Methods of Teaching Business Communication

We are regularly asked whether our flagship book Trees, maps, and theorems is available in PDF or any other electronic format. (No, it isn’t, and if you own a copy, you can probably guess why.) Recently, a reader asked me about the e-book movement. A difficult question: ebooks have definite advantages, yet I find I am skeptical, perhaps because I value visual structure so much.

Recent winner of five Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and three Golden Globes, Michel Hazanavicius’s
2011 silent movie The Artist must have done some things right.
Besides providing viewing pleasure to many of us, it reminds us
of three basic principles of effective communication.

After a visit to Saint Petersburg, my friend Marc Parisel sent me a picture of a delightful set of signs—a perfect reminder of the intrinsic limitations of visual representations. Essentially, pictures are always ambiguous and condemned to be concrete.

On 24 June 2011, Business Insiders featured this display as their chart of the day—a page that even made LinkedIn Today (“the most shared news on LinkedIn,” they say). I discuss it on this blog as my own chart of the day, but for very different reasons: this graphical display exemplifies several shortcomings typical of the charts produced these days.

There is nothing wrong with using lists (with or without bullets), unless of course anything about the list is wrong, as is too often the case on presentation slides… and in commercial advertising. A bullet list at a Shell gas station in California exhibits everything that can go wrong.

I have mixed feelings about this Microsoft SlideFest. Certainly, I salute any initiative that helps presenters create better slides; today’s average slideshow is so awful that every little tip helps. At the same time, I have my doubts about both the approach
adopted for the SlideFest and the examples of improved slides.

As if giving an oral presentation was not challenging enough, speakers must face one additional obstacle: suboptimal rooms. Whether recent or older, in conference centers or on campuses, rooms are seldom designed or set up in a way that encourages
effective speaking.

A short article from The Economist claims that “making something hard to read means it is more likely to be remembered”. Being someone who goes to great lengths to make every piece of text easy to read, I had reasons to be distressed. Alas, the only bad news to me was how the article exemplifies yet again all that is wrong with empirical research into learning and communication.

Pictures can have literal, metaphorical, or conventional meaning. This picture, taken in a light-rail station in Seattle, exemplifies some of the issues with a picture’s “literalness” (or lack thereof). Must I interpret it as meaning “you must use the table microphone”?