“Recently I saw a sign outside a store that said, “Please enjoy our food and drinks outside.” It seemed so much nicer than the more direct “No food and drinks.”
Read Adams’ full post here.
Why are learning styles relevant to this Diversity Series?
Because a person’s preferred learning style tells a lot about their information-processing style and how best to communicate information to that person.
In terms of interpersonal relations, you gain a great advantage by knowing your own and the other person’s preferred styles.
As a professional communicator, you can consider this another tool available to you to understand your audience. You can review a communication to consider how to make it easier for people of each learning style.
To learn your own style, do the online test at A Learning Style Survey for College.
The four styles used in that survey:
are explained at
| The Four Learning Styles in the DVC Survey |
Others have written about the learning style issue, so you can look at the other approaches here:
Get to know your readers
Your aim is a document planned so you can give the same answer to each of these three questions
* Who is able to read this?
* Who is likely to read this?
* Who needs to read this?
Working with limited funds or public funds, you may try to write for “the widest possible audience“. “Everybody” or “anybody” is a difficult audience. There is no “general public” for plain language writing. Just try to picture a member of the general public. Some probing questions and basic investigation will help you narrow the focus of your project and get your real readers in mind.
You need to explore your intended audiences’ characteristics, needs and expectations. With the information you gather, you can write and design your document to
* reflect the readers’ concerns and daily life
* use familiar words, phrases and ideas
* use an acceptable tone that suits the reader and the message
You want to discover these features of your audience:
age range gender issues
first language family structure
education cultural traditions
reading abilities math abilities
familiarity with the subject matter biases, sensitivities
familiarity with any special language self-image
attitude toward topic motivation
physical, mental or emotional challenges specific interests and concerns
I will simply refer you onward to an article at Talking Story by Say Leadership Coaching about the civility and respect that should anchor your plain language:
In May, I presented at the Council of Canadian Administrative Tribunal’s 4th International Conference, in Vancouver, British Columbia – “Administrative Justice Without Borders”.
I had been working with the CCAT for some 18 months on this issue. CCAT released a book at the conference on plain language and administrative practice. It will be available soon online.
Our handout at the conference was a 12-page summary of the previous publication by the Literacy and Access to Justice Project. That is is now available here. The 100-page original is available here.
Some pictures are here; not great pix because of the blinding Vancouver sun!
Carolyn Elefant brought this to my attention, so I bring it to yours.
This is how you are supposed to use PowerPoint in a presentation or in front of the jury:
Matt Homann of the [Non]billable Hour shows how to build an innovative law firm.
His presentation also shows how to use PowerPoint and Slideshare to best advantage.
The visuals arouse emotion or a memory with an emotion. The words are minimal. The PowerPoint sets a mood for the speaker’s presentation–although this one stands on its own!
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.
But first, here is her definition of rapport:
Rapport is fundamental to all coaching and NLP. The thesaurus definition of rapport is:
I’d highlight a few important words from that definition:
Relation… between people. It’s not something one person ‘does’ to another. It exists between people.
Trust. Rapport is connected to but not the same as trust. Rapport can be built (and lost) quickly. Trust takes time.
Feeling. There’s often a ‘feeling’ of connection with someone – but you might not be able to put your finger on why, or how
So rapport is all about the relationship between people. Although there are things that you can do to build rapport you cannot manipulate another person into feeling it. To build rapport you also need to let yourself be open to influence – and to respect the other person that you are communicating with.
You can create rapport by relating to people in a way that creates a climate of trust and understanding. Although we can learn ways to build and create rapport it is important to remember that rapport is natural. It is integral to human communication.
As Joseph O’Connor reminds us: “we do not need to create it as much as stop doing what could be preventing it…”
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Here is her article on Writing with Rapport: Be Real at Confident Writing.
