miércoles, 25 de abril de 2012

EXPAND YOUR TWITTER COMMUNITY






8 Tips to Help You Expand Your Twitter Community Rapidly

By Bill Miltenberg, PR News
On April 2, the @PRNews Twitter account reached a milestone of 40,000 followers. Exactly one year prior, the account had 4,400 followers. 

While brand managers shouldn't view Twitter success as a numbers game or popularity contest, building a larger following can help amplify your strategic efforts—from customer service and fundraising to building awareness for your brand. And, of course, it's just plain exciting to watch a community grow.

Here are some of our lessons learned in building the PR News Twitter community. 

  1. Don't be a droid: Show that you've got a human side, and that your account is not just an automated RSS feed. Pose questions, use varied punctuation and provide a tone and voice for your account—even if it's managed by multiple people. Give your audience—and your prospective audience—a reason to follow you on Twitter.
  2. Respond when people talk to you: When you receive an @ message or a direct message—with the exception of automated direct messages—respond. Simply say thank you, start a conversation and express gratitude when a connection is made. If you're worried about filling up the feed with these personal tweets and crowding the content-driven or business-goal tweets that you feel the rest of your followers would prefer, you can schedule them for off-peak times. Even then, the recipient will be notified you've responded and will be more likely to engage with you again. Speaking of scheduling tweets...
  3. Schedule tweets for early mornings and later hours: The social Web is a 24/7 content-consumption beast that should be fed even after you've left the office for the day.
  4. Give credit: With @PRNews we're fortunate to have a lot of stories of our own to link to, but if you don't have that option, showcasing others' work is a great way to build connections. Linking to a blog post, article, idea or any other type of content through another person on Twitter is a great way to show your audience you're a must-follow in your industry, and that you're not operating in your own company's silo. 
  5. Participate in conversations at industry events: Be sure to know the hashtag of the event you're attending, and keep the tweets flowing around it before, during and after with summaries. Use direct quotes, @mentions of speakers and retweets of fellow attendees to let everyone on site know that you're worth following.  
  6. Integrate paid and earned: Depending on your budget, placing ads on Twitter to promote either individual tweets or your account itself can provide high visibility for a relatively low cost. Dallas Lawrence, chief global digital strategist for Burson-Marsteller, says Twitter's sponsored campaigns are one of the best crisis management resources, and a way to gain more relevant followers. “Twitter’s targeted follower acquisition strategy is an effective way to go from 1,000 to 10,000 followers and can help amplify your messages,” says Lawrence.
  7. Bookmark and use the PR News Twitter Directory. This Twitter handle directory of PR agencies/consultants, corporations, nonprofit organizations, PR professionals and media, is sortable by category and can help you find a handle within the industry in a pinch. You can also find leading individuals and companies to follow, as well as Twitter chats to participate in to make more connections.
  8. Make the tweets useful. We link to useful content—both content that we create and content created by others. But not everyone has time to link through a tweet, so try to make the tweet itself valuable to your community.

lunes, 23 de abril de 2012

CROMOSOMAS DEL ESPAÑOL


Los cromosomas del idioma español

Álex Grijelmo 



Debía dirigirme al aeropuerto de Bogotá, en diciembre de 1997, y una empleada colombiana del Hotel de la Ville, coqueto y francés, en el norte de la ciudad, me advirtió: "No vaya usted por esa avenida, porque a estas horas se encontrará un trancón". 

Jamás habría empleado yo la palabra "trancón". Habría hablado de "embotellamiento" o "atasco". Pero entendí perfectamente un vocablo que oía por vez primera en mi vida. ¿Por qué? Porque sabía reconocer sus cromosomas, asociarlo en un instante con "atrancar" y con "tranco", y con "tranquera". Los hablantes colombianos han llegado, pues, a crear en español un concepto no heredado -quienes llegaron tras Colón jamás pudieron referirse a un atasco de naos en hora punta-, y que no figura en la última edición del Diccionario de la Real Academia Española,. pero han inventado legítimamente una palabra que responde al genio de nuestro idioma, una voz con familia conocida cuya genética podemos identificar. En otros países de habla hispana se buscó también la palabra adecuada para designar una acumulación de vehículos que suman tal cantidad que no pueden pasar por un punto estrecho, y se acudió a los conceptos del atasco en una tubería o al cuello de botella que canaliza el líquido a borbotones hacia el exterior del recipiente. En Colombia los hablantes pensaron también en algo que impide el paso, y se tropezaron con el tranco de la puerta. 

Estos cromosomas de las palabras -tan vinculados a la genética del idioma- constituyen la base que nos permite asegurar que 400 millones de personas hablamos la misma lengua. 

En Zacatecas (México) , precisamente durante el congreso sobre el idioma español, necesité comprar lo que en España se llaman cuchillas de afeitar, concepto que, tomando la parte por el todo ( sinécdoque) , incluye no sólo la hoja sino también el manguito de plástico en el que ésta se inserta para mayor comodidad del usuario. En fin, necesitaba cuchillas. La dependienta me entendió muy bien, a pesar de que ella tampoco habría empleado nunca la expresión que yo acababa de usar. "Ah, ya sé", me respondió. "Usted lo que quiere es un rastrillo". 

