by Sue Horner | Sep 9, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
(I posted this earlier today, but a hard drive failure on the server hosting my site washed it away. So apologies if it shows up twice. To make up, I’ve added two bonus errors!) We all make mistakes, but in this business, you need to work hard to keep the error...
by Sue Horner | Sep 3, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Last week, I was juggling several different articles for two different employee publications. One somewhat daunting piece started off with three interviews, four people to quote and three pages of notes. I had 1,500 words to boil down into 500, a process I like to...
by Sue Horner | Jul 16, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
When my elderly neighbour passed away more than a year ago, his daughter took time to mourn. Then she started the task of cleaning up and fixing up, intending to sell the place. It’s a small two-bedroom bungalow, so the likely buyer will be elderly. The...
by Sue Horner | Jun 21, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Stephen King’s books used to be on my reading list. Early in my working career, I read The Shining on the half-hour train from the suburbs into the city. I would get on the train and start reading, and suddenly I would look up, eyes wide and heart pounding, and...
by Sue Horner | Jun 12, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Really, I’m working away here, but I just had to stop and share this. A client invited me to sit in on a conference call, with the intent of writing an article for the employee newsletter. Before the call, the fellows we’d be talking to took the time to...
by Sue Horner | Jun 11, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
What a great exercise in telling a story and setting a mood, in a tight framework too! I’m talking about the Copyblogger’s Twitter Writing Contest. The goal: Write a story in exactly 140 characters (the length of a post on Twitter, aka a tweet). Not more,...
by Sue Horner | Jun 7, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Talk about a deft turn of phrase! Spotted in an interesting article in the Toronto Star called “Patient gets brain surgery – fully awake,” by Joseph Hall: “Glioma, as it is also known, is a whack-a-mole cancer, with tumours that are treated or...
by Sue Horner | May 22, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
If you are a blogger, consider yourself patted on the back by Anne Holland, Content Director of MarketingSherpa. She encourages bloggers in the May 12 newsletter (see #9) thusly: “Starting a blog is easy. Keeping the blog going for more than a few months is...
by Sue Horner | Apr 25, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
After posting yesterday about a 66-word sentence, I came across Grammar Girl’s column on the same topic. Quoting Bonnie Trenga of Sentence Sleuth, she says about why you should keep it brief: “Your readers are following a path you’ve laid out for...
by Sue Horner | Apr 24, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
A colleague asked my opinion on a line in a client’s article this week. The colleague thought the line ungrammatical but the client insisted it was right. In the interests of privacy, I won’t show you the line here. However, I can tell you that...
