We’ve all heard the old saw, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” But a camel seems like an ideal design for the contexts in which it thrives. If the committee that designed the camel had come up with a horse instead, people in those parts would jokingly refer to the horse as “a camel designed by a committee.”
Over months and years of editing UNH Extension print materials, I’ve come across many writing projects produced by “committee”—group collaborations—some of which involve groups within an Extension program area, others representing people drawn from two or more UNHCE subject-matter areas/UNH departments, and still others involving partners from outside agencies and organizations.
I assume the practice of joining ranks with others to produce manuals, books, Web sites and other products will continue apace, for many reasons, chief among them: most critical and emerging topics of broad public concern cross the boundaries of many disciplines, agencies and organizations. One writer offering a single perspective can’t offer the scope or depth available within a diverse group.
For decades, Extension has played a unique and powerful role as a neutral convener, bringing likely and unlikely parties to a common table to share resources, brainstorm new approaches to old challenges, and help heal the fragmented research and information base that characterizes so many current problems.
The agony, the ecstasy, the payoff
Almost anyone who has participated in a collaborative writing effort will agree: collaborating can become painful, sometimes excruciatingly so. The process can drag on interminably and product that eventually emerges can stun team members: a confusing mishmash of chaotically organized fragments, a cacophony of styles and voices, anorexic in content.
But collaborations can also yield products that are richer, broader, and deeper, more sensitive to varied audience needs, more multi-layered, more credible, and more useful to their intended readers than single-authored efforts.
Writers (and their readers) will find the Web particularly well suited to collaborative projects. Software designers have already de have developed a range of sophisticated tools that enable collaborative research, writing, editing and publishing.
I’ve found a considerable body of research in the field of collaborative writing, but most of it seems to apply to writing pedagogy (K-12 on up) rather than professionals collaborations among adults.
Of course, much of the extensive literature on group dynamics also applies to group writing projects. But writing projects have their own set of potential pitfalls, and they place some unique demands on group members.
Over the next few days, I’ll share some ideas for writing, editing, and publishing collaboratively. I’d welcome responses from any of you about the successes and failures, you’ve had with collaboratively publishing ventures.
Tomorrow’s topic: Prequels to writing: Facing the tough stuff up-front and head-on.
I read a lot during my late December-early January vacation. As I often do, I had four or five books going simultaneously. I read them the way I've read since childhood, opening one book at some random location, reading a bit, then picking up another and doing them same.
Books that interest me I usually read in entirely, but rarely from front to back, the way most print authors intend.
Two of my early winter reads involved writing: William Safire’s How Not to Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammar, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Long Navigator or the Mutinous Crew.
I recommend them both as fun, quick reads by great word masters that will refresh your awareness of good writing principles and when to break them.
Reading the way I do often provides me with delicious serendipitous collisions of material from different volumes. That happened as I dipped into the Le Guin and Safire books, serendipitously coming across passages in each that adress the matter of how to handle the tricky gender-referencing pronouns.
Novelist Le Guin:
Whatever the writer does has to be within the frame of knowing [readers’] shared expectations. Only if you know the rule can you break it.Here’s an example: I often use the possessive pronoun “their” in the singular. This is “incorrect,” say the grammarians, because each one, each person is a singular noun, and there is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used theirwith words such as everybody, anybody, a person; and so we all do when we’re talking…. The grammarians only started telling us it was “incorrect” along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when they also declared that “he” includes both sexes: As in: “If a person needs an abortion, he should re required to tell his parents.”
Do I have to say that my use of “their” is politically motivated, and, if you like, politically correct? It’s a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language-legislators.
But it isn’t politically incorrect. It’s just pushing it a little.
I know what I’m doing.
And now, the irrepressible and witty arch-conservative Safire:
Etymologists know that the word man, going back to the Sanskrit manus, means “human being” and is sexless. Although man and woman are differentiated in English, the universal meaning of man to encompass both sexes remains. Why accept a fiat from anti-sexism headquarters to change it now?Cool it humankind; let language change in its own time, not to fit the schedule of any –ism. Resist the linguistic importunings of those who say, “get with it man.”
Well, yeah. And the word economy derives from two Greek words meaning household management.” But the sentence: “The report notes the U.S. economy grew 3.5 percent in the third quarter,” doesn’t conjure many mental references to households divvying up the child care responsibilities or trying to stretch the food budget by planting a vegetable garden, any more than the generic word “work” covers the tasks of preparing meals at home, tending that vegetable garden, or splitting your own firewood.
Safire seems to ignore the point Le Guin tacitly honors: Even single words can trigger a frame of reference which tacitly describes a worldview that accords more value to some people, practices, or ideas than others. Mindful writing and critical reading require the capacity to make explicit the frames that underlie word choices.
From my perspective, we need to make ordinary language both more gendered and more gender-bias free.
Take it from someone who took up sports in the mid-1980’s, when women had no choice but to wear “unisex” running shorts and shoes. If the men of that day had had to wear garments designed around the shapes of female torsos and feet, the marketing term “unisex” wouldn’t have lasted six months.
In Wednesday’s Waking Up Writing entry, I introduced the work of Michael Rich, a physician at Children’s Hospital in Boston whose research has demonstrated that the very act of using a video camera to record their own lives improves the health status of young patients, independent of any additional clinical interventions.
Rich says his research has begun to shed light on the common disconnect between health knowledge and behavior change, “because it looked broadly at participants’ illness perceptions, rather than limiting itself to a focused inquiry into explanatory models of disease origins.”
The VIA studies also reveal that insights gained from the two-way information flow changed professionals’ knowledge and behavior.
The VIA research hints at what can happen to literacy and learning when we let go of the traditional dichotomies between provider and consumer, teacher and student, expert and layperson.
Mindfulness theory
In fact, it confirms Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer’s 30 years of research into the phenomenon she calls mindfulness, which she defines as “a psychological state characterized by openness to novelty, alertness to distinction, sensitivity to different contexts, awareness of multiple perspectives, and orientation in the present, ” and contrasts with mindlessness, “A psychological state characterized by operating from a single, fixed perspective, interpretation or category, independent of context; habitual, routine.”
Her research led Langer to conclude that most formal and informal education today involves reliance “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…. 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.
Questioning assumptions about learning and literacy
Langer’s work questions the assumptions that underlie many conventional notions of learning and literacy, namely that to become “literate” in a field or topic of inquiry, a student must assimilate a body of information, developed through research and vetted by experts, an approach which “presume[s] that the goal of the education process is to equip [learners] to achieve specific, desirable outcomes [pre-selected by] experts.
Rather than allowing an individual to generate new hypotheses that may be mindfully tested in the individual’s own experience, a teacher or expert often assumes that the objective is apparent and that only the means of achieving it remains obscure to the naïve observer Teaching from this perspective consists of presenting step-by-step methods of problem solving, making possible an entirely mindless type of success.
Langer acknowledges the fears that may arise among educators:
One of the fears people may have of [the mindful approach] 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.
Perceived stability is often in the experts’ interests because their authority rests on the stability of the categories they employ…. This capacity to find a means of shifting perspectives can be a vital element of our ability to navigate new situations, just as the ability to maintain stable categories is often critical for the expert’s authority.
A few tips writers can use to foster mindful learning
The Value of Uncertainty
Conditional language: intentional uncertainty
Invite Multiple Perspectives
E-prime
Participatory design: Confer with readers before you begin to write
Analyzing readership: classification, intuition, and feedback models
Participatory design and evaluation: Listen to readers think aloud
Do you have Sprachgefühl (SHPRAKH-guh-fyool)? This German word means having a feeling for language, especially an ear for idiomatically appropriate language.
For writers, Sprachgefühl requires not only having an ear for language, but actually writing for the ear.
To ensure your writing has Sprachgefühl: From time to time, read aloud what you’ve written. If it doesn’t sound natural, a lot like you speak, revise it until it does.
Note: People who learn English as a foreign language, especially as adults, often struggle with English Sprachgefuhl, since idiomatic language refers to language whose meaning a listener or reader can’t infer from the meanings of the words that comprise it.
VIA overturns the traditional clinician-patient dynamic, giving patients primary control of their own health information. Through VIA, young patients decide what is most important to communicate, show how their medical conditions affect them, and, in “real life” context, indicate what they need from medical care. VIA seeks to give voice to young patients, allowing them to take ownership of their health status and medical management. — Michael Rich, Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA) founder
What if information providers turned to their consumers, not just for help crafting better, more informed messages, but to foster their own learning? Would overall literacy improve?
Research conducted through the Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA) project at the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston indicates strongly that it could.
Founded by Dr. Michael Rich, once an aspiring filmmaker who studied with renowned Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and an expert in media influence on children, VIA research gives video cameras to children, teens, and young adult patients with chronic illnesses, asking them to record the events of their daily lives and speak into the camera about their own thoughts, feelings, understanding, and experiences with their illness.
Rich et al. report that during a VIA pilot project with asthma patients, “Participants in the VIA pilot showed significant improvement in their asthma-specific quality of life after creating their visual narratives, but before viewing them or changing their disease management based on the research findings.”
In other words, the mere act of filming themselves improved the young patients’ health status (which previous medical interventions had failed to do).
The project also yielded an astonishing range of data useful for educating clinicians themselves, for instance:
VIA revealed that 95% of the participants were exposed to known asthma triggers that were not discovered using a standard-of-care medical history. Inappropriate use of medications was found in 83% of participants; 33% exceeded prescribed doses, 28% discontinued medications without consulting a clinician, and 72% used ineffective inhaler technique
Rich and colleagues found that the camera’s “distancing effect” let the young media-makers view their own lives and environments as onlookers, which changed their perceptions of themselves and their illness:
The camera has no selectivity; it documents what is there. When (participants viewed) the pilot VIA visual narratives, the distancing effect of the video allowed (them) to discover for themselves health-affecting exposures in their daily environments to which they were previously oblivious.
All educators might benefit from paying close attention to this extraordinary revelation of Rich’s asthma research (emphasis added):
All of the participants in the VIA pilot related biomedically accurate explanatory models of the asthma disease process. Because they were patients with moderate or severe asthma at a major medical center, these findings revealed the effectiveness of the asthma education that they had received as part of their medical care. However, in this group, accurate knowledge did not translate into effective health behaviors because participants did not always believe that their asthma management plans would be effective or that the potential benefits were worth the side effects. These asthma patients’ explanatory models addressed disease management rather than etiology. VIA was able to shed some light on the unclear relationship between health knowledge and behavior because it looked broadly at participants’ illness perceptions, rather than limiting itself to a focused inquiry into explanatory models of disease origins.
A closing question to ponder when thinking about sharing control over information flow: Could other communication tools, including words alone, accomplish what cameras do in VIA research?
Plain language (also called Plain English) is communication your audience can understand the first time they read or hear it. Language that is plain to one set of readers may not be plain to others. Written material is in plain language if your audience can:Find what they need;What is Plain Language?Understand what they find; and
It almost goes without saying that most forms of literacy rest on a foundation of clear, easy-to-understand wordsmithing. Good writing.
About a decade ago, a group of government employees concerned about making government documents clear and understandable to the general public spawned what has become known as the “plain language” movement. The call for plain language has spread to other fields: law, medicine, engineering, academia in general.
The group of federal employees that started the movement remains active as the Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN); they’ve created a Web site rich with resources to help people write well. Writers can also find help at the nonprofit Plain Language Association’s excellent companion site.
Plain language boils down to the essential rules of thumb for good writing, which include organization with the reader in mind, setting verbs in the active voice, choosing common everyday words, cutting all unnecessary words, keeping sentences relatively short, using personal pronouns: (I, we, you), and making sure your graphics and page design techniques align well with your message and your readership.
I’ve posted a good number of the basic tools for clear writing since beginning this blog last April.
Defined by results
But, “No one technique defines plain language,” the government plain language Web site notes. “Rather, plain language is defined by results—it is easy to read, understand, and use.”
Aha! Defining by results. What a concept! But this question immediately pops up for me: How will we define “results”?
Have I increased “literacy,” for example, because 90 percent of my readers did well on a test of factual recall six months after they read our instruction manual? Or if a survey revealed that more than half my readers had changed behavior after reading my manual?
While these tests and surveys might reflect well on the clarity of my writing, they wouldn’t measure whether readers found the instruction manual culturally appropriate, or useful in novel situations the manual didn’t or couldn’t anticipate.
