Motivated Grammar provided an excellent discussion of word choice — specifically confusing homophones (like “your” and “you’re”).
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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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Amateurs fail after a misdeed
Anyone who avoids full responsibility after making a mistake counts as an amateur in my book. This past week, my students discussed the purpose and effectiveness of a letter from a publications manager to a group of volunteer editors. The consensus was that it effectively informed readers about the reasons for performance issues in the manager’s area, as well as plans to address them in the…
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Amateurs want the wrong kind of power
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…
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Pros use graphs ethically
Whew! The beginning of the academic year has kept me fully occupied this past week. I wanted to take time to share a few good discussions I’ve been reading about constructing graphs. Check out Nigel Lewis at Capgemini’s Business Analytic’s blog for some good examples of scale issues (as discussed in my Video Tutorial on Graphics). And Naomi…
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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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The video tutorial on subject-verb agreement
Last week, I wrote that subject-verb disagreement matters because it signals a serious breach in etiquette. And that distracts business readers. Relatively few of my former students (or writers for whom I served as editor) have committed the faux pas in the writing they have done for me. But, for those amateur writers who do struggle with subject-verb disagreement,…
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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…
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Want something lite AND intellectual for lunch today?
To learn the history of the English language, I had to take an entire 15-week university course. (And read Baugh’s book shown in the photo here.) But you can get the big picture in an entertaining — if not entirely vetted by experts — way in only 10 minutes. Enjoy getting fit!
