by Sue Horner | Feb 19, 2020 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
“Exciting changes at Paper.li!” said the email subject line. (Paper.li helps you “create a web presence” with an online newspaper that contains your “curated” content.) The email continued, “We’re thrilled to have you as part of our community, and want you to be the...
by Sue Horner | Oct 24, 2019 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I’m on Plain Language duty. While my client overhauls structure and cuts duplication on the website, I’m trying to make the content more readable. The existing words are often off the readable charts – post-graduate, say, or grade 13 – whereas my client hopes for...
by Sue Horner | Aug 1, 2019 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Smart communicators use multiple channels to reach employees, and email remains a constant for most workplaces. But dealing with the “excessive volume” of communications is a challenge for companies around the world, according to State of the Sector 2019 –...
by Sue Horner | Jun 28, 2019 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
One way to help people understood something is get to the point. Don’t bury your information in too much detail, ramble, or hide the action with passive language. While falling down the rabbit hole of internet links one day, I happened upon an article from 2015 that...
by Sue Horner | May 16, 2019 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Print can be expensive, so I understand that Costco will no longer send their printed Costco Connection magazine to lower-tier members like me. After all, their stated mission is “to continually provide our members with quality goods and services at the lowest...
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 | Oct 24, 2018 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The Guardian’s Alex Hern forced himself to read all the terms and conditions he encountered in one week. In that time, he collected 146,000 words of legalese in 33 documents. It was, he said, “enough to fill three quarters of Moby Dick, just to explain what I can and...
by Sue Horner | Oct 11, 2018 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Let’s be clear. Those “Terms and Conditions” we have to “accept” or “agree to” before using new software, phones and other technology are anything but clear. I blame lawyers, who stuff sentences with words to cover every possible situation. The sentences are wordy and...
by Sue Horner | Nov 23, 2017 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Noise is a big issue around airports. A jet taking off can produce an average of 100 to 120 decibels. That’s as noisy as it is in the front row of a rock concert. If, like airports, your business makes noise that’s affecting your neighbours, you want to show that...
by Sue Horner | Nov 23, 2016 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
As a Canadian, I won’t comment on the recent U.S. election. But I will say it’s interesting that certain aspects of president-elect Donald Trump’s speaking style could be considered plain language. The November issue of my newsletter, Wordnerdery, talks about five...
