The LPGA this week announced a controversial communications policy that will tie the hands of many international female golfers. As Lorne Rubinstein reported in The Globe and Mail, the world’s most lucrative female golf association has invoked a policy that insists “its players speak English to a certain standard or face suspension of their membership.” 
How [...]

I have been watching the Democratic National Convention - the coronation of Barack Obama. Much has been written over the last decade or two about the irrelevance of the major parties’ conventions, how they don’t really mean anything since nominees are almost always decided through the primaries system.
But ever since I campaigned for George McGovern [...]

The other day, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I mentioned that I work for a PR firm. Her response - oh, you mean like Samantha Jones? I cringed. Most Sex and the City fans will tell you public relations involves party planning, made infamous when Samantha Jones first held up [...]

One of the worst communications phenomena of our time is upspeak. In the 1980s it emerged as the comical accent of “Valley Girls,” where ditzy kids would have an interrogative cadence to everything they said.
Now, it’s everywhere. And it must be stopped.
Upspeak makes you sound uncertain, as if every sentence is a question. Almost every [...]

The Globe and Mail’s Christie Blatchford - who is reporting from the Olympics in Beijing — has written an interesting perspective on the impact on journalists of blogging and other new media delivery. 
The full column can be found here.  Here’s an excerpt:
It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone [...]

Michael Phelps is certainly dominating the headlines, at least for these two weeks.
I heard an interesting conversation during some of the Olympic commentary the other night.  One of the broadcasters was despairing that swimming only comes into the spotlight and the public consciousness every four years.  “Why can’t we get Americans to be interested in [...]

Every morning I pick up my copy of the newspaper and start scanning the headlines for the day’s top news.  Reading the newspaper is something I have enjoyed since my days in college as I always look forward to sitting down with the paper and a good cup of coffee.
Recently, I have started feeling depressed [...]

I don’t know about other the language of other professions, but public relations seems to have its own dialect. Perhaps they’re heard in most areas of marketing, but here are a few words and phrases that make me grimace:
“On our radar” - it seems like this phrase is blurted out at least a few times [...]