Someone asked yesterday, “Should I use infer or imply in this sentence: ‘The data...an alternative hypothesis.’”
A speaker or writer implies; a listener or reader infers.
So, “Did you [the writer] mean to imply an ethical lapse on the part of Sen. Hogswell?” But, “I [the reader] infer from the evidence that Sen. Hogswell broke the law.”
In the example above, the data serves as a metaphorical “speaker,” so my questioner would write: “The data imply an alternative hypothesis.”
A person interpreting the data, however, would “infer an alternative hypothesis from the data.”
Hysteria - a term (dating from the time of Hippocrates in 400 BC) for excessive and uncontrollable emotion; including anxiety disorders and related conditions. Adj. Hysterical. The term is derived from the Greek word “hystera” meaning womb or uterus. Since the condition seemed to affect mainly women of childbearing years, it was believed to be caused by a wandering uterus. The ASAP Dictionary of Anxiety and Panic Disorders
I’ve seen the words “hysteria” and “hysterical” in print a a lot in recent weeks, precipitated by the host of crises that have swept or threaten to sweep through the nation and region: mosquito-borne EEE, devastating hurricanes followed by breakdowns of both emergency response and civic order, the emergence of a strange flu that jumped from horses to dogs, the threat of pandemic influenza.
I feel queasy when I read, “This is no time for hysteria,” or its close rhetorical relative, “There’s no need for panic,” coming from public officials or experts on the topic at hand.
When I closely examine the context of these injunctions, I usually find a subtle or not-so-subtle form of social control that encourages me (1) to remain passive and leave the situation at hand to experts, (2) to deny my reasonable fear or outrage, and (3) silence my legitimate demands for information (or lack of information) about matters that affect my life. I want to stay in the loop.
When I feel fear, I don’t want vague, patronizing, abstract reassurances. I want my leaders to acknowledge and validate my fears—even the irrational ones. I want to know what they know about the situation and what they don’t know, and most of all, what steps I and my neighbors can take to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our neighbors.
In cases of imminent threats, I want to know what steps emergency planners and the subject matter experts have taken to protect people more vulnerable than I; if they haven’t taken any steps, or can’t offer any meaningful protection, I want to know that, too.
I want my leaders to acknowledge their errors of omission and commission. Most of all, I want to admit their own fear, and to become exemplars of resoluteness and courage in the face of it.
Well-known risk communications experts support my point of view. For example, see Fear of Fear: The Role of Fear in Preparedness ...and Why It Terrifies Officials.
A timid question will always receive a confident answer. Henry Lytton Bulwer, diplomat and author (1801-1872)
This quotation came via today’s Wordsmith. It got me to thinking: How do I question the reports and articles I read? How do I question those of my colleagues? My own?
Ask yourself what kinds of answers you might get if you asked bold, courageous questions of the writer the next time you engaged with text (including your own). Give it a try!
I'm not sure whom to blame for the pathology of apology. I just know it's not me, and I'm sorry, but that's the last word. Scott Libin, The Pathology of Apology
Google effective apologies and you come up with nearly two million Web pages, white papers and fact sheets from sources ranging from conservative religious organizations to the Harvard Business School, offering almost identical language on the healing value of effective apologies.
The effective apology typically includes these elements:
1. A common understanding of the exact substance and nature of the offense, or perceived offense. (Example: “Yesterday on the telephone, I said….”)2. Recognition of responsibility or accountability on the part of the one who offended. (Example: “I could have chosen other words.” “I spoke without thinking.”)
3. Acknowledgement of the pain or embarrassment that the offended party experienced. (Example: “It’s understandable that was upsetting to you.” “If someone had said that to me, I would not have liked it, either.” But not, “I’m sorry you’re so easily hurt.”)
4. A judgment about the offense. (Example: “I was insensitive.” “What I did was wrong.”)
5. A statement of regret. (Example: “I’m sorry I used those words.”)
6. An indication of future intentions. (Example: “In the future, I will try to think about the impact of my words before speaking.” “I hope we can have a relationship of mutual respect.”) Elements of an Effective Apology, Columbia University Ombuds Office
We can probably agree on the relative absence of the simple, heartfelt apology from our public and corporate discourse, our schools, and homes. Making an effective apology requires both emotional intelligence and wordsmithing skills. A bad apology can make a bad situation much worse.
Scott Libin’s column on the topic today offers a cogent first-person reflection on “the specific disorders that can afflict apology and drain even a well-intended effort of almost all impact.”
I recommend it, along with Jill Geisler’s companion piece, In Praise of Sorry Leaders, as good medicine for curing your own apology pathology (if you have one) and for understanding why you sometimes end up feeling so bad after the bad guy has finished apologizing to you.
Laboring over the impenetrable prose of the textbook’s statistics unit during a research design course in graduate school, I chanced across the utterly fabulous online statistics text, Concepts and Applications of Inferential Statistics, by Richard Lowry, a professor of psychology at Vassar College. I bookmarked the site for handy reference, particularly when I need to understand the statistical design and data analysis of a journal article.
