I volunteer for the South Orange Rescue Squad, helping them spread the word about their work. One of my initiatives is a monthly column that appears on the local radio station's website. (We don't have a community newspaper, unless you count the four-day-a-week student paper from UNC that mostly covers campus.) WCHL and its website Chapelboro get a lot of local traffic, helping SORS expand its audience. The column offers behind-the-scenes looks at the squad's operations, highlights some of our volunteers and deliver how-to and explainer content to show readers how to stay safe and help others. The latter serves our goals for outreach while helping community members respond while EMS is on the way. I'm sharing two recent installments here because the information might be useful to you, too!

How to respond to an opioid overdose

Excerpted from The South Orange Dispatch: "How to Help Someone Who's Overdosing"

Signs of an overdose can imitate many other serious medical problems, so it’s important to call 9-1-1 and get medical attention anytime someone is in distress.

1. Check for responsiveness and normal breathing by loudly asking if they’re OK, tapping them on the shoulder or rubbing your knuckles hard on their chest.
2. Yell for help and call 9-1-1 if the person doesn’t seem OK, isn’t responding or breathing normally.
3. Answer the dispatcher’s questions, which helps them help you respond. (As soon as dispatch has your address, they send EMS, even while they’re still talking to you.)
4. Give NARCANⓇ or naloxone if you suspect an overdose. There are very few potential side effects of administering naloxone, so if you have reason to suspect an overdose, give it!
5. Do CPR, beginning with chest compressions hard and fast in the center of the chest if they don’t respond and aren’t breathing normally.
6. Stay on the phone and with the person until EMS arrives.

The article has details on recognizing signs of a possible overdose, too. Click the image to get them!

How to help someone who's bleeding

Excerpted from The South Orange Dispatch: "Learn How to Stop the Bleed"

Follow these steps to assist a bleeding person until EMS arrives:

1. Make sure the site is safe. You can’t help if you get hurt, too.
2. Call 9-1-1, put your phone on speaker and answer the dispatcher’s questions. They send EMS as soon as they have your address so continuing to talk to them doesn’t delay help.
3. Get or send someone to get the first aid or Stop the Bleed kit.
4. Put on clean gloves if you have them.
5. Use a gauze pad or clean article of clothing to cover the wound.
6. Apply direct pressure. If the person is able, they can hold the gauze in place; otherwise, you or someone else can hold it or wrap the site to keep the pressure on.
7. Keep the person as calm as possible with reassuring words.
8. Put another gauze on top of the first one if it bleeds through. Do not take off the first bandage or you may make the bleeding worse!
9. As soon as you can, wash your hands with warm, soapy water for at least 20 seconds. Use hand sanitizer until you have access to soap and water.

The article has more helpful information. Click the image to read it!

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The post How-to content: Bystanders save lives first appeared on The Word Factory.

genAI content has a sneaky habit that's eroding your authority, credibility and overall reputation. It creates content that looks and sounds like anybody else's. And you're not necessarily going to even know it unless you read a lot of other people's stuff. Like your boss does.

For people using AI

For the last two weeks, I've been revising a series of reports for an advisory firm. Each had a different author, yet all reflected the same sentence patterns. The biggest culprit is the it's not x, it's y construct. Not a problem used once or twice and presented in different terms. But it's everywhere in these reports. It's annoying enough to read the exact same pattern multiple times in a single document. It tells me you either didn't notice (lack of attention to detail) or didn't think it was a big deal (lack of awareness). When it's all over different documents by different authors, though, it can signal that you're not an original thinker and communicator, and neither are the others. It reinforces that you didn't put in extra work to revise the content and make it your own. That's not a good look. And that's just the impact of one of the AI issues. It compounds when you leave the rest unaddressed, too.

Your action item, then, is to use the time AI saves you getting started to read your copy closely (out loud is good, too) and revise it carefully. I've got some suggestion for where to start.

For people supervising AI users

You may not think your reputation's at risk just because your employees are using AI wrong. Ooops. Not the case. When your board or leadership team, customers, prospects and investors read work from your company, they see the patterns, too. And it puts the same level of doubt on you (and your firm) as it does on the individual writers. It also makes us wonder why you're not doing something about it.

Your action item is to make revision a core competency for yourself and your direct reports. Follow my advice for getting started. You may be able to address this on your own. Or make a deeper investment by hiring a writing instructor to offer a group training for your team or individual coaching for high-potential employees or those who need the most scaffolding.

Using AI to draft can be a smart move, but it will generate better returns if you invest effort into tuning it up before turning it in.

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The post Listen up! genAI text is tanking your rep first appeared on The Word Factory.

I spend a lot of time getting people engaged with our planet. These are some of my favorite activities.

