Steve Judd sent me this doozy of a headline from the Business section of yesterday’s New York Times: “Reading X-Rays in Asbestos Suits Enriched Doctor.”
The humor, of course, derives from the double meaning of the word “suits,” both “suits of clothes” and as a short form of “lawsuits.”
To avoid microcontent mishaps, check carefully for double meanings, dangling modifiers, and ambiguous adjectives. Before you publish important documents, ask two or three colleagues to scrutinize your titles, headings and subheadings for gaffes.
“New research taps into placebo effect: Low expectations may affect results,” reads a headline in the morning paper.
Which results do the low expectations affect? The results of the “new research?” Readers don’t find out until they get into the meat of the article.
Doctors have long thought the placebo effect was psychological.Now scientists are amassing the first direct evidence that the placebo effect actually is physical, and that expecting benefit can trigger the same neurological pathways of healing as real medicine.”
The problem with the headline—especially if it became divorced from the context of the article that follows, as might happen if the headline appeared as a Web links—involves the physical proximity of the words “research” and “results.” Results typically follow from research, so readers may become momentarily confused.
Each moment of confusion stops the forward momentum smooth reading requires. Such moments accumulate, contributing to the overall cognitive burden of a reading task.
The headline writer might have avoided the confusion by writing, “New research into placebo effect: Patient expectations affect healing.”
In this post I would like to suggest that media literacy can be an important part of all extension education.
First a story:
I recently had occasion to talk to a group of parents attending a leadership series about the influence of media messages on children and families. The initial discussion took a turn I am guessing is common. “It’s too bad how everybody else is influenced by advertising and media messages but I’m not.” Well I used an activity available at the Center for Media Literacy website created by Carrie McLaren based on the artwork of Heidi Cody to help us all reflect on the role of media in our culture. First a slide of local natural plants is shown, including common trees such as poplar and maple. As predicted the participants could only name a few. Then a slide containing an “alphabet” derived from logos and brand names was shown, a photo of an instillation by Heidi Cody. The group easily named the source of each letter of the “alphabet.” Hey that’s the “P” from the Pez dispenser, that’s the “E” from leggo my eggo, the “I” from the ice machine etc. Needless to say the discussion took a different turn from there.
So what is my point? Well it could be that we all could benefit from more familiarity with the plants and animals in the environment around us. No doubt, but I would like to draw your attention to the other “environment” around us, the sea of symbols and symbol systems we are all immersed in day in, and day out. These symbols form messages which are created by someone, with a specific purpose in mind.
A couple of questions:
What messages from our culture influence you, and the work you do?
What messages influence those you work with?
Consider the following specific questions:
What are the messages about teens in our culture today?
What are the messages, in our culture, about parents of teenagers?
Can I as a parenting educator do my work without reflecting on the answers to such questions? I think not. I suggest that there are similar questions in all of the various fields we work in.
I suggest that critically reflecting on the popular culture messages that impact ourselves and the folks we work with is an essential part of relevant & effective education.
To view the lessen plan mentioned above, visit the Center for Medica Literacy's page The Branding Alphabet.
Confused about whether to use e.g. or i.e. when giving examples?
The latest grammar hint on the Association for Communications Excellence (ACE) writing special interest group's Web page should end your confusion.
Revulsion. That feeling that all this stuff you have written is stupid, ugly, worthless—and cannot be fixed. Disgust. Peter Elbow, Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process
Most writers have felt nauseated about their writing at some point in a writing project. It can strike at any moment, even at times when your enthusiasm for the topic runs high and your words flow freely.
I characterize nausea as a unique species of writer’s block. I lose my enthusiasm. The topic feels hopelessly complex, and my wordsmithing powers grossly inadequate to capture what I understand of the subject at hand. As a novice freelancer, I let go of more than a few great opportunities because writer’s nausea shut me down, sometimes after weeks or months of research.
Peter Elbow, one of my favorite writers-who-writes-about-writing, devotes a full chapter to nausea (from which I took the opening quotation) in Writing with Power, a fine book first published in 1981. Mercifully, the chapter runs only two pages (pp.173-175).
Like Elbow, I’ve learned that, while I can’t prevent the nausea or predict when it might strike, I don’t have to give in to it. Writes Elbow:
First of all, recognize it for what it is: a stupid game you play with yourself, a sneak attack by demons….
For me the demons take many forms, but they all have the same ultimate aim: to keep me from wrapping up and winding down that piece of writing. They want me to quit.
