This post follows up on a couple of earlier ones about a letter soliciting sponsorships for an outdoor sign at The First Tee of Tuscaloosa. Pros don’t settle for platitudes about audience described the principled way in which we analyzed our audience. Pros plan message content strategically described how we developed the content for the first draft. This one describes…
Everybody loves show and tell. Check out this monthly event in Brooklyn. Sadly, the workplace equivalent of “showing” typically consists of PowerPoint slides filled with text. That’s tell and tell rather than show and tell. Everybody complains about PowerPoint. A Google search showed that “Death by PowerPoint” appeared 11,100 times in newly created web content in…
This post follows up on some conversation about the meaning of “specialist” after my On Being a Writing Specialist a few days ago. I had always used “specialist” and “pro” and “expert” interchangeably. That will change now that I’ve done some more reading and reflecting. I knew I would have to define what I mean by “pro”…
One of the most important things any teacher or manager can do to help amateurs become pro writers is to discuss sample messages with them. The key here is discussing the sample message in sufficient, relevant detail and connecting those details to future messages the writer will create.** Here are the guidelines I’ve provided before to those introducing…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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,…
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…