En efecto, la cuchilla de afeitar, o de depilar, se acompaña por una especie de rastrillo que pasa por la superficie de la cara, o de las piernas, para arrancar el vello y respetar la piel, como el rastrillo del labrador quita las piedras sin llevarse la tierra. 

He utilizado en páginas anteriores la palabra "altoparlante". Un español acudiría siempre al vocablo "altavoz" (un español que no fuera periodista, porque en ese caso lo normal sería que emplease baffle).Sin embargo, "altoparlante" y "altavoz" pueden entrar en el vocabulario de diálogo entre dos usuarios de español procedentes de México y España, porque se entenderán bien con ellas: conocen sus cromosomas. Igual que cualquier hispanohablante comprendería al mexicano que pidiese "agua de la llave " donde tal vez él piensa "agua del grifo", que le invita a "platicar" un rato, o que le recomienda cocer pescado "a fuego manso"; o al peruano que se refiere a "la municipalidad" en vez de al "ayuntamiento"; o a la colombiana que describe a un novio como "muy avorazado". Porque todas esas expresiones tienen cromosomas relacionados con la Ila que abre y cierra, con la plática del cura, con el calor inocuo frente al fuego violento, con el concepto de municipio y con el adjetivo que se obtiene al exprimir la palabra voracidad. 

En los últimos años han llegado al diario donde trabajo numerosos periodistas latinoamericanos, que cumplen en la Redacción sus prácticas o sus becas, generalmente tras unos meses de estudios en la Escuela de Periodismo Universidad Autónoma-ElPaís. 
A veces utilizan en sus reportajes ―que se publican con normalidad en el diario, puesto que durante su estadía ejercen como redactores― palabras que, perteneciendo al idioma español, tienen mayor presencia en sus países que en España, donde el uso las sustituye por otras igualmente válidas. Por ejemplo, ellos emplean muya menudo "inclusive" en el lugar de "incluso". Algunos editores les han corregido, sobre todo años atrás. Yo creo que no habría que hacerlo, y ésa parece ser la tendencia actual. Por ejemplo, el 5 de agosto de 1988 se publica en la sección de Deportes una información de Hernán Iglesias, argentino que cursaba el posgrado en la Escuela de Periodismo de El País. Y explica su texto: "La comisión se expidió ayer también sobre los casos del Betis y el Valencia". En efecto, "se expidió" sonará raro a muchos hispanohablantes, pero el Diccionario registra tal expresión como propia de Chile y Uruguay (vemos que también en Argentina, como no podía ser de otra manera si tenemos en cuenta la situación geográfica de los tres países), y la define así en la entrada "expedir": "Pronominal [por tanto, expedirse,. es decir, como el periodista argentino emplea el verbo]. Manejarse, desenvolverse en asuntos o actividades". y pese a ser una expresión propia de determinados países, los cientos de miles de lectores de ElPaís de Madrid habrán comprendido perfectamente su significado, que habrán asociado sin duda con "despachar". 

Hablar un mismo idioma no equivale a utilizar las mismas palabras para todo. A los españoles nos suenan hermosísimas muchas expresiones de América Latina porque se hunden en lo más profundo de nosotros mismos y se nos muestran como soluciones lógicas, pero diferentes, para nuestras propias ideas; y definen además con exactitud nuestras propias ideas; aunque de un modo distinto. Supongo que lo mismo le ocurre a un latinoamericano al escuchar a un español o a cualquier otro hispanohablante de un país distinto al suyo. Eso es la unidad del idioma, el genio profundo que da vigor a todo el sistema lingüístico, la sima que podemos compartir 21 países y que arroja hacia la superficie criaturas identificables porque proceden de la misma cultura. Que no es ya la cultura que impusieron los españoles a partir de 1492, sino la que todos los pueblos hispanohablantes han ido creando conjuntamente durante estos siglos. 

La unidad del idioma no se altera en absoluto por el hecho de que un español bucee en la "piscina" mientras un mexicano nada en la "alberca " y un argentino se baña en la "pileta", estando todos ellos en el mismo lugar. Las tres -precisas, hermosas- parten de lo más profundo de nuestro ser intelectual colectivo. Podemos ver el ADN de "piscina" en piscis, y en "piscifactoría ", y hasta saber que la palabra procede de aquellos estanques de los jardines que se adornaban con peces; y relacionar su significado con un lugar donde se almacena agua y donde, como peces en el agua, podemos aumentar la velocidad mediante unas aletas como las del pez, y también nadar al estilo rana. Y la "alberca " mexicana ( del árabe al birka, estanque) nos llevará por la genética y la historia a terrenos de regadío rurales donde se hacía preciso almacenar el agua para luego esparcirla, y donde los mozos del campo se remojaban para ahuyentar la sofoquina. Y a la "pileta" podemos asociarla con "pila" y con "pilón" ("¡al pilón, al pilón!", se grita en los pueblos de Castilla cuando el grupo verbenero se quiere bajar del escenario demasiado pronto), y tal expresión española es como las dos anteriores. 

