Author Archives: George Dovel

Free Video for Classroom Use: Balancing Emotional and Logical Appeals for Persuasive Messages

Here is the fourth video in our new series that addresses a variety of specific communication challenges and offers practical advice that students can apply now in their coursework and take with them on the job. This video helps students understand how to find the optimum balance of emotional and logical appeals when crafting persuasive messages. […]

Free Video for Classroom Use: Do Your Visuals Tell the Truth?

Here is the third video in our new series that addresses a variety of specific communication challenges and offers practical advice that students can apply now in their coursework and take with them on the job. This video helps students understand the nuances of visual ethics and gives them a framework for making ethical choices when […]

The Future of Communication: Augmented Writing

This is the fourth post in a series about technologies that are shaping the future of communication. We’ve been following technologies that cover an interesting array of possibilities, from enhancing existing communication modes to replacing at least one of the humans in a conversation to assisting people who have a variety of motor, vision, and […]

Free Video for Classroom Use: The Three-Step Solution to Three Intimidating Challenges in Business Communication

Here is the second video in our new series that addresses a variety of specific communication challenges and offers practical advice that students can apply now in their coursework and take with them on the job. This video helps students tackle three challenges that all students and all business professionals face: Making every message and […]

Free Video for Classroom Use: Sharing Negative Information Without Being Negative

We're excited to launch a new series of brief videos that you can use to supplement your lectures. These videos address specific communication challenges and offer practical advice that students can apply now in their coursework and take with them on the job. We're producing two versions of each video. The instructor version concludes with […]

The Future of Communication: Socialbots and Taskbots

This is the first post in a new series about technologies that are shaping the future of communication. We’ve been following a dozen-plus technologies that cover an interesting array of possibilities, from enhancing existing communication modes to replacing at least one of the humans in a conversation to assisting people who have a variety of […]

Using the Business Communication Course to Teach Professionalism

One of the major benefits of the business communication course is that it helps students practice so many valuable skills, from research and analysis to organization and document design. The course also creates an opportunity to incorporate these communication-focused skills into the larger context of being a business professional. We define professionalism as the quality […]

Hall of Fame: Weebly’s Email Template for Nontechnical Users (with Slide for Classroom Use)

Anyone who has lived through an iteration or two of Web technology can appreciate how easy it is to set up and maintain a blog or website these days. Thanks to readymade blog themes, drag-and-drop website builders, and other user-friendly tools, what once required days of hair-pulling coding can now be accomplished by total neophytes […]

Dr. Holly Littlefield’s Epic Collection of Social Media Failures

If you were fortunate enough to attend Holly Littlefield's presentation at the ABC convention in Seattle this past week, you were treated to an entertaining and highly instructive selection of social media failures. Her talk, "Audience, Brand, Channel: Using Social Media Cases to Teach Communications Concepts," offered a taste of everything from cringe-worthy image choices […]