I admire the site’s organization and navigation strategy, its comprehensiveness, and its comprehensible prose. Lowry offers an equally first-rate companion site called VassarStats, which contains numerous utilities and statistical function calculators of for those moments when you need to calculate a pesky two-way factorial ANOVA for independent samples or fit an observed frequency distribution to the closest Poisson Distribution.
If you’ve shied away from studying statistics because it seems too difficult, need an occasional brush-up on some esoteric statistical procedure, or find yourself in need of an interactive calculator to plug your data into, you may want to bookmark Lowry’s site yourself.
I sent Lowry an email thanking him for the enormous effort of getting his sites online, and especially for his flowing, easy-to-read prose, so radically different from the several statistics texts I’d consulted in my search for understanding.
Lowry’s reply illustrates the strength of the us/them linguistic barrier that influences so many students to steer clear of the hard sciences. In part, it reads:
Sometime back in the mid or late 80s I published a little introduction to probability theory …. As the manuscript was making the rounds with editors and reviewers, one of the latter wrote something along the lines of: It's a fine treatment of the subject, though the style is altogether too poetical. That will give you an idea of how literate treatment of a topic is regarded in the sciences….
Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the liabilities of the conventional outline: namely that it commits you psychologically to a chronological order you might want to abandon later in the writing process. If you learn something new or your perspective on your topic changes as you compose your draft, you may find it nearly impossible to incorporate your new learning or leaning into your text.
But sometimes we get caught in a horrific time crunch and have to write in a hurry, working more like news reporters on deadline than like academics with a long planning horizon.
I recently came across this column by Poynter Online’s Chip Scanlon, entitled Five Boxes to Build a Story Fast: A Suggestion from Rick Bragg. Scanlon writes cogently about writing and editing as a senior faculty member for the Poynter Institute.
In this column, the last of five in a series called “Helping Writers Take Charge: Five Tools for Editors,” he notes that Pulitizer-winner Bragg doesn’t write from outlines, but uses a “five-box” system for getting the job done fast.
Here I scavenge Bragg’s five points and slightly modify them for the kinds of writing Extension professionals typically do: reports, fact sheets, newspaper articles, etc. Together, they offer a sequential plan for developing a rough draft ready for revision and editing, but constructed loosely enough to accommodate new learning and a change of emphasis.
Begin with five sheets of unlined paper as the five “boxes” in which you will construct the guts of your writing assignment.1. On the first page, write your lead, a sentence or two that contains a compelling image, a great quotation, or some detail you think will draw readers into your topic.
2. On the second, write a “nut graph” [great term!] that sums up what you intend to write about. A nut graph not only helps you focus on the meat and substance of your writing project, but—in the metaphorical sense of the nut as a seed—on your subject's generative possibilities, the ways the summary paragraph could grow and expand.
3. On the third page, write a new image or detail that serves as a segue to the bulk of the narrative to follow.
4. On the fourth page, jot down the supporting details that will plump out your article or fact sheet.
5. For the final page, come up with what Bragg calls the “kicker,” an ending paragraph featuring a strong quotation or image that leaves the reader with a strong emotion.
“Emotion?” you exclaim. “I’m writing a fact sheet!”
Without getting too deeply into the neuroscience, remember that the emotional centers of the brain respond to an event more quickly, and often more strongly, than the so-called “thinking brain.” Skillful writers understand that emotion not only helps sustain readers’ interest and focus their attention, enabling them can absorb and integrate the factual information, but also provide much of the impetus motivating behavior change.
A few strong uses of the verb to address:
Martha addressed the envelope. (put an address on)The provost will address the Dean’s Council on Friday. (speak to, talk to)
I addressed my question to Dr. Rankin. (direct to or at)
She doesn’t like her children to address adults by their first names. (greet)
Tiger addressed the ball as he prepared to tee off. (face off, assume a stance towards)
Cosby’s book addresses the causes of homelessness. (cover, treat)
We’ll address the hydrological aspects first. (face, confront)
However, when used as an abstract catch-all verb that suggests action aimed at solving a problem, address doesn’t deliver much meaning. It’s become a bureaucratic cliché, and when I see it used this way, the word raises my suspicions that the person or group doing the addressing actually didn’t or won't do much, maybe nothing:
The administration developed a new plan to address underage drinking.I need some time off to address my issues.
If you find you’ve used the word address in a problem-solving context, consider finding a more specific, concrete verb that tells the reader what the subject of your sentence actually did, wanted to do, or plans to do, or might do. So, for example:
The administration will tighten its zero-tolerance policy on underage drinking by mandating a two-week residential alcohol education program for first-time offenders.I need some time off to mend fences with my dad and begin treatment for my eating disorder.
Now, about those issues you keep trying to address. The word issue has many meanings, but it doesn't mean “problem.”
Solve problems. Identify obstacles. Reframe the situation. Slay your demons. But please don’t address your issues, at least not in writing.
Katrina and the Citizen Publisher, Steve Outing’s September 20 post to the E-Media Tidbits blog of Poynter Online (a great resource, even for non-journalists) speaks movingly about what I think of as the “evolution of voice” for ordinary people, in this case, a Florida corrections officer and his wife.
