Tag: communication

Innovation, communication, and the Errors Tour

An important lesson: sometimes our efforts to connect with an audience fall flat.

It was great to be back on the Missouri S&T campus earlier this week to give the keynote talk for the university’s first Innovative Communication Conference. (Huge thanks to Dr. Jossalyn M. Gale, director of S&T’s Writing and Communication Center, for inviting me to speak.)

In my talk, I wanted to expand on the idea of the conference theme — “Innovation Requires Communication” — to emphasize the importance or storytelling in communication and innovation. I also wanted to impress on students the importance of embracing failure, and I needed a catchy title, something that would resonate with the mainly Gen Z audience, so I decided to borrow from 2023’s biggest pop culture event, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and call my presentation “The Errors Tour (Andy’s Version).”

Reactions to my cover slide were mixed. The older folks in the audience (read: faculty and staff) appreciated the wordplay. The students either smiled politely or remained expressionless. It seems they were over 2023 and all things Swift.

But …

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That exclamation point!

Some see the ! as the comic sans of the punctuation world, a clownish affront to all who take their writing and reading seriously.

When I decided to rename this blog Andy writes! to signify its new direction, I’m sure a few readers cringed at the sight of an exclamation point in the title.

I understand. For writers, the exclamation point (hereinafter referred to as “!”) is perhaps the most maligned and most offensive of all punctuation marks. In his book Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, Benjamin Dreyer calls the ! “bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying.” In her Grammar Girl Style Guide, Mignon Fogarty, without passing judgment, advises, “Don’t overuse them.” The late Elmore Leonard, a prolific and best-selling crime novelist, laid down the law on the ! in his 10 rules for writing: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.”

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