Welcome! I’m Phyllis Mindell, and you can call me “Word Grandma.”

For more than 40 years, I’ve worked with young women as a language consultant, providing expertise in reading, writing, speaking, and all things communication. To celebrate my 80th birthday, I’ve launched an exciting new project: TheWordGrandma (now PhyllisMindell.com).

My ninth decade will devote itself to empowering young women so that your voices are heard as you seek not only to do well but also to heal the broken world, as Charlotte the spider did, through the language of power.

Why model the language of power on a little spider? Charlotte the spider stands as a great teacher of how a strong female (even if she’s tiny and has six legs) uses powerful language to persuade, to change the course of events, and, of course, to save the life of the runt of the litter. A quiet voice of power, love, and true leadership.

This site is free in every way: free from ads, free from costs, and free services for those who want them. It is not political and has no point of view except about language; I want to help you figure out how to express your ideas without weakness, hostility, or anger.

The ugliness we see and hear on social media has diminished our ability to argue, to speak civilly, to listen respectfully, to persuade others — young people must be able to stand strong and speak powerfully. If you’re shocked and saddened by what you see and hear and wish you could find a voice of power, kindness, and love, let us help you.

While the site is directed toward young women, everyone can benefit from powerful communication skills. Visit if you:

• want to write, speak, and read with confidence and power
• yearn to accomplish something worthwhile in the world
• sometimes find your foot in your mouth
• don’t seem to be heard
• see others get credit for your work or ideas
• sound, write, or present below your ability level
• feel inadequate in challenging situations
• wish to find a strong authentic voice
• long to disagree without nastiness

The site will include quick tips, but the real progress in your language and communication requires you to read and practice.

We’ll provide links to samples of How to Say It for Women. The full book (and ebook) can also be found online and at your local libraries.

In addition to language tools and tips, the site has articles, books, essays, and links to projects.

Please feel free to use any material you see here or link your friends to information that’s helped you. (Please cite and link!)

Thanks for visiting!

Note: Phyllis Mindell, of blessed memory, passed away on October 21, 2022. She is survived by her sons, Joe and David Mindell; their wives Ossie Borosh and Pamela Mindell; and grandchildren, Arye, Samuel, Lucia, and Clara Mindell. Phyllis was predeceased by her beloved husband, Marvin.

Gifts in memory of Phyllis Mindell may be directed to support the Mindell Family Fund-Surgery at the Johns Hopkins Department of Surgery. Please make checks payable to Johns Hopkins University. Gifts may be mailed with a memo indicating that this gift is in memory of Phyllis Mindell to the Fund for Johns Hopkins Medicine, 550 North Broadway, Suite 722, Baltimore, MD 21205 or made online at https://secure.jhu.edu/form/surgery by choosing “Other” from the drop down.

This website (PhyllisMindell.com, previously TheWordGrandma) contains some of Phyllis Mindell’s articles, essays, writing tips, and other works.     

Read more about Dr. Phyllis Mindell below.

For nearly 40 years, as founder and president of Well-Read, Dr. Phyllis Mindell created, presented, and wrote all course books for seminars in women’s language, reading, writing, public speaking, and leadership. She also mentored young women who apply her ideas to their lives and work; they now hold leadership positions in medicine, law, psychiatry, business, and the nonprofit world. (Read about them in Profiles!)

As an original thinker in her fields, Dr. Mindell wrote five books, including Words: Connect, Clarify, and Lead (2021), and dozens of articles, columns, and research papers on all aspects of leadership, language, and communications. Power Reading was cited as one of the 30 best business books of the year and selected for Soundview Executive Book Summaries. A Woman’s Guide to the Language of Success: Communicating With Confidence and Power and How to Say It for Women, have sold over 200,000 copies and been translated into German, Chinese, and Arabic. How to Say It for Executives was lauded by the Carnegie Library. And you’ll find practical tips from those books right here, free.

An engaging, inspiring, and provocative speaker, Dr. Mindell keynoted and addressed such audiences as Simmons Women’s Leadership Conference, University of Michigan Medical School, Xerox International, and dozens of others in the US and abroad. Her students come from more than twenty countries, her corporate clients include Fortune 500s as well as nonprofits to whom she donates her time.

She earned the doctorate from the University of Rochester, the MS from City College of New York, and the BA from Brooklyn College. She has also done postdoctoral study in neurolinguistics, literature, and writing. Dr. Mindell held the title of adjunct Professor at Georgetown Medical School, where she helped scientists and doctors hone their professional and patient communication skills.