My tests wouldn’t measure what readers thought the instruction booklet should have covered, but didn’t, or whether readers found discrepancies between what I wrote and their own experiences putting the instructions to use. And it wouldn’t measure any unintended consequences arising from my manual: that many readers felt patronized, demoralized, powerless, or poorly understood, for instance.
If the writer makes up half the literacy equation, don’t I have to measure how I’ve improved my own literacy in the process of producing and evaluating my text?
Last week, I offered a description of literacy originally used in a report on health literacy, but which I believe speaks to literacy in all its many forms: “where the expectations, preferences and skills of individuals seeking information meet the expectations, preferences and skills of individuals providing information.
Another way of putting it: To foster literacy, information providers must also act as co-seekers, asking for, and incorporating what readers know. Providers must also invite their readers to participate as co-providers of essential information. The earlier in the writing process writers engage with their prospective readers, the better.
Most of us have had the experience seeking written information on a particular topic and feeling frustrated, for one or more of these and many related reasons:
You found the information too generic for practical use. Readers may not find even detailed how-to information useful. Often the details involve matters of place. Laws, rules, regulations, policies, demographics, access to professional services, availability of resources, etc., can vary dramatically from state to state, county to county, town to town. Your particular living situation may raise important concerns for you that others wouldn’t have.
The written material contained unacknowledged and unwarranted assumptions about you. The writer may have assumed your able-bodiedness, mobility, sexual orientation, control over a situation, a safe living situation, or access to certain resources (e.g., high-quality food, lawyers, reliable transportation).
You need information that spans many disciplines, but found information at hand limited to a single narrow dimension of your need. Statutes, organizational by-laws, budgets, self-interest, and many other factors, including ignorance, typically constrain the content of written materials. Writers rarely move beyond the scope of their own knowledge and immediate purpose to recognize other dimensions of their readers’ needs.
As a self-educated reader, you already had a good grasp of the empirical facts and the basic science involved, but you came seeking information because you haven’t found a way to act on what you know. You might feel frustrated by your own fear, denial or apathy, or by income limitations, cultural barriers, social isolation, family violence, legal matters, or a host of other concerns.
Because of your own experience, you could have supplied emphasis and details that would have improved the quality and usefulness of the written material. Almost everyone knows how that feels.
My point: In almost any matter involving people’s ability to seek, find, understand, and productively use information obtained from text and images—our standard definition of literacy—listeners or readers themselves bring half the literacy equation to the table, not only their skill with language, but their hopes, expectations, culture, and experience.
Much Extension work involves written communications intended to foster behavior change. No matter how well you write, if you think of yourself as the exclusive information provider and your readers as the passive seekers of the information you choose to provide, you may end up as part of illiteracy problem.
For some help starting to think about engaging your readers as co-producers, and yourself as a co-seeker, check out the August 1 - August 12 posts to Waking up Writing (scroll to bottom of page to begin).
With few exceptions, economic textbooks focus on households as consumers and fail to discuss households as producers using their own labor and capital. Households are presented to the modern student of economics at school or university as places of consumption. Economics theory focuses on consumer behavior, which concerns the choice of households on the quantities of the commodities they choose to buy given the limitations of their money incomes and the prices of commodities. With few exceptions, economic textbooks fail to discuss the allocation of time available to various processes of household production. They also fail to mention that household expenditures often are not purchases of goods ready to be consumed but are capital equipment, unfinished goods, raw materials and energy to be used as inputs to a production process. — Duncan Ironmonger, Household Production and the Household Economy
Among the few large-ticket consumer items I’ve bought brand-new in my lifetime, I count a washing machine, a chainsaw, a rototiller, a freezer, a lawn mower, and two bicycles. When I plunked down my cash or plastic, these items became duly registered as part of the Gross Domestic Product by which we consumer products toted up and accounted for in the gross domestic product.
But once I got them home, I began using each of these products to perform essential economic activities, to “produce” services for myself and my family. I invested in those products very much the way industries invest in capital equipment. In the case of the lawn mower, I use it to produce landscaping services for myself. I use the chainsaw to produce the fuel that heats out home, dries our clothes, pre-heats our water, and cooks some of our food during the winter months. I use the bicycle to maintain fitness of body and mind, and because I often bike to work during the warmer months, as basic transportation.
