I find a little humor helps keep cabin fever at bay this time of year. Bloopers always give me a quick pick-me-up.
A few bloopers hot off the church bulletin presses:
The Jack and Kill Daycare is looking for someone to help part time on Saturdays.
Our Wednesday Night Family Cafeteria meal will feature a variety of Chinese dishes including One Ton Soup.Events: December 9th, Christmas Caroling at the Parkview Nursing Home 7:00 p.m., December 10th, Breakfast with Satan 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. in the Fellowship Hall.
What are you doing for lunch Tuesday? Local Funeral Director Barry Gilbert will talk about the benefits of cremation.
Saturday the Youth Group will serenade a number of our seniors with Christmas thongs.
What about these resume bloopers?
Experienced supervisor, defective with both rookies and seasoned professionals.Seeking a party-time position with potential for advancement.
The Web site yourdictionary.com offers a list of the 100 most frequently misspelled words in English. (Don’t ask me how they count all those misspellings.)
In the intro to the list “Dr. Language” promises: “Each word has a mnemonic pill with it and, if you swallow it, it will help you to remember how to spell the word.”
Well, maybe. Take the mnemonic pill for that tricky word “judgement”:
“Judgement” is governed by one of the rare rules of English orthography, so why not enjoy it? After [c] and [g], [e] is retained to indicate the letter is “soft,” i.e. pronounced like [s] or [j], respectively. Omitting it indicates it is “hard,” i.e. pronounced [k] or [g], as in “fragment,” “pigment.” If we write “management,” “arrangement,” we should write “judgement,” “acknowledgement,” “abridgement.” The presence of the [d] is of no significance to English orthography.
Gulp. How’d that go down?
Under the heading, Needed: new scientific norms for emergency times,
“Revere,” the collective name for several anonymous public health scientists and officials who blog at Effect Measure, today addresses the matter of “scientific hoarding” among leading scientists in several nations, including China and the U.S—in this case hoarding information critical to understanding of the transmission and evolution of the H5N1 avian influenza that threatens to trigger a global pandemic.
Revere points to two reasons for such hoarding. The first involves “scientists who want as much credit as possible for their individual scientific accomplishments.”
I understand this completely. I have spent a great deal of my professional career in academia. Publications, not money, are the coin of the realm in our world, the keys to promotion, reputation, lab space, grant funding and much else. This serves a useful function for science, acting as an incentive for high quality publications and sharing of results with the world community of scientists. But it can also have the opposite effect, leading to polluting the literature with the “least publishable unit” (splitting up a body of work into as many publications as possible to build a resumé), hesitation about sharing samples, data and techniques until they have been maximally milked, embargoing of scientific work by journals seeking to make news -- and distressingly often, nasty authorship disputes.
Revere points to a second reason, namely, “issues of national pride and the knowledge that viral isolates are an economic resource if they are used as seed for a vaccine.
But then, the hard reality:
Viruses move across borders much more quickly than data, even though the latter are capable of moving with the speed of electrons. The speed bottle neck here is social and political. Neither the outmoded system of international relations nor the twentieth century mentality that governs senior academic researchers and journal editors works in this situation. In an emergency there must be some recognition that the usual criteria of personal and national credit are suspended. That might entail both a real and a perceived sacrifice in recognition, credit and perhaps economic benefit. Since that is a lot to ask of people and nations, we see the best antidote is worldwide censure of behavior that in other circumstances would be considered acceptable and usual but in this circumstance is reprehensible.
“In neither instance does it bring credit on the nations and scientists involved. In the context of an impending pandemic it is the worst possible outcome of an unlovely reality of academic science,” Revere opines.
Censure—an appeal based on a moral imperative—as a means of provoking rapid change in a deeply entrenched academic/scientific model? An intriguing idea.
Headline in the Food section of Wednesday’s Concord Monitor: Cooked differently, you may love Brussels sprouts.
In my day, I’ve been fried, grilled, steamed, and toasted, seared, poached, boiled, and roasted. But I’ve always liked my sprouts steamed and served with a little garlic butter.
There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. Here I will examine the key factors that influence this problem and some corollaries thereof. John P. A. Ioannidis
“In modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”
Yesterday, I made reference to how the open-access online Public Library of Science (PLOS) has begun changing the face of peer review in science.
Poking around on the current homepage of PLOS Medicine brought me to Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, by John P. A. Ioannidis, a medical doctor affiliated with the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.
Two major sub-heads reflect the main conclusions of Ioannidis’s work:
:Most Research Findings Are False for Most Research Designs and for Most Fields
Claimed Research Findings May Often Be Simply Accurate Measures of the Prevailing Bias
“Research” in human health and well being
Some Extension professionals rely on the findings of clinical trials published in major medical journals. For a sobering look at why educators mightcheck out this companion article in PLOS Medicine: Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies, by Richard Smith.
Here’s his intro:
No wild-eyed, left-leaning investigative reporter, Smith served as editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal for 25 years. Under the sub-head, Peer Review Doesn't Solve the Problem
he candidly admits:
Journal editors are becoming increasingly aware of how they are being manipulated and are fighting back, but I must confess that it took me almost a quarter of a century editing for the BMJ to wake up to what was happening.
Read the whole article for more context and Smith’s suggestions for ways to confront this problem.
So, might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve? Robert S. Boynton Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs
An interesting Feb. 16 piece by Daniel Gross in the online journal Slate, Twilight of the Blogs: Are they over as a business?, about the “death” of blogging as a commercial enterprise, linked to an equally fascinating Nov. 16, 2005, piece by Robert S. Boynton, Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs: When academics post online, do they risk their jobs?
I found Boynton’s piece especially notable for its insights into the concept of peer review. Boynton opens by noting the current concern in academia about the effects of blogging on academic careers. He cites an anonymous official from a Midwestern college quoted in an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know 'the real them'—better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more,” wrote the pseudonymous columnist.
For me the subtext here suggests that a candidate’s blog probably makes a better tool for getting to know the quality of his or her work than a page of references and a 30-page CV.
Many [academics] perceive blogs as evidence of a scholar's lack of seriousness. Shouldn't he be putting more time into scholarship, they wonder, and less into his blog? And if a blogger does have something serious to say, why is he presenting it in a superficial medium, rather than a peer-reviewed journal?
Speaking of “serious mediums,” Boynton gets right to the point:
At the same time, it is hardly a secret that lots of peer-reviewed material and articles in prestigious academic reviews are neither very good nor widely read, while some of what appears on academic blogs is of high quality and has a large readership (some of it, obviously, isn't and doesn't). So, it's worth taking a closer look at the question: How can a system that ostensibly cares only about the quality of one's arguments and research automatically include the former and exclude the latter?
In many respects, Drezner's predicament was merely a cyber-version of an age-old dilemma. Whether online or off, the kind of accessible and widely read work that brings an academic public recognition is likely to draw the scorn and suspicion of his colleagues. Furthermore, so-called public-intellectual work won't count for much when it comes time to decide whether one gets tenure. In most disciplines at large research universities, tenure is directly related to the number of peer-reviewed books and articles one publishes. Teaching and community service are factored in but are usually far less important than one's publishing record.
Generations of Cooperative Extension workers have suffered under this reality. The tenure and promotion system often privileges academic research and writing and devalues the informal outreach and applied research work we do. Not that our work lacks integrity or rigor, but much of it lies outside the narrow, implicit and explicit boundaries academia has drawn for itself.
Writes Boynton:
Peer review, however, is not a static practice. Some disciplines in the sciences, physics in particular, have had great success bypassing the cumbersome apparatus of traditional peer review (in which a large corporation owns a journal, which has a standard board of editors and is published regularly, and sold at a very high price) in favor of self-policed Web sites on which scientists (often the same ones who edit the expensive journals) post and critique their research papers. Rather than waiting months for publication, and then months more for reaction, they receive immediate editorial scrutiny from the very set of peers they most want to hear from.Perhaps the most significant challenge to the traditional peer-review practices comes from open-source projects like the Public Library of Science, which, though their journals are peer-reviewed, are available to all readers.
For me, all this represents evidence of change, not just technological change, but the fundamental changes to established institutions and to human consciousness itself that arrive with any new method of communication.
The “twilight” Boynton refers to may indeed signal the demise of hopes for the blog as a wealth-producing vehicle. It may signal a decrease in dominance of our current systems for validating the quality of research and intellectual ideas.