Elbow warns writers to understand how “writer’s nausea” leaves us in an emotionally and intellectually weakened state. Nausea impairs judgment. It flips some physiological switch that makes it almost impossible to find the right word or get the right sequence of words and ideas.
Some remedies:
Take a fresh sheet of unlined paper and conduct a five-minute freewriting exercise, in which you simply express you rage and frustration about getting stuck with your project. You can also do this exercise by speaking aloud (very loud, if you can find a private place).If you have time, leave the project for an hour—or a day. Do something physical. Take a walk. Clean the office kitchen. Take out the trash. Split some wood. Hang the wash. Put your mind on the task at hand, not the piece of writing you can’t finish.
Ask a colleague to read what you’ve written, even if you only have a few rough paragraphs. Ask for help, not mere feedback. For example: “The subject seems too complex for an 800-word article. Can you suggest a way to narrow my focus?” “These two [aspects of the topic] seem connected, but I can’t find the words that create a bridge between them. Can you help?” “I keep having the feeling my piece breaks down here on the second page. Where did I go wrong?”
Muddle through without attempting a rewrite or a major revision. Tidy up as best you can. Settle for whatever you can muster today. Get it done. Ship it off. Let it go. With any luck, you might just have an empathetic, first-rate copy editor at the other end.
Last week I received an email notice announcing an Ornamental Weed Management Symposium scheduled for early January. “Hmm,” I thought. “What a great idea! Someone else shares my appreciation of weeds as ornamental plants and wants to teach folks how to grow them.”
I opened the attached flyer about the event and read: Ornamental Symposium: Advances in Nursery Weed Management. All the latest on keeping weeds out of nurseries growing ornamental plants. Nothing about ornamental weeds themselves.
Another humorous example of how adjectives run amok unless writers pay close attention to 'em.
Readers love controversy and learn from debate. Disagreement is exciting. Everyone loves a fight, and by witnessing the contest of competing ideas we can better understand what they imply.
This quotation comes from the outstanding 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web, by Mark Bernstein, for the blog A List Apart.
Tip 5. Find Good Enemies (which follows Tip 4., Make Good Friends) may seem counterintuitive, especially for Extension writers, who generally prefer talking about partnerships, coalitions, and community.
“Dramatic conflict is an especially potent tool for illuminating abstract and technical issues,” notes Bernstein. I’d add that almost all issues of pressing public importance involve many levels of controversy and disagreement, even among the experts and scholars who study them.
Bernstein carefully distinguishes “good enemies” from “trolls,” who “seemingly live for controversy and seek out ways to create and inflame disputes…. Never engage them; you cannot win.” “Trolls,” he adds, “when ignored, will usually retire.”
Good enemies, chosen with care, help spark mindful deliberations of the issues that matter to you. Showcasing the best representations of perspectives that differ from your own will help boost your credibility with readers, who will appreciate your encompassing understanding of the topic.
And, of course, “When it’s over, try to make good friends with good enemies.”
Did anyone catch The News Hour on PBS last night? The show’s Mediawatch Unit aired a segment that examined the phenomenon variously called citizen journalism, participatory journalism, hyperlocal, grass roots, do-it-yourself, bottom-up, social media, and user-generated media. PBS calls it “We media.”
Enabled by new technology—“social software” (such as blogs and wikis), Internet-connected mobile phones and other handheld wireless devices that also shoot still photos and video—the new media erase the conventional distinction between “content developers” and their “audiences.” By extension, we may also say they’ve begun to alter the conventional boundaries between teachers and learners, experts and laypeople.
The News Hour segment featured a New Hampshire online community newspaper, The Forum, which serves a four-town area encompassing Deerfield, Nottingham, Northwood, and Candia. Check it out!
The Forum, which went live last August, even scooped the Union Leader in breaking the story that a contingent from the N.H. National Guard had been dispatched to Louisiana to aid Hurricane Katrina relief.
If you listen to the News Hour segment all the way through, you’ll catch some information about wikis, a form social software that enables collaborative editing—in short, allowing any site visitor to make editorial changes to content on a wiki site. Our own Cooperative Extension system will next year roll out a Web portal called eXtension, whose editing will take place in a wiki environment. We’ll all have an opportunity to receive wiki training allowing us to participate in content creation and editing. Stay tuned!
The primary difference between the old journalism and the emergent participatory journalism? Multi-directional content creation.
