inCommunicado - eric eggertson

Sports writers are sometimes underestimated. How hard can it be to write up a game?
David Shoalts found a good way to measure the impact of the three-day suspension of New Jersey Devils’ Cam Janssen.  Calling it a 12 minute, 36 second suspension, Shoalts multiplies the player’s average ice time per game, multiplies it by […]

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Leah McLaren’s front-page Globe and Mail interview with actress turned director Sarah Polley goes pretty well until you get to the background description that says "she took the title role in Kevin Sullivan’s hit show, Road to Avonlea."
I have only one question:  Did she play the road, or Avonlea?
Definition: title role
(Image from Sullivan Entertainment website)
Tags: […]

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Anyone who’s been to more than a couple of conferences can tell you the most valuable sessions are in the hallway, or in the bar, chatting and arguing with other participants.
Yet most conference promotions maintain the myth that the keynote speakers and the panel discussions are the reason to pay vast sums of money to […]

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I got the following e-mail from a friend.

"Greetings:  I’ll be out of touch for a while, as I’m not sure what e-mail arrangements there will be in Tibet.  I shall report back when I return to Calgary, in late September."

While it may be of interest to me that she’ll be out of e-mail contact, the […]

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A free e-mail newsletter hit my Inbox today (not spam, something I subscribed to), and I applied my usual critical lens while reading it.
Normally, I would write up my thoughts in a blog post, and send it out into the online world to express my thoughts, attract attention, perhaps draw comments from others, and maybe […]

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I’ve seen "Fortune 500", "Fortune 100", and even Fortune’s "Global 500".  But when someone tries to describe a company as "a Fortune 14 organization," my stupid language meter goes off.
If the company is 14th on the Fortune 500 list, then just say so.
That’s the same laziness of writing as when people use precise measures like […]

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Kevin Kelly has a write-up and a good list of the various sites that use the consensus of their participants to identify and rank online information.
Kelly uses sites like this to: "get a fantastic sense of what the web is reading, and an early glimpse of what will reach the MSM in the next day […]

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If you’ve ever sat beside a salesperson on a plane, or read a trade magazine, you’ve heard the language that business uses when it’s selling to business.
English is replaced with a patois of jargon and bravado, as the product benefits are touted, ROI is proven, and unique selling points are emphasized.
Yet here’s a company that […]

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Jane Genova doesn’t believe in waiting around for someone to notice her. She promotes herself, constantly trying to reinforce her image as someone who’s got something special.
The Connecticut corporate writer says the trick to success has nothing to do with chasing job titles or steady paying gigs. You have to position yourself as a player.
"How […]

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Richard Laermer did everything right.  In a PR News (print version) column about sloppy grammar and spelling, he got the tone right, found some good examples of dumb mistakes by editors and others who should know better, and voila — a thoughtful bit of writing for busy PR folks to read.
But there, hiding in paragraph […]

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Writing for broadcast requires remarkable discipline. No matter how many fancy words you know, you need to boil the sentences and phrases down to simple concepts, communicated simply.
But simplicity isn’t good enough. You also have to be clear.
A news item on the radio today was about a adult video store robbery, in which the thieves […]

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