But I doubt it signals the end of weblogging and its electronic heirs.
Charts, tables, and other graphics often deliver complex information more effectively than words. But bad graphics, or merely decorative graphics that convey no essential information, can annoy and confuse readers, and sometimes even deliver information that diametrically opposes what the writer intended.
Look here for some examples of brilliant displays of quantitative information (by way of Guy Kawasaki’s blog).
Some other examples:
Princeton University acceptance letter (Note: Even text serves as “graphics.”Two final points:
Take special care adding graphics to online documents, where readers have much less context from which to construct meaning.Remember that every element of a print or online document that your readers see functions as a graphic element, not only charts, tables, photos, and “art,” but also text itself (font shape, size, color, bold/italic/underlined, number of fonts on a single page, special features such as shadow, inverse, etc.), organization of white space (margin size and justification, length of words and sentences, manner of indicating a new paragraph), and color.
From an Associated Press article about the University of Iowa's preparations for a pandemic influenza:
Christopher Atchison, associate dead of the University of Iowa College of Public health, said universities need to be prepared should the virus spread to the United States.“Any institution that assembles and houses thousands of people needs to have this as a concern,” said Atchison, chairman of a task force studying the university's preparation for bird flu.
Zombie task force?
Be sure your words go down easy, for you may be eating them tomorrow. And remember that there IS no “off the record.”—Ron Graham
Ron Graham manages a Web site called Rhetoric for Engineers and Other Practical People. Dynamite!
Please read his post on media relations. Short, to the point, and comprehensive. Best one-shot advice on the topic I’ve seen.
2005 was the year we saw a convergence of a number sometimes contradictory language trends: the major global media became more pervasive yet actually less persuasive; the language spoken by the youth of the world is converging at an ever-increasing rate; and the Political Correctness movement become a truly global phenomenon. Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor (GLM)
Want to stay tuned to the hot topics of the day? Keep up with the latest lingo of politics, fashion, youthspeak, political correctness? For all this and more, bookmark the Global Language Monitor.
The GLM analyzes language trends and their subsequent impact on politics, culture and business (with a particular focus on Global English) by means of what progenitor and president, Paul JJ Payack, calls the Predictive Quantities Index Indicator, an algorithm that:
helps track the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, and throughout the Blogosphere. The algorithm tracks words and phrases in relation to their frequency of use and contextual usage. The PQ Index/Indicator is weighted, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, and citations in the major media.
Payack says his algorithm picks often contradict the beliefs of pundits, to wit, the fourth-quarter-2005 list of politically sensitive terms.
Go here to learn about most frequently spoken word on the planet.
Disclaimer: While I find the GLM lists interesting, amusing, and informative, I won’t vouch for the algorithm or its accuracy, despite the fact that numerous credible news and information sources cite its findings as authoritative.
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.— Joseph Stalin
Concrete, specific nouns and verbs communicate more precisely than abstractions because they create images in the reader’s mind. Abstract language not only communicates less effectively, but writers often use it — unconsciously or deliberately — to deceive or put distance between themselves and their readers.
William Lutz devotes an entire chapter of his book The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore to a discussion of the malicious consequences of abstract language in public speech. Below, a brief passage from that chapter, Abstracting Our Way into Doublespeak:
Notice the progression from concrete to abstract in the lists below:1996 red Toyota Camry
Toyota
New car
Automobile
Motor vehicle
Vehicle
Private transportation
TransportationThe higher the level of abstraction the more detail we leave out, the more we ignore differences, and the more we concentrate on similarities, no matter how few or how tenuous these similarities might be. When I talk about transportation, I am including only those aspects of the 1996 Toyota Camry that place it in a category that includes bicycles, airplanes and trucks.
Phil
Maine Coon
Male cat
Mammal
Vertebrate
Animal
Living thing
ThingBy the time we get to ‘thing,’ we’re a long way from Phil.
The less abstract our language, the more concrete and specific we are because we are using language that includes a lot of detail…. Language that is more concrete and specific creates pictures in the mind of the listener, pictures that should come as close as possible to the pictures in your mind.
