by Sue Horner | Aug 23, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Son #1 was absolutely stunned this morning when I read to him a piece that one of his favourite bands was going to be playing in Toronto in October. His shock came from the fact that the newspaper scooped the Internet. That’s right, he had not yet heard of the...
by Sue Horner | Aug 3, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Dan Santow (a senior VP at PR firm Edelman) had a great post on his blog Word Wise about words that people latch onto and use “until their meaning and power dies.” His list of “words that have fallen into the death trap” includes some pet...
by Sue Horner | Aug 2, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
My dog is known to police. I found this out from a hanging door tag left by the local Humane Society while I was out. “Please call the officer below re: incident involving ‘Jake’,” it said. Uh oh! While I was away one weekend, Jake had stayed...
by Sue Horner | Aug 1, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
No wonder employees find it hard to understand company “leaders” (the new word for managers, apparently). The latest “BigExec-speak” I ran into this week: Action as a verb, as in, “We’ll action those areas.” Ugh. Criticality....
by Sue Horner | Jul 30, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Last week, a client questioned my use of a comma, which I explained was as a visual pause and an indicator of a change of thought, not a serial comma (as in “red, white, and blue,” where the comma after “white” is not necessary). It seems these...
by Sue Horner | Jul 27, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
What a coincidence! The latest issue of Daphne Gray-Grant’s weekly Power Writing Tips newsletter (for people “who want to write better, faster”) also talks about the pompous way people sometimes want to be quoted, similar to my last post: “But...
by Sue Horner | Jul 25, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
A colleague shared this great term for an affliction common in the corporate world: source remorse editing. That’s when you get a terrific, meaningful, human quote from someone for a corporate use, say a newsletter. During the approval process, your contact sees...
by Sue Horner | Jun 22, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
My preferred method of getting a comment from someone to include in an article for an employee publication is to actually talk to the person and get the comment straight from him/her. (I know, what a concept!) As with writing a speech for another person, it’s...
by Sue Horner | Jun 14, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
When it comes to writing that you want people to read and understand, simple and familiar is good. Many executives don’t see it that way, though; they want to “utilize” this and “optimize” that until you want to scream. My rule of thumb...
by Sue Horner | May 29, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Companies love their acronyms and initialisms. The thinking seems to be, why waste your breath to say the full words when you can abbreviate? Thus I am working on revising an article today that contains three acronyms I had not yet seen. (I keep a list for this client...
