by Sue Horner | Sep 6, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I love reading the expressive ways other people have found to make a point. Here are my latest finds (the parts I particularly like are in bold): • “I sometimes think of cancer as a long and difficult journey, a quest out of Tolkien, or a dark waltz.” –...
by Sue Horner | Jun 22, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Ontario and British Columbia are getting a new Harmonized Sales Tax, or HST, on July 1. The HST replaces the Goods & Services Tax that I now charge, so this will affect me. So I signed up about a month ago to receive technical bulletins from the government that...
by Sue Horner | May 20, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
A client called yesterday in a bit of a panic, wondering if I could revise a news release for her by end of day. This is the kind of thing I often refer to as “pulling a rabbit out of a hat.” I was already juggling a number of projects, but this is a...
by Sue Horner | Dec 2, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Here’s some more expressive writing. Love Letter is a public art project in Philadelphia consisting of a series of 50 rooftop murals painted by local and international artists. The project began in August 2009, and is described this way: The murals, which are...
by Sue Horner | Sep 25, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Yesterday was a big day for those of us who notice and cringe at signs with extra or missing apostrophes. If people suggest that makes you a nitpicker, tell them you have nothing on former newspaperman Jeff Rubin, the founder of National Punctuation Day. Jeff started...
by Sue Horner | Sep 20, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
This week I had the shocking experience of having someone Not. Like. My. Work. I say shocking because I’ve been fortunate. Over about 18 years of running my own business, I’ve been able to submit a first draft of my assignments that’s pretty close to...
by Sue Horner | Aug 13, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Here are more great examples of words eloquently or imaginatively written for the enjoyment of readers: “The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries.” – Joshua Wolf Shenk in The Atlantic, “What Makes Us Happy?”...
by Sue Horner | Aug 2, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
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...
by Sue Horner | Jul 10, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
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...
by Sue Horner | May 27, 2009 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I just love finding words eloquently or imaginatively written for the enjoyment of readers. No coincidence, such writing also helps readers visualize what you’re explaining. Here are more examples spotted recently, with my fave parts in bold: “An earthquake will...
