Julie Kalish '91 Leads Session of Fall 2010 MLDP

Last week, the Management and Leadership Development Program (MLDP) welcomed Professor Julie Kalish ’91, Vermont attorney and lecturer in both Dartmouth's Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and Vermont Law School's Legal Writing Department. Professor Kalish began the session with surveys of employers and recent graduates that all stressed the importance of strong communication and writing skills in the workplace. Throughout Professor Kalish’s presentation, the participants learned how they might develop these valuable skills by embracing the “universals” of good writing: clarity, concision, and correctness.

MLDP participants utilized these rules both collectively and within their respective small groups in order to analyze real-life examples of workplace communications and to understand that individuals may draw a myriad of assumptions, good and bad, from one, three-line message. By the end of the evening, participants were carefully crafting and sharing their own written responses to an array of real workplace scenarios. With great thanks to Prof. Kalish, the participants took away the lesson to value each and every message they write as if it may reach the highest levels of management in their workplace.

-- Julius Bedford '12