Recent Course Offerings

In response to numerous requests, I am listing my Top 25 Courses I have offered recently, online and onsite, synchronously and asynchronously, and in group and coaching sessions. 

1. Business Writing for Results – Using standards of business writing across and outside the organization.  
2. Technical Writing Essentials – Writing in an audience-appropriate style for IT specialists, engineers, scientists, architects, and accountants.
3. Advanced Writing Skills for Experienced Professionals – Developing a multidisciplinary toolbox in writing all forms of business messages. 
4. Using Principles of Critical Thinking in Writing – Adopting time-tested reasoning techniques in speculative and analytical messages
5. Writing Effective Business Reports – Producing descriptive, analytical, and persuasive reports by building a useful library of templates
6. Business Grammar – Covering tricky grammatical rules, their exceptions, and the most common word and sentence errors
7. Business Writing for Multilingual Professional – Communicating for nonnative English speakers in formal and informal writing styles
8. Writing High-Impact Executive Summaries – Summarizing lengthy documents and experiences with precision and power 
9. Persuasive Writing – Wooing readers by studying and practicing the principles of influence
10. Proposal Writing – Creating internal and external pitches to get your readers to yes
11. Perfecting Procedural Writing – Generating instructional documents in compliance with organizational and regulatory standards
12. Writing Effective Email – Hitting the high points in emails and messaging to save time for your readers and yourself
13. Writing Powerful Slide Decks – Designing memorable slide content that brings home your key points
14. Writing with Respect – Crafting acknowledgments, appreciations, and apologies to deepen positive relationships
15. Revising, Editing, and Proofreading – Protecting your REP (Revise content and structure, Edit expression, Proofread for errors).
16.  Writing Fast Under Pressure – Employing the writing process necessary for efficiency.
17. Customer Service Writing – Winning customers and business through reader-focused writing
18. Writing in Plain Language – Translating jargon and legalese for a general audience, especially for government workers
19. Blogging for Business – Capturing online audiences with compelling content.
20. Designing and Presenting a Business Case – Cultivating an authoritative, evidence-based, results-driven business case for upper management
21. Audit Report Writing – Applying the hallmarks of exceptional audit reports
22. Writing Root-Cause Analyses – Composing scientific-based, exhaustive, credible causal analyses 
23. Evaluation Report Writing – Assessing business situations accurately, from performance appraisals to project assessments 
24. Investigative Report Writing – Completing comprehensive, objective incident investigations
25. Resume and Job Application Writing – Representing yourself professionally in the job application process 

If your organization or team would benefit from these training opportunities, please reach me at Phil@PhilVassallo.com. 

13+ Reasons to Look Forward to 2023

My last post offered 13-plus reasons for remembering 2022. On this day, the eighteenth anniversary of this blog, I give 13-plus reasons for anticipating 2023 with delight.

1. Work. I have a nearly completely booked schedule through the first half of this year and a promise to see more of the same as the year progresses. Work keeps me motivated to stay at the top of my game as I research developments in rhetoric, business, and communication.

2. Nashville. I have never been to Nashville, but I will correct that miss in the early spring, visiting the Grand Ole Opry, Ryman Auditorium, Country Music Hall of Fame, and Honky Tonk Highway, among other places of interest.

3. Cuba. Another place I have never been to, which I will remedy in late April through Road Scholar. I'll stop by Havana, Cienfuegos, and Trinidad. I look forward to hearing the music, watching the dancing, doing some of my own dancing, tasting the cuisine, learning the history, practicing the language, and meeting the people.

4. Upstate New York Theater Tour. I plan to take a 1,300-mile, mid-June car trip through the towns of Ithaca, Syracuse, Utica, Cooperstown, Saratoga, Schenectady, Albany, and Woodstock. All of them are homes to summer theater or music festivals, so I'll have a lot to see besides the verdant countryside, which is a deep pleasure in itself. 

5. Deer Isle. In mid-July, I will attend the annual family reunion in Deer Isle, Maine, where we will head to Arcadia National Park, Isle au Haut, Stonington Opera House, and 44 North Coffee.

6. New England Theater Tour. On both ends of the Deer Isle trip, I will go on a similar theater tour that I took in 2022, covering the Dorset Theatre Festival in Dorset, Vermont; Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut. This year, I will add the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. Hopefully, I will meet up with friends along the way.

7. New Jersey Shore Theater Tour. Theater tripping continues in late July on the Jersey Shore at Cape May Stage, West Cape May, Long Beach Island, and Long Branch. This trip is part beach and part playhouse.

8. Berlin. This city with a remarkable heritage has something for everybody, whether it's art, music, dining, history, or architecture. It is definitely a checkoff item of most bucket lists. I'll be there in mid- and late-August

9. Malta. My island, my people, my roots. This will be my tenth, and maybe my last trip there, in late August for the Mgarr festa, my parents' village.

