Give and get the lowdown on shopping in Toronto
You’re in a new city, perhaps for a conference or other business. Most of your time is mapped out, but you want to pick up a souvenir or gifts for family back home. Or maybe you forgot to pack the right shoes, or you spilled coffee on your lap. Where do you go?...
Cold winter breathes new life to frosty words
Snow is again falling, the story of the winter of 2013-2014 for much of the eastern United States and Canada. It’s barely February, so there is much winter to come. Even skiers can’t be happy about this, when blowing snow creates whiteout conditions for...
Guest bloggers allowed, but you’d better be genuine
Can we talk about guest posts? Plenty of bloggers are because of a piece by Google’s Matt Cutts talking about guest blogging as a link-building strategy. The issue is not so much a guest blogger offering to write a post, which is a legitimate way for an expert...
7 things I’ve learned in 7 years of blogging
Has it really been seven years since I started this blog? Hard to believe, for someone who had a hard time updating a journal more than once every couple of months, as I shared in my very first blog post! Since then, I’ve managed to fairly consistently blog once...
What kind of content should you put in association newsletters?
Do you work with email distributors? Among my volunteer jobs these days is communication for two groups for independents, IABC’s Professional Independent Communicators and the Communicators Connection (formerly Halton-Peel Communications Association). So I find myself...
Thinking about hanging out your shingle? Start here
With years running my own business under my belt, I may be doing a few things right. So when friends or acquaintances say they are thinking about starting their own businesses, I’m happy to chat about my own experiences. Assuming you have searched your soul and are...
New year, new words we’d like to banish
Selfie received the most nominations to the 39th annual list of banished words and phrases, or more accurately, the list of word and phrases WE WISH were banished for “Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.” This according to the...
The best of the Red Jacket Diaries in 2013
As another year winds to an end, here are the top 10 posts readers found the most interesting on the Red Jacket Diaries over the past 12 months: Some great examples of expressive writing I’ve run across this year, including terms like “tunefulness and...