Los jóvenes mexicanos harán un clavado en el agua donde los barceloneses se tirarían de cabeza o los limeños, entre otros, disfrutarían de una zambullida, y el estilo empleado al hacerlo le parecería lindo a un chiapaneco y bonito a un sevillano; y ambos se entenderían también, por más que el sevillano nunca dijese "lindo" ni el chiapaneco "bonito", igual que el español pronunciaría "paliza " donde el americano "golpiza" y los dos entenderán la expresión del otro sin haberla pronunciado jamás. Y ambos sabrán de lo que hablan cuando el mexicano cite "la computadora" y el europeo "el ordenador", inf1uido aquél por el por el inglés (pero con familia en el español: computar, cómputo...) y éste por el francés (pero con los genes de las romances: orden, ordenar, el que ordena: ordenador). 

Y si preguntamos en Argentina cuánto nos falta para llegar a una calle pueden contestarnos que "dos cuadras" donde nosotros diríamos "dos manzanas", pero tan metafórica resulta una expresión como otra y las comprenderemos sin problemas 1
. 

El cada vez más intenso intercambio cultural entre los dos lados hispanos del Atlántico va reproduciendo un fenómeno curioso: las palabras específicas -esas soluciones distintas a cada lado, halladas en las esencias del idioma- circulan ahora cada vez más desde Latinoamérica hacia España, asumidas rápidamente por quienes las reconocen como propias aun inventadas a miles de kilómetros de distancia. Los españoles, por ejemplo, hablan ya del "ninguneo" que sufre alguien, una expresión y un verbo (ningunear) inexistentes en la península hace apenas diez años; y "grabadora" "está sustituyendo a "casete" con la fuerza del oleaje que la impulsó desde América; y el "culebrón" ha reemplazado a la "telenovela" en las pantallas y en el vocabulario de la gente. y con la gente empieza a abrirse paso la palabra "engentarse", que podemos definir como "saturación de presencia humana ", "estar ahíto de gente"; por ejemplo, en un bar de moda en el cual se hace imposible llegar a la barra para pedir una copa. O en una fiesta a la que han acudido más invitados de los que se esperaba. Situaciones ambas que le engentan a uno y le incitan a marcharse, o al menos a desearlo. 

El intercambio de palabras, sin embargo, no data de los tiempos actuales. De ello puede dar buena imagen la historia de la voz "tiza ", que designa esa arcilla terrosa blanca que se utiliza para escribir en los encerados. Un elemento, por cierto, que va desapareciendo de los colegios, sustituida por los rotuladores de alcohol y las pizarras (que ya no lo son) de plástico blanco; pero que permanecerá aún muchos años entre los jugadores de billar, quienes usan un compuesto de greda y yeso para afinar la suela de los tacos y al que llaman igualmente "tiza". Pues bien, la palabra "tiza" procede del náhuatl, del vocablo tizatl que decían los indígenas, y de allí se llevaron la palabra los españoles. Sin embargo, los mexicanos llaman a la tiza "gis", palabra de raíz griega (del griego gipsum, yeso) llevada a México precisamente. ..por los españoles. 

El lenguaje del fútbol en España ha dado paso a numerosos argentinismos, y así los locutores hablan de "botar un saque de esquina ", en una acepción del verbo "botar" (lanzar, arrojar) que rara vez se usa para otros lanzamientos en la Península y las islas. Pocos españoles saben que la palabra "hincha ", que todos ellos conocen como descriptiva del apasionado seguidor de un equipo, nació en Uruguay, y que arranca del hecho de que el forofo que más animaba al Nacional de Montevideo de principios de siglo era Reyes, el que hinchaba los balones; el "hincha ". 

La palabra "auspiciar" -apoyar, proteger-, que el lingüista Rafael Lapesa 2 recogía en 1966 como propia del español de América y desconocida en España, circula ya con su documento de identidad por toda la Península y cualquier español habla ya de algo "novedoso ", una voz que entró en el Diccionario en los años veinte, a propuesta de Ramón Menéndez Pidal, con marchamo de americanismo. y con letras de canciones -Chabuca Granda, Les Luthiers, Los Chalchaleros, Los Cuatro Cuartos, Cholo Aguirre y sus ríos. .. Víctor Jara, Quilapayún, Facundo Cabral, Alberto Cortez, Cafrune, Larralde, Chavela Vargas- o con las frases de la literatura, llegaron también términos como "quebrada " (arroyo en Argentina, lo que un chileno llamaría "acequia"), o "pollera" (falda), o "vereda" (acera en Argentina) o "capitalino" ( de la capital). En ellas vemos con precisión su significado: ¿No es hermoso pensar en los quiebros que da el agua del riachuelo, o en los pollitos que alguna mujer reunió en su falda, o en la vereda en la que un día se plantó el cemento de la acera?; y las entendemos; y por eso podemos pensarlas. 

Lo mismo sucede cuando una camarera latinoamericana le pregunta a un español: " ¿Le provoca un café?". Tal vez tenga la tentación de contestar que le provoca más la camarera, pero habrá entendido el significado profundo de "provocar" en español 3. 

