Friday fun with lame punctuation humor
Happy Friday!
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Fun with Weird Al’s “Mission Statement”
MTV News says Weird Al sounds just like your boss. What? They’re talking about “Mission Statement,” the final video release this past week from the Mandatory Fun album. Weird Al Yankovic does not only make fun of the way the less powerful use language. This time his target is the language of the powerful. The song’s a parody of corporate jargon using…
What happens when passive voice is banned?
I’ve said before that advice to ban the passive voice counts as a platitude. A recently published study corroborates my point. The authors of that study wrote, [Advice to ban the passive voice] implies that the active and passive voice can be used interchangeably and, where grammatically possible, the active voice should always be favoured. Their results show…
It’s dangerous using words: Malapropisms and more
Today I’m sharing a little linguistic fun by directing you to an episode of the Slate podcast, Lexicon Valley. In case you’re impatient, one of the hosts provides a definition: the word malapropism comes from the name of a character in an 18th-century play called The Rivals by a guy named Richard Sheridan. There’s a…
Friday fun with punctuation gone wild
For the funny explanation of appropriate usage, see College Humor. You can even download them as truetype fonts for actual adoption. It’s worth a few minutes! Happy Friday!
What (else) do we know about writing white papers?
A couple of months ago, I summarized the available evidence on writing white papers. I’ve done more digging and want to provide a follow-up with a few more details on developing content, organizing it, and using an appropriate style. (See the earlier post for a description of the white paper as a genre.) The bottom line…
Why new grads don’t get the job
My colleague, Saul Carliner, shared this slide deck from Mark O-Toole about why new grads don’t get hired. See if you can locate one of the eleven reasons that isn’t caused by (or couldn’t be fixed with better) communication. Congratulations Graduate! Eleven Reasons Why I Will Never Hire You. from Mark O’Toole Here’s my analysis….
