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November 9, 2009 by Jerry
Last week, billionaire Michael Bloomberg won his campaign for a third term as the Mayor of New York City, but only by a surprisingly close margin. According to the report of his victory in the New York Times, “Published polls in the days leading up to the election suggested that the mayor would win by as many as 18 percentage points; four years ago, he cruised to re-election with a 20 percent margin.” This time, however, his margin was only 5 percentage points. The Wall Street Journal’s report of the outcome quoted Maurice Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac
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November 6, 2009 by Jerry
One of the Wall Street Journal’s most interesting features is their weekly “Anatomy of a Masterpiece,” where noted authorities analyze classic works in their fields: literature, architecture, music, and art. Recent offerings have focused respectively on Samuel Johnson’s 1759 novel Rasselas, St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, Dmitri Shostakovich’s “24 Preludes and Fugues,” and ThĂ©odore GĂ©ricault’s 1819 painting, “The Raft of the Medusa;” the latter inspired an earlier blog about pictorial composition as it relates to presentation slide design. A more recent analysis of classic art has inspired today’s blog but, this time, crosses the line from art into
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November 2, 2009 by Pearl
In Jerry’s previous blog, you read about a recent Wall Street Journal article titled “When Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues.” In it, Mark Bauerlein wrote about “the diffidence, self-absorption and general uncommunicativeness of Generation Y.” To better understand why Bauerlein made such a comment, please travel back in time with me to the beginning of the millennium: It’s close to midnight in the winter of 2000. While catching up on the day over the phone with her friend, a 14-year old girl swivels in a chair with her legs crossed on top of a desk. To the right
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October 30, 2009 by Jerry
Major newspapers, along with countless other print publications, have been focused on what is rapidly becoming their chief competition—and perhaps successor—electronic communication; and especially electronic social networking. Text messages, emails, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, while lacking the organizational breadth and professional depth of newspapers, have clearly encroached on print territory. One of the major side effects of this cultural change is in the area of interpersonal communication and, particularly among young people. A recent Wall Street Journal article, “Why Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues,” focused on these dynamics. We’ll give you our views on the subject from two
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October 26, 2009 by Jerry
On Saturday, two separate articles from two diverse sources—sports and politics—provided a lesson about the importance of being positive in communication. The sports item featured Stanford’s freshman quarterback, Andrew Luck, whose coach calls him “a rare combination of confidence and humility.” Luck demonstrates that rare combination in his post-game press conferences when reporters ask him about his mistakes. As the article reported, “He never bristles at such questions and never makes excuses. He doesn’t dwell on dropped passes, penalties that wreck big plays or bad breaks.” In Luck’s own words, “As many balls that have been dropped, there have
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October 23, 2009 by Gerhard
Welcome Guest Blogger, Gerhard Gschwandtner What happens when people ask you to address a group of people to persuade them to take action on an idea? Chances are that you suddenly become aware of your heartbeat, your throat may become dry, you nervously take a sip of water, stand up, and then notice that all eyeballs in the room are focused on you. In one short moment you may have experienced a surge of anxiety that you are trying to mask with a smile that has a hard time sticking to your face. How should you prepare for a
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October 21, 2009 by Jerry
On his nightly “fake” news program, The Daily Show, Jon Stewart often aims his satiric barbs at television news: at the broadcast networks for their breathless inflation of non-events, and at cable news for their extreme branded positions. Two of his favorite targets are Fox News for their conservative views and CNN for their overweening claims about being “the best political team on television.” But Stewart’s assault on CNN last week went much deeper than their self-praise; he went right to the heart of one of journalism’s basic tenets: investigative pursuit. As the Huffington Post reported, Stewart showed video
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October 19, 2009 by Jerry
Now that we are in the peak sports period of the year—the culmination of the baseball season and the heat of the football season—the voices of play-by-play announcers and color commentators are filling the airwaves. Most of them are just that, filler; stuffing the soundtrack with meaningless digressions, infantile inanities, vain attempts at jock humor or, at best, statements of the obvious. One voice stands out from all the rest: Vin Scully, the radio voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers—now playing in the National League Championship Series. Scully, who is 81 years old and in his 60th year as
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October 14, 2009 by Jerry
In the preceding blog, you read about how Microsoft, with their venerable taglines, “Where do you want to go today?” and “Your potential, our passion,” deployed a call to action and a benefit to great effect. The taglines scored a trifecta by adding a third rhetorical device, the persuasive word, “you.” “You.” If you do a search on bing.com for a Yale University study of persuasive words, you’ll find nearly 200,000 references to a ranked list of the top ten persuasive words. “You” leads the list. (The others, in descending order are: “Easy,” “Money,” “Save,” “Love,” “New,” “Discovery,” “Results,”
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October 12, 2009 by Jerry
In my blog two weeks ago, you read how Yahoo, following the example of other corporations, deployed the persuasive word “you” in the tagline of their new $100 million marketing campaign called “It’s You!” Microsoft (now a business partner of Yahoo) has a pair of taglines using the same powerful word, but theirs add two other rhetorical devices to score a trifecta. Microsoft’s venerable slogans, “Where do you want to go today?” and “Your potential, our passion,” are successful because each of them deploys three powerful persuasive selling factors: Each of them represents a call to action for Microsoft;
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