As E.B. White put it in the chapter he contributed to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (1959): “Do not dress words up by adding ‘ly’ to them, as though putting a hat on a horse.” —The Mavens’ Word of the Day, June 29, 2001
Word stylists argue about the correctness of adding “ly”, to the so-called “enumerative adverbs.” Firstly or first? Secondly or second? Thirdly or third? And so on.
I tend to edit out the “ly,” not only in the cause of brevity, but because the short forms sound more modern and less stuffy to my ear. And I agree with the author, JC, quoted above, that it also makes sense from a number of other pserspectives:
I think your repeated deletions of -ly represent time well spent. Partly this is a matter of consistency: I can't imagine anyone saying “eleventhly” or “seventeenthly”—and even those who do use “firstly” in enumerations would never use it in any other adverbial context (“The Smyths arrived at the party firstly and left lastly?”). But perhaps another reason to avoid firstly and secondly is that they resemble hypercorrections--inappropriate forms substituted for perfectly good ones, out of a desire to sound especially correct.
For more on the suffix imagine anyone saying “eleventhly” or “seventeenthly”—and even those who do use “ly,” visit this page in The Mavens’ Word of the Day.
A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a gift certificate to a Thai restaurant for my daughter and her roommate, who live in the Washington, D.C. area, figuring they might want to use it during a hectic holiday shopping trip.
I found the place by searching online, choosing an eatery with moderate prices whose customers raved about its homey ambiance and the authenticity of its cuisine.
I ordered the gift certificate by phone, and had a hilarious exchange with a woman who answered. She’d obviously learned English as a foreign language, and had to concentrate to hear and make herself heard against the background noise of garrulous evening diners.
I couldn’t understand her soft-but-staccato, rapid-fire English, and she struggled to interpret my slow, careful articulation. She interrupted often with, “Wah? Pleece say ‘gain.” And I interrupted her with frequent interjections of, “Excuse me?”
We encountered special difficulty with the spelling of names and addresses (for example, at one point, she had the roommate’s name as Finger, instead of Ginger). Our troubles had us both laughing before we completed the transaction.
Three days later, I received a small envelope containing my credit card receipt, with everything painstakingly hand-lettered in ballpoint pen. I found myself moved by the handwriting, by the fact that someone labored over each letter, making sure to get it all right.
I’d never thought before about the deep, qualitative differences between the uniformity of a computerized font, however elegant, and the unique shape of an individual person’s hand-made letters. It this case, the handwriting delivered special meaning. It made me even more certain I’d chosen the right restaurant.
I agree that being technologically educated is not the same thing as being literate. I also suggest that being merely literate is not the same thing as being productively educated.Even many intellectuals have not always been so sanguine about literacy.� Plato thought that literacy was a disaster. In the Phaedrus�Plato argued that literacy would, indeed, destroy minds. Writing would destroy memory, weaken the rational powers, and lead people away from, rather than towards, the truth. Writing destroyed accountability. The author became alienated from the word and the word from the author. The author lost the ability to defend the word that, in its written form, remained passive and inert, defenseless and unresponsive.
Perhaps, as many students of the orality-literacy distinction have argued, literacy was indeed mind destroying. Many have argued that literacy was built on the destruction of the oral mind. It may be that the Internet will rot our literate or would-be literate minds just as literacy initiated the rotting of the oral mind. On the other hand, perhaps we should worry less about what will happen to the literate mind and more about what, if anything, will replace it. - Al Cheyne (Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) Will the Internet Rot Your Mind?
Three seemingly disparate recent news items connect and reflect one another through Cheyne's comments:
Item: From a December 16 New York Times piece by Sam Dillon, Literacy Falls for Graduates From College, Testing Finds, we learn that �the average American college graduate's literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read�When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills.
The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts.
Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily identifiable information in short prose.
Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet.
"We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.
Item: Long headline from a recent Cable in the Classroom ("The cable industry's education foundation") press release: Textbooks May Be Going the Way of Eight-Track Tapes in New Era of Digital Content, Say Education, Technology Experts: Games, Interactivity, Simulations, Streaming Video, Multimedia Transforming Education Landscape: Classrooms Need to Catch the Wave.
The press release reports on a forum it says drew school district administrators, representatives of teacher unions, virtual education providers, cable programmers, teachers, and education organization leaders, to explore "how digital content and technology can enhance and expand learning, and what these developments mean for the way we prepare teachers, involve parents, and design classrooms for a new digital education environment."
< snip>
Digital education content is making it both possible and necessary to reinvent schools, said a panel of education leaders and technology experts at a forum hosted by Cable in the Classroom (CIC) and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) held Friday."Wiring schools is the beginning of the story," said Douglas Levin, director of education policy for Cable in the Classroom. "But the content is also a vital piece of the puzzle, in many ways the most meaningful piece."
"Quality content is the key to whether students succeed or fail in the learning enterprise, and digital content is a rich, deep well," said Helen Soule, Ph.D., executive director of Cable in the Classroom. "If we think about the resources that are out there, and if we think of how we could -- and should -- transform schools, we have an opportunity to create the kind of classrooms that will help children take their place in the highly competitive global marketplace that awaits them."
Then further down:
Electronic gaming offers enormous possibilities for learning, as a totally engaging medium demanding rapid decision-making, short- and long-term thinking, and the willingness to fail repeatedly before succeeding.Item: In the November 6 issue of Wired News, an AP story, Imagine, Make It Real in Fab Lab reports on a pilot MIT initiative that has established Fabrication Labs in which ordinary citizens, given a bit of training, use cutting-edge computer-controlled fabrication tools to fashion their own creations. MIT has established seven Fab Labs as free community resources in places as distant as Norway and Ghana. The project has equipped the labs with commercially available tools, such as laser cutters, milling machines, and electronic assembly tools.
"Open-source software and MIT-written programs control the devices, machining parts to tolerances that once could be achieved only using equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars," the AP writer notes.
Fab Lab output can be practical, or whimsical.I won't take up more space speculating on the future of what we loosely call "literacy," but simply remind you that humans have come only recently to mass literacy and that pre-literate humans created impressively sophisticated societies.
- Herders in northern Norway erected a telecommunications network to track their sheep's wanderings with radio antennas and electronic tags.
- In India, farmers created measurement tools to ensure a safe milk supply and measure fat content, and women found a way to scan and print carved wooden blocks used for a local kind of embroidery. In a separate project, villagers designed small LED lights for use in areas lacking electricity.
- Villagers in Ghana, meanwhile, harnessed solar power to make electricity and cook food rather than relying on firewood.
- On the fanciful front, a teenage girl in Boston created a diary security system that photographs anyone coming near the owner's private writings -- say, a nosey brother.
Citizen inventors with only modest technical expertise swap ideas with counterparts at other Fab Labs around the world by electronically sharing design blueprints or going to a Fab Lab website that offers project ideas.
"If you give people access to means to solve their own problems, it touches something very, very deep, said Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT physicist and computer scientist who is among the movement's chief proponents. "There's sort of this deep thing inside that most people don't express that comes tumbling out when they get access to these tools," he said.I work from the assumption that technologies not yet imagined will both transcend and incorporate, not only the conventional print literacy traditional educators now revere, but also our current electronic media literacies. Electronic media have irrevocably altered the power structures that mass print media created and have already begun eroding the legitimacy of our current political, economic, and educational gatekeeping systems.
The Cable in the Classroom press release warned:
Parents, school board members, other education leaders, and teachers are going to need professional development to catch up with the new ways children are learning.I doubt most of their elders have a prayer of ever catching up.
Posted by pboyles at 7:28 PM
Tennis players have their elbows, athletes have their feet, so what do writers get? They get their cramps. Mogigraphia is a fancy name for writer's cramp…. A synonym of mogigraphia is graphospasm.-Anu Garg , Wordsmith
Delightful words like these make a common muscular problem sound erudite, in a sort of Pythonesque way. Mogigraphia derives from the Greek words mogis (with difficulty) and graph (writing).
Hear mogigraphia pronounced (marvelously sensuous).
Use it in a sentence: “Good news! It’s not carpal tunnel, but only a bad case of mogigraphia. Take two aspirin and lay off the dissertation for a week or two.”
Think you have a tough writing job? Imagine developing definitions for dictionary entries.
To wit: In addition to the 58 new entries in Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which include “catwalk,” “Al Qaeda,” “blog,” “sheesh,” “cargo pants” and “irritable bowel syndrome,” word-seekers will find 20 new meanings for existing words, among them, “wedgie.” The anonymous definition-writer came up with:
wedgie: 2. the condition of having one's clothing wedged between the buttocks especially from having one's pants or underpants yanked up from behind as a prank -- often used with get or give
From a Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, interview with Webster's editor-in-chief, Mike Agnes:
How do you collect new words?
We have a language-monitoring program in place. We have researchers that work full time in-house who monitor print, radio and television sources. They have a reading program. They read novels, magazines, newspapers … listen to talk radio. They are recording emerging English, anything that is not documented in our current college dictionary. Anything that's spoken or printed is a potential source. I don't care if it's graffiti on a men's room wall.
What a gig! Where do I apply?
Planning to write a little blurb cautioning writers to use adjectives mindfully, since this pesky part of speech often communicates subtle bias or tells readers what to think and feel, I chanced upon Geoffrey Pullam’s provocative February 18, 2004, post to the blog Language Log.
A snippet (I hope you read the whole post):
What do these writing experts think they are doing trying to take something as subtle as how to write well and boil it down to maxims as simple as the avoidance of one particular grammatical category? Are they... Well, I'm really going to need an adjective to say this... Are they insane?Look, you don't get good at writing by deleting adjectives. Writing is difficult and demanding; you can learn to get moderately good at it through decades of practice writing millions of words and critiquing what you've written or having others critique it. About 6% of those words will be adjectives, whether you write novels or news stories, whether they're good or bad.
The exception is that if you belong to the academic chattering classes—the literary experts who tell other people to avoid adjectives—the frequency goes up to over 8% in your academic prose. As in so many other domains, the very people who tell you not to are doing it more than you are. As Bertold Brecht put it:
Those who take the meat from the table
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.
Powerful stuff. I don’t think it contradicts what I’d planned to say, but I do think it deserves to stand alone.
People get confused over whether to use different from or different than. (Pity the Brits. They have a third choice: different to.)
Although different than has become common in informal speech and writing, most sources prefer different from for simple comparisons like the ones below, as well as in most other instances:
Your rules are different from mine.New Hampshire’s certification standards are different from Vermont’s.
The one instance in which experts agree writers can use different than arises when a clause follows the construction:
Geological features in your region are markedly different than the features we have here in the Northeast.
When in doubt, use different from. It always sounds right.
Of course, you can always “write around” a construction that sounds awkward to your ear. For example, you might write, Your rules differ from mine. New Hampshire and Vermont have different rules for certification. Geological features differ markedly between our two regions.
From the blog, Regret the Error, which tracks corrections, retractions, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the media, come the Crunks ’05: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections.
Most of us appreciate a moment or two of hilarity during this dark and often-harried time of year, especially at the expense of people who get paid for careful, accurate wordsmithing. Reading a newspaper or magazine’s corrections helps us put our own proofreading and copyediting gaffes into perspective.
The 2005 Typo of the Year comes from a November 1 Reuters article:
Quaker Main Meats, Inc., on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of ground beef panties that may be contaminated with E. coli.