10. New York City. I'm fortunate (I owe it all to my parents) to be living so close to such an exciting city, rich with culture, art, music, literature, history, fashion, international cuisine. Since I work in the city so often, I'll probably extend my stay with trips to Smalls and Mezzrow, Birdland, Dizzy's, MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the New York Public Library.

11. Friends. For all the first 10 events, I will likely connect with family and friends of like-minded interests. In these cases, I benefit from their unique perspective on whatever we are seeing or hearing. enhancing my own experience. 

12. Reading. I have a feeling that 2023 will send me to more books on culture and creativity, my current interests. For starters, I expect to read works of Geert Hofstede, Joe Henrich, and Woo-kyoung Ahn.

13. Writing. All of these experiences will lead to more playwriting, essays, and poems.

Look ahead. Plan like you'll live forever; live like you'll have only today.

13+ Things That Made 2022 Memorable

For the first post of this year, I'll take both a look back, followed by a forward-looking post on the eighteenth anniversary of WORDS ON THE LINE on January 5. A special thanks to Ian Denning, whose post inspired this one.

Remembered 2022 Pleasures

1. In January, I continued four sets of Zoom meetings with family and friends, thanks to my sister, niece and husband, daughters, and their husbands, childhood friends, work friends, and associates. These chats opened me to bountiful creative ideas, led me to new adventures, checked my phobias, and reinforced my better angels.

2. In February, I continued my never-ending quest of experiencing international cuisine by picking up Haitian patties and eating djon djon with my younger daughter's Haitian in-laws.

3. In March, I finally visited Miami Beach, dancing to Latin jazz at Ball and Chain in Little Havana, viewing local Latinx art at Vizcaya Museum and Perez Art Museum, cruising Little Haiti, and checking out the Everglades, because in America, there is nothing else like that blend of Latin culture and nature.

4. In April, I spent a few days in Maui, specifically Kaanapali Beach, with my older daughter's family, obviously to get a respite from the northeastern cold, but also to appreciate the wildlife (whales and turtles) and the splendorous landscape.

5. In late April throughout May and part of June, I began an eight-week writing course for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, a wonderful organization of committed employees. The course was so successful that it repeated later in the year, and a third offering will roll out later this month. 

6. In May, I started regular post-pandemic dinner dates at New Jersey restaurants with friends, feeling invincible with my multiple covid vaccinations and craving outdoor activities. From my friends, I always pick up new ideas about popular culture and vital reading material.

7. In late June, I headed to Cocoa Beach for a weeklong family reunion. I'll usually pick up some medical knowledge from my West coast daughter and her husband, both doctors, and musical wisdom from my East coast daughter and her husband, both musicians and music teachers. Being with the five grandson, ages 2 to 12, was equally educational.

8. In July, my wife and I took a cool theater tour through New England, going to Dorset Theatre Festival in Dorset, Vermont; Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; and Westport Country Playhouse in Westport, Connecticut. During this tour, we saw the great Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Anna in the Tropics, about connections between the dignity of manual labor and the imaginative power of literature, and Kim's Convenience, the comedy that led to the television sitcom. The best part of this trip, however, was meeting up with three different groups of friends in each state.

9. In August, we hung out in Oakland, California with my West coast daughter's family, where I picked up Collected Poems, 1974 - 2004 by Rita Dove Poems, 1962 - 2012 by Louise Gluck, and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, inspirational reading material for any time or occasion. 

10. In September, I visited the Warner Gallery at the Mamaroneck Public Library to see Robert Mucci's premiere art exhibition, Out of Silence, a collection of some 30 abstract paintings and multimedia pieces that was both visually appealing and life-affirming.

11. In October, I had dinner at Queen of Sheba Restaurant in New York City with Charles Lynch, Brooklyn poet and my English professor during my undergraduate days. Any meeting with Charles leads to an adventure in learning and laughter.

12. In November, I attended a concert of the Jubilee Singers at the Liquid Church in Princeton. The Jubilee Singers comprise African American singers (and others, as my younger daughter is a proud member) performing traditional spirituals. Their soaring music is heaven-bound. 

13.  In December, I closed the year by spending some time in the Monterey dunes and on the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, visiting Dracena Park, Huckleberry Botanic Regional Park, and California Academy of Sciences, as well as  rereading my favorite memoir, Music Is My Mistress by the inimitable genius composer, pianist, and bandleader Duke Ellington. Duke reminds me that creativity is a 24-7 endeavor.

All of these events kept alive my desire to work and write and share ideas.

Anticipated 2023 Pleasures

To be continued.

What Are You Reading over the Holidays?

Last post of the year!

