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 | 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 | Mar 22, 2024 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Were you among the 19.5 million viewers who tuned in to this year’s Academy Awards (21.9 million in its last half hour)? If so, you may be wondering if that number is a lot, or a little. Were we a large group of trendsetters watching Oppenheimer walk away with Best...
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...
