines formerly known as Pfizer, Moderna and...
by Sue Horner | Sep 9, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
So much of what we see online seems pretty random. That’s because the lifespan of content posted on social media is mostly fleeting: On Snapchat, you might have 10 seconds, although Stories last about 24 hours. Tweets might be visible to your followers for an...
by Sue Horner | Sep 2, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Roughly this time last year, I was lamenting the overuse of words like cadence that have turned them into jargon or buzzwords. It’s still everywhere, as in this recent example: “Prime Your Revenue Engine with a Prospecting Cadence.” It’s also been a big year for...
by Sue Horner | Aug 20, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Readers love lists. Organizing long and possibly confusing information into a list helps readers scan and understand the information. But there are multiple ways to use punctuation in lists, as I was reminded while proofreading a client document that used all of them....
by Sue Horner | Aug 13, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
If you like the idea of spinning a wordy, over-the-top sentence that would be proud to launch a bad novel, you must know about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I first found and wrote about this amusing contest in 2009, although it began in 1982. As the site says,...