¿Y cómo no comprender lo que se intenta decir cuando alguien anima a otro: "hombre, no te me achicopales"? Y los hispanohablantes europeos reconoceremos que achicopalarse refleja mucho más que acobardarse o retraerse, que no se trata de un vocablo equivalente sino de otra manera de emplear el español, en este caso con sus influencias indígenas, para llegar a un resultado singular, cuyos cromosomas podemos relacionar con "achicarse" o hacerse pequeño ante una adversidad. 4 Más fácil aún resultará entender a la mexicana que nos presente a su novio con buen humor, resolviendo de un plumazo las dudas del lado europeo del Atlántico entre "mi compañero", "mi amigo", "mi prometido", "mi chico"." que las distintas formas de convivencia han acabado por superar y que derivan en que la gente que aún no ha llegado acierta edad se enrede en dudas al referirse a su pareja. Pero la mexicana dirá: "...Y aquí le presento a mi pior es nada". Y la comprenderemos perfectamente.




1 El Diccionario da una escueta explicación de la palabra "cuadra", al definirla simplemente como algo cuadrado. Tal vez debiera añadir que una cuadra es el lugar donde se encierra a los animales (generalmente a los équidos) y también un conjunto de edificios cuyas calles adyacentes forman un cuadrado. 

2 Rafael Lapesa. Revista de Occidente, art. cit. "América y la unidad de la lengua española”. Ese artículo se reproduce en El español moderno y contemporáneo, Rafael Lapesa, op. cit. 



3 "Provocar", por influencia del inglés, se hace equivaler a veces a "causar": "le provocó una herida", en lugar de "le causó una herida". "Provocar" implica una acción que acarrea o incita a otra acción. Causar supone simplemente una acción, que alguien o algo recibe de manera pasiva. Se ve mejor la diferencia en los sustantivos: causa y provocación; la causa necesita sólo una acción; la provocación precisa una, pero pretende dos. 

4 Ni achicopalarse ni engentarse figuran en el 
Diccionario de la Real Academia Española.


lunes, 16 de abril de 2012

COMMUNICATION


How to be an outstanding communicator

by MARTIN SHOVEL 

The message from recruitment agencies, employer surveys and the like is familiar, loud and clear: you must be an outstanding communicator if you want to get to the top of your profession. Technical audit skills and practical experience are, of course, essential, but they will only take you so far up the greasy pole; to make it those extra few slippery feet to the very top you’re going to have to find a way of transforming yourself from a good communicator into an outstanding one.
Keep it simple
Outstanding communicators distinguish themselves by the way they use language. The first thing that strikes you when you listen to an outstanding communicator speak is the simplicity of their language: they use words you can understand in a way that makes it easy to follow what they’re saying.
But simple is hard, and takes courage. It takes courage because it goes against the grain of workplace communications. In organisations, language is often used as a protective veil whose main purpose is to cover the speaker’s back rather than enlighten their audience. A concoction of jargonistic words arranged into convoluted sentences is an effective way of covering up ideas that are half-baked, obvious, or trivial.
Many people mistakenly equate this kind of overcomplicated, difficult-to-follow language with cleverness. The following example – though satirical – makes the point:
“Undue multiplicity of personnel assigned either concurrently or consecutively to a single function involves deterioration of quality in the resultant product as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of personnel.” Masterson, J. and Brooks Phillips, W., Federal Prose, 1948, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina
What effect does language like this have? It intimidates, it excludes, it frustrates, and, ultimately, it wastes time (and therefore money!). It embodies everything that is the antithesis of outstanding communication. It is puffed up, self-serving – and, in the final analysis, like the emperor’s new clothes it leaves its author looking naked and foolish. Translated into the language of clarity and simplicity, the same gobbledygook becomes:
“Too many cooks spoil the broth.”
Beyond plain English
Clear, plain English is an essential part of good communication. It is the language of instructions that are easy to follow, intelligible contracts, and business letters that read as if they’ve been written by an articulate and sympathetic human, not a machine. But outstanding communicators, although masters of plain English, come into their own when they move beyond it.
Clear explanation is the forte of the good communicator. But clear explanation alone isn’t going to be enough to persuade people to vote for you, or to inspire them to follow you into the heat of battle. You need something more: you need to be able to communicate in a way that appeals not just to minds, but to hearts as well. When Barack Obama began his bid for the US presidency in 2007 he was a rank outsider, an unknown. It was the power of his oratory that opened the doors of the White House to him. Writing back in 2008, The New Yorker’s George Packer wrote that, moments after listening to Obama’s New Hampshire campaign speech, “the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days.”