In his post, Outing introduces a site called hurricanekatrinasurvivors.com, put up by Robert Gary and his wife, to help Katrina victims locate their loved ones. The Garys set up and continue to maintain the site simply because they wanted to help people
Hurricanekatrinasurvivors.com…performs the type of public service that government or news media traditionally take on (just as Craigslist takes on the task of classifieds provider). Nola.com, the website of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, for instance, became a dominant disaster-information and missing-persons clearinghouse. Yet now, a corrections officer can create something as useful and widely used as those produced by major institutions.
I’d also characterize the rise of this and many other emerging forms of citizen journalism not merely as evolutionary, but as genuinely revolutionary. For centuries, print media have largely determined who gets the right to speak and publish and who will frame the issues of the day. Print publishers (combined with electronic broadcasters) have held the power that legitimizes some perspectives and marginalizes others.
The Web has changed those power relationships in ways we have barely begun to discern.
Many of us worry about the dark side of Internet traffic—pornography, sexual predation, terrorist recruitment. We worry about the abundance of spurious information generated by anonymous people with dubious credentials.
Instead of the censorship or expert-vetted, seal-of-approval models many of us now prefer, we might consider looking for a teaching model we could use to help our many stakeholder populations (including children) learn to evaluate the quality of online information for themselves.
That same model could also provide the ground from which citizen publishers begin coming online themselves as high-quality content providers.
A September 20 Associated Press article entitled Housing prices wound young: rents highest in nation quotes economist Russ Thibeault: “I think it is really hard on young households who are scratching their heads and saying 'Can I afford to live here?’”
Can “households” scratch their heads and speak?
I see a lot of this kind of fanciful language: The Boston Globe has learned…. The administration worried.... The 18th-century saw numerous technological innovations.....
Drives me nuts!
I don’t think abstract or impersonal entities such as households, newspapers, administrations, and centuries (eras, decades, months, etc.) can learn, warn, see, or scratch their heads.
Like the pathetic fallacy, which attributes human aspirations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, or traits to events or inanimate objects, nouns that can’t logically complete the actions of the verbs dilute meaning and raise questions in the reader’s mind that can bog down the reading process.
Writers could deliver more clarity by choosing subjects that genuinely match the action of verbs they follow. So:
This is really hard on young householders, who are scratching their heads….
Globe reporters Dwindle Fahrenheit and Olive Appel learned yesterday…. (Or, even more daring, We learned yesterday….)
Top administration officials worried….
The numerous technological innovations of the 18th-century include….
One evening last week, I spent some time poking around the Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN) to check its stock of emergency preparedness resources.
EDEN describes its purpose on the hompage: “[To link] Extension educators from across the U.S. and various disciplines, enabling them to use and share resources to reduce the impact of disasters.”
Along the way, I looked for information about H5N1 avian flu, one of the hottest topics on the national and international scene. Its dimensions include human health, agriculture, wildlife (birds), critical infrastructure, international economics, and political preparedness, among others.
Keying “pandemic,” “H5N1,” or “avian flu” into EDEN’s search function takes a reader to this February, 2004 publication entitled Specialist: 'Bird flu' unlikely to cause pandemic, the primary “resource” EDEN seems to offer on this critical and emerging issue.
I say “seem,” because the link doesn't lead to information about the H5N1 avian flu virus, but to a report on an outbreak of another strain of avian flu that emerged in Delaware in 2004. Very confusing to users looking to inform themselves about the H5N1 strain of “bird flu” currently raging in Southeast Asia, which scientists fear might mutuate to trigger the next human flu pandemic.
Even more troubling from a risk communication perspective—the Ag Answers report contains this unqualified statement by a Purdue poultry specialist: “Low pathogenic AI does not affect human health.”
Last week the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota ran a bulletin titled: “
Scientific accuracy often improves when writers understand the pedagogical value of uncertainty, and when they use conditional language in statements describing current scientific understanding of a topic.
In the case above, Purdue poultry specialist Applegate might have more accurately reflected the situation with words such as, “To date, we have no evidence that low pathogenic avian flu viruses can infect humans,” or, “Leading virologists say that low pathogenic flu viruses don’t infect humans.”
To remain credible, an organization that promotes itself as research-based should consider setting up internal committees that scrutinize existing documents, prune old information from its Web site, or update documents to reflect current research.
When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail. Abraham Maslow
Mindfulness researcher Ellen Langer has found that suggesting a learner (1) consider other possible ways of interpreting information while reading text or listening to a lecture, (2) try to think about a topic from other people’s points of view or (3) find ways to make the information relevant to their own lives improves many measures of learning.
Like conditional language, these techniques help learners stay open to fresh ways of reassembling learned information when life confronts them with novel challenges where they could use old information, functions or categories in new ways. In The Power of Mindful Learning, Langer writes:
When faced with something that hasn’t been done before, people frequently express the belief that it can’t be done. All progress, of course, depends on questioning that belief. Everything is the same until it is not… Once we generate possible ways of doing something, even if they are low-probability bets, the perception of a solution’s being possible increases enormously.