In 2021, Phyllis Mindell published “Words: Connect, Clarify, and Lead” with co-author Erica Bryant.  

Phyllis Mindell passed away in October 2022, survived by her sons, Joe and David Mindell; their wives Ossie Borosh and Pamela Mindell; and grandchildren, Arye, Samuel, Lucia, and Clara Mindell. Phyllis was predeceased by her beloved husband, Marvin.

In A Painful Case, James Duffy, a literate loner with “neither companions nor friends, church nor creed,” meets a married woman and engages her in a friendship. When she “caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek,” Duffy breaks off the relationship. Five years later he hears of her decline into drunkenness and suicide when she steps in front of a train. His epiphany comes when he realizes that “he had been outcast from life’s feast” and is alone.

In The Dead, Gabriel Conroy and his wife attend a holiday gathering. As they leave his wife hears a tenor singing an Irish song that brings memories of a young man, Michael Furey, who died many years ago. Gabriel is so wrapped up in his own desire and ego that he fails to notice Greta’s revery till they return to their hotel room and she tells the story of the sickly young man who stood outside the gate the night before she left for the convent school and died as a result. Gabriel finally realizes that he has never known such love for any woman.

Duffy and Gabriel are literate men. Duffy owns a wall of bookshelves that “were arranged from below upwards according to bulk.” He owns Wordsworth, the Maynooth Catechism, Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, Nietzche, and he likes Mozart. His friendship with Mrs. Sincoe is a literate one: “…he entangled his thoughts with her.. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her.” Unlike Gabriel, however, he doesn’t write. When Mrs. Sincoe asks him “why he didn’t write out his thoughts,” he answers, “For what…  with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To subject himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and fine arts to impresarios?”

When he does write for himself, he uses the third person: he is alienated from his own soul as from the rest of the world. After he breaks with Mrs. Sincoe, he writes, “Love between man and man is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” So there can be neither love nor friendship for James Duffy. Duffy’s intellect doesn’t help him to tolerate or understand other people – he fails to communicate despite his literacy. “We cannot give ourselves…we are our own…every bond…is a bond to sorrow.”

Even after the death of Mrs. Sincoe, it takes a long while before he admits to himself that “he withheld life from her,” that he’d “sentenced her to death.” His literacy, his culture, his books, Mozart, even the love of a fine woman could not save him. “His life would be lonely…until he died, ceased to exist, became a memory – if anyone remembered him.”

In The Dead, Gabriel is not only literate: he has a degree from the Royal University. He “loved to feel the covers and turn the pages of newly printed books. Nearly every day… he used to wander down the quays to the second hand booksellers…” He writes professionally and orates at the family gathering.

But, despite his literacy, Gabriel repeatedly fails to read his environment. He “could not listen” to the music at the party. He engages in a verbal duel with his old friend, Miss Ivors, when she jokingly suggests that he’s a West Briton rather than an Irishman. He’s too distracted to listen to what old Mrs. Malins tells him and ignores his wife’s enthusiasm about a trip to Ireland.

Gabriel perverts language as a tool of human communication. As he enters the party, he’s already concerned about his speech, although he disdains his audience. “He was undecided about the lines from robert Browning because he feared they would be over the heads of his hearers…their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand…He would fail with them…His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

He plans to use the speech as a way of getting back at Miss Ivors, even if it means lying about his aunts. “What did he care that his aunts were only two ignorant old women?”

Gabriel fails to communicate with his own children: “He’s an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom’s eyes at night and making him do the dumb-bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout. The poor child!”

Gabriel uses his gift of language to distance himself from his own people as well. he writes a literary column for The Daily Express, apparently an English versus Irish publication, and he strives to travel to the continent “to keep in touch with the languages.”

Gabriel’s epiphany comes long after the gathering ends. As he and Gretta are leaving, she lingers on the stairs listening to the tenor sing an old Irish song. Then he misreads Gretta’s changed attitude. “She…seemed unaware of the talk about her…and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart.” He’s aroused to passion, thinking of “moments of their secret life together.” But he fails to speak the words he thinks: “He longed to recall to her those moments to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy.” Roused to passion, Gabriel doesn’t notice Gretta’s revery and, instead of speaking words of love to her, he tells her about a debt repaid by Freddy Malins. She then tells the story of Michael Furey, the delicate boy who died for her sake. Finally, Gabriel sees himself for what he is: “a ludicrous figure…a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to the vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the  pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.”

