I get a lot of email I discard almost immediately, like the one week I received a few days ago with the subject line: “Don’t get spooked, Oct. 31 deadline….”
Classifying it as one of those home mortgage advertisements, I almost trashed it with the day's junk mail. For some reason I clicked on it and found it contained information from a national Extension colleague.
Most office professionals receive dozens, if not hundreds, of email messages each day. If you want to make sure people read your email, learn to write a good subject line. “Hello all,” “Important message for you,” and “Have you ever wondered?” don’t work because they don’t give a harried reader a reason to open and read them.
As someone who's written my share of vague and vacuous subject lines, I've resolved to change my ways. I'll forget about sounding entertaining or literary. I'll make my subject lines as explicit and as specific as possible.
Instead of “Important vote today,” I'll write “Legislature to vote on wildlife bill today.” Rather than “Notice: upcoming forum,” I'll write “Medicare Part D forum Tuesday.”
News mixed for women in workplace, read the headline on an interesting article about gender disparities in earnings that persist despite gains for New Hampshire women in recent decades.
Out of context (when, for instance, the headline might appear in a list of articles or a list of links online), the headline causes a little confusion, since the word “mixed” can serve as either a verb or an adjective.
So the reader might wonder before reading the story (as I did): Who mixed the news for women?
A rewrite that offers more clarity in less space: Working women gain, but still lag.
Ever think about starting a blog? Looking for a few rules of thumb for evaluating the blogs you follow, or for helping your clientele or your kids evaluate a blog?
Web usability expert Jakob Neilsen’s recent Alertbox post outlines the top ten design mistakes bloggers make. I notice I’ve violated some [sigh].
Please read #3 and #4 carefully. Then look at #9. You might not think it applies to you. But consider the many ways Web pages and paragraphs get linked, saved, cached, cut, pasted and emailed. Then substitute words such as “clientele,” “partner agencies,” and “colleagues” for “future boss.”
Tip: Scroll to the bottom of the page for a link that lets you subscribe to Nielsen's Alertboxes. They come infrequently, and you'll nearly always find them interesting, useful, and to the point.
[I]t’s easier to sound like you’re making sense than to actually make sense. – Erin Kissane, Attack of the zombie copy
Just in time for Halloween, Steve Judd sent me a link to the humorous Attack of the zombie copy, a recent post to the blog A list apart.
Perfect timing, not just for Halloween, but for this season of Extension reporting. Although reporting may make you feel like a zombie, you probably want to guard against writing like one.
Read Attack of the zombie copy for fun. Read it for homework if you find yourself writing sentences like this: “Our interdisciplinary collaborative diversity initiative experienced significant progress in furthering three of the four Key Objectives identified in the Draft Planning Document developed in a prior funding cycle.”
A list apart author Kissane recommends starting with an outline. I believe in freewriting first and writing up a quick outline during the revision process to bring order to your final product.
No matter what strategy you work from, you may want to begin by asking: At the heart of it, what do I really want to say here? and write your answer down, using the most concrete, precise words you can muster.
Another useful cure for zombie prose: Occasionally read what you’ve written aloud. If it sounds dead and empty, revise your words until they sound more like you speak.
With the largest vocabulary of any language, in English we have a word to describe almost everything. And when we can't find one, we're happy to borrow from another language…or just make one up….” Anu Garg, Wordsmith
From that category of words I’ve occasionally wished we had, but never knew we did comes accismus (ak-SIZ-muhs), a noun that means “pretending disinterest in something while actually desiring or craving it.” It comes from the Greek word akkismos, meaning coyness or affectation. A useful word. I like its adjectival form, too, accismatic.
Listen for the faint, resonant tones of accismus when you hear someone say (or see in writing), “Oh, I don’t deserve such an award,” “You can’t mean me!” or “I was only doing my job.”
The University of Chicago claims Werner Heisenberg (father of the Uncertainty Principle, one of the foundations of quantum mechanics) as one of its 78 Nobel laureates, although Los Angeles Times writer Karen Kaplan asks, “Did Heisenberg even spend more than a few months in Chicago?” (Gives an ironic twist to the notion of “uncertainty principle,” when no connection between the physicist and the University of Chicago appears in Heisenberg’s biography.)
In a widely-distributed article on “Nobel inflation,” Kaplan notes that many universities, which demand rigor and precision in research and academics, disregard their standards when laying claim to Nobel laureates.