I got a chuckle from the Best Service Journalism clip, which comes from the Journal Times of Racine, Wisconsin. From its Things to Know column, under a headline entitled Choosing a Diet: Here’s a Tip, we read “Before you fall in love with that adorable little puppy, find out how large it will be when fully grown.”
Before listing the year’s most sobering and hilarious corrections, and the most egregious instances of journalistic plagiarism, Regret the Error speaks to its core purpose:
Fact checking needs to play a greater role in the editing process, anti-plagiarism software should be utilized within newsrooms, and the correction must be evolved to meet a higher standard of disclosure. 2005 was the Year of Consequences. Let’s make 2006 the Year of Action.
A hearty “Amen!” to that.
In a December 11 Concord Monitor article headlined, In 500 words or less, make yourself irresistible: Seniors sweat out answers to college essay questions, I found this line: “Locally, high school seniors are racking their brains to answer them as winter application deadlines approach.”
I took the word “racking” for a homophonic error. I’ve always used the verb “wrack” in clichés involving the brain. To my eye, “racking their brains” invokes an image of brains set on a rack to cool or dry out.
As I usually do, I checked my preference with a few online sources. Lo and behold, Paul Brians offers my spelling as one of the Common Errors in English.
If you are racked with pain or you feel nerve-racked, you are feeling as if you were being stretched on that Medieval instrument of torture, the rack. You rack your brains when you stretch them vigorously to search out the truth like a torturer. “Wrack” has to do with ruinous accidents, so if the stock market is wracked by rumors of imminent recession, it’s wrecked. If things are wrecked, they go to “wrack and ruin.”
Oops!
But wait! The Columbia Guide to Standard English offers this refinement:
In some senses, the verbs rack and wrack are synonymous, and the two words, each as either noun or verb, are nearly interchangeable at some points. The usage problems arise over which spelling to use where there seems to be a possible or a clear overlap in meaning. Most Edited English will prefer rack your brain, wrack and ruin, storm-wracked, and pain-wracked, but other Standard written evidence, including some Edited English, will use the variant spelling for each
I follow the link to nerve-wracking, where I read:
nerve-wracking, nerve-racking (adj.)These homophones are variants of the same word meaning “intensely stressful on the nerves,” “trying of the patience,” as in That oral exam was a nerve-wracking [nerve-racking] ordeal. Both spellings are Standard.
Then I turn to Brenda Shaw, who opines in the Eggcorns Forum:
To ‘wrack’ means to ruin or destroy; it’s related to ‘wreck’. To ‘rack’ means to torture someone (esp. on the rack), or to literally or metaphorically stretch and strain something as if on the rack.Which is the original form of ‘nerve-(w)racking’ or ‘to (w)rack one’s brain’? Either one makes sense in either context. If something is nerve-wracking, it’s destroying one’s nerves; if it’s nerve-racking, said nerves are being strained. Racking one’s brain would mean to stretch or strain it to the limits of endurance; wracking one’s brain would mean thinking so hard that the brain is wrecked.
Hey, given my druthers, I’d prefer a brain or nervous system overwrought from “thinking hard” as opposed to “stretched to the limits of its endurance.” So, I guess I’ll keep on wrackin’ and rollin’.
Sometimes a trend comes along that is brutally painful for a self-respecting journalist to acknowledge. So it is with some embarrassment that I report on the latest obsession buzzing through the arcane fields of linguistics and lexicography, one that will resonate with any Times reader who values well-written English. We hacks, it seems, have become so enamoured of lazy, formulaic turns of phrase that we have inspired a new academic sport devoted to chronicling them. They even have their own name: snowclones. Snowclones? Darling, as journalistic clichés go, snowclones are the new black. David Rowan, Trendsurfing: “Snowclone Journalism”
In honor of the big dump of snow we Granite Staters received last week, I offer a recently coined word you may not have com across: snowclone. (I hadn’t until I read about it here.)
A speaker or writer creates a snowclone when she uses the structure of a familiar idiom or cliché with a new idiom in a new context:
The Eskimoes have 100 words for snow. If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy.