Langer’s mindfulness research suggests that when writers encourage readers to examine factual information from other points of view or make information relevant to their own lives, they provide their readers with powerful decision making tools. She writes:
Mindful decision making, as opposed to decision making passively based on data assembled by outside observers, is a process of active self-definition…. When we rate our own behavior, it is often in our best interest to generate novel criteria. This capacity to find a means of shifting perspective can be a vital element of our ability to navigate new situations, just as the ability to maintain stable categories if often critical for the expert’s authority.
Most facts exist in rich contexts. We could view them from differing perspectives or try to understand them from another person’s point of view. (Langer suggests, for example, examining the “facts” in a standard Civil War history text from the point of view of a young slave woman.)
Yet most contemporary writing, not only popular books and articles, but also textbooks and academic papers, tends to present information in universal, absolute statements of fact, stripped of most of their context.
A mindful approach to learning rejects ideas such as “right answers” and “bodies of essential facts everyone should know” in favor of encouraging learners to generate alternative viewpoints and perspectives.
Many writers assume a single perspective toward their topic without realizing they’ve done so. Typically, they also make assumptions about their readers, about the stance they want readers to take toward their material and about how they want readers to think about them.
Writers also often forget that emotional, ethical, intellectual, social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, historic and even spiritual dimensions come embedded within most factual narratives, as well as age, race, ethnicity and gender-based biases. Part of the work of opening our writing to multiple perspectives might involve uncovering these dimensions of our work.
How can you invite readers to generate multiple perspectives on your topic?
• The most basic technique involves simply suggesting readers to consider varying perspectives as they read. You might write:
Despite the well-publicized potential negative consequences of obesity, research that shows Americans of all ages continue getting fatter and fatter. This fact sheet explores some ideas about why, but we encourage you to think for yourself about this topic. Put yourself and your family into the situation as you read. Question the information and try to come up with hypotheses of your own.
• As the writer, you might begin by asking and answering questions like these of yourself:
Have I presented a single, absolute, context-free perspective on the topic? If so, does that perspective contain unexamined assumptions?
If you answer yes to these questions, sometimes simply unearthing and stating the bias you bring, especially if you phrase it in such a way that holds open the option for other interpretations, will allow readers to process the information more mindfully. For example
This article provides information about a chemical weed eradication program from the perspective of conventional farm economics: Perennial weeds have begun to compete with farm crops and increase the farmer’s costs, thereby reducing farm profits. Approaches not covered here include strategies that might have prevented those weeds from becoming established in the first place and reducing perennial weeds by planting cover crops that outcompete weeds.
• You could also brainstorm multiple perspectives for yourself. If you’ve immersed yourself in a topic through intensive research and reading, this exercise may bring fresh insights to your own research and teaching. Examine an emotional aspect of your topic, for example, or two or more conflicting ethical perspectives. Try to look at your topic from the perspective of another academic or scientific discipline.
• Try to examine your topic through the eyes of a reader of the opposite gender, someone from a different socioeconomic stratum, another nationality, or with a different worldview.
Reading a wire service report in yesterday’s newspaper headlined Gene found to control urge to eat, a friend remarked, “Oh, here’s a reporting error. The reporter writes, ‘Yale scientists have proven that the gene, AgRP, makes a protein that feeds brain cells that give orders about when to eat and how much.’ That violates a central rule of reporting facts. She should have written, ‘Yale scientists say they have proven….’”
Too picky? I plead guilty to having broken that rule myself.
In this case, though, I find my friend’s criticism dead-on. The small contextualizing word “says” would have delivered a big difference in meaning, especially in conjunction with the word “proven.”
If I’d edited that piece, I might also have replaced “proven” with “demonstrated” or “shown.”
To view an answer as right or wrong, we must freeze the context in which the answer is being evaluated. Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning
I remember vividly the day about 25 years ago when I picked up Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
The simple act of turning a line drawing upside down and focusing on the relationships among its curves and angles, rather than trying to “draw” a face or a foot, enabled me to produce a reasonable facsimile of Picasso’s famous sketch of Igor Stravinsky sitting in a chair.
The deceptively simple action abruptly changed my way of seeing and washed away decades of belief that I couldn’t move beyond stick-figure drawing because I had no “artistic talent.” Edwards’ exercises helped me understand that I could overcome an apparent disability by finding a new way to approach the task.
Intentionally inserting specific elements of uncertainty into your writing may help accomplish for readers what turning an image upside down did for my drawing, namely foster dramatic changes in awareness, expand creativity, and motivate behavior change.
I use the term uncertainty* here to mean verbal strategies that present facts in ways that help readers remain open to other interpretations or ways of using the information when the context changes. Uncertainty in this context offers a counterpoint to absolutism, our default method for delivering factual information.
Absolute vs. conditional language
Absolute language, which includes words such as never, always, all, certain, always, and impossible, as well as most verbs of being, closes off alternative ways of interpreting the facts presented, freezing them into a single, static, context-free perspective.
Conditional language places limits or “conditions” on statements of fact, which helps the reader’s mind stay open to other ways of understanding the same facts when they appear in a novel context. Conditional terms include some, most, maybe, often, perhaps, likely, unlikely, typically, usually, possibly, one way of....