“Counting Nobel prizes is the ultimate academic sport…a no-holds-bared exercise in selective memory ands fuzzy math,” Kaplan writes. “Nobel prizes make schools attractive to prospective students, faculty and donors, conferring the aura of a winner.”
She cites universities that proudly claim as “their” Nobel laureates professors they’ve fired, and two which lay claim to the same volunteer they refused to hire for pay.
Because “A university does many things,” many schools may claim a single laureate: one because he earned a bachelor’s degree there, another because he attended graduate school there, another where he currently sits on the faculty, or holds emeritus rank, yet another because the laureate delivered a series of guest lectures there.
The take-home message for me from this punchy little piece: Writers and readers need to remember the implicit rhetorical plasticity of simple words, titles and descriptions, no matter how apparently reputable the source: “Werner Heisenberg, of the University of Chicago…” or “University of Chicago Nobel laureate, Werner Heisenberg...,"
Most words and phases allow a broad range of interpretation. Neither writers nor readers should assume that others will interpret a word or phrase the way they do.
In my local paper, the article ran under the headline, “Universities experience Nobel prize inflation.” Experience? That seems like a strange verb to use when the article itself clearly suggests “engage in” as the better choice.
I was talking with Peg yesterday about email. I told her I created a folder in my email program to put all those emails that I need to keep, but don't fit with other emails into a folder with similar emails. I call the folder "Archive." I only keep emails that are waiting for an answer in my Inbox and my Outbox. With Eudora, the program runs better if there aren't a lot of emails in the Inbox and Outbox, and I'm able to find emails quickly when I need them! Peg said she was going to create two folders, "In Archive" and "Out Archive." As emails increase in number, it helps to find ways to file them efficiently so we have time to do everything else!
Plurals all! To refer to a single instance of any of these terms, use datum, criterion, or phenomenon.
I’ve compiled a data file, where I’ve listed each datum of observation in my experiment.
In a list of criteria for membership in an organization, I’d call a required academic credential one criterion.
If I study unusual geographic phenomena, I’d call a single feature a phenomenon.
My local paper had a caption yesterday under a photo of the chef at a new restaurant, presenting “a grilled beef tenderloin wrapped in apple smoked bacon dish from the restaurant.”
Eh?
I flashed on the appearance of that “beef tenderloin wrapped in apple smoked bacon dish.” The photo revealed that the dish (platter) itself didn’t wrap around the grilled tenderloin, so I suspected the apple smoking process applied to the bacon, not the dish.
This caption needs a rewrite to deliver the caption-writer’s original meaning. One possibility: “Restaurant chef Robert Steele presents a grilled beef tenderloin wrapped in apple-smoked bacon.”
Writers need to pay special attention to captions, headlines, email subject lines and other brief informational summaries, especially in online documents, where they become “microcontent.”
Microcontent can provide essential contextual or navigational cues for readers, but only when constructed carefully. Microcontent like the caption above raises distracting questions in readers’ minds that slow the reading and may cause confusion.
A Word a Day (AWAD) brought me a great new word today—godwottery—which applies to two of my major interests: horticulture and prose style. According to Anu Garg, who directs the AWAD project, godwottery has two meanings:
1. Gardening marked by an affected and elaborate style.2. Affected use of archaic language.
Garg says the word arose from a line penned by Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897): “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! (God knows),” when he needed a line to rhyme with a line ending in “rose plot.” The poem described Brown’s garden, which featured a pool with fish, a grotto, ferns, roses, and more.
As a long-time gardener, I’ve seen many gardens (and known many gardeners) afflicted by godwottery. I’ll admit to a certain fascination with these outdoor spaces dotted with plastic, copper, glass and ceramic sculptures, pump-driven brooks and waterfalls, and sometimes planted with garish fake flowers in surreal colors in spots where real ones have failed to thrive.
Fortunately, garden godwottery has never tempted me, since I grow mostly fruits and vegetables in a hillside garden passersby can’t see from the road. I don’t really care what it looks like, as long as it produces plenty of food.
As a writer/editor, I’ve ploughed through my share of prose godwottery, including occasional drafts of my own work.
I cured myself of prose godwottery by reading widely, which sensitized my ear to both good and bad prose in a hundred styles, and by having the good fortune to work with a string of fine editors who helped me unclutter my style.
