Sports announcers get away with jargon, but don’t try this at home
When interviewing someone for an employee newsletter article, I always ask the meaning of unusual terms, acronyms (a word, like OPEC, formed from the initial letters of other words) and initialisms (a group of initial letters pronounced individually, like CBC). People...
6 tips to avoid the legal blues
So when I sang the legal blues recently, I should have been more helpful and given some suggestions for avoiding approval problems with lawyers. Here they are: Consider what’s going on. In a time when lawyers are super-super-sensitive, like a lawsuit or merger,...
Guilty pleasures, or websites that make me laugh
It has rained here most of the day, so what better time to share some of the websites that never fail to bring a smile: I can Has Cheezburger, or LOL cats. Talk about creative writing! The silly captions to crazy pictures of cats (and occasionally other small pets)...Have you lost your blogging mojo, too?
While countries around the world worry about swine flu (sorry, H1N1), I’m here to tell you there is another insidious virus sweeping at least the blogging world. Yes, some online Dr. Evil is secretly going around stealing our mojo. You know you’ve noticed...The legal blues
Woke up this mornin’ (da DA da da) Sun shiny and bright (da DA da da) Finished writin’ my articles (da DA da da) They were lookin’ tight (da DA da da) But wait just a minute (da DA da da) What’s that I see (da DA da da) A note from Legal,...Storm watch and summer memories
A thunderstorm blew through Oakville on the weekend, and it brought me back to summers spent at my grandparents’ cottage in the Laurentian mountains in Quebec. The cottage was built in the early 1900s, on a hillside with glimpses of the lake just visible in...Truly awful writing takes skill; here’s some inspiration
Everyone can write, can’t they? But it takes real skill to come up with truly awful writing, like that celebrated by the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This is almost as much fun as the Oddest Book Title of the Year contest. But instead of just finding...
Twitter signs he’s just not that into you
In the movie, “He’s Just Not That Into You” (seen on the plane on the way home from San Francisco), Drew Barrymore’s character laments the sorry state of communication with the opposite sex: “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work,...