As Gretta sleeps, Gabriel understands that “…she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake.” He thinks about the impending deaths of them all, all except Michael Furey, and realizes, “Better pass boldly into that other world in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” And he knows, “He had never felt that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love…His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.” But communication fails him once more: “He was conscious of but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence.” Gabriel, whose language failed to enlighten him, now must face the final silence.

When my mother left the shtetl of Jaworow in 1925 to go to America, her family and friends gathered for a farewell event at which they signed a blue velvet autograph album and added their names to a list of guests at the event. Participants in a flowering of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, they signed in five languages. The album traveled, along with postcards and other documents, with her to New York and later to Brooklyn. When she died in 1989, the album moved to my home and later my apartment in Washington, D.C. It won little attention until I trained to be a guide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and decided to have it translated and preserved online. Visit broniasalbum.wordpress.com to learn more about Bronia and see original photos and documents.

Like all people learning to read, the adults in that course revealed very quickly that their intellectual capacity greatly exceeded their ability figure out what the words say. Every preschooler, every new immigrant, every dyslexic person shares the problem: they have trouble reading The Cat in the Hat but can discuss complex ideas about good and evil, politics, and family life. Because no interesting reading matter was available at their levels, I faced the challenge of finding pieces whose simplicity of language belies the depth of their ideas. Just like the adults in the literacy classes!

Along came Langston Hughes, one of the poets who chose to write in the vernacular rather than the classical language of earlier scribes. His simple language, easily accessible even to early adult readers, talks of big ideas: witness lines like,

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

With only one two syllable word, these lines and the poem from which they come give us enough to think about and talk about for weeks. They invite us to revisit and reflect upon the ideas and read again.

The classes went very well: we figured out how to set up a page for each person and craft an individual program; if someone missed a few weeks, their class could pick up where it left off.

On the first day of class, most of the students didn’t know where to begin when asked to write their own name. And they suffered: Pearlie May had a permanent chip on her shoulder and described ugly encounters she didn’t know how to deal with. Her illiteracy was so deep that she couldn’t take or deliver a message. It turned out that her hostility reflected only that she didn’t have the words to deal with the world: as the ability to read and write grew, the sweet temperament emerged. Some proved brilliant: Hattie went from illiteracy to reading the Hughes’s Simple stories and writing literary critiques.

And Emma, although she ran a large estate and was a renowned cook, never mastered more than the most basic literacy: she was the first dyslexic I’d met and the inspiration for my doctoral studies and lifelong interest in the “black swans” of literacy, the dyslexic and the highly gifted.

The group gave a poetry reading for the other adult classes in the community: each chose a favorite poem and practiced the art of oral reading. The evening proved a great success and brought one big surprise: Emma decided instead of reading her choice to sing it: The Weary Blues of course is the song played “… With his ebony hands on each ivory key…”  With her adult wisdom, she fully understood.

“This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited … a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu… Because we can never again live apart, we must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

King’s nonviolence brings love for all humanity; it channels rage into loving action; it shuns physical violence ; it embraces all faiths and colors; it holds a clear moral position; it excludes no one from love; it seeks the end all decent people seek: “the end is redemption, the end is reconciliation, the end is the creation of the beloved community.”

No one can say what he would have thought of this summer’s demonstrations except through his own words: I think he would have smiled at some aspects and wept at others. 

He’d have smiled:

At the beloved communities of peaceful protestors, who came to mourn together with anger and love. 

“It is this spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends.”

“The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be  the day of man as man.”

“Nonviolent resistance is a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.”

And Martin Luther King Jr. would have wept:

For what we’ve lost, forgotten, never learned, or erased in the half century since the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 

For the burners, who torch shops, schools, police stations.

For the destroyers, who deface and shatter statues.

“…it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.”

For those who attacked schools and houses of worship and sold their own souls for a moment of revenge. 

“…the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”

For the well dressed young man walking off with a 65” tv in downtown Washington, having bought into the worst materialism of our time but not the civic duty that binds us together. 

For the attorneys who firebombed a police car in New York, only to have their lawyer suggest that their sentences should be cut because “no harm was done.”

“The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers..”

For the spray painters who diminish themselves through death wishes and curses. 

For the nihilists who have decided that their goals can be achieved only through chaos, not love. 

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Martin Luther King III and older King partners interviewed for the Times June 26 issue speak of their sadness at the acts of violence, looting, arson, and defacement of statues: “…we…were demonstrating…the power of nonviolence… you don’t write people off as the enemy…When you enter a confrontation, it is with an intention to move to reconciliation.” – “deeply dismayed by the initial outbreak of violence…” These voices of peace, unity, and reconciliation mirror the voices of the Floyd family and must be heard in the conversation on how to end historic systemic racism in America. 

