In getting ready for my leadership communication class tonight, I have been thinking about power. After all, leadership implies power. Most management researchers differentiate among different bases of social power: Legitimate power (position, reciprocity, equity, & dependence) Reward power (personal & impersonal) Coercive power (personal & impersonal) Informational power (direct & indirect) Expert power (positive…
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…
Julia Williams, President of the Professional Communication Society (and one of my favorite colleagues) has negotiated a deal to offer a free eLearning course on leadership communication to IEEE members. Details are available in Julia’s Monthly eNotice. IEEE offers 3 CEUs (or professional development hours) for successful completion of the course. I created the content for…
Thanks (again) to the Center for Plain Language, I found a terrific story of the process pros use to manage the creation of a document with a very large and heterogenous audience. Check out the infographic timeline at the Know Before You Owe site (under “How we did it”). It describes the process used by Kleimann Communication Group…
Here (finally) is the tutorial on analyzing a workplace audience. I’ve been distracted for a few days, playing nurse for my 17- year-old son after oral surgery. Whew! More later . . . Related articles Pros don’t settle for platitudes about audience (proswrite.com)
Know your audience! The most common platitude about workplace writing. Well . . . duh . . . who could argue with that? It certainly doesn’t describe what pros have learned. What amateurs need is GUIDANCE for getting to know the right things about their readers. My guidance, based on a chapter new to the third edition of Revising Professional Writing, focuses…
Did cupid fail? You can’t be certain unless you know his aim (get it?). I mean maybe he was looking for work in the off season and was hired as a hitman. OK. That was kinda lame. But my point is that you ignore the importance of purpose in determining the success of a document at your own peril….
Growing up, my son never wanted to start at the beginning. I guess it’s human nature. I mean who doesn’t want to start with dessert? My son’s desire wasn’t an issue until he wanted to participate in some new activity that required skill (think karate, piano, golf, etc.), and he still wanted to skip the beginning. With those…
Amateurs write workplace documents as if they were some version of a five-paragraph essay. It’s one consequence of using literature teachers to teach writing in the US. Our students do not learn that different rhetorical contexts (different goals, audiences, messages) give rise to different ways of organizing and presenting information in a document. That’s called genre awareness. Let me…