Warming up your language
Modern neuroscience has demonstrated conclusively that we feel our way into decisions. Numerous case studies have shown that people with damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to make decisions at all. It seems that the rational mind working by itself dithers endlessly as it weighs up the various possible reasons for taking one course of action rather than another.
So, to be an outstanding communicator you have to begin by engaging people’s feelings. Once people care about what you’re saying, you have their attention. And the key to making people care is your choice of words. Words are the wrapping for your communications, and if you want your audience to unwrap what you say, you need to warm up your language.
The notion that words can be warm or cold might sound strange, but let’s test it out by returning to the piece of gobbledygook I quoted earlier. Like a lot of organisational speak, it’s crammed full of long words of Latin origin: words like ‘multiplicity’, ‘personnel’, ‘assigned’, ‘concurrently’ and so on – I‘m sure you get the drift.
Imagine for a moment that you’re at a friend’s party and you find yourself chatting with someone you’ve never met before, over a glass of wine. How would you feel if your new acquaintance (another Latinate word) spoke to you using long Latinate words. I suspect that, like most other people, you’d experience him as distant, cold and, given the context, weird.
But what makes ‘friend’ a warmer word than ‘acquaintance’, and ‘many’ a warmer word than ‘multiplicity’? Well, here’s a clue: say the word ‘acquaintance’ to a young child and they’ll give you a blank look. But follow it with the word ‘friend’ and their eyes will light up as the word conjures up an image of someone they love.
Words like ‘friend’, ‘cook’, and ‘dog’ are common everyday words; and, like most common everyday words, their origins lie in Old, and Middle, English. These also happen to be the first words we learn as children – they mark our entry into the realm of language, and verbal communication. Our relationship to them is a visual one, because our first encounter with them is one of pointing, touching or physically interacting with the thing they represent. They embody that magical moment when things become words.
Visual language
By contrast, words of Latinate origin are latecomers to the English language party – both historically, and in the language acquisition of an individual. This explains why a word like ‘dog’ brings to mind an image, while a word like ‘canine’ probably doesn’t. Outstanding communicators favour words of English origin because they are warm and visual – they help other people ‘see’ what you mean.
A quotation ascribed to Winston Churchill offers a good rule of thumb for choosing warm, visual words: “broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.” It’s no accident that the final lines from one of Churchill’s most famous and stirring speeches (“we shall fight on the beaches”) is full of “old words” – “beaches”, “landing grounds”, “fields”, “streets” and “hills”.
The multisensory power of concrete language
Latinate words are cold and abstract; Old English words are warm and concrete. Concrete words aren’t just visual, they are multisensory – they engage all our senses. When Churchill used words like “beaches” and “fields”, he knew that they would invoke a variety of sensory responses in his audience: the sight of the sand and the azure blue sky; the sound of the waves lapping on the seashore and the shriek of the gulls; the smell of the sea; the salty taste on their tongue; and the feeling of warm grains of sand on the soles their feet.
Advertisers constantly exploit the power of multisensory concrete language. They don’t try to sell us just any old generic chicken. No, it’s not just chicken: they tell us it’s actually farm-reared, organic, golden Wiltshire farm chicken. Carefully selected picture words like these are designed to give us an experience – one that appeals to our tastebuds and stomachs, as well as our intellects.
Outstanding communicators don’t tell, they show. Statistics are abstractions that leave us cold. If you want to bring home the full horror of a natural disaster, you don’t talk about the thousands of people who have perished, and the unimaginable scale of the humanitarian disaster visited upon those who’ve survived. Instead, you put the disaster into a human context by making it concrete, and you do this by focusing on the story of a single family.
Story and metaphor
Study after study shows that people are very poor at understanding risk. And disasters like the financial meltdown and the BP oil spill raise the question of just how effective risk experts are at communicating what they know about risk to non-specialists. Outstanding communicators understand the limits of statistical data – they know that in most instances it just goes over the heads of a lay audience.
The most effective way of communicating risk is to get people to feel it, and the way to do this is to use story and metaphor to create an imaginative experience of what the risk is like – one that make sense in terms of what people already understand. To most lay people, a statistic like: 50 million acres of rainforest are cut down every year, doesn’t mean too much. It doesn’t sound good, but it’s far too abstract for a non-specialist to grasp.
Most people don’t know what an acre looks like, and they certainly have no experience of quantities as large as 50 million. On hearing a statistic like this neither their brains nor their emotions are engaged. So the chances of keeping their attention are slim at best. Al Gore faced the problem of communicating this statistic in his campaign to save the rainforest, and being an outstanding communicator he chose to dramatise the statistics by transforming them into a story-like metaphor.
This is how he did it:
“We lose one acre of rainforest every second. Imagine a giant invader from space with football-field sized feet, clomping across the rainforests of the world – going boom, boom, boom every second. Would we react? Well, that’s essentially what’s going in the rainforests right now!”
Putting it all together
Gore’s transformation of a dry statistic into a story metaphor that helps people experience as well as understand the enormity of the situation, exemplifies all the elements that make an outstanding communicator. From the outset, Gore doesn’t allow his expertise to act as a barrier between himself and his audience – after all, the word “communication” originates from a Latin word meaning “to share”.
Rather than blinding them with science, he puts himself into his audience’s shoes and looks for a way of helping them understand what they don’t know (the statistic) in terms of something they’re familiar with (football fields and B movies about invaders from space). He uses familiar, short, concrete, visual words – and he makes the simple complex without compromising its integrity.
So the key to transforming yourself into an outstanding communicator is to make your language as visual and concrete as possible. And the best way of doing this is to heed Churchill’s advice and go for short, everyday words, rather than difficult-to-understand long ones. Always think carefully about who you’re speaking to, and never allow your expertise to shroud your message in fog. Finally, use story and metaphor to bring what you say to life – and always remember that outstanding communicators move hearts as well as minds.
(This article was published in August 2010 in the Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors’ magazine. Shortly after it appeared, the IIA’s Keith Labbett – Head of Audit at British Waterways – invited us to give a two hour interactive plenary session on ‘Outstanding Communications’ to the IIA’s South West Conference, which we did on 12th May 2011. Delegates loved our session and found it both stimulating and practical.  We could do something similar for your conference, so please get in touch if you’d like to talk things over.)

