Readers label you based on your style

Readers label you based on your style

I’m in Seattle at the Association for Business Communication conference. Erin Kane and I will present “Reader Perception of Workplace-Writer Attributes” this afternoon. (Our fellow researchers, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning couldn’t make the trip.) We had more than 600 working adults in the US tell us whether they preferred the more plain or less…

More on word choice in evaluations of men and women
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More on word choice in evaluations of men and women

Today, I’m following up on a short post about the use of the word abrasive in performance reviews for women. Similar discussions of word choice in student evaluations of college professors have been a hot topic in the past week. See Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant in the New York Times. Or in Inside Higher…

Choose your words carefully — when it counts
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Choose your words carefully — when it counts

Which should you write: “Jane is an adequate team member” or “Jane is an OK team member”? The adjectives in the two options are synonyms.  So how do you choose? Are you wondering about “OK” in a written message at work? Here’s a list of readers’ attributions made about writers based on a choice to use one of two different…

Fun with Weird Al’s “Mission Statement”

Fun with Weird Al’s “Mission Statement”

  MTV News says Weird Al sounds just like your boss. What? They’re talking about “Mission Statement,” the final video release this past week from the Mandatory Fun album. Weird Al Yankovic does not only make fun of the way the less powerful use language. This time his target is the language of the powerful. The song’s a parody of corporate jargon using…