Citing a Blog Post

 

 

A number of people—most recently a student from Malaysia—have asked how to cite a blog post.  Generally, I think this should do it:

 

For APA style:

Last name of author, first initial. (Date of publication—year, month, day). Title of blog post. [Web log post]. Retrieved from Blog URL.  

So, if you were citing a recent post from my own blog, it would look like this:

DeVito, J. (2013 April 30). Interviewing exercise. [Web log post].  Retrieved from htpp://tcbdevito.blogspot.com.

Another style manual does it a little differently:

DeVito, J. (2013, April 30). Interviewing exercise. Retrieved from http://tcbdevito.blogspot.com.

For MLA Style:

Author’s last name, first name initial. Title of post. Title of blog. Date post was written. Date post was accessed.

DeVito, J. “Interviewing Exercise.” The Communication Blog. 30 April 2013. 21 May 2013.

Hope this helps.

Interviewing Exercise

When Jen Guzman—chief executive of Stella & Chewy’s pet food company—was asked (NYTimes, April 28, 2013, BU 2) what three questions she would ask in interviewing someone for a job, she said: (1) “Why do you want this job?” (2) “Why do you think you would be good at this job?” and (3) "What do you think are the five most important qualities or things that you need to be good at this job?”

I thought this would make an interesting exercise in an interviewing class as students prepare their responses to potential employment interview questions.

Public Speaking Example

 

Here’s a great public speaking example to illustrate how to make large numbers real to an audience, courtesy of the HuffingtonPost.com:

Walmart’s CEO earns an annual salary of $20.7 million. To make the same amount of money, it would take an average Walmart worker (earning $12.67 per hour, working 40 hour weeks, 52 weeks a year, without paying any taxes) 785 years.

A great brief exercise would be to ask students to illustrate this discrepency in other ways.

Living Without the Internet

 

One way to introduce computer-mediated communication and its role in our everyday lives would be to identify important lifestyle habits that we’d be willing to give up as long as we could keep our Internet connection. It would be interesting to poll a class on this and compare the results for different age groups, for men and women, and even for academic major. Here, for example, are some interesting statistics, reported in the Harvard Business Review (October, 2012, pp. 32-33), on the percentage of people in various countries who would be willing to give up an important lifestyle habit to keep the Internet:

·         89% of those in Indonesia and 65% of those in the United Kingdom would give up alcohol instead of the Internet.

 

·         91% of those in the United Kingdom and 67% of those in India would give up fast food rather than the Internet.

 

·         56% of those in Japan would give up sex rather than the Internet but only 12% would in Brazil.

 

·         56% of those in China would give up driving a car (but only 10% in South Africa) instead of giving up the Internet.

 

·         86% of those in Japan and 59% of those in Brazil would give up chocolate rather than the Internet.

 

·         85% of those in China and 55% of those in Germany would give up coffee rather than the Internet.

 

·         78% of those in Indonesia but only 5% of those in France would give up showing rather that the Internet.

 

·         60% of those in Japan and 42% of those in France would give up exercise rather than the Internet.

Metaphors of Culture

Here is a brief table that I created for use in  the current edition of Interpersonal Messages to stimulate different ways of thinking about culture and also about metaphors. I thought it might be useful more generally in a variety of different courses/classrooms.  These insights are taken from a variety of sources including Edward Hall's Beyond Culture; Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov's Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind; and the websites of Culture at Work and Culturally Teaching: Education across Cultures.

 

Seven Metaphors of Culture

                                                          

Metaphor	Metaphor’s Claim/assumption
Salad/Jelly beans	Like items in a salad or bag of jelly beans, cultures are individual; yet, they work together with other cultures to produce an even better combination.
Iceberg	Like the iceberg, only a small part of culture is visible; most of culture and its influences are hidden from easy inspection.
Tree	Like the tree, you only see the trunk, branches, and leaves but the root system, which gives the tree its structure and function, is hidden from view.
Melting pot	Cultures blend into one amalgam and lose their individuality. But, the blend is better than any one of the ingredients.
Software	Culture dictates what we do and don’t do much as does a software program. Out of awareness, people are programmed, to some extent, to think and behave by their culture.
Organism	Culture, like an organism, uses the environment (other cultures) to grow but maintains boundaries so its uniqueness is not destroyed.
Mosaic	Like a beautiful mosaic is made up of pieces of different shapes, sizes, and colors, so is culture; the whole, the combination, is more beautiful than any individual piece.