PENSAMIENTOS: "LA VIDA"


martes, 10 de abril de 2012

USO DE LAS PALABRAS


Tips for Freelancers


7 Ways to Better Manage Your Time as a Freelancer



As a freelancer, you've taken control of your career. You can scale your workload up and down as you see fit, but how do you effectively manage yourself without losing a step? Kevin Casey, a Null Media author, and Jerome Iveson, who founded project management site Solo, discuss how a freelancer can best manage their most valuable resource—time.


One of the great allures of the freelance life is the opportunity to gain more control over how you spend your time. But making that dream a reality while building a successful, sustainable business can prove to be a challenge.

For starters, there’s the nagging anxiety that if you’re not working you’re not making money, which is, unfortunately, largely true. There’s no such thing as paid time off in the freelance world. Working for yourself revives the old cliché that “Time is money.” Mismanaging your time can become exceedingly expensive and sidetrack an otherwise promising career. This fact becomes even more apparent when you factor in all the mundane but necessary non-paying tasks of running your business, such as invoicing, courting new clients, and paying taxes.

So what are the best ways to maximize your time as a freelancer? We asked Jerome Iveson, founder of Solo, an online project-management suite designed specifically for freelancers, to share his thoughts. He offered some straightforward advice for how to manage your most valuable commodity and to avoid common time sinks.

1. Overestimate your time. Freelance pros who don’t take steps to adequately understand how much time a project or assignment will require set themselves up for major management headaches. If you ever take on work thinking “piece of cake,” take a moment to be sure it’s not a schedule drain in disguise. “Underestimating how long something will take is a killer. Always overestimate,” Iveson says. “This is especially the case if you are attempting something new that may be just outside your comfort zone. Learning on the job is all well and good, but it will take longer.”

2. Charge what you’re worth. Bad morale—or flat-out apathy—can lead to the deadly sin of procrastination. (For more on that, see #6.) This problem can appear under various guises, one of which is low pay. “Make sure you charge what you are worth. Never undercharge,” Iveson says. “Working too hard for too little will sap morale.”

3. Learn to say “no.” It’s easy, especially when you’re just starting out as a freelancer, to say “yes” to everything. Perhaps this is because you won’t get far if your clients are unhappy. But you need to set limits, too. “Clients will sometimes be testing, wanting results quicker or cheaper. Try to stick to your guns. Be firm and fair,” Iveson says. “One needy client can impact the rest of your schedule.” Decline jobs that aren’t worth your time or energy.

4. Make a project plan. Good time-management starts with a written plan, whether you prefer the latest digital tools or old-fashioned pen and paper. “Have a plan of what you want to achieve in a certain given timeframe,” Iveson says. “It doesn’t have to be detailed or rigid; a simple to-do list will work fine.”

5. Don’t beat yourself up. No one is perfect. Even if you’re a freelancing veteran, you’re likely to make mistakes every now and again. Whether you miss a self-imposed deadline or make another misstep, don’t compound the issue by wallowing in it. “Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t get something done on time,” Iveson says. “Learning from your mistakes and understanding how to improve is better than punishing yourself.”

6. Don’t put things off. We know, we know—that’s easier said than done. But procrastination will waylay your profitability. Chuck those bad habits and devote your work time to, well, working. Develop an action-oriented mind-set around moving projects toward completion and making smart, efficient choices. Iveson notes that that doesn’t mean you should always be in a rush. “Make timely and informed decisions. If you aren’t sure about a decision, sleep on it, reassess, and then act.” 

7. Track every minute of your time. No matter how you bill clients, you can’t become more efficient if you have only a vague sense (or no idea whatsoever) of how you spend your days. You need to quantify the time you invest in projects and clients to determine whether any given one is boosting—or killing—your bottom line. To this end, track your time in a detailed fashion by whatever means works best for you. “Religiously track your time, even if you don’t charge per hour,” Iveson says. “It’s very easy to spend time doing something you love. But, if you don’t know how much time you’ve spent, how do you know if a project is profitable? If you keep spending more time than quoted on a certain task, it may be time to adjust your quote accordingly.”

Fortunately, the online era has spawned a wealth of new tools that can help maximize your resources. The web abounds with smart tools for the modern freelancer, such as project management software, virtual assistants for those non-revenue-generating tasks, and marketplaces like Elance to help you find work.