When we see protestors kneel together, walk arm in arm, share water with police and each other, sing together, pray together, demand action, we see King’s vision. When we see the looters, arsonists, destroyers, and marchers who spout hate, we see a small dark but influential voice that masquerades as the voice of the people. 

Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, his colleagues are dying off, but their philosophy and discipline remain and must return to our cultural conversation. The substance and methods of peaceful resistance endure; indeed, they offer hope for revival of our American spirit and unity.

“The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor..”

Words: Connect, Clarify, and Lead, by Dr. Phyllis Mindell and Erica Bryant
24 steps to start your WORDS journey to clarify, connect, and lead, from “me to we” all the way to the summit of loving argument and the pinnacle of loving criticism. See how WORDS enable you to find your authentic voice in the world, aided by the wisdom and experience of two professional writers and teachers.

Power Reading
This book will NOT show you how to speed read, since speed reading doesn’t work. This book teaches the principles of Power Reading, helping you increase your reading efficiency at work by 10 to 70 percent. The book also shows you how to apply Power Reading skills to the computer screen, and demonstrates ways to improve writing, listening and study skills.

How to Say it for Executives
How to Say it for Executives offers everything current and future leaders need to know to get their ideas across powerfully, efficiently, and humanely.

How to Say It for Women
Packed with powerful techniques and real-world tips, this practical, candid guide shows women how to shed the language of weakness and gain the language of power. Real-life examples, specific advice, exercises, business and literary references show women how to overcome subtle and overt chauvinism, kick the “spontaneity” delusion, and shape policy decisions at the top.

A Woman’s Guide to the Language of Success
An expert on professional communications teaches women how to transform themselves by shedding weak phrases, gestures and words, in order to command respect, motivate, establish authority, and make a difference.

Phyllis Mindell, 81, still recalls the coats her father Sol Gross made out of remnants of Persian lamb in a rented New York loft. Despite his allergies, he’d patch the scraps together, in 10-inch strips, to create coats to sell at modest department stores.

“He was an unsuccessful furrier, it was the worst possible thing for an intellectual,” Mindell says from her home in Washington, D.C. 

At the time, however, the world, and with it the Gross family, was being battered by the Great Depression.

“You did anything you could to make a living,” she says. 

The family lived frugally, but there was one thing Sol and Esther Gross always had money for: charity. Before taking a trip in the late ‘60s, Mindell’s father brought an envelope to her house and placed it in a book. Were something to happen to him, she was to send it to the address marked on the envelope.

“When he returned, he took the envelope and mailed it away,” says Mindell, who’d been unaware her father had been helping support a less-fortunate family overseas.

This compassion left a mark on Mindell, a writer who ran a successful business teaching advanced communications.

How did the path of a young Brooklyn College student link to that of an Argentine marquis studying at NYU’s Institute for Latin American Studies? Even that’s a story: my dearly beloved best friend “sister” Gioia went to NYU and, when I came to spend the weekend, we were set to meet her then boyfriend at the Catholic Students Lounge. There we met H and his Latin American coterie (it was the friend from Peru who gave me the llama) and went to one of the famed Village cafes. Somehow H and I connected and he introduced me to one of his (many) charming ways: he taught me to link arms with him as we sipped our wine. That was enough: I was smitten!

His group of friends befriended me and we attended NYU parties and drove to the cafes on Sheepshead Bay while  H and I enjoyed a lighthearted and (we both knew) ephemeral romance. He was the first (only?) man who serenaded me with gaucho love songs; he wove stories about how if he and Peron met in the street only one would live; he told of the day he was speeding around a dangerous curve on his motorcycle and the Virgin Mary saved his life (Jewish girls from Brooklyn do not marry men who were rescued by the Virgin Mary); he described the  paintings in his parents’ home. And when my birthday (I think it was my nineteenth because I’d met Marvin before my 20th) arrived, he gave me a gold charm engraved with my initials; when I asked why he didn’t sign his name he said that my husband would not be pleased to see such a gift from another man. If he ever did an  unkind deed or hurt my feelings, I don’t recall – I don’t think he did.

I don’t remember how it ended but it wasn’t hurtful for either of us: my dear husband of 53 years entered my life soon after that birthday and I lost touch with H and his friends (they may have returned to their home countries after I was given the little llama).

Each person we care about transforms us in some way: Dashing H showed me the prospect of a bigger world, of a life of romance, of the possibility of playing one’s days out on a larger stage. For this I will always be grateful.

