by Sue Horner | Oct 14, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Plain language can save lives or make them harder, as the Center for Plain Language noted on Twitter this week. The occasion: International Plain Language Day (Oct. 13). We were disappointed with many of the results of the Federal Plain Language Report Card this year....
by Sue Horner | Oct 8, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
One of the things I love about social media is the random way you meet interesting people. I’m not quite sure of the breadcrumb trails that led me to connect on Twitter with Brad Marley, CEO of Yelram Media, but we share an aim to help companies tell their stories...
by Sue Horner | Oct 2, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Please tell me I’m not alone in feeling a lack of creative spirit these days. Sure, some people have taken up baking sourdough bread or learned to play guitar or are singing arias from the balcony every evening. I keep reading that Shakespeare wrote King Lear and...
by Sue Horner | Sep 25, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
While the pandemic has been busy disrupting our lives, many of us headed outdoors to bike, walk, hike and take in the peace of being in nature. My 2020 was already going to include hiking along the Bruce Trail, Canada’s oldest and longest marked hiking trail (898...
by Sue Horner | Sep 17, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
After running into countless uses of the word “cadence” over the past few months, I’m hopping on my Grouch Train. As happened with the word “resonate,” overuse has turned a respectable word into one that screams jargon. Here’s a look at cadence and some of the other...
by Sue Horner | Sep 10, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Here’s the TL;DNR (too long; did not read) for this post: The term man-hours is outdated and politically incorrect. This week, more than 4.47 billion people wanted to know the meaning of “man-hours.” Google Trends shows fairly regular search traffic...
by Sue Horner | Sep 2, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Remember the old days, when you used to buy software and run it until it would randomly crash and other things started to go wrong? Then you’d upgrade, spend hours getting things working again, and then run it until the danger zone again because it was such a hassle?...
by Sue Horner | Aug 21, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Your readers might just skim your text (sorry!), but chances are they’ll look more closely at the headline, photo and caption. Ideally, those three elements together should tell most of the story, in case the reader bypasses the rest of the article altogether. Photos...
by Sue Horner | Aug 5, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
So, you need to write about something important. The problem is, it’s boring or routine. You know the topics. They’re necessary, but they aren’t the sexiest. Safety reminders, maybe, or a potentially dry explanation of a (zzzz….) process...
by Sue Horner | Jul 31, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Do you want to explain something, make a point or maybe just spark a laugh? Give readers and listeners a shortcut to understanding by reaching for similes, which use “like” or “as” to show how two things are alike. (Metaphors do the same thing...
