By Linda Forrest
Many moons ago, I had the great pleasure of taking a communications course with Dr. Eric McLuhan, son of world famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan. A well-respected author and professor in his own right, Dr. McLuhan’s course was designed in order to provide the students, who were studying a range of topics in business management, with a solid language base upon which to establish themselves as competent writers and communicators.
Through course material, we were taught the wonders of styling sentences and how to properly use punctuation. These sound like fundamentals and they are, but the amount of proper grammatical and punctuation training included in a typical primary and even secondary school curriculum is positively lacking. This post-secondary course had us circling grammatical errors, doing word puzzles, correcting punctuation, and learning the true value of a semi-colon among other activities in the name of strengthening our communications abilities. As a result, I feel that each student in that class ended up a better writer and although I’m not certain of the whereabouts of the majority of my classmates, I’m confident that they’re better communicators today because of it.
Having always had a love of language and reading, I consider myself quite the philomath and get positively giddy at the prospect of learning a new word (being in technology PR, this opportunity presents itself quite often, as you can imagine.) Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day email has been coming into my inbox for years now. Having had no idea that I would end up in public relations as my career, my strong feeling is that no matter where I ended up career-wise, I would have been well served by my love of knowledge and language, in part fostered by the course taught by Dr. McLuhan.
Writing is predominantly what we do here at inmedia. Although we may not subscribe fully to the idea that the medium is the message, I feel lucky to have been educated in part by Dr. McLuhan and to this day still make use of some of the reference materials provided in that class. Everyone, even professional writers need to “sharpen their saw” on a consistent basis and I’m glad to have these tools at my disposal. So, thank you, Dr. McLuhan.
