So along with my two weld labs I have to complete a "business communication" class this quarter and god just looking at the textbook and the format is reminding me of all the worst parts of college

Tho I WILL give this to the external site we have to use: it's formatted so that I can have the homework and the textbook up in the same window, making it very easy not to actually read the book

This is good because the parts of the book I'm skimming even in the first chapter are real ghoulish

Pictured: Nothing at all weird and kinda racist

There might actually be something to this, but the presentation and the overall vibes are Off

@coriander I think like... some of these points are probably correct and maybe you need to know them in a business class like yeah, two semesters of japanese I took, I was told outright refusal is considered impolite in like social interactions. But at the same time I'm pretty sure there are plenty of cases of americans not wanting to refuse something (like in work / negotiations) so they ask for impossible shit as a condition.

It feels like older anthropological studies, or like travel food writing.

@lapis @coriander it's also wrong in the sense that in chinese it's outright acceptance that's considered rude and if you want to be really traditionally polite you should probably say no first like, three times

like their model of "asia" is clearly just japan and not, you know, the other countries whose flags are listed

@lapis @coriander “ah yes, China, the country whose meritocratic administrative systems were grounded in the standardized testing of literary classics while europeans were running around hitting themselves with sticks… surely they do not ‘give authority to written information’” ?????