One of my great expectations as any holiday approaches is the found time to read more, and this year has not disappointed. Since I would be spending Christmas and New Year's days on another coast, I knew that the vacation would begin the moment I passed security at Newark Airport's Terminal C and settled into a seat at the waiting area of my departure gate to read. The cross-country flight would grant me another six hours of uninterrupted reading. Then I anticipated more late-night or early-morning opportunities during a stay on the dunes near Monterey and hills of Oakland. 

I recently bought at a bargain price the Library of America's boxed set of all 14 Kurt Vonnegut novels, spanning 45 years, from 1952 to 1997, because I wanted to rediscover why I was so caught up in the Vonnegut mystique of the early 1970s, when I was a college student. I've gotten through Player Piano (1952), a disjointed but revelatory critique of the dystopia that would emerge when machines replace human labor and engineers and managers run everything, and The Sirens of Titan (1959), a slapstick space travel odyssey about wealth, greed, and vanity.

Then sometimes you get an unexpected gift, as I did on Christmas Eve when browsing East Bay Booksellers on College Avenue in the Rockridge section of Oakland, California. I picked up Again, the Dawn: Selected Poems, 1976 - 2022 by Grace Schulman. Schulman, a recent recipient of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Achievement in American Poetry and a Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, where she has taught for 50 years. As one of her early students, I was greatly influenced by her teaching style and writing, as I mentioned in a previous post. This latest Schulman book collects 127 poems from all nine of her volumes, standing as a testament to an extraordinary career, which I hope is far from over. 

So here I am, switching between Vonnegut and Schulman, returning to writers I discovered a half-century ago. But I am also reading newer writers, mostly nonfiction, as I've noted in previous posts here. What are you reading during your downtime?

Use Your Words!

When children cry without explanation, parents typically say, "Use your words." It's a good reminder to all of us when writing business email or instant messages. Below are three common examples of using our words to say what we really mean.

This first example written by an information technology analyst to an end user replaces two words too general in the context with more specific ones:

• Vague: You must do several things before starting the engine.
• Specific: You must take three security precautions before starting the engine.

This second example written by a project manager to a department chief shows how two specific project-related terms replace a crude, virtually meaningless word:

• Vague: We will talk about project stuff during the meeting.
• Specific: We will talk about project deliverables and contingencies during the meeting.

This third example written by an engineer to all levels of the organization interested only in operations minimizes the value of two other business aspects because they do not relate to engineering. The second draft clarifies that oversight. 

• Vague: This engineering report divides the business issues into operations and miscellaneous.
• Specific: This engineering report divides the business issues into operations, administration, and management.

The problem with being specific is that we sometimes do not come up with the best words in first draft, so we should allow editing time if we want to use our words.

 

Pandemic Practices

I know the last thing you want to hear about is the pandemic. But I've learned a lot more than the value of getting vaccinated, washing my hands, masking up, and meeting others sparingly during those two-plus years that we were in pandemic mode, although I am grateful for those lessons. Sure, I lost a lot of business, but as the saying goes, money ain't everything, especially when considering those who lost their lives to covid. I mentioned in previous posts the pleasures of reading, writing, listening, and seeing more intently (and intensely) during those "lost years," but I believe I have gained so much by slowing down my commercial treadmill from March 2020 to June 2022. Here is how.  

I found unprecedented time to read many of the books on my bucket list, but I still have many more to read. Some recent worthwhile reads have been Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Geert Hofstede's Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations, Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci, and Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation.

I have subscribed to YouTube channels that never cease to put a smile on my face, including those of pianists Rossano Sportiello, Stephanie Trick & Paolo Alderighi. Or I could just listen a thousand times to pianist Michel Camilo play From Within, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane play The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond play Emily, pianist-singer Eliane Elias play Samba Triste, or pianist Ahmad Jamal play Poinciana. Those five videos alone could take and make an entire day for me.

All of these activities have inspired and continue to shape me, proof that we never stop learning.  

Advice for All Writers from Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) offers eight tips for fiction writers in his introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (2000), but three of them, tips 1, 5, and 8, apply to business and technical writers as well. 

Tip 1: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. We need to heed this advice when writing anything at work, from an audit or an investigation report to a procedure or a proposal. Readers do not need to know all the who, what, where, when, why, and how—only as needed. Consider the business purpose related to your audience. It's not what you know that matters; it's what your readers need to know.

Tip 5: Start as close as to the end as possible. Fiction writers can take this tip to mean that they should reveal or foreshadow the climax or even the resolution early in the story. On-the-job writers use another term: executive summary. Ask for what you want right up front. In an incident report, you will want to note the human and property damage of an accident immediately. For a proposal, you want to put the ask right away.

Tip 8: Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such a complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should the cockroaches eat the last few pages. Well, Vonnegut said it all with this piece of guidance, didn't he? Place the request before the reason, the solution before the problem, and the result before the process.

Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut.