Nine things I’ve learned in nine years of blogging
January is a big month here at Get It Write headquarters. In this month of new beginnings, I celebrate the leap of faith that launched my business in 1991, and I also mark another year of sharing my thoughts on the Red Jacket Diaries blog. Yes, I recently marked my...
Ditch the jargon to make your point
Inc.com’s contributing editor, Geoffrey James, doesn’t sugarcoat it. In a piece called How Corporate-Speak Rots Your Brain and How To Stop It, he says jargon “makes you and everyone around you progressively less intelligent.” What’s more, rather than making you sound...
Boost your business with the power of thought
My competitors are better than me. I’m not as smart as my colleagues. People won’t want to pay for the services I offer. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking thoughts like this, you’ve been the victim of perceptions you have about yourself...
Use focus + five steps to be more productive
You don’t have to hire someone to slap you every time you turn to Facebook. That was the extreme step blogger Maneesh Sethi took to be more productive, detailed in Why I Hired a Girl on Craigslist — and How I Quadrupled My Productivity. But to be...
Answer my email, it might be urgent
If you wanted to reach someone urgently, would you rely on email? Increasingly, it seems, you would. Well, you might not. I certainly wouldn’t in a business situation*– I would pick up the telephone and call. Yet at a professional development event earlier this...
The best of the Red Jacket Diaries in 2015
Thank you to the people who took the time to read (and sometimes comment) on the Red Jacket Diaries blog this year. Here are the 10 most-viewed posts in 2015: 1. My recap of Mitch Joel’s speech to IABC/Toronto in February, where he talks about people wanting...
How to make resolutions you’ll keep
As the old year winds to a close and you get ready to pop the champagne on a new one, you’ll find lots of advice for making and sticking to resolutions. I’m not a big fan of once-a-year resolutions, but according to the impressively named Statistic Brain...
12 gifts for readers and writers, 2015 edition
Are you still Christmas shopping? As the big day hurtles closer, those ads warning of “last minute” are starting to hit home. If you have avid readers/writers/word-and-punctuation nerds on your list, you might be interested in these dozen ideas, inspired...