An experiment in mindful writing
Mindfulness researcher Ellen Langer and colleagues have conducted dozens of experiments that compare various aspects of learning by absolute words and texts with those acquired through conditional language.
In one experiment they slightly modified the text of one chapter of an exam required for stockbrokers and others who want to sell securities. Their modifications consisted of rewriting all absolute statements of fact in conditional language. For example, these statements:
Municipal bonds are issued by states, territories, and possessions…as well as other political subdivisions. Such political subdivisions would include counties, cities, special districts for schools…. Public agencies such as authorities and commissions also issue municipal bonds.
rewritten conditionally now read (emphasis mine):
In most cases, municipal bonds are issued by states, territories, and possessions…as well as other political subdivisions. Such political subdivisions may include counties, cities, special districts for schools…. Public agencies such as authorities and commissions may on occasion issue municipal bonds.
Only a close reading would detect these subtle changes, but they mattered significantly to student readers in this experiment.
After recruiting undergraduate subjects and dividing them randomly into two groups, researchers asked one group to study the original version and the other half to read the “conditional” version of the text. After 25 minutes of study, the subjects took two tests, one of factual recall (multiple choice), the other asking the subjects to put the material to creative use.
Both groups performed equally well on the multiple choice test, but the conditional learners outperformed the traditional learners in the test of creativity, which included asking students to “name as many uses as you can think of for municipal bonds.”
Significantly, the conditional learners also reported enjoying the material more than the conventional learners.
Putting learning to use in life
I think about the value of conditional language when I imagine a food service worker receiving instructions about handling food safely, a logger taking safety training, or a 12-year-old learning CPR and other emergency first aid techniques during a baby-sitting course.
Typically, these students will “learn” in a quiet, distraction-free setting organized by the teacher for the purposes of instruction.
Yet how can the manual’s written words or the teacher’s oral instructions possibly anticipate the food service worker’s need to adapt the lessons to the chaos and pressure of the restaurant kitchen on a night nearly half the staff has called in sick, and she’s come to work herself with a sore throat and low-grade fever? (She doesn’t get paid when she doesn’t show up.)
How will the logger put what he’s learned to use when his partner goes down, pinned unconscious under a fallen tree, his cell phone and radio won’t work in the remote site, and he doesn’t know the area?
And what will the baby-sitter take from the manual, the teacher’s words, and even the hands-on practice, when the baby chokes just as the power goes out in a fierce windstorm?
To manage well in those new contexts, won’t these students need to summon and organize responses based on more than passing grades on the multiple choice test?
*By uncertainty, I don’t mean the sort of ambiguity and abstraction that characterize bad writing.
I also don’t mean the kind of linguistic uncertainty deliberately crafted to evade or deceive, typically full of passive verbs and abstract concept nouns, but empty of people--like this message broadcast to the general public two days after an explosion ripped off the roof of the # 4 reactor at the Soviet Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26, 1986, expelling eight tons of radioactive material:
An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl power station, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Those affected by it are being given assistance. A government commission has been set up.
Uncertainty creates the freedom to discover meaning. If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty and no opportunity for control. The theory of mindfulness insists that uncertainty and the experience of personal control are inseparable....Expert observers tend to focus on particular features of a situation that enable them to hold variables constant…. Perceived stability is often in the experts’ interest because their authority frequently rests on the stability of the categories they employ.
One of the fears people may have of an educational system that creates a place for several perspectives is that nothing will remain stable, there will be nothing reliable on which they can lean for continuity. Yet we discover that by viewing the same information through several perspectives, we actually become more open to that information…. If we fail to explore several perspectives, we risk confusing the stability of our own mindset with the stability of the phenomenon itself. Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning
If you want readers to come away from something you’ve written with the capacity to reassemble and put to creative new uses what they’ve learned, rather than merely an ability to recall factoids, you may want to weave uncertainty and ambiguity into your statements of fact.
This advice may sound counterintuitive—if not heretical—but it has a strong research base. A bit about some of it:
Mindful vs. mindless
For more than 30 years, Harvard University psychology professor Ellen Langer and colleagues have conducted research into the state of attention Langer calls mindfulness, which she defines as “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context.”
She distinguishes mindfulness from its opposite state, mindlessness:
When we are in a state of mindlessness, we act like automatons who have been programmed to act according to the sense our behavior made in the past, rather than the present…we are stuck in a single, rigid perspective, and we are oblivious to alternative ways of knowing.
Mindful learning: context, perspective, making distinctions, generating alternatives
Langer began her career researching how people learn and comparing the consequences of various ways of learning. She writes, “Whether the learning is practical or theoretical, personal or interpersonal; whether it involves abstract concepts, such as physics, or concrete skills, such as how to play a sport, the way information is learned will determine how, why and when it is used.”
Her research led Langer to conclude that most formal and informal education today relies on “ways of learning that typically work to our detriment and virtually prevent the very goals we are trying to accomplish.” With conventional teaching and learning, Langer says:
Facts are typically presented as closed packages, without attention to perspective. Scientists know that research results in findings that are probably true given the context in which the work is tested….but facts are not context-free; their meaning and usefulness depend on the situation….When we ignore perspective, we tend to confuse the stability of our mind-sets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon: All the while things are changing and at any one moment they are different from different perspectives, yet we hold them in our minds as if they were constant.
