What Causes People to Be Successful in Their Careers? Part IV: Effective Speech Making—Word Choice, Style, and Language Sophistication

Throughout these blogs, we have been asking the question: What causes people to be successful in their careers? The answer we provided was the achievement of people skills. We showed evidence of this position through research from leading universities. This research showed that much more than half of job success comes from people skills. We also noted that much of what we call people skills is effective communication.

Communication as a Premier People Skill

In our first blog, we used the model developed by Robert Bolton in People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts to show that certain attitudes support a person’s successful efforts at effective communication, attitudes that produce good relationships before formal communication even starts. These attitudes are genuineness, respect, and empathy.[1] We will refer to this paradigm as the “Bolton Model.”  

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Assume We Have a Can Opener

There’s an interesting article by Jim Manzi in the most recent issue of the City Journal. In it, he addresses the weaknesses of empirical research in the social sciences, a problem he attributes to the greater “causal density” of questions concerning human behavior. Because of he complexity and number of potential causes for an outcome, it is extremely difficult to conduct randomized field trials that isolate the cause to be tested.

 Manzi begins his article by referring back to the debate about the stimulus package. Noting that Nobel laureates lined up on both sides of the question, he writes that “[f]ierce debates can be found in frontier areas of all the sciences, of course, but this was as if, on the night before the Apollo moon launch, half of the world’s Nobel laureates in physics were asserting that rockets couldn’t reach the moon and the other half were saying that they could.” The only thing that could be said for sure about the stimulus is that, however it turned out, “several Nobelists would be wrong about it.”

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Marquette Graduates Account for Just Under One Quarter of All Practicing Lawyers in Wisconsin

Based on information provided by the State Bar of Wisconsin, there were 23,761 active members of the Wisconsin bar at the beginning of June 2010. Of these, 5,818 (24.5 percent) are graduates of the Marquette Law School. The remaining 17,943 were almost evenly divided between graduates of the University of Wisconsin Law School (8,982) and graduates of out-of-state law schools (8,961).

Presumably, this means that 62.3 percent of Wisconsin lawyers were admitted pursuant to the diploma privilege, compared to 37.7 percent who either passed the bar examination or were admitted based on practice elsewhere.

Unfortunately, detailed information on the alma maters of those who attended law school out of state is not currently available. However, it appears that the schools with the largest number of alumni practicing in Wisconsin are located in states bordering Wisconsin.

Special thanks to James Behan, Database Support Analyst, State Bar of Wisconsin and to Marquette law student Colin Forester-Hoare for their assistance with the compilation of this data.

Continue ReadingMarquette Graduates Account for Just Under One Quarter of All Practicing Lawyers in Wisconsin