Communications Skills

Oh, balderdash! I just read that using profanity enhances team building in the workplace. Say what? Apparently, a vocabulary of four-letter words brands you as part of the “in” group in the information technology industry, and the practice is ...

If you speak English and only English, does it make sense for me to explain something to you in French — even if I speak slowly? Of course not. While you probably never make this specific mistake with your clients, almost all of us commit a ...

You’re articulate, right? You appreciate and emulate good legal writing. So why do you turn off so many listeners and readers so soon?

It started with the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone. Capital letters appeared in places they never appeared before. Grammar rules call for capitalizing proper names, but now the correct reference to some brands calls for capitalizing in the middle ...

I once defended a product liability case where the client was adamant that the product always be called a “personal watercraft.” It most definitely was not, he insisted, a Jet-Ski. The issue was the use of a trademark to refer to a similar ...

Some words sound like they mean one thing when they actually mean something very different. Using one of these false friends incorrectly could cause you a problem. But It Sounded Right … The term “false friends” traditionally refers to words ...

You may find people taking pictures of their device screens with their own (or other people’s) phones. Don’t do that. There’s an easier way. Instead, investigate your device’s built-in ability to take screen shots — also known as screen grabs or ...

How can you learn confidence? Sometimes you have to figure out how to act like you're confident until you feel it. Here's one way to go about it.

Email is the global de facto communication standard. Business use of email continues to grow. Email is also a hybrid form of communication — a written form used conversationally. This hybrid nature, coupled with habits developed early in its ...

Sanctions. That word has always troubled me. It’s a contronym, a word that has opposite meanings. Lawyers know that a motion for sanctions asks the court to penalize an adversary’s bad act. But other English speakers define a sanction as a ...