Hello! After a four-month hiatus, my blog is back. You might not have noticed the gap, but in case you did—my apologies for the long wait. In a minute, I’ll tell you why it happened and how I might have done things differently, if I’d been just a wee bit more disciplined…but first… I’m proud […]
corporate newsletters
Render Unto Caesar
Plagiarism is rarely a concern for internal communicators. In many cases, whatever corporate program you’re writing about has been written about before, and you’ll have heaps of existing material to steal from. It’s not only fine to do this, it’s often important to do so. The way you talk about a program or policy is […]
Reflections on the Lowly ‘Graph
I’ve been thinking about paragraphs. Increasingly, I find my paragraphs devolving into single sentences, like the one above. Surely this isn’t how I was taught? I remember concepts like: “A paragraph is a collection of related sentences dealing with a single topic.” I remember something about a topic sentence, followed by at least three sentences […]
How Will it All End?
Beginnings are nerve-wracking. Middles can be tricky. But the highest circle of writing misery, in my book, resides in figuring out how to close. Ever since the days of high school essays, I’ve hated writing conclusions. In conventional essay writing, the role of the conclusion is to summarize. But if what I’m writing is a […]
Exercising Your Metaphor Muscle
My niece recently spent a few weeks in South Korea, sending home evocative missives about her travels. In one email, she likened a short, uncomfortable flight she took to an island to being shot out of a slingshot. She kept the metaphor alive paragraphs later, when she described the return trip: “it was sad to […]
What I Learned Over Summer Vacation
I’m just back from three weeks of travel in Italy with my family. It was hot, it was touristy, it was expensive. We had a great time. I had planned that I wouldn’t work during this time, and mostly I didn’t. But, as keeps happening, my work found me, and I realized the lessons I […]