by Sue Horner | Aug 3, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Dan Santow (a senior VP at PR firm Edelman) had a great post on his blog Word Wise about words that people latch onto and use “until their meaning and power dies.” His list of “words that have fallen into the death trap” includes some pet...
by Sue Horner | Aug 1, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
No wonder employees find it hard to understand company “leaders” (the new word for managers, apparently). The latest “BigExec-speak” I ran into this week: Action as a verb, as in, “We’ll action those areas.” Ugh. Criticality....
by Sue Horner | Jul 27, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
What a coincidence! The latest issue of Daphne Gray-Grant’s weekly Power Writing Tips newsletter (for people “who want to write better, faster”) also talks about the pompous way people sometimes want to be quoted, similar to my last post: “But...
by Sue Horner | Jul 18, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
What happens when a phrase references old technology? It becomes a prime candidate for being misspelled. I thought of this when spotting “put us through the ringer” in my local newspaper. The word should be spelled “wringer,” as in the old...
by Sue Horner | Jul 12, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Talk about a never-ending job! Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition) recently added some new words, chosen among submissions from readers for their favourite word not in the dictionary. Sadly, one of the top choices was...
by Sue Horner | Jun 19, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
I ran across a couple of instances this week where the writer chose words that didn’t quite hit the mark, in my opinion: “Church for people who like church” (seen on a notice board outside a church). It appears to be out there as a selling feature,...
by Sue Horner | Jun 14, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
When it comes to writing that you want people to read and understand, simple and familiar is good. Many executives don’t see it that way, though; they want to “utilize” this and “optimize” that until you want to scream. My rule of thumb...
by Sue Horner | May 29, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Companies love their acronyms and initialisms. The thinking seems to be, why waste your breath to say the full words when you can abbreviate? Thus I am working on revising an article today that contains three acronyms I had not yet seen. (I keep a list for this client...
by Sue Horner | May 1, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
MarketingSherpa’s free weekly newsletter led me to the wonderfully named Gobbledygook Manifesto, which was cited as a winner in its 2007 Viral Marketing Hall of Fame. David Meerman Scott calls himself an “online thought leadership strategist” (hmm,...
by Sue Horner | Mar 17, 2007 | The Red Jacket Diaries blog
Did you know that there is another “holiday season” approaching? I know this because a weekend flyer from a local grocery store mentions it several times. It was a little puzzling, at first, because it’s March. The only “holiday season”...
