Attributive tags, which are also called signal phrases, alert the reader that you are beginning to paraphrase or quote a source. Attributive tags also demonstrate the authority of your sources; giving proper credit to your sources demonstrates careful research and distinguishes your ideas from those of your source authors.
Embedded Hyperlinks
For emails and other digital documents, hyperlinks provide readers with a direct, convenient way to access the sources you’re citing.
In most word-processing applications (including Outlook, Gmail, Word, and Google Docs), you can create formatted hyperlinks by highlighting the text you want to make into a link, right-clicking/control-clicking, choosing the “link” or “add link” option, and pasting in the appropriate URL.
You can hyperlink the attributive verb, the name of the publication, the title of the article, or the names of the authors. Keep your hyperlink choices consistent throughout a single email or document.
Raffaella Sadun, Joseph Fuller, Stephen Hansen, and PJ Neal of Harvard Business Review reported on a recent study of 5,000 C-suite job descriptions.
As the July-August 2022 issue of Harvard Business Review explains, the workplace has evolved so that “strong social skills” are essential for both new employees and members of the C-suite. These include “a high level of self-awareness, the ability to listen and communicate well, a facility for working with different types of people and groups.”
In “The C-Suite Skills that Matter Most,” Harvard Business Review explains the way that the changing workplace environment demands not just technical skills, but also people skills, especially “what psychologists call ‘theory of mind’—the capacity to infer how others are thinking and feeling.”
Content on this page was created by the Business Communication team at the Wisconsin School of Business.