In some instances, I could have paid others to perform these services.
But our system of standard national accounts only “counts” what I pay for in dollars. What I do for myself or my family or as a community volunteer disappears.
Paying a day care provider to take care of my young child while I “work” counts. If I care for my own child, it doesn’t count. My payment for the vegetables I buy in a supermarket passes into the Gross Domestic Product. The vegetables I invest my own time and equipment to harvest from my own backyard don’t.
They may not count, but they do matter.
The household economy
A few economists have begun serious research that attempts to measure the size and shape and describe the importance of this invisible nonmarket economy, sometimes called “the household economy,” most notably Australian economist Duncan Ironmonger of the University of Melbourne. I took the quotation that introduces this post from his 2000 paper, Household Production and the Household Economy. Reading the whole thing will shake up your thinking about conventional economics and how it defines consumers and producers and what constitutes "economic" activity.
Literate consumers or literate producers?
How all this relates to “literacy” becomes the topic for my Waking Up Writing posts over the next week or two.
Most popular and professional writing on health literacy focuses on strategies for helping people become wiser consumers of professional health care products and services. Same with media literacy, which generally focuses helping people become more critical consumers of other people’s messages.
I don’t deny the importance of literacy education for consumers. But how would our thinking about literacy change if we considered ourselves and the people we touch with our educational outreach as primary health producers or media producers?
In 2004, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a report entitled Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion, which discussed the implications of the Institute’s finding that nearly half the nation’s adults “have difficulty understanding and using health information, and there is a higher rate of hospitalization and use of emergency services among patients with limited health literacy.”
I found this interesting statement tucked into the IOM report:
Health literacy is where the expectations, preferences and skills of individuals seeking information meet the expectations, preferences and skills of individuals providing information.
I think this approach gets to the heart of the general notion of “literacy.” Notice that it places shared and interdependent responsibility on information seeker and provider alike.
The adverb where gives the approach a particularly spatial flavor, locating literacy in that invisible realm psychologists call “intersubjective space.” This invisible space encompasses language, culture, worldviews, hopes, values, feelings, dreams, concepts, theories, memories, and all the other invisible forces we use to understand and to act (or refrain from acting).
By this definition, communications aimed at developing literacy require more than clear and accurate statements of empirical fact.
Stay tuned. I plan to explore this line of thinking in a series of posts over the next few weeks.
If you rely on computer tools to do your proofreading, please consider asking two or more human readers to scrutinize your written copy before you publish.
To better understand why, visit this recent post and comment at Blogslot, a blog for copy editors.
Despite this apparently widespread need, few people are formally trained to write about numbers. Communications specialists learn to write for varied audiences, but rarely are taught specifically to deal with numbers. Scientists and others who routinely work with numbers learn to calculate and interpret the findings, but rarely are taught to describe them in ways that are comprehensible to audiences with different levels of quantitative expertise or interest. — Jane E. Miller, The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers
Whether your project involves writing a dissertation or a grant, reporting your research, developing fact sheets, or drafting a newspaper article for a general readership, you’ll often have to present numerical concepts, either embedded in your narrative text or in graphic formats such as charts, graphs, or tables.
And you might well do it more effectively if you had a copy of Jane E. Miller’s The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers: The Effective Presentation of Quantitative Information at hand. Miller, who teaches research methods and statistics at Rutgers, produced this compact, well-written reference to help writers and speakers bridge the disciplines of statistics and expository writing. Every Extension office should stock one.
People trained in the hard sciences who struggle with expository prose will find Miller’s frequent use of poor, better and best examples of numerical representations extremely useful. Writers who suffer statistics phobias will find comfort in Miller’s clean, succinct, non-jargonistic approach to the subject, which also serves as a reference (or refresher) for basic statistical concepts.
Miller’s book will not only help you present numerical concepts clearly, accurately, and honestly, but it will also help you become a more critical reader.
The publisher has posted a study guide for the book. You can check out the table of contents and test your own strengths in communicating numerical concepts by doing some of the problems provided after each chapter listing.