Gave a “Mac on the Road” Alumni Lecture on “Making Sense of Social Media”

I had a wonderful night giving a public lecture to a great audience at the Holiday Inn on Wyecroft Rd in Oakville. The lecture was in the “Mac on the Road” Alumni Lecture Series, so I knew some people in the crowd! What a pleasure to reconnect with people who were my students only a …

How I became an academic: from tenure until the present

During the last month, I have been recounting the story of how I became an academic. In this, the final blog entry in this series, I discuss what it was like settling into the reality of becoming a middle-career academic and learning to savour life a little. During the last two years before tenure, I …

New editorial and research assistant: Natalie St. Clair.

I am very pleased to welcome Ms. Natalie St. Clair to COMM-Lab, where she will work with me as Editorial and Research Assistant this year. Natalie’s primary role will be to serve as Assistant Editor of the Journal of Professional Communication. Her responsibilities in this role will include assisting me, the Editor-in-Chief, with subscription management, bookkeeping, promotions, …

Co-organised LACUS Conference.

Last week I organised a conference called LACUS – Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States. I love event planning. I love hosting people. I love throwing parties and cooking for people. So, last year, I agreed, with my colleague Dr Michael Kliffer from the Department of French, to host the Annual Meeting of …

Want to be a good communicator? Learn to know yourself.

Communicating effectively with those around you requires empathy and sympathy. Does this mean that you, as an effective communicator, must be a touchy-feely person or ascribe to new age values? Not at all (unless you want to, of course!). Rather, empathy and sympathy can be learned. But before you can be empathic and sympathetic, you …

Excellent first on-line MCM733 CommTheory Class

Tonight I led my first on-line tutorial with my class of professional communicators in the Communication Theory course I teach for the Master of Communications Management program (joint between McMaster U’s DeGroote Business School and Syracuse U’s Newhouse School of Public Communication). We had an excellent session. The students in the class, whom I have …

For communicators, listening is key. A few tips to improve your skills.

There is very little that is natural about communication. Word associations. Metaphors. Our vision of the world is like a kaleidoscope of moving bits of glass, settling in a slightly different configuration every time we pause to ponder. In fact, most of concepts, symbols and metaphors that we process as we communicate are of a …

The study of how we understand one another.

I have always been fascinated by hermeneutics, which is the study of meaning and understanding. What does it mean to mean something? More importantly, how what does it mean to understand something that someone else is communicating? In my PhD thesis, I explored whether it was possible to use the structures in a text (syntax, …

Public Relations and the Social Media Revolution

Mass broadcasting systems permitted the marketing revolution of the 50s and 60s. Now, the social media revolution is opening up the same radical possibilities for public relations. PR is the business of building relationships, in Canada that means preferably symmetrical relationships between an organization and its various publics. In the past, it was very hard …

We live two lives, in two realities: physical and online

People no longer live one life, but many. Physical. On-line. With whom are we really communicating? You may think that this is a silly topic, if you’re someone who hasn’t grown up on-line or thrown yourself into the world of the Internet and social media. But you would be mistaken – a significant proportion of …