Old media function primarily as“broadcasts”, with a central source distributing information/entertainment to an “audience.” In contrast, “we” media technologies allow almost anyone to participate in formats dubbed “many-to-many.”
Communication experts studying these new media predict they will change the nature of expertise, authority, teaching, and learning, as well as concepts of trust, communication, community, and intellectual property.
Hang on for a wild ride!
Chip Scanlon, who teaches and writes about writing for the Poynter Institute, a couple of months ago wrote a piece called What Lies Beneath: The Iceberg Theory of Writing
In it, Scanlon quotes Hemingway: “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
If good writing consists in large part of knowing what to leave out, I think it also requires having an abundance of material to leave out.
It seems counterintuitive to many people that good writers begin with an abundance—often a super-abundance—of material. The more material you have to work with, and the greater a diversity of sources you’ve drawn upon, the richer and deeper a piece of writing you can produce.
Your material can come from experience and experiments, from cogitation and imagination, from reading books and articles, interviewing people, listening to lectures and overhearing conversations, from tuning in to TV and radio shows, participating in blogs and online discussion groups, and a hundred other sources.
But, by the end of a writing project, most of what you’ve learned and thought about won't show up as words on the page. The depth of your understanding of the topic contributes grace, balance, dignity, and authenticity to the relatively few words that do appear.
From an article on changes to the state’s ServiceLink program, a network of centers that help senior citizens link up with health and wellness benefits and programs: “Aging experts have long advocated for programs that care for seniors in their homes, not institutions.”
Hmmm. Do the “aging experts” refer to folks with expertise in aging, or to experts getting along in years themselves? The writer might have avoided that moment of confusion by changing the subject to “gerontologists,” or “experts on aging.”
Sometimes the worst thing you can do to your writing is say, “Done.”
Why is it that so many people’s idea of writing messes and romances with the old idea of muse? As if the act of writing involves simply sitting down with pen to page (or fingertip to key) and divinely spilling forth communicative genius ‘till done. Why does the idea that writing is ‘magic’ still permeate our idea of what it is to write; of how we write and of why we write?
The best way to write well, is to know that writing is work. Good writing does not innately flow from mind to paper. It is a more rehearsed process. Too often, authors jettison words to page to print, without revisiting their intent, their text, and their audience. Revisiting your work does not belittle the first effort, it only serves to strengthen the overall product.
The youth of today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information…. Many of our [teaching] institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new [electronic] environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force….It is a matter of greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word…Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms. Marshall McLuhan, 1967, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
I love the Somewhere North of Boston (S.N.O.B.) Film Festival, hosted each year by New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord. Today’s Concord Monitor carried a brief preview of this year’s festival. This quotation by featured Concord filmmaker Mike Eschenbach caught my eye:
I’m a documentary guy—as far back as I can remember, my mom used to have me dissect commercials and figure out how we were being manipulated to buy insurance of whatever they were selling.What I was 8 years old, it seemed sort of like she was a killjoy. But it gave me a critical eye and an appreciation for the real. Non-fiction has never been boring to me. It’s life.
Verbal: a word formed from a verb that takes on the function of nouns and adjectives.
A headline in my morning paper read, Professor: Give victims $200,000 check, choice. Its subhead, Rebuilding programs won’t help, he argues, raises a question.
Did the writer mean that rebuilding-programs won’t help, or that reconstructing certain programs won’t help?
In the first case, the writer would have used “rebuilding” as the present participle of the verb rebuild, an adjective modifying the word programs. In this instance, a reader could infer the writer meant that programs to rebuild the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast cities.
On the other hand, the writer might have wanted to use “rebuilding” as a noun, a grammatical construction known as a gerund. Rebuilding won’t help. As a verb form, a gerund can take an object—in this case, the word programs. (Rebuilding what? Rebuilding programs.) As a gerund, “rebuilding” could refer to “programs” as diverse as GED tutoring, dental care for poor children, and financial counseling for seniors.
The headline writer might have avoided reader confusion by writing something like: Professor: Give victims $200,000 check, choice: Don’t focus on rebuilding, he argues.
Headlines, sub-headlines, titles, email subject lines, photo captions, and other brief summary statements serve readers as abstracts of the meaning writers intend to deliver to readers.
The brevity of such “microcontent,” coupled with the fact that it usually stands alone, and often in bold, italicized, or otherwise highlighted text, makes mistakes in spelling, word choice, grammar and syntax especially conspicuous.