A THOUGHT ABOUT THE WORD "LITERALLY"


Literally – the much misused word of the moment

It's like literally so misoverused. But whereas Jamie Redknapp gets the word nonsensically wrong, writers such as James Joyce knew exactly what they were doing with it

Jamie Redknapp 

I was sitting in a cafe – one of those generic pain au raisin and latte joints, with an earnest singer-songwriter soundtrack to boot – when a kid to my left piped up: "My school gym is like literally 500 years old." His friends nodded with conviction. They understood. They felt the appalling deprivation of it all. A 500-year-old cross-trainer just isn't any good to anybody. But I wasn't going to underestimate my table-neighbour just yet. I couldn't give up on him like that. After all, I appreciated the subtle contradiction of that "like", poised on the edge of potential simile, and that bold, indicative "literally", ready-armoured for its grapple with hard fact. But then, a couple of sentences further into their criss-crossing conversation, he said: "I'm literally gutted that I failed my English mock." Ah, well, yes, quite. The country is literally going to the dogs.

Actually, I rather enjoy it when people force a "literally" where the antithetical and more pretentious "figuratively" would do – would, in fact, be more literal. But I have my limits. If you literally spray me with your false statements, do I not drown? If you literally press it upon me that the impossible has indeed happened, do I not recoil? However, one needs to be careful in diagnosing such linguistic ills. Nobody likes the queasy pedant creeping up with cold fingers, ready to clip our wings. (He tends to sit on his own in the corner of generic pain au raisin, skinny latte joints where they play singer-songwriter tunes.) It is an unfashionable and unendearing role.
But as Anthony Burgess once said, the poet and the pedant are as one, and grammar is glamour. So let's be poetical. Let's indulge ourselves in some glamour. It is tiresome to merely point out the ridiculousness of a statement such as "that cross to Rooney was literally on a plate" (Jamie Redknapp) or "Barca literally passed Arsenal to death" (Jamie Redknapp) or "he had to cut back inside on to his left, because he literally hasn't got a right foot" (Jamie Redknapp). It is even more boring to then counter this with a pained attempt at sarcasm such as "did he smash the china?", "someone should call the police" or "wow, a uniped footballer" (Unglamorous Pedant). It is far more interesting and glamorous to question what we are doing when we say "he walks into the room and he's literally like a hurricane" (Chantelle Houghton) or when, over a contemplative cuppa perhaps, we merely observe that "centre forwards have the ability to make time stand still. And when Chopra got the ball, it literally did just that" (Jamie Redknapp). What, for instance, might these phrases have to say about our relationship to reality?
I'm no socio-linguist or cognitive-scientist, but I do like to float some hypotheses: maybe we're a generation that is scared of commitment, linguistically deferring reality with our false literallys and our compulsive "likes" and "sort ofs" and "kind of things" that make everything seem only tentative and approximate; maybe our literallys are geared for emphasis, betraying a touching desire to be taken seriously or a cry for attention; maybe our misuse reveals a deeper insecurity about what in fact is real; maybe it reflects a sheer disregard for proportion or accuracy; or maybe it arises from a subconscious need for universality in a confusing age of spiralling subjectivities and relativistic hopscotch, longing to pin down objective truths in even the most fantastical of scenarios …
Of course, we might just be lazy and imprecise users of language. But what happens when James Joyce uses "literally" incorrectly, as when he says that "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet" or tells us that to Leopold Bloom's mind the Gloria in Mozart's Twelfth Mass is "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat". Is James's "literally" any better than Jamie's?
I would suggest that a writer must have good reason for misusing the word. After all, literally also means "to the letter" and "of literature" (deriving from the Latin for "letter": littera), so we should expect a degree of exactitude and particularity from a man of letters such as Joyce. And he more than delivers, misusing his literallys to grant us a deeper insight into the workings of his characters' minds. Just to take the second example from above, Joyce is not only able to tell us something about the dynamic interaction between Bloom's thirst for "higher" knowledge and his bourgeois background, but, more intimately, he is able to embody Bloom's capacity for empathy – Bloom can harmonise high and low, just as he can align the literal and the figurative.
Salman Rushdie is another serial "literaliser". He never tires of taking phrases that sound like classic hyperbole ("I am literally disintegrating", "he began, literally, to fade" in Midnight's Children) and making them, well, literal. In doing so he creates fantastic otherwise worlds, where the angle of vision has been slightly adjusted so that we might see things anew.
The point is that these writers are actually being highly precise in their misuses. Here is a particular favourite of mine: "The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything." This is the sublime Saul Bellow in Humboldt's Gift. The thoughts are partially ironised – they belong to the novel's narrator, who is struggling to summarise a range of impenetrable philosophical works – but nevertheless contain immense truth and beauty. However, it is by working through and beyond that initial intervening "literally" that he gets to the pure metaphor of the last sentence. And it is in that last sentence that we hit the heights of genius.
Writers such as Bellow, Joyce and Rushdie remind us of the fundamentally comic nature of life. That's not comic as in "ha ha" comedy (there's little to laugh about in those Bellow lines), but something more essential – a mood perhaps, maybe even a quality of vision. It has to do with life's potential for adjustability and transformation; with a reality of shifting proportions, surprising angles, creative awrynesses. The comic world is above all an inclusive world. It is also opposite to the tragic view of a harsh and prohibitive world, where the literal – the objective truth – is inflexible and unassailable.
Clive James once called a sense of humour "common sense dancing". I think that this is profound. If it is so, then misuses of literally are common sense raving: we know that the fans behind the goalpost haven't literally gone insane (Jamie Redknapp) and that Messi doesn't literally send people out of the stadium (Jamie Redknapp). The writers, however, are the ones who recognise our powerful need for the literal and figurative. They convey our longing for some kind of sympathy between the figurative expressions of our imaginations (clumsy and beautiful as they are) and the empirical truth of the literal world that we seek to describe. The writers show us that if the world is a mirror of thoughts, no straightforwardly literal statement will ever be enough to help us see it more clearly.
(By: Jamie Redknapp)
 

sábado, 7 de abril de 2012

THE JOKE OF THE WEEK

APOSTROPHE - APÓSTROFO

Apóstrofo. Signo ortográfico auxiliar en forma de coma alta (’), que apenas se usa en el español actual.

