Just interrupting your scroll to say hi—and to thank you for visiting my website! In case you’re curious: I'm a strategic communication professor, freelance designer, corporate consultant, public speaker, author, moonlighting blogger, father of four, a really bad golfer, and lifelong optimist. As for this site? Always a work in progress, but I’m constantly adding communication and design resources for students, teachers, and business professionals. (I also occasionally throw in my thoughts about work, life, and the world.) Hopefully you'll be able to find something useful here.
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On its surface, plagiarism seems pretty straight forward—if you copy someone else’s work and claim it as your own, you’ve plagiarized. At it’s most basic definition, that definitely true. But plagiarism is actually a little more complicated than that. Truth is, if you break it down, there are at least
The OPTIC Strategy for Visual Analysis is a simple method of rhetorical criticism designed to help with the process of analyzing visuals. OPTIC is an acronym, standing for By following the five steps of the OPTIC strategy, you can take nearly any visual artifact (like a poster, painting, advertisement, video
With Mom’s big day right around the corner, I know what you’re thinking: you want to impress that amazing woman in your life with impeccable, flawless, and beautiful punctuation. Problem is, that pesky apostrophe is…confusing. So, what should you do? Where should you put the apostrophe? You basically have three
As we enter spring and approach one of the most important holidays in Christianity—Easter—it’s time to dig through your calendar to ensure you have the right date circled. After all, Easter has probably one of the most unique ways of determining its date of any religious holiday and it’s not
Rhetoric is, as Aristotle once put it, the “faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion.” What does that mean exactly? Every time we communicate, we have options for how to assemble a message. We can use words, sounds, facial expressions, colors, icons, symbols or any
Semicolons are often seen as a strange and mysterious punctuation mark; they’re part period and part comma. So why use them? They’re useful to break up the stylistic approach to sentence structure, allowing writers to combine two related thoughts, often removing a word or two in the process. They’re also
Quotation marks are most commonly used to signify direct quotes. However, they also have a unique quality in that they can communicate sarcasm or snarkiness. They can also draw attention to words being described as words and they distinguish a short media piece from its larger container. Good writers need
Question marks are easily recognized has the icon that turns a statement into a question. You may be interested to know, however, that while question marks typically fall at the end of a sentence, they can sometimes be used mid-setence. Terms You Need to Know to Use Question Marks QUESTIONA
Periods (also known as “full stops” or “full points”) are probably the most recognizable and widely used punctuation mark. Their primary and most common purpose is to end a sentence. But periods can (and should!) be used for a variety of other purposes as well, including creating acronyms and abbreviations.
Parentheses are valuable writing tools; they allow writers to insert added detail within a sentence, clarify a writer’s thinking, or include citations to avoid plagiarism. It’s important to know how to use parentheses—especially for citation purposes!—but you won’t want to overuse parentheses for the purposes of inserting added detail. Be
