Welcome to Ubiquity’s Communication Corner
The Communication Corner is dedicated to helping you better write and speak about your professional specialty. It is a monthly feature, programmed to help you progressively acquire the skills of professional writers and speakers.
Each monthly installment will have three parts: An essay on a fundamental aspect of effective writing or speaking, a do-it-yourself exercise to help you practice the topic being discussed, and an invitation to submit your exercise for a possible (but not guaranteed) commentary on your draft.
Philip Yaffe, a retired journalist for the Wall Street Journal and a member of the Ubiquity editorial board, is the moderator of the Communication Corner.
We invite you to subscribe via the signup box at the left. We will send you announcements of new installments of the Communication Corner, approximately once a month.
Readers who subscribe will be able to download a free PDF copy of Philip Yaffe's book The Gettysburg Approach to Writing & Speaking like a Professional.
Articles
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The Extraordinary Power of Hot Spots
by Philip Yaffe
April 2025Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.
The concept of "hot spots" has previously been mentioned in Communication Corner essays (e.g., "How to Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say" and "Why Putting Yourself in the Mind of Your Reader is Easier---and More Challenging---Than You Might Have Imagined"). Now it is time to look at the concept in detail. Why? Because understanding and applying hot spots (which is not all that difficult) has often proved to be the quickest and easiest way of markedly improving one's writing. Judge for yourself.
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How to Generate Reader Interest in What You Write
by Philip Yaffe
February 2025Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.
Who has not discovered to their dismay that no one wants to read their most carefully crafted, meritorious, compelling, and passionate writings? Think of all the proposals you have written that no one was interested in. Or the web pages, the blog posts, news releases, company brochures, etc. that fell flat. Chances are, such mishaps are linked to producing texts that fail to connect with what your readers would be interested in reading.
This article was originally published by Ubiquity in 2009 as a single contribution. It is now being republished as part of Communication Corner, the author's interrelated series of essays curated to help computer professionals communicate more effectively with each other and the general public.
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If You Write It Better, You Will Say It Better
by Philip Yaffe
January 2025Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.
Today it is generally accepted that to fully achieve in most fields of endeavor you must be a competent (if not a superior) writer and public speaker. Computer science and computer programming are no exception. However, it is a mistake to believe that good expository (non-fiction) writing public speaking are distinct disciplines. They are flipsides of the same coin. Recognizing this essential dualism makes achieving competence in both faster and significantly easier.
This essay (slightly modified) originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Toastmaster, the official monthly magazine of Toastmasters International, which has more than 14,000 clubs for members seeking to grow their public-speaking and leadership skills.
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Words That Don't Translate into English
by Philip Yaffe
January 2025Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.
The better you become as a good expository (non-fiction) writer, the more you appreciate just how challenging (and rewarding) it is to produce good expository text. Most treatises on good writing seem to presume that you are writing for native speakers of the language in which you are writing. However, often this is not the case. If you are not a polyglot, poor translation could lead to poor outcomes.