Do you recognize off-putting godwottrery in your own, or others’ prose? Don’t underestimate the value of a good copy editor.
Converse From the Latin con=with and uersari=to turn [ideas] around.Content From the Latin con=with and tenere =to hold
The history of our word conversation carries with it the sense of movement and varying perspective, both of which have found their way into the theory of mindfulness. Information processed mindfully remains active and dynamic, available for the learner to use in new contexts.
Yet we typically think of writing as an act of producing content, filling a space with words and ideas. Content carries the idea of a fixed amount of material, a fixed perspective, information held together by single point of view fixed by the writer.
Content or conversation?
Producing content generally implies that you the writer-expert will disgorge what you “know” and believe others should or want to “learn.” Having a conversation implies a back-and-forth wrestling with the subject matter, viewing it from varying angles and asking questions of it using your words and ideas as a fulcrum or a jumping-off point. Conversation implies interactivity, opening your words and ideas to questions, challenges and new insights.
This difference reveals itself dramatically when we think of Cooperative Extension’s charge to develop programs that foster multi-party engagement, rather than expert transmission.
Eventually your words will fill a certain amount of space on the page or on a computer monitor. All writers face space constraints, but having a limited space does not require a limited mindset or a single fixed stance towards the information. The conversation doesn’t have to end with your book, article or fact sheet. The best writing whets the reader’s appetite for more, more involvement with the topic, more of what you write.
So, how can you converse with your readers, rather than simply filling a page with content?
You might start by conversing with yourself, out loud or on paper. State your intention. Why do you want (or have) to write this piece? Why do you think someone else should read it? What assumptions do you begin with?
Now, take a point of view from which you question your original assumptions. Question the facts you plan to put in your publication—have you stated them as absolutes, or have you qualified them by placing them in appropriate contexts?
Consider stating (in writing) what you and other experts don’t know about the topic.
Ask what role you assume as the writer. Imagine writing from another perspective that enables readers to interact more meaningfully with the material you present.
Read what you’ve written aloud from time to time, assuming the role of a critical reader.
As you write, visualize talking with someone about your topic.
Consider beginning with a question. Answer it. Ask another, and another. Keep writing down your answers. Use conditional language; work to eliminate absolutisms.
Suggest that readers find correlations between their own experience and aspects of your topic.
Consider using personal pronouns: I, you, we. Humans come hard-wired to respond to human voices and personal pronouns suggest real human voices.
Consider asking: Can I present this information from a different point of view? Then try to do it.
Consider ending with a question, maybe one you’ve often asked yourself.
“Bare with me,” a writer begged his readers in an article I read recently.
Oops! In this simple case of a misused homonym (words that sound the same, but have different meanings and often, different spellings), the writer issued an invitation to get naked with him.
I think he really meant “Bear with me,” where "bear" means “put up with.”
Our words bear and bare each has a wide range of meanings. For example, "bear" appears in many many phrasals, two-word verbs, which often dramatically transform the meaning of the original verb: e.g., bear down (accelerate, push harder, move up on), bear up (endure serenely), bear with (put up with), bear out (confirm the truth of).
On the other hand, “bare” changes meaning often, and often quite subtly, when used as an adjective: e.g., bare root, barefoot, bare-knuckle, bare bones, bare truth, bare livelihood.
I hesitate to call them “guest” bloggers, these four generous colleagues who filled in for me last week to keep Waking Up Writing going in my absence. But I have no hesitation about extending my gratitude to all of them: Steve Judd, Holly Young, Lynn Tolfree, and Gillian Hodges.
What an interesting array of posts! Fine writers Lynn Tolfree and Gillian Hodges-Rapp (who has a new surname because she just got married), both work as county administrative assistants. Gillian came to Extension with a degree in English and previous experience as a professional newspaper writer and editor. Lynn has taken writing courses and aspires to a professional writing career.
I consider our organization lucky to have such thoughtful and talented wordsmiths in support roles. I’ve learned that many Extension support staff play vital, if often unacknowledged, roles as writers, editors, data collectors, graphic designers, and photographers.
Lynn’s thoughtful post on the value of trust—“Trust is telling the truth, even when it is difficult, and being truthful, authentic, and trustworthy in your dealings…”—reminded me of the importance that political scientist Robert Putnam accords trust. In his 2000 best-selling book Bowling Alone, Putnam presents trust as both the foundation and the result of a rich store of social capital, and notes a strong correlation between high levels of trust and civic engagement.
