Dr. Jon Leydens, co-author of Engineering Justice: Transforming Engineering Education and Practice, spoke to us at ProComm 2017 about the growing importance of intercultural communication and social justice in engineering practice, how current approaches fail to prepare our future engineers to confront these issues, and …
Brian Traynor and Ryan Boettger represented PCS at IEEE Sections Congress—‚a triennial gathering of IEEE Section leadership—in Sydney, Australia in August this year. 1250 IEEE members from 165 countries participated the event. We were able to introduce PCS and its activities and publications to many IEEE …
When designing visuals, we often neglect to identify a purpose beyond simply representing data. But visuals – particularly data visuals and infographics – are most effective when they are designed with a clear purpose in mind, particularly if they contribute to an argument. Melissa Clarkson’s …
As news organizations, governments, and corporations struggle to communicate more complex information to multiple audiences, they increasingly rely on visual representations. Quite a number of prominent failures in visual design that have played out in the media over the past few years; looking at these …
In a previous post, I wrote about your job application as an argument, and showed how we could use a rhetorical framework established by Stephen Toulmin to help your cover letters do a more effective job of connecting your evidence to the job requirements. In …
Oldies can be goodies: one of the wonderful things about the IEEE PCS Newsletters Archive is that much of its advice to writers remains valid.
Philip Yaffe’s “Don’t Let Good Grammar Spoil Good Writing,” from the April 2009 IEEE PCS Newsletter, tells us why breaking grammar rules can create …
The first quarter is traditionally a strong hiring season for companies, and also a time when people turn to thoughts of new jobs and career paths. Professional communication skills are key to taking advantage of those opportunities, particularly in engineering and the sciences. In a series …
Increasingly, engineering projects are crossing national boundaries. Groups working together are having to work in virtual, physically dispersed teams, making communication practices both more challenging and more essential to the success of a project. While the field is still young, communication researchers have started to catalogue challenges and …
We don’t always say what we mean …
In fact, we often avoid direct speech acts – saying what we mean – in the service of politeness and conflict avoidance, relying instead on indirect speech to communicate complex thoughts. An indirect speech act, according to linguist John Searle, …
We asked Greg Pogue of the IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, who, with Clay Spinuzzi, hosted a session and panel on entrepreneurial communication at ProComm 2016 about the fundamentals of making a good “pitch.” Watch his response here:
