Communications Skills

Similar-sounding words can have very different meanings. Sound-alike words have tripped up many a scribe. Because you may be spelling the word correctly but misusing it for the context, spell-check is of no help. Watch out! Incorrect usage will ...

Theodore Bernstein created an analog to the economic maxim that bad money drives out good: bad words tend to drive out good ones. Bernstein, a journalist and professor, wrote or co-wrote seven books on grammar and usage. As an addict of grammar ...

The Internet is awesome. It's also horrible. It's the greatest timesaver in human history (okay, maybe air travel, but it's up there). It's also the biggest time-suck. With so much information and so many resources available at your fingertips, ...

If you want people to notice you online, it doesn't take a marketing genius to know it's all about the visuals — a photo, infographic or video will out-pull your wall of words every time. (A photo of you will help, too.) We're not advocating ...

People expect a lawyer to be able to answer tough questions. But what if you don’t know the answer? I still remember my first day in torts class. Old man river, my respectable professor, called on me to analyze an opinion from some archaic ...

Sending an email is fast, and you can transmit at any hour, but that may be where the effectiveness and efficiency ends. Remember the bad old days of telephone tag? You would waste time swapping phone messages until you could finally have a ...

Let’s face it: Lawyers don’t think, talk or write like regular people. We’re trained not to. The systems we work in are bewildering. The language we speak is full of specialized terms. The documents we create are both written in our language and ...

Ethics rules require you to keep your client informed (see ABA Rule of Professional Conduct 1.4). The client’s guidelines may require interval and event reporting. But sometimes it feels like nobody on the other end is reading your client status ...

Here’s one for the books. You can bank on it. Clichés are overused phrases that everyone knows. Pundits of good communication advise shunning clichés as unoriginal and boring — which is why readers of these posts may be surprised to see me take ...

We all have habitual ways of relating to other people, and chances are your habits haven't changed much over the years. So ask yourself, does the way you communicate and behave foster positive relationships with clients, colleagues, family and ...