If you write in more than one language but don’t want to switch keyboards when you do, read on. I regularly write in French as well as English. Spanish and Italian also sometimes make their way into work product and correspondence. In those languages, certain letters are
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“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” ― Mark Twain I’m always looking for tricks to improve my writing. One trick I learned a long time ago involves culling excess verbiage from
Read more →Companies that file documents with the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR) often need to ensure they are in both of Canada’s official languages. Document translation is expensive. Can businesses avoid this expense? After all, it’s 2019. Free translation services abound online. Have you heard
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This blog post is partly about technology and partly about me patting myself on the back. I was recently recognized for my ability to conquer new technology. Here’s the story. Backstory If you follow my social media feeds, you’ll notice I increasingly speak about translation. That’s because
Read more →I’ve stopped counting the number of times I’ve seen people use free email services (like Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo) as their business email addresses. Those addresses create the wrong impression, especially when all other customer touchpoints – business cards, websites, store signs, brochures and so on –
Read more →Autocorrect features help you prevent misspellings, but they have other uses as well. For instance, you can create shortcuts to help you quickly insert: special symbols that don’t appear on your keyboard (like ©, ®, ¿ and ¡) boilerplate text emojis These features ship standard on every
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Do you have an office job that lets you work remotely? If you do, chances are you work not so much on your computer as you do through a secure “tunnel” into your company’s servers. Whether you use Windows or a Mac the work environment appears as
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News websites need to make money, so they ask readers for subscriptions. These subscriptions seem reasonable and I suspect many news junkies (sorry, readers) pay for them. My relationship to news websites I’m doing what I can to avoid the news in general. As an old New Yorker cartoon
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When I start to write a document, the ideas in it never get to the page in publishable order. (I know I’m not alone in this.) Pieces of the “story” float about. Many writers feel a compulsion to write from the start of a new document. That
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I’ve been increasingly making phone calls using my Mac, without even touching my iPhone. FaceTime on the Mac makes this possible when my Mac and iPhone are connected to the same WiFi network. (Apple provides full setup instructions here.) It’s a great convenience. The sound is fine,
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