Good dog! 7 tips for better comms with pets and people
I’ve been walking my neighbour’s two dogs at lunchtime, to cover while his daughter is away. Logan and Norman are relatively big black dogs, like my guy was, and they were good pals with him. So while I’m helping my neighbour out, I’m also getting a little “dose...
3 ways to spark interest with expressive writing
Have you ever been urged to “show, don’t tell” in your writing? Then you want to think about expressive writing. For a compelling example of the power of language, take a look at this fascinating piece about earthquakes by journalist Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker....
Find the heart of your story with these questions
What I write for employee newsletters and other content often involves explaining dense, complicated and potentially boring subjects. Yet a client once paid me this huge compliment: that among my strengths is the “ability to find the human angle in any...
Show some love for neglected expressive words
What knavery is this? With so many words at our disposal, we’re ditching some perfectly delightful and expressive words. Wayne State University, for one, is having none of it. Each year, the university’s Word Warriors column lists the top 10 words...
Another odd book title wins cheeky contest
At a time when attention spans are shorter than ever, a long-running quirky contest fits right in. Yes, I’m talking about The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title. “We don’t judge books on the contents within or even by their covers, but by their purest,...
7 deadly sins of e-newsletters
If you’ve ever given someone your business card at a networking event and later discovered you’d been signed up for a daily newsletter, you’ve seen the dark side of email newsletters. Good email newsletters share information of value to the reader....
How to take the leap to the independent life
A young PR professional with about a year of corporate experience under her belt approached me to talk about how to develop her career. We had a good conversation, after which she said she was inspired “to take tangible steps toward strengthening my visibility...
Ditch the fragments when writing a caption
A photo caption’s job isn’t to tell the whole story all by itself. Ideally, the photo captures attention; the caption adds meaning and leads the reader to the story for more details. Of course, there are plenty of rules about captions (also called cutlines). A...