Dumbing Down vs. Simplicity

Never assume that describing something in basic, simple, fundamental terms will annoy your audience. Dumbing down is a form of distortion and possibly deception. Simplifying and clarifying are forms of altruistic communication. Find out more about the differences between "dumbing down" and simplifying and clarifying...and how to decide how simple an explanation should be.

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2004). Articles>Documentation>Writing>Business Communication

E-Mail is Dead

What did the kids say? Email is dead. It's hanging on as a mode of communication for adults (that's us) and within businesses. Kids will even use it to communicate with adults. But for the majority of kids, email has been replaced by two things: text messaging and social networks.

Lentz, Michelle. Write Technology (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email

E-tiquette: Rules of the Road  

Hay-Roe presents nine rules for writing clear, concise e-mail messages.

Hay-Roe, Hugh. Intercom (2001). Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Email

Easy Public Relations with Online Tools

Shoestring-budget heroes, rejoice. The Internet offers many inexpensive opportunities to deliver better public relations results in our broadband-driven universe. No doubt, emerging concepts such as corporate blogging, podcasting or immersive web content (like "advergames") can produce their fair share of angst. But let's not forget to explore simple web-based tools available to large and small organizations alike.

Heule, Nandy. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Public Relations>Online

Edelman's Perfect (Blog) Storm

In early March, The New York Times ran a story with the headline "Wal-Mart enlists bloggers in PR campaign." While the story itself is of interest as an example of how some PR agencies increasingly see blogs as legitimate communication channels, it is of greater interest to look at what the Edelman PR agency did in this specific case acting on behalf of their client—what went right and, more important, what didn't.

Hobson, Neville. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Blogging>Case Studies

Editing Mathematics  

Editing mathematics is like editing a foreign language, with its own conventions, symbols, and rules of grammar. Various typographic rules must be followed exactly since deviations from them change the meaning of the material. Like poetry, placement of the information on the page is important for the meaning. The editor often must be a cryptographer, decoding esoteric handwritten material.

Burgan, Murrie W. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Scientific Communication>Technical Editing>Mathematics

Editing the Baldridge Quality Award Application  

Editing the Baldrige award application requires unique plans for the writing, editing, reviewing, and publishing cycle. The editor’s role includes training nonwriters to write, establishing style guidelines, setting reasonable schedules, and editing each draft.

Hamilton, Delores I. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Business Communication>Style Guides

Editor as Teacher, Writer as Student: Building a Relationship for Corporate Writing Improvement  

Corporate writing skills deficits may be minimized by effective technical writer training programs. One way to effect long-term writing improvement is to cast a skilled technical editor in the role of resident writing teacher. The successful editor-as-writing-teacher must confront personal writing processes and attitudes, develop a positive and trusting relationship with clients, develop writing assessment skills, analyze and understand the corporate culture and language, and keep abreast of new techniques and tools in writing education. Acquistion of these attributes and skills is a realistic goal for a seasoned technical communicator.

Abbott, F. Thomas. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Education>Editing>Business Communication

The Editor as Translator (or: How Do You Say That in Calculus?)

Sometimes English just isn't the most elegant way to say something. It might be so much easier if we write for a math journal, because the correct language for the explanation can be, in fact, mathematics.

Hart, Geoffrey J.S. Geoff-Hart.com (1999). Articles>Editing>Scientific Communication>Mathematics

Effective Internal Communication in Global Organizations

Today’s global marketplace teaches us that effective practices for internal communication in international corporations must be tuned to the cultural profiles of employees in their own countries. Internal communication departments are given the task of adapting company messages that effectively reach the organization’s global employee base. In order to ensure the effectiveness of these communications, organizations must first develop awareness, knowledge and intercultural skills within their internal communication teams.

Apud, Salvador and Talis Apud-Martinez. Communication World Bulletin (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Collaboration>International

Effective Presentations

An essential aspect of any research project is dissemination of the findings arising from the study. The most common ways to make others aware of your work is by publishing the results in a journal article, or by giving an oral or poster presentation (often at a regional or national meeting). While efforts are made to teach the elements of writing a journal article in many graduate school curricula, much less attention is paid to teaching those skills necessary to develop a good oral or poster presentation - even though these arguably are the most common and most rapid ways to disseminate new findings. In addition, the skills needed to prepare an oral presentation can be used in a variety of other settings - such as preparing a seminar in graduate school, organizing a dissertaton defense, conducting a job interview seminar, or even addressing potential philanthropic sources!

University of Kansas. Articles>Presentations>Rhetoric>Scientific Communication

Effective Risk Communication Starts with Solid Research

The terms risk communication, crisis communication and risk management are often used interchangeably. Crisis communication we understand to mean communicating once the crisis has hit. Risk management entails ensuring as far as possible that risks do not become a reality. Risk communication is part of risk management—informing responsibly on the extent of risk.

Macleod, Sandra. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Risk Communication>Research>Crisis Communication

Effects of Technical Editing in Biomedical Journals: A Systematic Review    

The 11 studies on technical editing indicate that it improves the readability of articles slightly (as measured by Gunning Fog and Flesch reading ease scores), may improve other aspects of their quality, can increase the accuracy of references and quotations, and raises the quality of abstracts. Supplying authors with abstract preparation instructions had no discernible effect.

Wager, Elizabeth and Philippa Middleton. JAMA (2002). Articles>Scientific Communication>Assessment

Eight Steps for Successful Events

In today's competitive environment the event remains one of the most powerful tools available to communicators. Events are powerful because they provide a physical connection between you and the people you need to reach. You can use an event to raise awareness of your services or products, generate support for a cause or introduce employees to work practices.

