The Red Jacket Diaries blog

Sue Horner is a freelance writer in Oakville, Ontario, who blogs about writing, newsletters, communications and running an independent business in The Red Jacket Diaries blog.
Hello from Royal Roads, week 2

Hello from Royal Roads, week 2

My second three-week residency at Royal Roads University is two-thirds done, closing last night with a class party that was all kinds of fun. Week one ended with tea at the historic Empress Hotel overlooking Victoria harbour; the photo shows me feeling a bit like...

Proofreaders still MIA

Is it just me, or are errors in the printed word slipping through more than ever? I’m not talking about abbreviations in Twitter or texting, I mean words that sort of sound like they make sense, but are slightly to a long way off the mark. Here are some of the...
Controlled burn of my brain

Controlled burn of my brain

Today presented itself to me as gloriously unstructured, pretty much the first such day since I embarked on my Royal Roads adventure last July. The reason: Year One is done. Yesterday, I submitted the final paper in the final class of the first year. I am torn between...
IABC11 highlights

IABC11 highlights

The badge you see here is the type of identifier that marks IABC World Conference-goers, making it easy to strike up a conversation with people you don’t know. As I mentioned in my last post, that’s one of the benefits of the conference. Here are some of...
No respect for words

No respect for words

“Words are not much valued on the Internet, perhaps because it features so many of them.” So reads a line in a recent article by David Streitfeld in The New York Times, called “Funny or Die: Groupon’s Fate Hinges on Words.” The article...