The charm and little silver llama remained with me for all these years, as has the memory of this happy time.

Trying to Remember J.F.K., by Thomas Mallon
The New Yorker, May 22, 2017

On November 8, 1960, I voted for Richard Nixon. I had turned nine the week before. According to my fourth-grade report card, from that September, I stood four feet one and a quarter inches tall and weighed fifty-five pounds: small enough to be permitted entry into the curtained voting booth in the Stewart Manor School, on Long Island, where my father let me pull the lever for Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge. It was a reach: during Nelson Rockefeller’s long Albany reign, the Republican ticket occupied the top row on New York State’s mechanical ballot.
…

I recall how Phyllis Mindell, the twenty-three-year-old teacher who had notated my height and weight, assigned our class to watch the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. As Kennedy’s inaugural arrived, Mrs. Mindell gave us a letter-writing exercise: we could send our congratulations to the incoming President, or offer the outgoing one our thanks. I loyally chose Eisenhower, and duly received an acknowledgment postmarked February 6, 1961, from Washington. The card inside was headed “Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” Eisenhower’s bold printed signature (not dissimilar to John F. Kennedy’s) sat where a stamp should have been—my introduction to the franking privilege—and as I look at the envelope more than five decades on I’m arrested by its little bits of archaism. There is no Zip Code, and the addressee, “Master Thomas Mallon,” might as well be Penrod Schofield.

The following June, in her last set of report-card comments, Mrs. Mindell observed that “Tommy has expressed great interest in being a politician someday.” The excitement of the election had clearly lingered.
…

Before the nine-thirty school bell rang on April 12, 1961, Phyllis Mindell called me up to her desk to ask if I knew “what happened today.” I said that Franklin Roosevelt had died sixteen years ago. That this was the fact I answered with—rather than the hundredth anniversary of the firing upon Fort Sumter, then being commemorated in newspapers and magazines—indicates to me that she was right about my political ambitions: Presidents were more important than events.

“No,” Mrs. Mindell replied, with excitement. “I mean what happened today—this morning. The Soviet Union put a man into space.”
…

On April 12th of this year—a week after my trip to Boston and fifty-six years to the day after she gave me the news about the Soviets’ leap into orbit—I have lunch with Phyllis Mindell, now eighty, an active and accomplished widow with thick, stylish white hair, if no longer the Jackie Kennedy clothes she jokes about once having favored. We talk about the vagaries of memory and wonder if she did not, after all, assign her students to watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates, since she and her husband did not own a television, a decision whose cultural pretentiousness she now laughs at.

We also talk about a letter that she wrote, in 1963, to John F. Kennedy, one that I was able to find through an archivist’s search of the Name File at the J.F.K. library. In it, she thanks the President for being “a sane man,” before noting that “the yet unborn children of the world will remember you as one who helped to eliminate the evil of the atomic bomb.” She does not remember writing the letter—is astonished that it’s turned up—but the circumstances of its composition remain vivid. It was occasioned by Kennedy’s having reached an agreement on the limited nuclear-test-ban treaty with the Soviets, on July 25th.

At the time, Phyllis was twenty-six and had been married to Marvin Mindell, an engineer, for almost five years. She had once miscarried, and the couple were reluctant to bring children into a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear extinction. But the late summer of ’63 appeared to be the beginning of a more promising time, with the test-ban treaty and the March on Washington. They made a small contribution to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that season, and Phyllis now tends to think of the whole period as being more the “King era.” But her memories of Kennedy remain warm, if unblinkered. “You can be a sane man and have feet of clay,” she says. In the end, “that’s our problem, and we have to figure out how to sort that out.”

Newly hopeful, Phyllis again became pregnant late in October, 1963, on a trip that she and Marvin took to Rome. Back on Long Island, she miscarried the baby on the morning of November 22nd. She learned of Kennedy’s assassination later that day, from the weeping woman who had come to take care of her and had heard the news on the radio.

By 1966, Phyllis had given birth to two sons. One of them, David Mindell, an M.I.T. professor, is an important theorist of space exploration and a leading scholar of the Apollo lunar-landing program. The political victory that that effort provided will eventually be a paltry thing compared with the actual human transcendence that it initiated, however fitfully so far. Project Apollo seems to me, even at this remove—and surely in the fullness of time—what mattered most about John F. Kennedy’s life. It was he who committed us to it, six weeks after Professor Mindell’s mother made me look to the sky with a stiff upper lip.

Thomas Mallon, a novelist, an essayist, and a critic, is the author of, most recently, Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years.