 

Conversational Empathy

 

Here is an exercise for stimulating class discussion of empathy that I wrote for the conversation chapter in the next edition of Human Communication. But, I thought it might be of interest more generally.

Conversational Empathy

Empathy

is a quality of interpersonal communication that involves feeling what another person feels from that person’s point of view without losing your own identity. Empathy enables you to understand emotionally what another person is experiencing. To sympathize, in contrast, is to feel for the person—to feel sorry or happy for the person, for example.

Although empathy is one of the most important qualities of interpersonal communication, expressing it is not always easy. This exercise is designed to help you identify some of the responses that are not empathic and the reasons they fail to express this essential interpersonal connection.

Here are ten possible responses to the “simple” statement, “I guess I’m feeling a little depressed.” For this exercise:

1.      Identify why each of the ten responses is (probably) inappropriate and not empathic. You may also want to consider the motivating factors that contribute to the varied responses. That is, why does someone respond as these Oranges did?

2.      Write original (but unempathic) responses for Orange 11 and Orange 12.

3.      Write what you’d consider an appropriate and empathic response. Consider too why your response is empathic. What does your response communicate that the varied responses from Orange did not communicate?  

Assume that Apple and Orange are close friends—not best friends but more than acquaintances. You may assume that Apple and Orange are two women, two men, or a woman and a man—select the genders as you wish.

APPLE: I guess I’m just feeling a little depressed.

 

ORANGE  1: I’ve been reading about depression and it’s all in your head. This research—it was done at NYU—showed that the ….

ORANGE  2: You depressed? Have you talked to Pat? Now that’s depression.

ORANGE  3: You’re not depressed; you’re just a bit sad. After all, that breakup could not have been easy.

ORANGE  4: Well, then, you need to get out more; let’s go and have some fun.

ORANGE  5: What else is happening? Have you talked to Chris?

ORANGE  6: Me too. I don’t know what it is but I woke up this morning and felt so depressed. I thought it was from a dream but I’m still feeling that way. Do you think I should see a counselor?

ORANGE  7: Are you? That’s really serious; it’s often a sign of suicide. Remember Pat? Got depressed after the breakup and jumped off the roof.

ORANGE  8: Reminds me of that movie—what’s the name? You know, the one with Meryl Streep?

ORANGE  9: Yeah, lots of people tell me the same thing.

ORANGE  10: Not you. I can’t believe that. I’d believe it about anybody but you.

ORANGE 11: ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­________________________________________________________.

ORANGE 12: ________________________________________________________.

EMPATHIC/APPROPRIATE RESPONSE: ________________________________

____________________________________________________________________.

[The types of responses illustrated here were designed to represent five common but (probably) inappropriate, non-empathic responses. These are not the only kinds of non-empathic responses but they seem among the more important.

1.        Depersonalizing involves moving the conversation away from the person and the person’s feelings as in the intellectualizing of Orange 1 or the shifting of the topic away from the person speaking to a fictional example as did Orange 8.

2.        Minimizing involves lessening the importance of what the person is thinking and feeling as in the responses of Orange 2, 3, and 9 or simply denying it as in the response of Orange 10.

3.        Problem-solving involves offering solutions to the person’s feelings as in the response of Orange 4.

4.        Re-focusing involves shifting the topic focus from the person speaking to another topic as in the response of Orange 5 or to the self as in Orange 6.

5.        Catastrophizing involves making the problem seem even worse than it probably is as in the response of Orange 7.]

 

 

Benefits of Studying Nonverbal Communication

The following is an edited version of a discussion that will appear in The Nonverbal Communication Book to be published soon (Kendall Hunt).

 

But, I thought it might be of interest more generally--to anyone teaching or taking or contemplating taking a course in nonverbal communication. The exercise at the end should prove useful for stimulating class discussion.

 

The Benefits of Studying Nonverbal Communication

 
The ability to use nonverbal communication effectively can yield a variety of both general and specific benefits in your social and your workplace lives. First, let’s identify some general benefits and then some more specific benefits.

Some General Benefits

The general benefits span the entire range of your communication life whether online or face-to-face, whether personal or workplace.

