by Sue Horner | Sep 18, 2025 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
For me, September is always a little bittersweet. While I appreciate spectacular fall leaves, summer is my season, and saying goodbye to it is hard. Among the joys of the season? Spotting fireflies at dusk on a warm summer evening. These days, this doesn’t...
by Sue Horner | Aug 26, 2025 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
How do you help readers grasp the meaning of especially large or small numbers? Make those numbers make sense by relating them to a familiar place, person or thing. See what I mean in my August newsletter. By coincidence, the examples I found all relate to places...
by Sue Horner | Mar 21, 2025 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Steve Jobs used an analogy when he introduced the iPod in 2001, saying it held your whole music library in a device small enough to fit in your pocket. As he said, “Analogies work because they make the unfamiliar familiar; they help the mind navigate new terrain by...
by Sue Horner | Jan 22, 2025 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The wildfires that dominated the news earlier this month are still blazing in Los Angeles. As I write this, the largest, Palisades, is only 59% contained. More than 200,000 people were evacuated; at least 27 are dead. More than 15,000 buildings have been destroyed or...
by Sue Horner | Nov 28, 2024 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The city of Toronto went wild for Taylor Swift this month. I wasn’t at any of the city’s six sold-out shows in her blockbuster Eras tour, but I have the friendship bracelets to show I was “concert adjacent.” You can’t hear about Taylor Swift...
by Sue Horner | Sep 30, 2024 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Sometimes the right words are just as effective as the famous picture that’s worth a thousand words. You may have heard about the wildfires that tore through Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016. News reports showed walls of flame and images of desperate people...
by Sue Horner | Feb 23, 2024 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Do you want to explain something, make a point or spark that “aha” moment? Reach for a metaphor, which shows how two things are alike without using “like” or “as.” A metaphor gives people a shortcut to understanding new, complex or conceptual info, says writing...
by Sue Horner | Aug 23, 2023 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
If you use numbers to make a point, it’s not enough to just list the numbers. Especially with large or small numbers, you help your readers by giving context. In the August issue of my newsletter, Wordnerdery, I look at some of the big, big numbers around Taylor...
by Sue Horner | Jun 21, 2023 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
If you want to explain something, make a point or spark an “aha” moment, reach for “figurative language.” It’s a type of expressive writing that doesn’t just enhance style, it sharpens meaning, says The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. One type of figurative language is...
by Sue Horner | May 23, 2023 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
When Canadian music legend Gordon Lightfoot died on May 1 at the age of 84, tributes flooded in. They praised his songwriting abilities and ballads that brought Canadian stories to the world. “A songwriter without parallel, his melodies and words were an...
