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 | Oct 25, 2022 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Brown bears are big. I mean, BIG. You probably have to guess at the size, but would you guess “seven times the average American adult”? That’s Chunk, at 1,200 pounds the runner-up in the annual Fat Bear Week, October 5 to 11 this year. The winner, Bear 747 (shown...
by Sue Horner | Jun 14, 2022 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Part of the joy of running your own business is playing hooky on a random weekday. So it was that my husband and I spent a recent day enjoying a visit to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) followed by a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game. For the second time, the ROM...
by Sue Horner | Jul 22, 2021 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Making a tiny change in your own life that would fight climate change seems impossible. That may seem especially so after a week that saw catastrophic flooding in Europe, wildfires in Western Canada and the U.S., a tornado north of Toronto and more. Yet Starbucks...
by Sue Horner | Apr 22, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
We’re still seeing one particular number everywhere these days – two metres (six feet). That’s how far we have to stay away from others to slow down the spread of COVID-19. But how far is that, really? Everyone citing this number quickly realized people need a better...
by Sue Horner | Mar 20, 2019 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Love them or hate them, numbers are all around us. Whether numbers mean anything to your reader or not often comes down to how well they are explained. I recently ran across Making Data Meaningful (pdf), a guide designed to be “a practical tool to help managers,...
by Sue Horner | Apr 27, 2018 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Can you picture almost 80 million litres? Probably not. It’s a huge number, too big to understand without context. A client wants employees to understand the importance of managing energy like diesel fuel. To make the 80 million litres the company used in 2017 more...
by Sue Horner | Mar 23, 2017 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) launched an exhibit this week that explores the story of nine rare blue whales that became stranded in thick ice and died. The ROM recovered two of the skeletons after the creatures washed ashore in Newfoundland and Labrador in...
by Sue Horner | Jun 27, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
How rare is it to be born on February 29, the extra day in a Leap Year? By chance I was travelling on this extra day one year, and found this explanation by journalist Steve Rubenstein in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Being born on Feb. 29 is rare, sort of. The odds...