Holly’s post on the Crisis Protocol Team contains an invitation to all staff to weigh in on one or more of the many aspects of the team’s work. I know I plan to, and I hope many of you take time to feed in to this important new initiative.
Well, I gotta go. Steve’s post really tripped my trigger. My inbox contains nearly 6,000 messages in serious need of management. My outbox contains almost as many. Yikes!
Thanks again, guys!
“Viable” means alive, capable of sustaining life, able to reproduce. So, you’d write about a viable bacterial colony, a viable seed, a viable ecosystem.
For accuracy in formal writing, reserve “viable” for living things, and describe strategic plans, political candidacies, economic ideas, and concepts as “feasible,” “sound,” “comprehensive,” etc.
Email, it’s not exactly a new technology, so why am I writing about it? Because what fast food service does for nutrition, email does to communication. It amazes me that I can have a grant application in my office at 12:02 PM and by 12:03 PM, that application is transferred to an office in another state, the same way it amazes me that my food is in my lap minutes after ordering. In both cases though, it’s obvious something is lost.
When most people sit down to write a formal letter, draft a report or even make a business call, a lot of time and forethought goes into its construction. People think about things like the layout; what language to use; punctuation; grammar; format; if their main point is adequately conveyed; if the writing flows, etc. When people write an email, many of these considerations are ignored, actually causing a break down in effective communication.
Email is certainly not the same thing as a formal letter. Its purpose above all things is to provide quick communication, but with this quick communication, we can make an effort to touch upon important elements of writing.
Some things to consider when writing emails:
Grammar counts. Before sending out an email, be sure to read over what you’ve written as thoroughly as if it were a letter, a grant, a report, etc. It may be a quick letter to a colleague with whom you’re friendly, but it is still important to double check the language used. Word choice, punctuation, spelling, etc are all responsible for how you will ultimately convey your message.
Remember the power of the written word. People often times write things that they wouldn’t say in normal conversation. Email seems to exacerbate this problem. People respond with an immediate reaction and hit send, before they have the time to really think about the message they are sending.
Keep it professional. It’s always a good idea to lean on the side of professionalism when writing an email. Keep in mind that a lot of emails get forwarded to individuals you hadn’t anticipated. A witty aside to the person you wrote the email to, might not mean the same thing to a higher-up who receives your email from a forward.
Respect confidentiality. All emails (unless otherwise stated) should be respected as confidential. When we receive an email, we often don’t think twice about forwarding it on to someone else. Can you imagine doing this with an actual letter though? Taking a letter you received, making copies and then sending it on to outside parties?
Chris Conlon and I are co-chairs for UNH Cooperative Extension's Crisis Protocol Team. Our goals are to work towards an organizational mind set to recognize crises and step in as appropriate (prevention, preparation, response, recovery)
and integrate UNHCE into the emergency response system in New Hampshire.
Others on the team are Kathy Jablonski, Bob Edmonds and Deb Maes. Our specific tasks include conducting a risk assessment, creating a communications plan and organization-wide incident report, updating county disaster manuals, conducting/providing staff training, posting web-based resources for the public and our staff, developing tools for rapid response work and mapping organizational assets.
This is an important task, and staff suggestions are welcome to any one of us. We look forward to providing a comprehensive plan that will help staff in emergencies such as the devastating floods of this past weekend.
I think people hope for improvement in their lives, and many of those people look for what they can do to make improvements. In my own search, I read articles about communication, leadership, and teamwork. The article Trust Rules! The Most Important Secret is one I found particularly valuable.
How important is building a trusting work environment? According to Dr. Duane C. Tway, Jr. in his 1993 dissertation, A Construct of Trust, people have been interested in trust since Aristotle. Tway states, “Aristotle (384-322 BC), writing in the Rhetoric, suggested that Ethos, the Trust of a speaker by the listener, was based on the listener's perception of three characteristics of the speaker. Aristotle believed these three characteristics to be the intelligence of the speaker (correctness of opinions, or competence), the character of the speaker (reliability -- a competence factor, and honesty -- a measure of intentions), and the goodwill of the speaker (favorable intentions towards the listener).”
