by Sue Horner | May 27, 2015 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Wills are distasteful to begin with. You don’t want to think about someone dying, let alone squabble over who gets the investments and the heirloom silver, the stamp collection and the stacks of National Geographic. (I’m joking; we’re parceling out...
by Sue Horner | Apr 24, 2015 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
This time of year, corporate sustainability reports bloom like algae in a lake. These reports show the efforts a company makes to do the right things for the environment and the community. However, the language that describes what they do is often thick with jargon....
by Sue Horner | Aug 21, 2014 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Newsletter articles and any other writing — speaking too! — can be improved if you cut out “hollow and meaningless” business language. This gobbledygook is also known as jargon monoxide, a wonderful term I discovered this week in a tweet by Stanford...
by Sue Horner | Apr 25, 2013 | Most popular posts, The Red Jacket Diaries blog
The easier we make it to read our newsletters and other material, the more people will read, understand and retain. Sometimes copy reviewers – engineers and lawyers spring to mind – will challenge you. They’ll try to turn simple words into stilted, formal...
by Sue Horner | Feb 7, 2013 | Most popular posts, The Red Jacket Diaries blog
“Write for impatient users.” If you take nothing else away from the latest study done by web usability expert Jakob Nielsen, that would be it. While Nielsen was specifically looking at how teens navigate online, you could make the case that everyone is...
by Sue Horner | Aug 9, 2012 | Most popular posts, The Red Jacket Diaries blog
It can be easy to just go along with formal, wordy and awkward wording, especially if your Legal team has a chance to review articles before you publish them. (Sorry, lawyers, but you know you aren’t comfortable with informal!) But please don’t. I’ve...
by Sue Horner | Jun 22, 2010 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Ontario and British Columbia are getting a new Harmonized Sales Tax, or HST, on July 1. The HST replaces the Goods & Services Tax that I now charge, so this will affect me. So I signed up about a month ago to receive technical bulletins from the government that...
by Sue Horner | Mar 30, 2008 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I’ve been playing with the grammar function in Word after a reminder from the Publication Coach, Daphne Gray-Grant. By paying attention to things like words per sentence (aim for an average of 14 or less), passive sentences (no more than 10%) and Flesch-Kincaid...
