In just 5 minutes, Jay Walker looks at the world’s latest mania: learning English. He focuses especially on China, showing photos and spine-tingling audio of Chinese students rehearsing English by the thousands. But why make such an effort to learn English?
Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of “social technology” that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.
Resolution is just a fancy word for goal. When we make New Year’s Resolutions, we are just setting goals.
We’re setting them for the whole year though! Most people can’t follow through on their self-challenges for a whole year, but what about for a month? Have you ever thought about setting yourself a 30 day challenge?
Matt Cutts gives a short (3 1/2 minute) presentation about why 30 day challenges are much more effective than big, crazy resolutions. This is an apt discussion for the New Year. Have you considered learning a new English word every day for 30 days? Or simply writing 250 words of whatever you want in English for 30 days? This structure can be especially useful for those who are trying to write academic articles: 250 words a day for a month. Check out the talk below.
Nancy Duarte has discovered a structure for your presentations that can keep your audience engaged and actively listening to your idea. This 18 minute talk gave one piece of advice: describe the status quo and describe what could be. Move back and forth between the two worlds. In this way, we can persuade our audience of the truth or value of our ideas. Watch the talk below to get more details!
This TED video makes the case for intelligible writing in the legal industry AND in business. He addresses “how to mandate simplicity” “how to make it a national priority” and states, “there’s no way we should do business with companies that have agreements with stealth provisions and that are unintelligible.”
Tax forms, credit agreements, healthcare legislation: They’re crammed with gobbledygook, says Alan Siegel, and incomprehensibly long. He calls for a simple, sensible redesign — and plain English — to make legal paperwork intelligible to the rest of us.
A branding expert and one of the leading authorities on business communication, Alan Siegel wants to put plain English into legal documents for government and business.
Medical, legal, and financial documents should be easy to read, but too often they aren’t. With spot-on (and funny) examples, Sandra Fisher Martins shows how overly complex language separates us from the information we need — and three steps to change that.
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