Tway defines trust as, “the state of readiness for unguarded interaction with someone or something.” He developed a model of trust that includes three components. He calls trust a construct because it is “constructed” of these three components: “the capacity for trusting, the perception of competence, and the perception of intentions.”
The capacity for trusting means that your total life experiences have developed your current capacity and willingness to risk trusting others. Many people are unwilling to trust because of their life experiences. In many work places, people are taught to mistrust as they are repeatedly misinformed and misled.
The perception of competence is made up of your perception of your ability and the ability of others with whom you work to perform competently at whatever is needed in your current situation.
The perception of intentions, as defined by Tway, is your perception that the actions, words, direction, mission, or decisions are motivated by mutually-serving rather than self-serving motives.
Additional research by Tway and others shows that trust is the basis for much of the environment you want to create in your work place. Trust is the necessary precursor for:
feeling able to rely upon a person,
cooperating with and experiencing teamwork with a group,
taking thoughtful risks, and
experiencing believable communication."
The article finishes with the statement: "Trust is telling the truth, even when it is difficult, and being truthful, authentic, and trustworthy in your dealings with customers and staff. Can profoundly-rewarding, mission-serving, life- and work-enhancing actions get any simpler than this? Not likely!"
I find that a good bit of the reading and writing I do is in the form of email. The website 43 Folders has many tips for dealing with the ever expanding volume of email we each process. Here are some links and some of my favorites:
Five fast email productivity tips
Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.”
The basic idea is to firewall processing as a discrete phase you go through no more than every hour or two at the most. For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.
If you can knock off a reply the first time you see a message, do so. But if you accumulate items that need a bit more attention, concentrate on getting them all in the right place, and then go back to your work—return only when you have time to start chipping away. Above all, don’t let unprocessed mail live in your inbox: this is a lazy habit that invites procrastination, guilt, and inaction.
From Eudora.com:
Also, the In, Out, and Trash mailboxes are the primary mailboxes in
Eudora. These mailboxes are loaded into memory upon startup of Eudora -
so if they get excessively large, you risk causing slowdowns in Eudora
and you may increase the chances of Data corruption. It is a good
practice to routinely Empty Trash and to transfer old messages from the
In and Out boxes to other mailboxes in Eudora.
I’m literally dead on my feet.
We had virtually no resources.
Many of us have difficulty distinguishing between the meanings of “virtual” and “literal”
“Literal” means “actual, without interpretation or embellishment.” It doesn’t mean “almost.”
“Virtual” means “not real.” It implies a representation of something, but not the thing itself.
Someone “literally” dead on her feet wouldn’t remain vertical for long! Instead, you’d write, “I‘m virtually dead on my feet (not really dead, but a good representation of dead).”
And rather than, “We had virtually no resources,” you’d write, “We had literally no resources (no actual resources at all).”
Over my years of editing fact sheets and newspaper columns that contain the Latin names for crops, ornamental plants, weeds, and trees, I’ve seen a lot of variation in the way writers choose to present them typographically.
Unsure myself of the scientifically correct way to write botanical names, I consulted the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.
The Code specifies italics for genera and species, and initial capitals for genera, but not species or subspecies: Glycine max (soybean); Zea mays (corn), Acer saccharum (sugar maple).
Capitalize the first letter and use Roman (non-italic) type for names of higher ranks: family, order, class subphylum, phylum and kingdom.
Learn more (a lot more!) about the standards for identifying plants by spending some time perusing the International Code yourself.
Please don’t!
This verbification of the noun “incentive” emerged from the mindless jargonbabble of the corporate memo. To my ear it sounds ugly, cold, and harsh, something that gets done to people, rather than inspiring them to act. “The vice-president’s new strategy will incentivize the field staff to work more for less pay.”
I dislike even more its close relative, “incent,” as in, “The government will use tax credits to incent middle-class Americans to save more.”
Linguists call such constructions back-formations—new words created from old ones. We’ve added countless interesting new and useful words to English language through this process, many of which no doubt sounded pretentious, awkward, or ignorant at first. But other back-formations die early. I hope incentivize and incent fall quickly into the mass grave of failed language.
If you find one of these words coming from your keyboard, consider replacing it with one of the solid, conventional alternatives: How can we motivate people to save more? Let’s brainstorm what incentives will bring people out. This kind of encouragement should move people to act.