Under this pervasively mindless teaching/learning style, Langer argues, “Not only do we as individuals get locked into single-minded views, but we also reinforce these views for each other until the culture itself suffers the same mindlessness.”
Information processed mindlessly commits the learner to a single way of understanding it. Langer writes:
Even if it later would be to our advantage to view the information differently, if we learned it mindlessly, it will not occur to us to reconsider it. When the context changes—and it always does in life—mindlessly learned behavior does not.
Learners tend to process information received unconditionally, devoid of context, in mindless fashion because they have little motivation to question the information or look at it from other perspectives.
Receiving information in absolute, context-free format often results in what psychologists call a premature cognitive commitment, “a rigid belief that results from the mindless acceptance of information as true without consideration of alternative versions of that [same] information.”
Langer has particular concern for information delivered in absolute statements of fact by experts and authority figures. Research shows people tend to accept information less critically from sources perceived as “expert.”
Conditional language
Much of Langer’s experimental work has focused on the language of teaching, learning and self-talk. She and her colleagues have demonstrated in many settings, with subjects ranging in age from young children to elders 80 and older, that people learn best when they receive facts in conditional language, the language of could, might, seems to, some research shows, etc.
When we are told that something “could” be, we understand immediately that it also could not be, or could be something else. When we teach important information, information about health, how to pilot an airplane, air-traffic control, bridge or building safety, and so on, we need to allow for exceptions, for information that goes beyond these common instances… Students learning such information must be open to factors that could operate in a new context. If we simply memorize the known past, we are not preparing ourselves for the as-yet-to-be-known future.
Langer’s research has demonstrated that merely suggesting that a learner imagine other points of view or other possible ways of interpreting information while reading improves learning and fosters more creative used of the learned material. She writes:
When faced with something that hasn’t been done before, people frequently express the belief that it can’t be done. All progress, of course, depends on questioning that belief. Everything is the same until it is not…. Once we generate possible ways of doing something, even if they are low-probability bets, the perception of a solution’s being possible increases enormously.
So, how can writers build mindful uncertainty into their texts? I’ll offer some suggestions in tomorrow’s post.
[E-prime] forces one relentlessly to confront sloppiness, laziness, fuzziness, blandness, imprecision, simplistic generalization, and a half dozen other all too frequent characteristics of casual prose. As a self-administered exercise, this single restraint on style, with all the discomfort that may ensue, offers more real insight in an afternoon than one can gain from a year's worth of spoken precepts. Cullen Murphy, “’To Be’ in Their Bonnets,” The Atlantic, February, 1992
If someone asked me for a single tip a writer or editor could take to improve almost any text, I’d answer: Translate the text into e-prime, a dialect of standard English that eliminates all forms of the verb to be*.
Linguist D. David Bourland began writing in e-prime in the late 1940’s and advocating publicly for its use in the late 1960’s. Bourland and other e-prime proponents claim that avoiding verbs of being in writing and speaking helps (1) sharpen critical thinking, (2) unmask hidden assumptions, (3) more accurately and honestly represent the facts at hand, (4) resolve apparent contradictions, (5) elevate the level of public discourse on a topic, (6) motivate change, and even (7) reduce stress.
E-prime performs this impressive work, they say, by forcing its users to move beyond Aristotelian logical structures that view the world through all-or-nothing, either/or, right-or-wrong lenses.
Nearly all uses of the verb to be create static, absolute statements that fix the mind in a single, perspective, treating facts as absolute, unchanging, context-free, or universal. Verbs of being reduce complex, highly differentiated subjects to simpler, more abstract conceptual nouns and adjectives
Think about it: When I write that something is, or was, or will be, I equate my subject with its predicate, robbing my subject of important contextual details of time, place and circumstance, and often obscuring the speaker or the subject behind the action.
Consider the statement that begins a fact sheet: Insect x is a serious pest of…. Here, the writer aims to introduce the insect as an economic liability for farmers and home gardeners. But consider that the crop-destroying insect may also provide food for birds, bats and amphibians, serve as a sensitive indicator of the presence of certain environmental toxins, or produce a self-protective substance of interest to medical researchers, making it so much more than a simple pest.
Reworking the sentence in e-prime, I could write with greater accuracy: Most New Hampshire vegetable producers consider insect x a serious pest of….
As this example shows, editing verbs of being from your work often causes a subtle shift in perception, from single-pointed, absolute, and static, to a matter of opinion, a datum of private observation. In presenting research-based facts, sticking to e-prime will help a writer place the facts and findings within specific research context(s).
As a linguistic discipline, e-prime encourages mindful problem-solving. It prevents both writer and readers from forming the premature cognitive commitments inherent in statements such as, That’s true (or false), or That’s impossible. It forbids questions that encourage closed thinking and single-perspective responses: What is the truth of the matter? What is the prognosis?
A few more points:
E-prime makes writing in the passive voice almost impossible.
