Friday Five: four months in

What I’ve learned from diving back into creative writing.

Four months ago, I relaunched this blog in its new incarnation, as a website dedicated to the craft of writing. I had just wrapped up a nearly 33-year career in communications, public relations and marketing with Missouri University of Science and Technology and, while I was certainly ready for a break from the day-to-day rigors of what that career had become, I was not ready to retire from writing. I was instead ready to dive back into writing for the joy of it. I was ready to grab hold of this new chapter of my life.

The past four months have been invigorating.

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Innovation, communication, and the Errors Tour

An important lesson: sometimes our efforts to connect with an audience fall flat.

It was great to be back on the Missouri S&T campus earlier this week to give the keynote talk for the university’s first Innovative Communication Conference. (Huge thanks to Dr. Jossalyn M. Gale, director of S&T’s Writing and Communication Center, for inviting me to speak.)

In my talk, I wanted to expand on the idea of the conference theme — “Innovation Requires Communication” — to emphasize the importance or storytelling in communication and innovation. I also wanted to impress on students the importance of embracing failure, and I needed a catchy title, something that would resonate with the mainly Gen Z audience, so I decided to borrow from 2023’s biggest pop culture event, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and call my presentation “The Errors Tour (Andy’s Version).”

Reactions to my cover slide were mixed. The older folks in the audience (read: faculty and staff) appreciated the wordplay. The students either smiled politely or remained expressionless. It seems they were over 2023 and all things Swift.

But …

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