Teaching Business Communication

One reason why we still see so many appalling presentations is that too many audience members put up with them. Fortunately, there is hope: newspeople are starting to complain openly about business presentations they consider torture.

Are the titles of your slides phrased as a sentence? If not, they are most likely not getting the message across. The power of an assertion is in its verb.

The Programme rental terms & conditions for the Hertz #1 Club Gold are doing everything possible to make me not want to read them: 72 pages of typical legal copy in one of the worst page layout I have seen lately.

While in Riga to run two workshops at the University of Latvia, I recognized three typical issues about pictorial signs, which are certainly worth a reminder.

Interestingly, the criticized use of the word man to designate a human of either sex as opposed to, specifically, a male one has got a direct, language-independent graphical equivalent, as illustrated by signs at the new Terminal 1 of Barcelona airport.

The delightful YouTube video of Microsoft redesigning the iPod package exemplifies the widespread phobia of emptiness—on the part of the communicators, not of the audience.

“Greetings from Apple! Before I start finding a solution to your problem, I want to…” What?! You want to do something else before taking care of my problem? What kind of a helpdesk are you?

After several decades of user-friendly software development, I would have thought that software companies would have mastered the simple art of writing clear instructions. Not Microsoft, though—at least not when they explain how to download and install the
“Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0”.

Perhaps I am too much of a rational mind, but I must confess
I am frequently confused by what I regard as inconsistent uses
of grammatical person and number in pronouns.

Legal copy never ceases to baffle me. What are those lawyers thinking when writing those texts that no one wants to read? Are they actually kidding themselves to the point of believing that they are communicating anything useful to their audience?