The research design was completed, the statistical consultant was hired and subjects were recruited in only five days. It took the team only five days to finish the research design, hire a statistical design consultant, and recruit subjects.
By eliminating the passive voice, e-prime assigns accountability for the action of a sentence.
Mistakes were made. Dr. Green made mistakes.
E-prime reveals the invisible thinker/speaker/writer behind the words, making the writing more accurate or honest:
It was discovered that five children were missing. The classroom teacher discovered that five children did not board the bus.
Making origami birds from visual instructions isn’t hard to do. I had no difficulty making an origami bird from visual instructions.
Preventable medical error in hospitals is a leading cause of death in the U.S. A 1999 study by the National Institute of Medicine ranks preventable medical error as a leading cause of death in the U.S.
Writing in e-prime helps force writers to make explicit the concrete, specific details that lie below the typical abstractions and generalizations:
The parents are to blame for the situation. The police blame the parents for the situation, even though the child said his parents don’t speak English and didn’t understand the rules.Once I decided to teach myself to write and revise in e-prime, it took me a few weeks to move from rough, awkward phrasing to relative fluency. From a purely stylistic perspective, revising any text into e-prime will make your prose livelier, more concrete, more accurate, and easier to read. I’ve found writing in e-prime often generates startling new insights into the topic at hand. Try it and see for yourself.
*Forms of to be: be, am, is, are, been, was, were, being; also contracted forms ending in ’m,’re, ’s.
More:
To Be or Not To Be: E-Prime as a Tool for Critical Thinking
List of many other e-prime papers
For a contrarian perspective (e-prime has fostered lively debate among linguists):
The Top 10 Arguments against E-prime
Alternately or alternatively? Illusion or allusion? Complement or compliment? Flaunt or flaut? Founder or flounder? Principal or principle? Their, they’re, or there? Lay, lain, or lay? Disinterested or uninterested?
Oy vey!
Most of have a few words we just can’t keep straight from words with similar spellings or close meanings. I have a few myself: farther vs further, for example.
Infoplease.com has a handy list of easily confused or misused words
you might want to bookmark to save yourself an embarrassing mistake in case you don’t have a copy editor handy.
I also recommend their little page of often-mispronounced words.
Communication is about shared meaning. Successful communication requires that the words you choose mean the same thing to you as they mean to the people you’re talking to. Peter M. Sandman, Risk Words You Can’t Use
Scientific accuracy and research-based information alone won’t guarantee effective written communication with your stakeholders.
Once again, I refer to the advice of risk communications expert, Peter Sandman. His paper, Risk Words You Can’t Use, though directed at corporate and public risk professionals, should resonate with CE professionals who may have come from a science or policy background, but who often must communicate various kinds of risk diverse stakeholder populations.
“Here are some risk words that are likely not to communicate,” Sandman begins. His list includes conservative, significant/insignificant, positive/negative, bias/anecdotal, risk, safe, prepared, confident, regret, compassion/empathy.
Of the unavoidable use of the word “risk” itself, Sandman advises caution:
What risk assessors mean by risk is the magnitude of a bad outcome times its frequency. The rest of the world focuses on the frequency half of the definition; when people ask how big a risk is, they usually mean how likely, not how bad. People also use risk to mean uncertainty; a course of action may be called “risky” either because the probability of a bad outcome is high or because the probability is unknown. Not to mention that what most people really mean by risk is what I call outrage—is it unfamiliar, memorable, involuntary, controlled by others, morally wrong, imposed by people you can’t trust, etc. [italics mine, except for really]
Sandman notes key differences between how scientists use the words “bias” and “anecdotal,” and the common, everyday meanings of those words:
All “bias” means in statistics is non-randomness; a biased study is one that can’t be relied on because the sample might not be representative. But to normal people “bias” implies cheating. So when [industrial] plant neighbors collect information about family members’ diseases, don’t say their study is biased.“Anecdotal” has a slightly different problem. Again, all you mean is that the neighbors’ study is nonrandom; it sounds like you think it’s chock-full of amusing little stories about those sick family members.
As writers, we need to speak in the common tongue when we communicate with our general publics. If you haven’t already, please look at Jody Lanard’s (Sandman’s physician wife) and Sandman’s Scientists and the Public: Barriers to Cross-Species Risk Communication. I consider it the best treatment of this topic I’ve seen, and I think it ought to sit on every Extension professional’s desktop as a reference work.
During crises, beliefs, feelings and values that typically remain implicit in most words (especially verbs and nouns) come into sharp relief.
One example: For days, media critics and bloggers have engaged in hot debate over photographers' and news reporters’ use of negatively charged terms such as “looting” and “gangs of thugs” for black victims of Hurricane Katrina, while using more neutral words such as “finding” or “taking” to accompany nearly identical images or text involving light-skinned people.
The editor of at least one metropolitan newspaper asked his staff to use the neutral word “taking” instead of “looting.” Randolph D. Brandt, editor of the Racine, Wisconsin Journal Times wrote in a letter to a Poynter Online forum:
I've instructed our news desk to change references to “looting” in picture captions to “taking,” and let readers draw their own conclusion from the context. I can't know whether somebody taking battery-powered tools from a ruined hardware store is "looting" or trying to find something he can use to get grandma out of the attic or fix his boat.We're not there. We can't really judge.