To be, or not to be? To ski or not to ski?
This is the face that launched a thousand ships. This is the voice that launched a thousand naps.
I like the way blogger Justin Busch describes snowclones: “those endlessly reusable templates for new cliches.”
It seems that linguists around the world have begun collecting snowclones, using their lists to poke fun of, primarily, journalists, for their laziness in not inventing fresh phrases for their descriptions.
The sport emerged about two years ago, when a distinguished linguistics professor, Geoffrey Pullum, reflected on Language Log, a popular linguistics chat forum, that there was rather a lot of newsprint being wasted on vacuously clichéd constructions such…. “We need a name for [the] multi-use, customisable, instantly recognisable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers,” Pullum suggested. He cited one particular bugbear: the recurring journalistic construction about Eskimos and their vast armoury of words supposedly devoted to snow.…. The problem, rather awkwardly, is that the assertion’s very premise appears to be flawed. The Inuit language pays far less attention to snow than the writers who recycle the attention-grabbing claim to make their points. It has become one of those “phrases for lazy writers in kit form”, Pullum lamented. Then why not, replied another professor, Glen Whitman call the construction a “snowclone”? David Rowan, Trendsurfing: “Snowclone Journalism”
I appreciate Pullam’s perspective on recycling worn-out expressions. On the other hand, I can also appreciate that some snowclones serve as sophisticated linguistic devices that take advantage of the human brain’s affinity for patterns, tapping into readers’ cultural understanding of the original idiom to bring them swiftly to an understanding of a new idiom, trend or point of view. For example,
I believe the children are our future, unless we stop them now! Homer Simson
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Anonymous
Note: For some insight into the myth of those innumerable “Eskimo words for snow,” visit this Wikipedia entry.
We call a word derived from the name of a real or fictitious person or place an eponym.
For example, the fourth Earl of Sandwich gave rise to our word sandwich. Our word lynch probably comes from Colonel Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter and Revolutionary War patriot who established an irregular court that doled out vigilante justice. The French microbiologist Louis Pasteur lent his name to the process we call pasteurization.
As an editor, I appreciated the eponym that appeared in my email inbox as the Word-A-Day for December 6: dryasdust, an adjective meaning “extremely dull, dry, or boring.” It comes from Jonas Dryasdust, a fictitious person to whom Sir Walter Scott dedicated some of his novels.
“Oy vey! I have to finish editing 12 dryasdust fact sheets by 3:00 p.m. today.”
P.S. I chuckled over the seasonal irony of the daily quote accompanying the dryasdust entry. Mark Twain wrote, “Be good and you will be lonely,” a direct contradiction of contradict Santa’s admonition, “So be good for goodness’ sake!”
Helen Branswell, widely recognized as the top North American journalist covering the complex issues surrounding H5N1 bird flu, reported recently about concern within the World Health Organization to avoid stigmatizing that would occur from naming the next pandemic flu after some specific city or region, as in “Spanish Flu,” or “Hong Kong Flu”
Trying to get a jump on the headline-writers,
Officials from the WHO and a variety of member countries meeting in Geneva this week will broach the topic of naming the next pandemic as part of discussions aimed at charting risk communications strategies for that eventual outbreak.
I got kick out of way Branswell mixes her animal metaphors toward the end of the article (her editors should have intervened):
Heymann sees the value in trying to choose a neutral name rather than let one evolve from the handiwork of headline writers.But if the H5N1 avian flu virus that is currently seen as the most likely candidate to trigger a pandemic actually does so, Heymann thinks the naming opportunity has already been lost.
“It's already been named. Bird flu.”
Thompson doesn't believe that horse is out of the barn.
“I don't think this is bird flu. I don't think this is the H5N1 pandemic. I think we have an opportunity.”
