The Byrne Blog

I must confess that I am not a huge fan of blogs in general.  I see them as a useful communication tool and one of just many ways to connect with people in this age of social media.  Don’t get me wrong; I like them, usually.  Sometimes I even enjoy well-thought and well-written blogs.  I’m just not in love with the concept.  I find them often to be ponderous, pointless, pretentious and pedantic.  Not to mention precious in their use of rhetorical flourishes like alliteration (or irony).  So, please excuse my excesses and omissions.  I realize that my chosen topic of commenting on communications requires a relatively high standard, which I hope to uphold more often than not.  Feel free to keep me on my toes and away from the common blog trap of self-important hypocrisy.

I have spent more than 25 years of my life (yikes) communicating or managing someone else’s communications in one way or another for money.  This is perhaps one of the few times that I’m doing it for free.  Trying it on for size, as it were.  I currently direct the communications for an AmLaw 100 firm, as I have for the past few years (and just got promoted to Chief Marketing Officer in July 2010).  Overall, it’s a very fun job with only the infrequent headache — just don’t tell my boss or he’ll stop listening to my occasional rants about working for lawyers.  I have written and edited for a few newspapers, have been a practicing litigator, a community magazine publisher, headhunter, marketing director and very sporadic free-lancer.  I have 12-year-old triplets (2 boys and a girl) and have been married for more than 17 years.  I recently returned to living on the North Shore of Chicago, and I’m not looking forward to a return to the typical winters there after several years living in Tampa and Philadelphia.

I am a huge fan of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and I posit one of my favorite quotes here so that it might be seen with more frequency than a random post:  “The language is perpetually in flux:  it is a living stream, shifting, changnig, receiving new strength from a thousand tributaries, losing old forms in the backwaters of time.”  I think that quote translates to communications in general and will be one of the guiding lights to my comments in this blog.