Copywriter, technical writer, translator (FR>EN, ES>EN, IT>EN), journalist

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Creating tasks using email

An email inbox isn’t the right place to keep track of your to-do list. Don’t believe me? Try it sometime and see if you don’t lose your list among the – what – hundreds? Thousands? of other emails sitting in there too. The consequences? Not doing the

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Introducing… the Delete key

I was once guilty: years ago, my Outlook inbox would sometimes overflow with stuff that wasn’t necessary. Unsolicited messages from PR companies (we journalists get plenty of those), unsolicited electronic commercial messages (distinct from outright spam) and other stuff could clog my inbox and, consequently, fuel the

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Finding freelance work with Canadian governments

Canadian federal, provincial, and municipal governments buy billions of dollars’ worth of goods and services every year that they can’t make or perform in-house. Freelance writing figures among those services, so in December I, along with a few other freelancers, attended three workshops offered by the Ontario

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Don't be a phish

Oddly, in the four years or so since the MacMost.com video below was published, not much has changed in the world of phishing. Phishing commonly refers to the activity of tricking people into surrendering financial or other important information using official-looking emails.

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Viewing two pages at once

It’s easy enough to do when you read a dead tree book – just put your thumb in the table of contents or index while you flip from page to page looking for the stuff you want. You can easily view two documents on screen as well,

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Bookmarking your document

When you create a cross-reference in a Word document, you can choose a number of different “hooks” to link that reference to. Headings, tables and numbered items might be the most popular such hooks. Sometimes, though, hooks aren’t precisely where you want them to be, so you

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2011 was a year of links, locks and bots

This past year saw its share of advances in the technology sector, and Canadian law worked hard to keep up. Here are four developments in technology law and how they affect Canadians. 1. Delinking from defamation Can one publisher be another’s keeper? Not according to the Supreme

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Speed up your writing

The longer the document you need to write, the slimmer the chance of getting it right on the first draft. So don’t agonize over every word when you first write a document. Instead, dash through the first draft and, wherever you’re not sure about something, leave a

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