Avoid jargon monoxide with the Son Test
Newsletter articles and any other writing — speaking too! — can be improved if you cut out “hollow and meaningless” business language. This gobbledygook is also known as jargon monoxide, a wonderful term I discovered this week in a tweet by Stanford...
10 ways to jump-start your blogging mojo
The last time this happened, in 2012, a Google search pulled up a piddling 31,000 hits. This time, “lost my blogging mojo” brought up more than 700,000 results. I think I am in good company. There are lots of reasons why I seem to have lost my blogging mojo, including...
My new mantra is, ‘Why not?’
If you read this blog, you know that it’s been one helluva a year. Recognizing the fragility of life, my new mantra (“a frequently repeated word, phrase, etc.; a slogan,” to quote the Canadian Oxford Dictionary) is “Why not?” When an...
Lessons from the Dogfather
Jake was our first dog. He’ll probably be our last dog, too. Long before we got our black Lab, I was already imagining the pain of saying goodbye to a treasured member of the family. Our youngest son was just 10, so I figured by that time, he would be old enough...
The expressive language of loss
Any writing can be improved by careful attention to words that convey meaning or emotion, or metaphors and analogies that bring a concept to life. The July issue of my newsletter, Wordnerdery, shares some wonderful examples of expressive writing I’ve found...
Write your own X (Twitter) bio, please!
“Award-winning writer. Organizer. Thinker. Travel fan. Food enthusiast. Evil explorer. Creator. TV specialist. Communicator.” This was a sample Twitter biography helpfully provided by the Twitter Bio Generator. Have you seen it? I ran across this tool recently (sorry,...
Remembering my Dad
My father — Grant Cunningham — was always the go-to guy for anything that needed fixing. His day job for more than 30 years was with Bell Canada (which he always called “Mother Bell”), but on the side he fixed stuff. In his prime, he built a...
The best of the Red Jacket Diaries so far in 2014
As we take a breather before Canada Day and launching into the second half of 2014, here’s a look at the most viewed content on the blog so far, as revealed by poking around under the blog “hood”: Thinking about hanging out your shingle? Start here...