Transfixed by doors & gates & paths
Beautiful gardens are part of the charm of Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. While I was there, I found myself enchanted as much by the various doors and gates throughout the gardens as by the colourful peacocks that roam the grounds. If you want to get all...
Keep calm and get over the post-whatever blues
As a society, we’re not very good at transition. Women who take maternity leave from a busy job outside the home practically get whiplash switching from the day job to the dead stop, career-wise, that is the all-consuming day-and-night job of motherhood....
Flex your creativity with truly awful writing
It was a dark and stormy night… So begins Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford, the inspiration for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. In tribute, the contest gives awards for the “opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels,” or...
Erase these wordy phrases
It can be easy to just go along with formal, wordy and awkward wording, especially if your Legal team has a chance to review articles before you publish them. (Sorry, lawyers, but you know you aren’t comfortable with informal!) But please don’t. I’ve...
Friday word fun: Aug. 3
It’s a long weekend in Ontario, so let’s lead into it with some Friday word fun! Creative haikus about traffic (thanks to Sue Ridewood for the link). Example appropriate to Ontario holiday weekend traffic: “Need a few days off / after Sunday night...
My school experience: Will miss this, won’t miss that
The feeling of accomplishment is sweet. The unsettled feeling of something ending is a little bittersweet. And after two years of assignments and papers and textbooks and academic readings, I’m finding my new freedom a little unreal. A classmate and I were...
BA in Professional Communication? Check.
Two years ago, I embarked on a journey. Call it a quest, or maybe a crazy idea, and really, what the heck was I thinking?? Part bucket list, part completing something left undone in my 20s, the idea of finishing my degree had been secretly nagging me for years....
Report on IABC 2012, part 3: Food!
So much goes on during an IABC World Conference, but I want to take a minute to talk about food. One of the great things about the conference is the Tuesday “dinearound,” something that I believe started years ago as a way for conference-goers to fill an...