First, it will improve your accuracy in understanding others, those who are from your own or similar culture as well as those who are from cultures very different from your own. Increased accuracy in understanding others will yield obvious benefits in social and workplace situations—from understanding a coy smile from a date to the meaning of a supervisor’s gestures.

Second, an increased knowledge of nonverbal communication will improve your own ability to communicate information and to persuade others. In many instances, it will help you reinforce your verbal messages. The greater your nonverbal skills, the more successful you’re likely to be at informing as well as influencing others.

Third, it will increase your own perceived attractiveness; the greater your ability to send and receive nonverbal signals, the higher your popularity and psychosocial well-being are likely to be (Burgoon, Guerrero, & Floyd, Nonverbal Communication, Allyn & Bacon, 2010).  

Fourth, it will enable you to make a more effective self-presentation. Consider, for example, that when you meet someone for the first time—at least in face-to-face meetings—you form impressions of the person largely on the basis of his or her nonverbal messages. Being able to more effectively understand and manage your nonverbal messages will enable you to present yourself in the way you want to be perceived. Each of these benefits and skills can be used to help or support another, or, unfortunately, they can be used for less noble purposes. For example, a person adept at nonverbal communication will be more effective in persuading others to buy cars or sign a mortgage they can’t afford or present themselves as competent when they aren’t or increase their attractiveness before hitting you up for a loan.

Some Specific Benefits

In addition these general benefits, here are some specific benefits of studying and mastering the art of nonverbal communication. Of course, learning about an important area of human behavior—what it is, how it works, what influences it, and a variety of other dimensions—is a benefit in itself. Increased knowledge is a benefit, pure and simple. But, there are additional, more immediately pragmatic, specific benefits that you can gain as a result for reading the text and completing the exercises. Here are just 25:

1. Use nonverbal messages to interact with your verbal messages thus creating meaningful packages of messages.
2. Use nonverbal messages to manage the impressions you give to others.
3. Use nonverbal messages to help form and maintain productive and meaningful interpersonal and work relationships.
4. Use nonverbal messages to help regulate conversations and to make them more effective and satisfying.
5. Use nonverbal messages to persuade—to influence the attitudes or behaviors of others.
6. Use nonverbal messages to help express and communicate your emotions.
7. Use nonverbal messages with sensitivity to cultural and gender differences and expectations.
8. Use hand and body gestures to communicate varied meanings.
9. Use body posture to reinforce your intended messages.
10. Manage your facial expressions to communicate the meanings you want to share.
11. Vary your facial styles to communicate a wide variety of messages.
12. Communicate different meanings with eye movements and with eye avoidance.
13. Use color, clothing, and other artifacts to communicate the meanings you wish.
14. Use spatial messages to reinforce your verbal messages and in ways appropriate to the purpose of the interaction.
15. Use territorial markers and respond to the markers of others appropriately.
16. Use touch appropriate to the relationship stage and avoid touch that may be considered overly intimate or intrusive.
17. Use paralanguage to signal conversational turns, your desire to speak or to continue listening, for example.
18. Use silence to communicate a wide variety of meanings.
19. Respond to the rules of interpersonal time that are maintained in the particular context, for example, the workplace or the classroom.
20. Manage your time effectively and efficiently; avoid wasting time.
21. Increase your own attractiveness in a variety of ways.
22. Increase your ability to detect lying (but with important limitations).
23. Increase your immediacy or closeness to others when you wish.
24. Increase your perceived power with nonverbal cues.
25. Use nonverbal cues in a civil and polite manner to further your purposes.

 Explaining the Values of Nonverbal Communication Study

Continue personalizing the areas of nonverbal communication by examining the specific benefits you can derive from the study and mastery of nonverbal communication. In Column 1 are listed the areas of nonverbal communication. For 1, 2, 3, or all of the areas, record in Column 2 any potential values or benefits you might derive in your personal or business life from greater effectiveness in using each of the channels or codes. In Column 3 indicate how you specifically might go about achieving this benefit or value.

 

Nonverbal Channel	Personal/Business Value	Achieving the Value
Body messages	Make a good first impression.	Avoid fidgeting and playing with my hair.
Facial messages
Eye messages
Artifactual messages
Spatial messages
Touch messages
Paralanguage and Silence messages
Time messages