Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly had a way with words — and with audiences. I have often used his words as the focus of discussions in my leadership communication class. In honor of today’s 50th anniversary of perhaps his most famous speech, Johnson wrote an interesting rhetorical analysis for today’s Economist. If you want to read…
Rarely. That’s how often you should delay when writing to readers from Western cultures. Our attention span is short. We value efficiency. We want to know your bottom line first. Then we’ll decide whether to keep reading. (I’m assuming your goal is to communicate a point clearly to your audience.) But telling you it’s rarely…
TEDEd brings us short lessons on many subjects. There are currently eight lessons in the TEDEd Playing with Language series. That’s where I found one called How did English Evolve that explains why some words are less “plain” than others. So I flipped it to create my own lesson related to plain language. (It’s a very simple process.)…
No matter how well you’ve mastered the etiquette of “proper” English — like confusing word pairs (its vs it’s) — this game from Us vs Th3m will challenge you! I got to Level 8. Can you?
As the academic year begins in US institutions of higher learning . . . I couldn’t resist sharing this comic from xkcd. Last year, faculty in my College were in an uproar over a redesigned website created for an external audience. The furor has died down now that most of the content for the internal…
So you’ve got an idea or service to promote? You’ll do much of that selling face-to-face. But you’re likely to need a written proposal in many cases. This post provides some basic guidance for writing a proposal (not a business plan, which is a specialized type of proposal) based on some relevant research. Proposals are…
Click on the cartoon to get the right size for reading. Happy Friday everyone!
Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz summarize the implications of some recent psychological research on format this way: Any variable that facilitates or impairs fluent information processing can profoundly affect people’s judgements and decisions. [Writers] are therefore well advised to present information in a form that facilitates easy processing: if it’s easy to read, it seems easy to do,…
No time to explore this in detail today, but Henry Blodget, editor of Business Insider, is getting a lot of attention for his article “This one tweet reveals what’s wrong with American Business.” The bottom line here is that Henry believes US corporations think only about the short term. If that’s true, plain language efforts…
More useful PowerPoint design tips from Gavin.