1. Como usos propios de la lengua española, se distinguen principalmente dos:

a) Para indicar, en ediciones actuales no modernizadas de textos antiguos, sobre todo poéticos, la elisión de la vocal final de determinadas palabras (preposiciones, artículos, conjunciones) cuando la que sigue empieza por vocal: d’aquel (por de aquel), l’aspereza (por la aspereza), qu’es (por que es).

b) Para reflejar, en la escritura, la supresión de sonidos que se produce en ciertos niveles de la lengua oral. Aparece con frecuencia en textos literarios cuando el autor desea reproducir el habla de personajes de escasa cultura: «Sacúdete el vestidito, m’ija, pa’que se nos salga el mal agüero» (Hayen Calle [Méx. 1993]).

2. Se conserva en la reproducción de nombres o expresiones pertenecientes a lenguas en las que se mantiene el uso moderno del apóstrofo, como el catalán, el inglés, el francés o el italiano: L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, O’Connor, c’est la vie, D’Annunzio.

3. Hay que evitar los siguientes usos del apóstrofo, ajenos al español, y que se deben al influjo del inglés:

a) Cuando aparece en sustitución de las dos primeras cifras de un año: ’82 por 1982. Si se desea hacer la abreviación, lo que es frecuente en la expresión de acontecimientos relevantes celebrados en ciertos años, no debe utilizarse el apóstrofo: Barcelona ’92 (Juegos Olímpicos). Basta con las dos últimas cifras del año, que pueden unirse o no con guion a la palabra precedente: Barcelona 92 o Barcelona-92.

b) Cuando se usa, seguido de una s, para indicar el plural de una sigla: ONG’s. El plural de las siglas es invariable en español: las ONG (→ sigla, 3).

4. No debe utilizarse el apóstrofo para separar las horas de los minutos: las 20’30 h. En este caso, se recomienda el empleo del punto, aunque también se admiten los dos puntos (→ punto, 4.1 y dos puntos, 2.1).

5. Tampoco debe usarse para separar, en los números, la parte entera de la parte decimal: 3’1416. En este caso ha de emplearse preferentemente la coma (→ coma2, 4), aunque también se admite el uso del punto (→ punto, 4.4).

6. No debe confundirse con apóstrofe (‘invocación vehemente’ e ‘insulto’; → apóstrofe).

Punctuation: Apostrophe


English Punctuation: Apostrophe

The apostrophe probaly causes more grief than any of the other punctuation marks put together!
The problem nearly always seems to stem from users not understanding that the apostrophe has two very different (and very important) uses in English.
  • to show possession and ownership - e.g. Jack's car. Mary's father.
  • to indicate a contraction - he's (he is), we're (we are), they're (they are)
  • These two examples show the apostrophe being used for possession (sentence 1) and contraction (sentence 2)
    • Colombia's coffee exports have risen steadily over the past decade.
    • Colombia's one of the main coffee producing countries in the world.

      The POSSESSIVE APOSTROPHE

      In most cases you simply need to add 's to a noun to show possession:
      • a ship's captain, a doctor's patient, a car's engine, Ibrahim's coat, Mirianna's book.
      Plural nouns that do not end in s also follow this rule:
      • the children's room, the men's work, the women's club
      Ordinary (or common) nouns that end in s, both singular and plural, show possession simply by adding an ' after the s but proper nouns (names of people, cities, countries etc.) can form the possessive either by adding the 's or simply adding the ':
      • a. The Hughes' home (or the Hughes's home), Mr Jones's shop (or Mr Jones' shop), Charles' book (or Charles's book)
      • b. the ladies' tennis club, the teachers' journal, the priests' church (note that the priest's church would only be refering to one priest while the priests' church refers to a group.)
      General notes: Many people want to know how to form the possessive of their own name when it ends in an 's' or when refering to the whole family, e.g. The Jones' children.
      Today it is no longer considered incorrect to use either form (Jones's or Jones') and many large organisations now drop the ' completely (e.g. Barclays Bank, Missing Persons Bureau) when publishing their name.

      The APOSTROPHE for CONTRACTION

      The most common use of contracted apostrophes is for:
      • has'nt = had not
      • can't = can not
      • there's = there is
      • mustn't = must not
      • I'm = I am
      • it's = it is
      • let's = let us
      • I've = I have (also they've, we've)
      • she's = she has or she is (also he's)
      Remember:
      • it's = it is (a contraction) while its = possession
      • who's = who is (a contraction) while whose = possession