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Amateurs think standard English matters only in school
Bydr.kimThe Harvard Business Review blog network recently featured a piece by Kyle Wiens called I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why. Wiens runs two companies, and both focus on technical communication. But he makes a good argument about why what he calls “grammar” matters in any workplace. Grammar is relevant for all companies. Yes, language…
Grades for plain language at US agencies
Bydr.kimCheck it out. The Center for Plain Language just released this 2013 report card for plain writing done by federal agencies. Details are available from their website. Two related media articles appear below. Sure makes me wonder what’s different in the USDA (Dept of Agriculture) and the DOL (Dept of Labor). Related articles The Worst…
Friday fun with the doge meme
Bydr.kimLearn a little something about language humor at Much Reading. Wow. over at The American Scholar. Jessica Love explains the linguistic humor of the doge memes. Like the ones shown here. Happy Friday!
Learn to identify needless words and promote clarity
Bydr.kimA couple of months back, Forbes.com published 10 Tips For Better Business Writing. Tip #3 was “Omit needless words.” The author echoed the time-honored advice of William Strunk, Jr., in The Elements of Style published by Cornell University, where he worked as an English professor, in 1919. (You may be more familiar with later editions of the book by Strunk…
Pros lead with language
Bydr.kimI teach my first class of the fall 2012 semester tonight: Leadership Communication. The focus includes writing but is not specific to it. Instead, we study how to lead with language (plus some non-verbal behaviors because we’re interested in communication). Because I will be thinking about the topics in this class quite often over the next 15 weeks, some…
Amateurs (and lawyers) beat around the bush
Bydr.kimMost of the world has heard that CNN and Fox News inaccurately reported the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Health Care Act last Thursday. Later that day, here’s how Ellen Killoran, a reporter for the International Business Times, explained their error: The egregious error does not appear to be the result of the news…
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!