Crawshaw, Bob. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Planning

Electronic Publishing of Scientific Manuscripts

To write a chapter about a topic which is so new and developing so rapidly that changes take place just about everyday is an interesting challenge. What I hope to accomplish in these few pages is to explain what electronic publishing is and explore a number of issues associated with this new area of information dissemination. Yes!, this is a new area of dissemination! And perhaps this is the place to start - by defining electronic publishing. Electronic publishing is a new form of communication. Electronic publishing, for the purposes of scholarly scientific presentation of results, is the creation of a scholarly work which is in a totally electronic (non-paper) form from its creation to its publication or dissemination. An electronic journal is a product that was specifically developed and designed for the Internet, a product which is not re-worked printed material that is delivered electronically. As I hope to show in this chapter, electronic journals and electronic publishing is much more than an alternat

Heller, Stephen R. hellers.com. Articles>Scientific Communication>Information Design

The Emergence of a Root Metaphor in Modern Physics: Max Planck's 'Quantum' Metaphor    

The two purposes of this article are: 1) to use metaphorical analysis to determine whether or not Max Planck invented the quantum postulate and 2) to demonstrate how metaphorical analysis can be used to analyze the rhetoric of revolutionary texts in science. Metaphors often serve as the basis of invention for scientific theories. When we identify these metaphors in Planck's original 1900 quantum paper, it is clear that Planck did consider the quantum postulate to be important. However, we also see that he does not consider the quantum postulate to be revolutionary. A New Scientific Truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Johnson-Sheehan, Richard D. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (1997). Articles>Scientific Communication>History>Tropes

Emergent Genres in Young Disciplines: The Case of Ethnological Science    

Although the rhetoric of relatively stable scientific disciplines has been studied extensively, less attention has been paid to discourse formation in young disciplines. The author extends recent theories of genre and disciplinary discourse in a close rhetorical analysis of early papers in ethnological science. Practitioners apply extant rhetorical resources to new disciplinary problems as they learn to identify themselves as participants in a collective project. The young discipline 'learns' its discourse from its practitioners.

Henze, Brent R. Technical Communication Quarterly (2004). Articles>Research>Scientific Communication>Ethnicity

The Emerging Role of Emotional Intelligence in Business Communication Classes  

Communication is a major component of emotional intelligence models. While we teach persuasive writing, presentations, bad news, good news, and you orientation in our business communication classes, to date we have not looked at the effects emotional intelligence has on our teaching. Emotional intelligence encompasses all areas that we teach in business communication. The purpose of this paper is to show how emotional intelligence is a part of what makes some people good business communicators and others poor ones. If we knew which students had a high-level or which had a low level of emotional intelligence, hypothetically that information could help us teach business communication concepts more efficiently in our classrooms.

Martin, Jeanette S. Association for Business Communication (2004). Articles>Education>Business Communication>Emotions

Emotional Factors for Mobile Business Success

How do emotion, meaning and identity shape the design and rapid adoption of mobile devices and services? China is a wonderful place to study this topic.

Braiterman, Jared and Yue Yu. uiGarden (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Emotions>China

Emotions Trigger The Right Moves

We pump out a lot of information about product features and benefits on the Web, but have you taken a look at how much -- or maybe how little -- we use emotional appeals to help customers buy our products? Take a look at how customers make purchase decisions.

Allen, Cliff. Allen.com (2001). Articles>Business Communication>Marketing>Emotions

The Emotive Value of Professional Communication and Use of Emotional Intelligence in Mangement

Now there is a growing body of science in the field of Emotional Intelligence (EI), indicating that the proper understanding and use of emotions can help us to be more effective professionals and better communicators for the overall development of a learning organization. This paper provides an overview of this topic and includes commentary from EI experts Daniel Goleman, Peter Salovey, and others to prove how one can effectively manipulate EI. This paper also highlights the components of EI and how they can be used to help employees create more productive working relationships inside and outside their organization. Through an analysis of various models of EI competencies available, this paper argues how they can be combined with other knowledge and technical capabilities to increase one’s overall effectiveness on the job.

Kumar Panda, Prasanta. International Journal for Technical Communication (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Management>Emotions

Empirical Studies Assessing the Quality of Health Information for Consumers on the World Wide Web: A Systematic Review

The quality of consumer health information on the World Wide Web is an important issue for medicine, but to date no systematic and comprehensive synthesis of the methods and evidence has been performed.

Eysenbach, Gunther, John Powell, Oliver Kuss and Eun-Ryoung Sa. JAMA (2002). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical>Online

Employee Communications in an Ever-Changing World  

Communications are continually changing in the business environment. Now more than ever, managers must be more culturally aware when communicating with the younger and older generations for all ethnicities. We, as employees, must also be aware of communicating with younger bosses and co-workers. Global communications, whether written or face-to- face, require different skills that each of us should aspire to understand in working with different groups. This paper covers the U.S. workforce statistics, seven communication principals, and cultural communications; provides you with a glimpse into discovering your communication style; and finally talks about how to communicate with younger bosses and co-workers.

Damrau, Jackie. STC Proceedings (2005). Articles>Business Communication>Discrimination

Employee Conferences That Matter

A troupe of disco dancers in gold bodysuits was about to hit the stage. Several of our corporate leaders—dressed as famous pop stars from the 1970s—milled around nervously in the wings. And I remember thinking, “What the heck have we got ourselves into?” I was part of the employee communication team for a government-owned financial institution: Farm Credit Canada (FCC). We were about to open our 2005 corporate office conference before a crowd of 500 people, many of them accountants. A campy musical opening could be seen as a risky choice. But here's what brought me peace of mind: I knew that behind the glitz, we had built our conference on a solid foundation of business thinking.

Mayne, Peter. Communication World Bulletin (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Interviewing