Just about now, as fall tiptoes ever closer, benefits administrators everywhere are dreaming not of crisp new back-to-school outfits or a bountiful harvest, but of benefits open enrollment. Those dreams are not likely to be the happiest during the best of circumstances, but with regulatory changes big and small brought on by the Affordable Care […]
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Writing in Between-Time
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Just Call Me The Woman With the Hammer
You know the saying, “To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” It came to mind last week when I was at the Working Mother Work Life Congress, an annual conference built around the release of the magazine’s famous “100 Best Companies” list. Sure, people were there to talk about work-life, but […]
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 […]