Category Archives: Robert’s posts

International Association of Business Communicators: World Conference 2013

The IABC’s 2013 world conference has been quite a success so far. The presentations have been amply tweeted at the hashtag #IABCWC13. (My tweets about this event and other things can be found at @thebasil.)  

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The Art of Scolding, cont’d.

“We have somehow not successfully received your professional-development documentation,” a Dean’s Office colleague wrote me in an email early in my career at Kwantlen. The sentence both charmed and alarmed me, especially the phrase somehow not successfully received, which seemed … Continue reading

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The Art of Scolding

In 1987 I promoted a story about “Secular Organizations for Sobriety” [SOS] that appeared in the Buffalo News. SOS was one of those secular humanist initiatives promulgated by Paul Kurtz’s publishing enterprises out of Buffalo, in this case “Free Inquiry,” … Continue reading

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Vancouver Schools and Social Media

The RSS feed on the right-hand side of our homepage has been aggregating lots of news stories and opinion pieces on the Vancouver Board of Education’s effort to create a policy codifying the appropriate use of social media by its … Continue reading

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Academic Blogging

My new favourite blog is by a Ukrainian-born scholar of Hispanic Literature named “Clarissa” – she doesn’t reveal her surname or some other would-be identifying information, like her university’s name – whose work I first encountered on Jonathan Mayhew’s Stupid … Continue reading

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It’s Usually Not Mother’s Day

Are there any people other than mothers who ever truly know that they have been the most important person in the life of someone else? I like this question, and ask some variant of it in most of my professional … Continue reading

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Complex Communications Solutions vs. Perhaps a Simpler One

From Paul Constant in The Stranger today: Chris DeRose published an article at Business Insider addressing the fact that McDonald’s is failing at customer service, with a vice president of the company openly talking about the “rude or unprofessional employees” … Continue reading

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No More Memos

Delivered to my house this week was the instructor’s edition of Daniel G. Riordan’s stalwart textbook Technical Report Writing Today, 10th edition. I was thrilled, I have to say, having used the 9th edition of Riordan’s text in my upper-level … Continue reading

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Make Room for Working

“Of the three goals to which all aspire – success in love, in society, and in profession – only two are plausible simultaneously: you can’t have a smooth love life, a rich social life, and still get your work done. … Continue reading

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Students Look at Digital Media

Students in my “Marketing in a Digital World” class at Kwantlen Polytechnic University have been keeping one another up to date on developments in digital and social media with their blogs and their classroom presentations. This class would be impossible … Continue reading

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