This is too good not to pass along!
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Friday fun with malapropisms
I’ve written about malapropisms before. If you want a diversion that involves word play with malapropisms today, try this game from Oxford Dictionaries. Example: The muscles around the stomach are known as the abominable muscles. Answer: Abdominal (‘abominable’ means ‘detestable’). A prospectus is someone who searches for gold. After a long air flight, it is reassuring to get your feet back…
Ideas are nothing without action
I love The Onion. And I love TED Talks. So I was tickled when my buddy, Erin Kane, a law professor who teaches legal writing and rhetorical analysis, shared this video one of her students found yesterday. What’s equally great is that the student, Troy Thresher, wrote: “I found myself analyzing the rhetorical commitments and strategies…
Vote in the People’s Choice Award for best plain English summary of a science paper
What a terrific initiative!
The sorry state of language education
Please tell me you had a teacher talk about homophones at least once during your educational experience. This story from the Salt Lake Tribune a few days ago depresses me on many levels. In short, an English language teacher was fired for using the word, “homophonic.” Like I’m watching a car crash . . . I haven’t been…
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Amateurs need explicit knowledge — not platitudes
I shared my position on the use of short lectures in a writing class a couple of days ago. But I told only part of the story from the video lecture-tutorial + teaching note that will be published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Education. The amateurs in my courses depend on me to make a professional’s tacit…
Learn to write like a secret agent!
Thanks to the folks at Bridging the Unbridgeable, I learned that the CIA style manual is now publicly available. As the Director of Intelligence wrote in the foreward to the 8th edition, The information the CIA gathers and the analysis it produces mean little if we cannot convey them effectively. I’ve included the manual here so you can investigate for yourself. The…
They got to be kidding. “No deadlines”? My professors seem to have deadlines to meet.
And don’t tell the professors over in the studio courses (those who need to operate heavy machinery and/or hazardous substances) that there are no environmental hazards. In any art setting one of the first things you get told is always “safety.”
And we’ve not even touched science or engineering yet.
Those guys at CNBC are absolutely clueless.
Forbes ran the same story at http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/01/03/the-least-stressful-jobs-of-2013/ — apparently lifted from one found at CareerCast. VERY sloppy journalism!
Wow, this sheds an entirely new light on the credibility of those career sites. If even a student like me can see that the article is almost 100% fact free and yet they published it as if it were a neutral, objective article, I wonder whether we can believe anything on those sites. We’re not even talking about taking them with a grain of salt here…
Preach it, sister! I love the points you make here (and the way that you make them). When I posted my blog post on this Forbes article http://wp.me/p2VVAw-Y, I didn’t expect to meet a colleague at the same university who was also a blogger and would address this topic. Nice to “meet” you.
Hello! Strange that we had to “meet” here. The online world is a strange place!