Improve your Writing
January 27th, 2021Be honest: if you sent me a piece of your writing, and I sent it back marked up like the page at the right, would you feel insulted? I know it’s sobering to see words you’ve carefully committed to paper marked up in red ink by a critic who deems your prose something short of […]
read more...6 tips for editing your own work — and why you should solicit feedback from othersIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
October 6th, 2020“Find another profession.” That was the blunt assessment of one high school student who sat through a presentation I gave in Saskatoon 15 years ago. The youth-targeted media literacy book that had earned me the speaking invitation, In Your Face – The Culture of Beauty and You, was an award-winning Canadian best-seller. But my ability […]
read more...The value of candid criticism from reliable sourcesBlog Post and Our Advocacy Work
April 27th, 2018We recently surveyed hundreds of women who’ve participated in our workshops and remained on our mailing list. Email overflow and work-life demands being what they are, we were happy to log 57 responses from women in 16 cities across the country. They gave us insight into what use they’ve made of the training we deliver, […]
read more...What Impact are We Having? What More Can We Do?Effective Communication, Improve your Writing and Increase Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
July 18th, 2017“Great lectures, bad hair.” Clearly, I’m no Einstein, but in the fight for my most memorable student evaluation as a university communications instructor, that comment from 1992 runs neck and neck with this one from 1998: “Puncuashun, and speling, to strick.” Translated, this means “Punctuation and spelling too strict.” (Which, I’m pretty sure, totally redeems […]
read more...Critical feedback is one key to successIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
May 15th, 2017I undermined the impact of my opening. I relied on my notes too much. I failed to advance my slides as intended. Those are just three of the critical observations I made after watching a video of myself delivering a conference keynote in Winnipeg. That’s the bad news. The good news is that 1. the […]
read more...Storytelling and the power of visual feedbackImprove your Writing
March 28th, 2011The dilemma is often an unconscious one: you’ve laboured over the text of your commentary (or letter, or website) and now you’re looking for feedback: do you send it to your mom? Your best friend? Your assistant? The people who either love you unconditionally, agree with you always, or think you’re brilliance personified? Absolutely, if […]
read more...Feel-good feedback no substitute for good editing advice