Although what we’ve named it probably won’t matter much during a severe pandemic influenza outbreak, I don’t dismiss the WHO naming exercise as a silly attempt at political correctness, and I'm sorry that CNews posted it under the banner of “Weird News.” Rather, I view the exercise as evidence of the mindful care with language on the part of the experts launching this daunting and unprecedented global risk communication project.
Any number of subtexts underlie the surface theme of Branswell’s story, chief among them an appreciation of the way written words endure to become part of the historical record people use to form, not only their understanding of the places they live in, but their own self-images as well.
Commenting she found it “refreshing to my could-care-less-how-it’s-spelled self,” an Extension colleague sent me the link to this humorous piece, which shows that readers can comprehend pretty well even when writers don’t pay much attention to correct spelling.
Sometimes spelling does matter, though, and your spell-check won’t offer a remedy.
A headline in the Concord Monitor last week carried news of the Australian citizen executed in Singapore for “heroine trafficking.”
One wag asks in a letter to the editor today, “Has Singapore suddenly become the center of an international white-slave ring, or do you just need a new headline writer?”
It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. Former President Bill Clinton
A single word means different things to different speakers, writers, listeners, and readers. Word meanings shift and evolve. The same word can have both literal and symbolic meanings. A word can shift meanings dramatically between contexts.
My Sunday paper contained an interesting piece written by Keene Sentinel writer Peter J. Cleary about a legal battle in Hinsdale over the meaning of a single word.
According to the article, Hindsdale’s zoning ordinance forbids structures in its industrial park taller than 50 feet, with the exception of “silos.” The Washburn Vault Company, a cement processing plant, recently received approval from the town planning board for construction of a new plant, which will include a 65-foot-tall structure the company—and apparently, the cement industry itself— calls a “silo.”
But Serena Benedict, whose property abuts the site of the proposed plant, charges that the ordinance’s exemption refers only the types of “silo” used for farm storage. Benedict has used dictionary definitions and a crossword puzzle clue to bolster her claim.
The case has gone to Cheshire County Superior Court for resolution.
Because the meanings of words shift so dramatically from one context to another, contracts and other legal documents may contain a section called “Definitions,” which list and define the meanings of important words, not only unusual words, but also common words whose varying meanings might cause conflicts of interpretation. These definitions make explicit precisely what the words will mean for the purposes of interpreting that document.
Writers need to bear these things in mind. Once you send of a piece of written work for publication, your words leave the private psychological domain, where you know they mean and the overall messages you intended them to deliver.
Make sure to set the words you deem important to your topic into contexts that make their meanings explicit (unless, of course, you intend your words to deliver a degree of ambiguity).
Many problems arise because we writers confuse the written product with the communication that happens when a reader assembles meaning from our words on the page (or screen).
Pick up a book, a magazine or a brochure—a final, written product. It occupies physical space. It has shape, size, weight and other physical attributes. We can count the words and paragraphs and commas and the number of pages.
But the actual communication between writer and reader via the written word takes place in what we might call psychological space, the invisible, immeasurable realm of intentions, meanings, ideas, information, concepts, theories, feelings, arguments, worries, beliefs, values, doubts, perceptions, imagination, questions, answers, linguistic sophistication, moral awareness, and worldview—the raw materials and eventual attributes of written communication.
Words on a page differ from words in psychological space. On the page, words lie susceptible to dictionary definitions and tests of factual recall. In the private, invisible psychological spaces where communication happens, words trigger memories and sensation, invoke symbolic interpretations. If a reader doesn’t know the words (or the language) or can’t discern their meanings from context, the words have no meaning at all. Words can communicate in ways the writer never intended, or even imagined.
The message here: As writers, we can’t equate merely having written a book, a fact sheet, or an article with having communicated, much less taught or educated a reader in the ways we hoped we would.
To gauge our strength as communicators, we need to engage often with readers at various stages of the writing process—before, during, and after. Especially for important documents, we need engage readers of both genders, readers both within and outside our target audiences, readers of various ages, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. We need to listen to their feedback and ask for their help in revising our words.
