"Clarity, Correctness, and Concision" - Prof. Julie Kalish '91 Leads MLDP Session about Writing in the Workplace

Spring 2011 Management and Leadership Development Program (MLDP) Participants

Last week MLDP welcomed Professor Julie Kalish ’91 for a session about “Writing in the Workplace”. Professor Kalish is a Vermont attorney and lecturer in Dartmouth’s Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. To start off the session, Professor Kalish summarized the 3 C’s of good writing – “clarity, correctness, and concision.” She presented surveys completed as part of the development of the Management and Leadership Development Program indicating that employers greatly value good writing and gave students the opportunity to reflect on their own experiences writing in the workplace.

Towards the latter half of the session, the students’ small groups participated in an exercise where they took real life situations and drafted written responses to the different circumstances. Each small group had the opportunity to share and discuss their responses with Professor Kalish and the all of the MLDP participants.

The MLDP participants enjoyed the event and found it very helpful. Will Hernandez ’13 said that the session taught him that workplace communication should be “quick, straight to the point, correct, and formal.” Patricia de Lucio took away that “being clear to the cause and appropriate to what you are saying is most important.”

-- Julius Bedford '12