I like the reflection offered by Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, on covering the crises in ways that honor the social contract which binds us all together. Although Clark speaks directly to working journalists here, we could all take his words to heart in reflecting mindfully on what we read during moments of crisis here and abroad:
This is our fear: that civilization is a thin tissue covering the surface of an angry mob. Our collective fears of violence, of strangers, of the poor, of the dispossessed with dark skins, provoke our flight or fight response. Shoot to kill. Zero tolerance. What do you expect?All this has profound implications for the news media. This is not a call for self-censorship, but for a deeper, richer and more nuanced rendering of the news:
• As we cover this crisis, we should continue to distinguish different layers of culpability, from stealing for family on one end to rape and murder on the other.
• Remember that the social contract in a democracy requires the government to keep the peace and protect the people. This provides us with an opportunity for watchdog journalism – to hold the powerful accountable for their accomplishments and failures.
• The hidden divisions in America of race and class are now fully visible. Most of us who deliver the news or receive it had no idea what it means to be poor in a big city, to lack the transportation, money, or knowledge to avoid the monster from the sea. It’s time to re-dedicate ourselves to telling the untold stories of the poor, and to creating a picture of the here and now that leads to justice and not recrimination.
• A single accurate image of a young male African-American looter may reveal an uncomfortable truth and do no harm. But an endless succession of such images creates a distorted image of society that can stigmatize all people of color. The images from New Orleans are so powerful and varied, that there is plenty of room for solid news judgment matched to compelling storytelling.
• It’s become too easy in this crisis to depict African-Americans as either the purveyors or victims of violence. In fact, black Americans will play out all the dramatic roles that make this story so vivid: not just criminal or victim, but protector, parent, child, law-enforcer, politician, soldier, reporter, friend. Our job is to capture all these roles to tell the fullest and fairest story.
An article in Army Times provides a painful example in which the writer himself doesn’t seem to notice the linguistic dissonance between his two information sources. In a piece entitled Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans, Joseph R. Chenelly opens with:
Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
The writer continues the combat theme, describing the violence in the streets as "the insurgency in the city."
He concludes, without emotional segue, with a bit from one of the troops under Gen. Jones’ command:
“This is making a lot of us think about not reenlisting.” [Spc. Cliff Ferguson of the 527th Engineer Battalion] said. “You have to think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who will turn around and shoot at you. We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came here to help.”
Combat operations? Little Somalia? Insurgency? Here to help, not fight a war?
Looting? Taking? Finding? Trying to survive?
Especially in moments of crisis, beliefs and values creep through the words we use to speak to each other, and to ourselves, internally, as well.
We fled our newspaper building in New Orleans on Tuesday morning, an eight-hour trek over a bridge and through country roads along the bayou until eventually landing safe in Baton Rouge. We've taken over the Louisiana State University journalism department and everyone is working, publishing online, despite having lost homes, possessions, pets and possibly some friends left behind.Several reporters returned to New Orleans this morning and are in boats and in one case, a kayak, covering the disaster. I'm part of the crew in Baton Rouge, where we are interviewing some of the thousands of evacuees who are here. Gwen Filosa, former Concord Monitor reporter, who now works for the Times Picyaune of New Orleans
If you’ve never considered the power of the Internet to respond to critical and emerging issues in ways unimaingeable only a decade ago, begin by reading this BBC article, which gives a good summary of the combined power of citizens and professional journalist-bloggers to bring on-the-scene news, photographs, pleas and responses for help, and hard information of many types.
Citizen bloggers throughout the storm-ravaged area continue providing first-person accounts and real-time photos, joining hard-news outlets and public emergency officials in collecting, organizing and integrating human communications despite a near-total breakdown of normal channels.
Most newspapers and electronic media outlets now offer online versions, and many have established well-read online blogs. Many encourage participation in local news collection by their own readers and viewers, building on the concept of citizen journalism .
The venerable New Orleans Times-Picayune has blogged all of its news content for the past three days from an outpost in Baton Rouge, after the storm flooded their downtown New Orleans offices.
CNN online has a front-page invitation: CITIZEN JOURNALIST: Has Katrina affected you? E-mail us your story, photos and video
But online visitors can read tens of thousands of up-to-the minute posts on blogsites not directly connected to any big news medium.
In Hurrycane’s Wunderblog, report from a devastated area readers experience a young woman's loss of innocence in her recollections of the storm.
Here, Lucy Keenan and Andrew Bruch, a young married couple living in DC, ask for donations for their planned weekend drive to two small Mississippi communities this weekend.
Where to Help Instapuindit has organized a list of relief agencies.
Staci Karmer’s blog, Trust But Verify Seeks strategies within the “blogosphere” to improve the collection and flow of information
Looking at these listings from craigslist.org makes me weep:
Offers of housing for Katrina victims
Offers of volunteer help of many kinds
Lists of lost and found people
And behold this extraordinary collection of authentic news and commentary in
Community news and views Warning! Strong opinions