Many Extension professionals work with clientele who need ways to publicize events or articulate their points of view to community-wide audiences. Almost all of us work with people who feel frustrated that their own perspectives on the topics they know something about and that matter to them never seem to get represented in mainstream press accounts on the topic.
Why not encourage them to write letters to the editor? You could even set up workshops where people can learn the basics of writing a good letter, draft letters, and/or read and comment on each other’s letters before they submit them for publication.
Among the most-read sections of the newspaper, the Letters to the Editor section gives a paper’s readers as chance to become writers. A letter to the editor can present a particular perspective on an topic, criticize the paper’s coverage of a topic, or rally community support for a cause.
Because many newspapers publish most of the letters they receive, each letter stands a good chance of getting published. People who become known in the community for writing strong, thoughtful letters may find it easier to publish their work in the community op-ed (opinion-editorial) sections many papers have instituted, sections with names such as Community Forum, Voice of the People, My Turn, or First Person that give local people more space and a more prominent place on the editorial pages sound off.
A few tips you can pass along (or use yourself):
• Before you sit down to write, learn the newspaper’s word limit on letters to the editor. Plan to stay well within it. Remember, if you don’t edit your letter, someone at the paper—typically a harried editor with little or no knowledge of your issue—will do it for you.
• In your final draft, make your main point in the lead sentence and follow up with one or two supporting points. If you have credentials or long experience that lends credibility to your voice, mention it in your letter or append your credentials to your signature.
• Always keep your tone civil and respectful, avoiding sarcasm and personal attack.
• When citing facts, document (or make sure you can document) your sources. Especially when questioning published facts, back up your point of view with facts accepted by a broad diversity of credible sources.
• If possible, let your letter sit a few hours before you send it. Ask a couple of people you trust, preferably folks who don’t know (or care) much about your topic, to read it for coherence and tone, as well as for grammar, syntax and “flow.”
Posted by pboyles at 12:30 PM
[I’d started writing this before I read Thom Linehan’s excellent guest post on Monday, Are we under the influence?. I think you’ll see the close connection between my reflections below and Thom’s suggestion “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.]
A few days ago, I received an email from a professional colleague, offering this link as a resource for new ways to promote healthful eating. Of course I clicked and had some fun perusing what turned out to be the “Health Calendar” pages of the Food and Health Communications, Inc. Web site.
November, 2005, of the Health Calendar brought us Fig Week and Split Pea Week. January ’06 will serve up Prune Breakfast Month, Fiber Focus Month, Hot Tea Month, Oatmeal Month, Pear Month, and Soup Month, among others.
October of 2006 delivers a mind-blowing list of 40 “month” and “week” designations, serving, without apparent regard for the delicious dissonance, as both Pork Month and Vegetarian Awareness Month, as well as Pizza Month, Popcorn Month, and Dessert Month. Next year will also bring us Hot Dog Month, Ice Cream Month, Catfish Month, Peach Month and Snack Food Month.
Food and Health Communications, Inc., which publishes all sorts of high-quality instructional materials for teachers to use for nutrition education, claims on its Web site: “Our materials are based on peer-reviewed, current scientific information. We do not accept advertising or funding by any outside organization.”
Maybe so. But a brief perusal of the Health Calendar pages reveals something I find even more disturbing.
Clicking on Fiber Focus Month, for instance, brings readers directly to the Kellogg’s homepage, Oatmeal Month to the Quaker Oatmeal homepage, and Prune Breakfast month to the California Dried Plums (a trade organization) homepage.
The Picnic Month link takes readers to the American Plastics Council homepage. Hot Dog Month leads to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. And on and on.
What company or trade organization needs to pay for ads when the site (whose URL gets distributed to nutritionists and health educators nationwide via professional listservs) delivers readers directly to their corporate Web homepage, under the banner of food and health no less?