Get to know a tree

Trees do so much for us, from generating the oxygen we need to breathe to providing shade and shelter. Use this activity to help you get to know more about the trees you encounter every day.

Keep a nature journal

You can do this formally, with a fancy notebook and cool writing utensils, or just scrawl on a little notebook or your phone's notes app. However you do it, paying closer attention to nature is a great way to deepen your connection and increase your gratitude. Get more nature journaling tips.

Be a shark & ray finfluencer

Our shark and ray friends need our help! Download this activity I created for Shark & Ray Awareness Day to tell people why we all should appreciate and protect our fun fishy friends.

Share your climate story

You may not know it, but you're a climate communicator! When people hear from folks they know and trust (like you), they're more likely to believe climate change information and take action. Check out my toolkit for creating your own climate story to share with your friends and the world!

Read all about it

There are so many terrific books about the Earth, the environment and our climate! Take a look at my list of must-reads and check out the monthly flora column, Refugium, that I co-write with Geoffrey Neal. Maybe one of them will inspire you to find more ways to show your gratitude for this Earth and try a new form of advocacy or action on its behalf! (I'm currently loving How to Love a Forest by Ethan Tapper!)

Connect with NASA

You can also find a ton of cool information and activities to help you learn more about our planet from my friends at NASA. Did you know the space agency employs more earth scientists than anyone else in the world!? So cool. Here's a sampling:

• Spell your name using images from NASA's LandSat
• Peep the raft of activities and resources at NASA|Earth
• See NASA's Earth Observatory image of the day
• Watch NASA's mesmerizing Oceans in Motion video

Post continues below the image

* Or Earth Month or all the damn time

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The post Resources for Earth Day first appeared on The Word Factory.

I was glued to Artemis II coverage across NASA's constellation (ha!) of channels earlier this month. And when I wasn't being awed by the images and affirmations the crew was sending back, I was marveling at the terrific examples of science and organizational communication on display by the space agency's team at every level. The sheer amount of training and coordination that was required to pull off consistent, human-level commentary is remarkable on its own before you even factor in that much of it was done live and unscripted. That's down to clarity, care, training and a dedication to the cause and the craft. But there's something even NASA can't teach, and that's humanity. It's conveying genuine empathy, wonder, gratitude, curiosity and, yes, even joy. That's recruiting people who know their feelings, communicate them authentically and — crucially — encouraging them to bring those emotions to their work. That's where a lot of organizations break down. Good on NASA for making humanity a core value.

NASA invests in communications training, from the top administrators down to volunteer ambassadors like me. That's right! I'm a member of NASA's Earth to Sky Community of Practice. We're teachers, scientists, park rangers, nature interpreters, and other formal and informal educators who communicate about climate change. We regularly hear from NASA folks about their work and how we can infuse it into our own. They also host workshops and courses to help us apply evidence-based communications practices.

Check out some of their live feeds (NASA's always got something going on!) and follow their various missions and divisions on social (they finally joined Threads after Artemis returned because so many of us were geeking out over there and reposting their Insta content!). While it may be hard to emulate the passion NASA team members have for the agency's work at your place of employment, I'm pretty sure seeing how they do it will inspire you to find some [moon] joy in your own comms work.

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The post Copy, moon joy first appeared on The Word Factory.

A few years ago, I read a riveting book by John Vaillant called Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World. In addition to his exceptional storytelling, he also has a fantastic vocabularly and I noted a host of new terms in my reading journal, some of which I shared on this very blog. One of them is revirescent: growing fresh or young again, reviving.

It spoke to me on a visceral level then and I've looked for opportunities to use it since in my writing or workshops.

For instance, here's a poem in which the noun form of the word, revirescence, ends the piece. Called Fire Season, appears in the January 2026 edition of Everyone Everywhere, along with a photo of a prescribed fire a few years ago at Blustem Conservation Cemetery, where I lead the Everyday Conservation program and volunteer on the burial crew.

I thought about the word again the other day, when I walked by the site of this year's prescribed fire, one field over. I'm leading a nature walk in a couple weeks and we'll spend a fair bit of time here talking about Southeastern grassland restoration and the role of fire in it. You can bet I've got revirescence in my notes! I snapped this photo to capture the revirescent landscape. All the green you see sprouted up within the week after the burn. Amazing.

As you're writing this week, see what words you can deploy that show what you want to tell. Try several out to find the one that conveys the right information and — crucially — is appropriate for your audience and sounds like something you'd say or write. Choosing cool words just for the wow factor usually has the opposite effect. You look like a jerk or make your audience feel dumb. Either way, that's a credibility hit you don't need.

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Images (c) 2026| Margot Lester. All rights reserved.

The post Word study: Revirescent first appeared on The Word Factory.