Offbeat Reference Requests: When to Say Yes and How to Say No

This essay explores the more unusual requests faculty and students make that are outside the normal scope of reference services. The author provides a list of considerations deciding to fulfill those requests and suggestions for refusing them

This is great, but can you make it red?: How to say no

Many of us know backseat design: Can you make this red? Can you move this over here? Why don’t we do it this way instead? While our colleagues often have great intentions, these requests can undermine informed design choices and distract from the bigger picture. This talk offers ideas on how to resist flights-of-fancy without causing conflict, explains why they happen, and explains the importance of standing your ground as a designer.Librarie

How to say no without saying no : A study of the refusal strategies of Americans and Germans

Cultures have been shown to vary drastically in their interactional styles, leading to different preferences for modes of speech act behavior. Culturally colored interactional styles create culturally determined expectations and interpretative strategies, and can lead to breakdowns in intercultural and interethnic communication. This dissertation investigated the differences between Germans and Americans in the speech act of rejection which can be explained by the general cultural differences. The native speaker subjects in this study were graduate students enrolled at four American Universities and at four Universities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The elicitation method used for this data collection was a discourse completion test, originally developed by Blum-Kulka that has been widely used for the collection of data on speech act realization both within and across language groups. The 18 situations included four stimuli for eliciting refusals: requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions. Each situation consisted of three different variables: social status (low, equal, high), social distance (stranger, acquaintance, intimate), and gender (same, opposite). The results indicated that Germans and Americans can be distinguished on the basis of their refusal strategies, since the choices of refusal strategies reflected the different characteristics of each culture: (1) Americans varied their refusal strategies according to status rather than social distance while Germans varied their refusal strategies according to social distance rather than status; (2) Germans employed fewer semantic formulas than did Americans in all 18 situations; (3) Germans employed more gratitude as well as more politeness strategies, positive and negative, than did Americans; (4) Germans employed an Avoidance strategy more often than Americans while Americans used the word ‘no’ more often than Germans; (5) German refusals were less direct and resorted to explanations other than their own inclinations in refusing, also German excuses were more vague than those given by Americans; (6) American refusals tended to be more direct and often gave their own inclinations as reasons for the refusal; (7) Germans used a third party for their explanations while Americans relied on their own decisions for their explanations

A 4-valued logic of strong conditional

How to say no less, no more about conditional than what is needed? From a logical analysis of necessary and sufficient conditions (Section 1), we argue that a stronger account of conditional can be obtained in two steps: firstly, by reminding its historical roots inside modal logic and set-theory (Section 2); secondly, by revising the meaning of logical values, thereby getting rid of the paradoxes of material implication whilst showing the bivalent roots of conditional as a speech-act based on affirmations and rejections (Section 3). Finally, the two main inference rules for conditional, viz. Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens, are reassessed through a broader definition of logical consequence that encompasses both a normal relation of truth propagation and a weaker relation of falsity non-propagation from premises to conclusion (Section 3)

Keynoter, September/October 2022

President\u27s Message Bosses Breakfast Flyer Membership Benefits AOP Purpose How to Say No Employee Development Time Holiday Auction Award Nominations Keynoter Award Our Reach NAEOP Conference Highlights Update from NAEOP Wine with Rhonda PSP Standards Membership Calendar of Event