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Balance in Politics (or, I Like to Run My Head into Walls)
One of the places I feel WAY too many people have lost balance is politics. I know that the attention is going to a minority group of people who like to be all obnoxious – not to the majority who may or may not sympathize with the extremists but are not so extreme. The problem…
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Why Beat About the Bush? Everyone Just gets Lost.
There are many reasons people choose to not get directly to the point: tact, fear, the desire to make things sound better than they are, the desire to hide what is really being said. However, when you choose to communicate that way, start handing out the compasses, because your audience is just going to get…
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Provocative Words
Welcome to my “Ode to the Thesaurus.” One of my favorite Facebook pages is The Writer’s Circle. I always seem to glom onto their lists of Other Words For <fill in the blank>. I’ve several of them clipped into my Blog Ideas notebook in Evernote. One I’ve been looking at a lot lately is for…
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1 Step Clear Communication
As a ghost blogger, I frequently write about the 7 this and 5 that. Everyone, even people who don’t like numbers, seems to love numbers in blog headlines. The number tells the reader how much they will learn in that post. Well, I am not part of the “everyone.” Mostly because, as a ghost blogger,…
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Words That Don’t Work: Nonplus
I believe that a person with a basic understanding of the language ought to be able to understand content published for the general population – even if they encounter a word they haven’t seen before. Obviously, text books, scientific articles, philosophical debates, and the such are likely to contain words that will send the reader…
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The Hazards of PowerPoint
This blog originally started as a guest blog for my friend Elizabeth Bachman; lately, however, I’ve been wanting to refer to the content, so I thought I’d spin it for myself. While I’d rather write a presentation than give one, I sit through them with some regularity. And I’ve sat through some really BAD presentations.…
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Properly Pronounce!
In a blog that I don’t think I’ll publish, I discussed the importance of proper pronunciation. That rant focused on how commonly people drop Rs from words such as “library” and “February.” And while I do find that tendency annoying, the blog itself was just a little too pissy – even for me. That said,…
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More “Bogus Grammar Errors”
Last time, I talked about 2 of the 7 bogus grammar ‘errors’ you don’t need to worry about as explained by author Ben Yagoda. I was having a day of Latin grammar references that needed attention, so I skipped the so-called rules that I couldn’t directly connect to Latin. However, I’m so pleased that someone…
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There’s More to Learning than Meets the Eye
I read a very interesting article, Paper beats computer screens, which validated my decision to not get an e-reader a few years ago. Apparently, comprehension and assimilation of text on a screen is not as good as for text on paper. Citing a Norwegian study of 10th graders as well as some supporting science out…
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The Culture of Writing
Especially for larger software companies, documentation is something management easily outsources. The problem with outsourcing writing is that the culture of the writer and the culture of the reader frequently don’t match. The truth of the matter is that most Americans only go to the documentation when they are stuck beyond all reason. At that…