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:
At the 2016 IEEE ProComm conference, we asked Bruce Maylath, winner of the 2016 Ronald S. Blicq award, about the cult of monolingualism and the dangers it presents to communicating technical work. Listen to his responses and examples in the video below to avoid the practical …
Ron Blicq performs one of the roles in a difficult conversation.
Ron Blicq has been integral to the development of technical writing as a field, and to the IEEE Professional Communication Society. It’s no wonder that our award for Distinction in Technical Communication Education bears his name. In …
Pam Estes Brewer, author of the IEEE-Wiley book International Virtual Teams: Engineering Global Success, will be giving an IEEE-USA sponsored webinar titled “Teaming at a Distance: Learn How to Make Remote Teams Work for You and Your Company” on September 8th, 2016, 2:00-3:00pm.
Remote teams are probably …
