IEEE Professional Communication Society will be holding the e-voting election of Administration Committee members soon.
The following people have been nominated for the Professional Communication Society’s Administrative Committee(AdCom). Each of the candidates was asked to respond to a set of questions. Please review their responses to …
To engineer is to write.
I was reminded recently about the amount of time working engineers spend on communication. As Jon Leydens explained in his 2008 PCS Transactions article,
“engineers spend between 20% and 40% of their workday writing, a figure that increases as they move up the career …
I need this t-shirt!
I am ready to confess: I do care a lot about the Oxford comma. The purpose of this post is to make you care too.
The Oxford comma, or “serial comma,” is meant to separate three or more items that appear in a …
Obama’s Reddit session was so popular, he crashed the site. Oops.
During an election campaign, I usually notice which candidates are using media and technology in novel ways. Think of Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992, or Barack Obama dancing …
Calling communication a “soft skill” implies that it’s easier, less technical, and of reduced value.
Recently the phrase “soft skills” created a heated debate among the members of the PCS AdCom. The question was, should communication be referred to as one of the “soft skills,” or …
Do you know why it’s called an “em dash”?
My day job — as an English professor at an engineering college — gives me plenty of opportunities to comment on and correct the grammar of my students. I don’t often do the same kind of correcting …
Can a MOOC teach writing?
As Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, gain in popularity and media attention, it seems that the course format–featuring 1 instructor and many thousands of students–may not provide a good environment for helping students with their writing. As Steve Kolowich reports …
Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto apologizing to the people of South Korea
Recent events in the news have reminded me of the vexing nature of apologies. Each of us has seen public apologies in the media: Jimmy Swaggert apologizing to his congregation, Representative Kevin Yoder apologizing …
I was struck by Jordan Weissmann’s report in The Atlantic about the value that bosses add to the work of their employees. We are all familiar with the bad boss syndrome, immortalized in television, film, blogs, and the numerous “Rate My Boss” sites that proliferate …
If you read the title for this post and wished to call me out on misuse of the semicolon (in a post about semicolons), then save yourself a stamp (or a few bits in an email) and be assured that I know how to use …
