Editing is a step you can’t afford to skip with ANY of your communication! Everyone’s an editor. If you’ve ever rewritten a sentence in a memo or rephraseda paragraph in an important letter, you were editing. And if you’ve ever been so fed up with the way a letter was sounding that youtossed the draft…
Pandora is one of my favorite “tools” for taking mini-breaks throughout the day. This app on my Android phone (which I downloaded from Google Play Store) is an internet radio service that allows me to listen to music whenever and wherever I am. Listening to music while I work makes it easier for me to…
Taking mini-breaks can lower stress AND increase productivity. Taking a break when we were kids was easy. Most of us probably had long stretches of time with “nothing to do” in the summer or on weekends. And if you’re like me, you learned early on that if you had too much free time and complained…
Canva is something I’d heard a lot about, but had never actually tried USING until over a year ago. I was starting to create social media posts for a client each week, and I knew Canva would be the best way to do that. I had no idea what a treat I was in for!…
White space and subheads are just two examples of good graphic design. WORDS vs. IMAGES If someone were to hold a contest and these two were the competitors, who do you think would win? If you agree with the phrase “a picture’s worth a thousand words,” you’d probably side with “images.” But if you’re a…
This post focuses on something most of us, I’m sure, take for granted. TREES. I think I first “fell in love with” trees during one of my family’s many visits to Muir Woods in Marin County – just north of San Francisco. To get there, we first had to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, then…
Starting a journal is easy. Just pick up a pen and notebook … and write! Not all clutter is visible. Mental clutter is a challenge for many of us, and a major hindrance to creativity. That’s why journaling is so important. Keeping a journal may not sound like something serious business owners do, but not…
Post-it® Notes – like so many things we now take for granted – were invented by accident. In 1968, a scientist at 3M’s Minnesota headquarters was trying to develop a strong adhesive when, instead, he came up with a substance light enough to remove and peel apart. The problem? He had no idea how it…
Red pens are my favorite tools to use for proofreading! Proofreading is more than just looking for misspellings. It’s also looking for missing punctuation. Or sometimes, as in the sentence below, punctuation thatshould NOT be there. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” Remove the comma from that last sentence…
Reading aloud to your children is one of the best gifts you can give them. Writing about storytelling in a recent article reminded me of something that’s very important to me: children’s literature. Like a lot of people who love writing, I learned to read early in life. In fact, I think I was reading…