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Keeping up when the lights are down #darkto

12/29/2013

 
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It's Canadian cliche time! Let's talk about THE WEATHER! Seven days ago, in the wee morning hours, Toronto awoke to the bzzzzzt sound of every appliance in the city shutting off simultaneously. We're Canadian, we're tough, we can handle a little power outage. 

Except it wasn't a "little" power outage. 

For the first day it was quaint. Candles are a nice touch. There was enough power in the laptops to charge tablets and phones, it was kind of like camping but with running water and a gas stove. And then night fell on the second day. An extra layer was added to the people and the beds, so it was like camping in the cold... The sun rose again and the lights did not come on. The devices were dying, the teeth were dangerously close to chattering and it seemed less like camping and more like an ordeal. 

PROD Communications runs out of a home office, and the home is shared with some very little people, the littlest of whom lacks the ability to speak up when he's too cold. At the 36 hour mark the decision was made to relocate to an offsite location, aka, a local hotel. 

A few lessons were learned along the way, specifically:
  1. ALWAYS charge your phone. If you're sitting on the couch, have a phone charger handy so you can keep it plugged in. Sure, going to bed with it at 76% seems fine under normal circumstances, but what if that's the last time your phone will see full power in your home for 61 hours?
  2. Keep your contacts up-to-date in your phone. If you can't access your email from your phone (not because you don't know how, but because you're having issues) a quick text explaining the situation to current clients will go a long way to protect your reputation.
  3. Cloud solutions exist for a reason. There is absolutely no reason not to keep your files backed up somewhere that can be accessed from anywhere in the world, including a hotel business centre not 15 minutes from your home. You haven't lived until you've tried to edit a work document on an iPhone. I seriously don't recommend it.
  4. Try to find the humour in the situation. Sh*t happens. If you maintain grace under fire, people will know you've got things well in hand. 

If you're one of my fellow Canadians still in the dark, I hope you get the lights back on back soon, and you were also able to find a new kind of joy this holiday season.  

Writer's Workshop - Writing can be a female dog

12/15/2013

 
I'm going to date myself horribly here but the first cultural reference that comes to mind is the old Young MC song, Bust a Move. The troubling line? "Play hard to get, females get jealous." 

Female what, exactly? Oh, he meant WOMEN. Both words have the same number of syllables, so there goes that argument! 

The next time you're planning to use male or female in a written piece, make sure the answer to male WHAT or female WHAT is already answered. Or better still, if it's something like "female teacher" or "male nurse" consider if mentioning the sex of the subject is even relevant at all. 

Check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing. 

Everyday Writing Workshop - Don't do THAT!

12/8/2013

 
Welcome back to the writing workshop, a weekly series of tips to help everyday writers sharpen their messaging. Today let's talk about the extraneous THAT placements just waiting to take over the world. 

It was a commonly held belief that Dickens' novels were so long because he was paid by the word. It would seem that is not the truth. So apparently Dickens' issue was the need for a better editor? Anyway, nobody is getting paid by the word in today's world of notoriously short attention spans, so make sure you ruthlessly cut any extra words from your writing. 

The word "that" is a good starting point.

Any time you have finished writing a piece, do a quick scan for the word "that" and read the sentence back to yourself without it. For example, if you remove that from "I think THAT Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time," you still have "I think Sean Connery is the best Bond of all time."  

See? Removing the extra word didn't change the meaning of the sentence at all! So stop doing THAT and check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing. 

Everyday Writing Workshop - Just Use It!

12/1/2013

 
Welcome to the writing workshop, a weekly series of tips to help everyday writers sharpen their messaging. For our first feature, we're going to take aim at a personal pet peeve: Just use it!

There is a common societal misconception that the more syllables the word has, the more articulate it seems. This leads to the rampant misuse of words like UTILIZE in blog posts and publications everywhere. I'm looking at YOU, technical manuals! Utilize is not a fancier version of use, it has its own very specific meaning. 

You are UTILIZING something when it is being used for something other than its intended purpose. When you USE a large kitchen knife to dice vegetables, you're using it. When you UTILIZE the back of that same knife to whack a jar to loosen the lid, you're utilizing it. 

Now go forth and USE the word UTILIZE correctly!

Check back next Sunday for another tip to tighten up your writing. 

    Author

    Julia Warrender is a member of the Canadian Association of Marketing Professionals (CAMP) and a Hubspot Inbound Marketing certified professional.

    ​She is also the owner of PROD Communications. 

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