The Grammar Instinct      

Back in 1990, Leonard and Gilsdorf presented 45 instances of questionable usage, in full-paragraph contexts, to both academics and working business executives. These usage elements included sentence fragments, assorted punctuation problems, pronoun–antecedent (dis)agreement, and various examples of questionable word choice. Their intent was to assess the “botheration level” of each usage “error”; their conclusions were that 1) academics are (nearly) always bothered by usage “errors” more than executives and 2) usage elements that bothered survey respondents the least were evolving over time into acceptable English usage. Just over ten years later, these same researchers have followed up on their original study and have drawn similar conclusions from the more recent data.

Manning, Alan D. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (2002). Articles>Language>Style Guides

Using Visual Rhetoric to Avoid PowerPoint Pitfalls  

Criticisms that Tufte and others have leveled against PowerPoint are not insurmountable defects of the programs themselves. These defects are generally due to an orientation, shared by program designers and users alike, and toward images rather than diagrams, toward perceptual decoration and object indication rather than toward visually mediated, iconic representations of verbal information. Using Peirce's theories of visual rhetoric, we show that improvements in visual communication generally - and PowerPoint slides in particular - depend on shifting our orientation away from image-driven thinking and toward diagrammatic modes of presentation.

Manning, Alan D. and Nicole Amare. IEEE PCS (2005). Articles>Presentations>Visual Rhetoric>Microsoft PowerPoint

What Is Thought?      

Students think better with “props,” i.e., concrete physical examples to discuss and manipulate. This observation, however, leads to a much broader theoretical insight. Thought, by its nature, equally requires the developing organization of physical objects and the mediating traffic of neuronal impulses in our brains.

Manning, Alan D. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (2001). Articles>Education>TC