Irradiated meet in markets soon, reads a hilarious blooper headline from the Take 2 humor section at the American Journalism Review Web site. The headline introduced a story on irradiated meat in Hilo's Hawaii Tribune-Herald. Take 2 ran the blooper under its own humorous headline, A High-Energy Affair.
Sometimes trying to say it in fewer words means big mischief, as in this misguided advice from the Hudson Hub Times of Stow, Ohio: Have Fun at Prom; Don't Drink, Do Drugs.
The take-home message: Draft and scrutinize microcontent with great care.
I encourage you all to sample the wares at PowerReporting: Thousands of free research tools for journalists, by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Bill Dedman, who last month assumed the post of managing editor at New Hampshire’s own Nashua Telegraph.
Dedman won a Pulitzer in 1989 for a series of articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution called The Color of Money, which described racial discrimination in mortgage lending
Not just journalists, but all writers, will indeed find many thousands of useful online resources at PowerReporting. For example, you might want to visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, “A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics; provides background material and explanations of First Amendment and intellectual property-related laws; they are also compiling a database of people/sites that have received cease-and-desist notices. There are ongoing topics, news updates, and reports on the current ‘weather.’”
I discovered a page that leads to all manner of government alerts, and another that lists a vast array of online calculators (in case you want to count the frequency of words in a document, adjust the dollar figures for inflation in the U.S. for any year from 1913 forward, or convert any world currency to another).
You can find full-text state statutes and legislation, a page of resources that help you research companies, and another page containing a very useful “search tools chart” that lets you compare features on some of the best search engines and directories on the Web.
Dedman even has a humor page. I liked hitting the “Take 2” button in the upper right of the homepage of the American Journalism Review.
Take 2 offered this blooper headline from the Associated Press: Bonus permits enable 809 hunters to kill two deer. Another “take” that struck my fancy—an editor’s parody that actually got published in the Philadelphia Enquirer: To comment briefly on editorials, call 215-854-5060. The Editorial Board members will roll their eyes and chuckle at your remarks. No doubt closer to the truth than whatever the Inquirer usually tells readers the Editorial Board members will do.
Most of us participate in email listservs, both the established, ongoing type that deal with a certain topic of professional or personal interest and the ad hoc ones that arise when several people begin writing a training manual, planning a workshop series, etc.
Most of us have also had the experience of email messages with the same subject line (e.g., Will the 17th work?) bouncing back and forth on a listserv for days, even weeks.
Change the subject line each time you respond, especially if you start discoursing on an entirely new topic. This will help the people on your list understand that the topic has shifted, however subtly. It will help distinguish your messages from everyone else’s, and you’ll help set a standard for email etiquette. It may also boost your credibility within the group, as someone who pays attention to people’s need to extract meaning from written messages.
I recently came across two outstanding online columns that speak to the importance of establishing a narrative voice (i.e., telling a story that connects emotionally and viscerally, as well as cognitively, with readers), no matter what medium you write for.
The first column, A Case for Web Storytelling, by Curt Cloninger for the blog A List Apart, speaks directly to Web “content” producers. The other, What is Narrative, Anyway?, by journalist Chip Scanlon of the Poynter Institute, addresses journalists.
As I’ve written repeatedly, humans come hard-wired for the sounds, tone and rhythms of the human voice. Neither the rigid visual imperialism of the printed line nor the whiz-bang techno-wizardry of interactive electronic media can override that primary feature of our genetic heritage.
The best writing always tells a story. The best writers write for the ear.
Many Extension writers confuse these homonyms (words that sound the same but have different meanings).
The word principal can function as either an adjective or a noun. As an adjective, principal means main, chief, or most important: “The prosecutor named Mr. Lee as the principal suspect in the crime.” “The collapse of the coalition serves as the principal argument in favor of our original plan.”
As a noun, principal has several meanings, including the amount of a loan not including interest (“He owes only $1000 on the principal.”), the main owner or investor (“As a principal in the project, Boggs should have given the field work more scrutiny.”), or a school executive (“Mrs. Higgins sent Beth to see the principal.”)
The word principle is always a noun. It means a rule, standard, or guideline. “I stand on principle.” “We operate from three central principles.”
A timid question will always receive a confident answer. – Henry Lytton Bulwer, diplomat and author (1801-1872)
Reading this quotation a few weeks ago got me to thinking: How do I question the reports and articles I read? How do I question those of my colleagues? My own?
Often I forget to ask any questions at all.
What kind of answers would I get if I asked bold, courageous questions whenever I engage with text?