Now that last week is over, and I get a breather from wearing a suit and listening to other people in suits talk at me using PowerPoint bullets (I’m not a “natural” administrator) . . . let me get back on track. Gavin’s post was a timely reminder about what makes a visual work.
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Guest Post: Confronting an employee
Hello! My name is Derek Longenecker, and I am an undergraduate in the University of Alabama MIS (Management Information Systems) program. I am entering a new phase in my life as I graduate this December, so I took Leadership Communication (MGT 422) and will complete the Management Communication Specialization to better prepare myself for communication…
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Communicating in Cairo
I saw this last week and thought I would share it today because I don’t have time to write much. (I’m in Atlanta for a few days at the AACSB Accreditation Conference.) According to a cab driver from Cairo, car horns are used by drivers there to communicate more than their frustration. Several morse-code like…
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A little diversion involving words
Got that frivolous Friday feeling? I have exams to grade so, naturally, I was looking for a diversion this morning and thought I’d share three of my attempts. Diversion 1: Identify the pun performed by today’s photo from doozzle. Diversion 2: Check out the pronunciation humor in this Berlitz ad. Diversion 3: Watch the short video on…
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Guest Post: The effects of leader communication on teams
My name is Aylin Wispeler. I am from Germany and at the moment I am doing my exchange semester as an undergraduate student at University of Alabama. I am here to deepen my knowledge in management and communication in order to become an effective leader in my future. I will begin my required internship in only…
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On being a writing “specialist”
[Updated September 7, 2012] What do you think makes a writing specialist professional want to tear out [thanks, Joyce] her hair? Subject-verb disagreement? No. Business reports with double-spaced text? No. Plagiarism? Not really. Students who write emails to pros in text-message style? OK, maybe a little. But the REAL frustration is the widespread incompetence of people who…
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In honor of labor
Our US celebration of Labor Day today made me reflect on the idea of work — especially work that qualifies as “labor.” At thirteen, I got my first job for an employer outside my family. For a few weeks in the summer of 1973, I worked with some of my friends detasseling corn for a seed company in Fremont,…
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No, thank YOU, you @#$%^ machine!
I’ve heard a few folks complaining about automated messages — thank-you emails to be specific. In Auto-politeness, revisited, one of The Economist’s Johnson bloggers wrote, Thanking is a real human response to a real event; I don’t know if it can be outsourced to a machine. Here is a personal example from a while back….
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Like to play with words?
Like to play with words? Need a diversion today? I suggest a visit to the Oxford English Fictionary. From their About page: Have you ever read a book and come across a word and said to yourself, “Hmmm, self, I wonder what that word means?”, and then gone to a dictionary to look up the…
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Pros lead with language
I 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…
