I blogged about this some time ago. While looking through my posts for another article, I found it and thought I'd share it again. Enjoy! While going through my email files, I found the following quote: “Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.” ~William Shakespeare Shakespeare packs quite a lot into this one line and I thought it so profound that I wanted to dissect it to get the full impact of what he is saying here. Shakespeare says that conversation should be pleasant without scurrility. Scurrility is abusive language or a rude remark. This is quite unique today with the invention of electronic communication such as you are...
Have you ever been in a hurry or just plain frustrated to where you were rather curt or downright rude to someone? We tend to do this more with those we’re closest to rather than with strangers. We use harsh words, we nitpick, we exaggerate, and we wound. Sometimes we do it with our children and often we do it with our spouses. Some of us do it so much it has become a habit and to the point where we don’t even realize we are tearing down the very ones God has entrusted us to lift up. But God tells us in Proverbs 15:1 “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” We are called, Instead,...
In the same way that decluttering your house simplifies your life, decluttering your communication simplifies your message. While cleaning out your closets makes room for the important things you need to store, cleaning out unnecessary words and phrases allows more focus on your most important points and infuses it with power. What is the clutter of communication? Weasel Words. Weasel Words are a dead giveaway that you are nervous or unsure of yourself. They devalue your leadership, curtail your effectiveness and destroy your credibility. Weasel Words come in three forms. 1. Unnecessary Words When a person is nervious or unsure of what to say, they fill their conversation with unnecessary words like: "I’m gonna go ahead and," "kind of/kinda" and "sort of/sorta." This...
As long as we are destroying word illusions this week with Toxic Words on Monday and the meaning of peruse on Wednesday, I thought we'd tackle something else that has been a pet peeve of mine for quite a while. You've probably seen that familiar paragraph attributed to Cambridge University that says that as long as you keep the first and last letters of words in the correct places, you can switch around the letters and still read the paragraph. Here's a screen shot: Well, there is more to it than it first appears. Check out this YouTube video of the Brother's Winn from What You Ought to Know: Now that they have burst your bubble on this little parlor trick, I'd like...
It's Phone Week! Saturday is the anniversary of the first telephone call so we are celebrating communication, the phone and technology this week here at the Communication FUNdamentals blog! Today's world is much more fast-paced than it was when I was a kid. I remember sitting on the porch with my friends, playing kickball in the street, gathering together on the corner to walk to the candy store and spend the afternoon. Now we rush from activity to activity…do not pass Go…do not collect $200! We want to do so much in such a small amount of time so we rush through things and don’t really understand them. We read part of a comment on Facebook. We think of what we are going...
