by Sue Horner | Aug 17, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
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...
by Sue Horner | Aug 13, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
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?”...
by Sue Horner | Aug 10, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
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 about Amazon buying Zappos. I liked that he apologized “for...
by Sue Horner | Aug 4, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
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...
by Sue Horner | Aug 2, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
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...
by Sue Horner | Jul 28, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
So when I sang the legal blues recently, I should have been more helpful and given some suggestions for avoiding approval problems with lawyers. Here they are: Consider what’s going on. In a time when lawyers are super-super-sensitive, like a lawsuit or merger,...
by Sue Horner | Jul 25, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
It has rained here most of the day, so what better time to share some of the websites that never fail to bring a smile: I can Has Cheezburger, or LOL cats. Talk about creative writing! The silly captions to crazy pictures of cats (and occasionally other small pets)...
by Sue Horner | Jul 20, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
While countries around the world worry about swine flu (sorry, H1N1), I’m here to tell you there is another insidious virus sweeping at least the blogging world. Yes, some online Dr. Evil is secretly going around stealing our mojo. You know you’ve noticed...
by Sue Horner | Jul 10, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Everyone can write, can’t they? But it takes real skill to come up with truly awful writing, like that celebrated by the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This is almost as much fun as the Oddest Book Title of the Year contest. But instead of just finding...
by Sue Horner | Jul 6, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
In the movie, “He’s Just Not That Into You” (seen on the plane on the way home from San Francisco), Drew Barrymore’s character laments the sorry state of communication with the opposite sex: “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work,...