Highly abstract language is a common form of doublespeak, especially among politicians…Using a high level of abstraction we can call the new dump, a “resources development park” and sewage sludge “organic biomass.” Such terms do not call to mind any specific picture because they are so far removed from the concrete reality they are supposed to symbolize. In fact, such terms do exactly what their creators want them to do.
Posted by pboyles at 3:55 PM
Now that your group has finished all the pre-writing tasks, you’ll need to decide how to do the work of getting your first draft on paper.
You have quite a few options, among them:
• The group divvies up the work among members according to level of interest or area of expertise.• The group agrees to leave the writing work to the strongest writer.
• The group tacitly agrees that the highest-status member (the one with a PhD, the one with supervisory responsibilities for the others, the one with the highest rank in his/her organization) will handle the writing.
• The group appoints (or sometimes hires) an “executive editor,” who works with the group to sketch the broad outlines of the work, assigns people to write its sections, sets deadlines and rides herd on the writers to ensure they meet their deadlines, checks all facts (often consulting outside experts), edits the drafts for grammar and comprehensibility, coordinates graphics and other design details with the designer, and handles all the details of getting the manuscript into print on online.
• The group composes much of the draft via group discussion, with group members talking out each section of the while someone takes it all down on a laptop.
• The group hires a professional writer.
I believe any of these options can produce a good end product, although I suggest deliberating the pros and cons of two or more of them before reaching consensus on the ultimate choice of method.
Whichever way you do choose to go, I recommend the practice of freewriting as especially powerful for a collaborative effort. Its rules:
• Put aside your notes.
• Pick up a pen or sit down at the keyboard and just get the words out.
• Don’t follow an outline.
• Don’t stop.
• Don’t think.
• Don’t make corrections or rearrange words.
• Don’t worry about whether what you write makes sense—give yourself permission to write garbage.
The practice helps prevent the writer or writers from becoming too attached to words that may require ruthless pruning during the editing and revising phases, from prematurely committing to a linear order, and from many other sins of both commission and omission.
As a writers' collaborative, you’ve dispensed with the preliminaries: revealed your assumptions and refined your expectations for the project, characterized your readers, developed guidelines for tone and style, decided how you’ll document facts, and consulted a designer.
Before you begin “writing,” consider conducting a group branching exercise. Have each group member write the working title of the project in the center of a big sheet of unlined paper (the bigger the better). Jut out from the center any ideas that come to mind when you bring your attention to the topic in the center of the page. Give yourselves a time limit—say, 10 minutes for a short, well-defined project, and 20-30 minute for a complex, multi-layered project that will integrate material from many disciplines and subject matters.
Though branching can feel undisciplined and unfocused, especially to people accustomed to working from curricula, syllabi, and outlines, it can bring a fresh, unifying perspective to a piece of writing work. Branching does have a few firm rules:
Put away your notes and reference materials. Don’t refer to them while you work.Don’t talk.
Don’t think.Don’t stop. Keep writing until the clock runs out.
Don’t self-censor as you work. Simply write down whatever comes to mind, even if it seems stupid.
After you’ve finished, look over your own page for a couple of minutes, then pass the papers around until everyone has looked at all the others.
Have a notebook handy. Jot down thoughts and insights that pop up as you scrutinize the branching exercises, particularly as you begin to draw comparisons between and among various group members’ work.
Because branching collects ideas on the page in a single plane, it doesn’t commit the group prematurely to a linear way of thinking about the topic at hand, and it doesn’t rank ideas hierarchically, in order of their presumed importance.
Use the branching exercise as a basis for group discussion. It may give you a much clearer understanding of how to proceed. It might also indicate a serious lack of group cohesion, in which case, you may want to go back to some of the topics and techniques outlined in Prequels to writing.
“Freedom’s freedom,” a friend and Extension colleague pronounced during a conversation about the wave of violence on several continents that followed publication of a group of Danish cartoons with images of the prophet Mohammed, an act which Muslims consider blasphemous “Freedom of speech means the freedom to say and print whatever you want.”
Whoa! On reflection, it doesn't seem that easy.
In our own nation, for example, at least 14 states have drafted laws to restrict the “free speech” rights of groups such as anti-gay members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, who have begun picketing funerals, including those of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Members of this small fundamentalist religious sect carry signs and shout at funeral-gowers that American deaths in Iraq represent God’s punishment for this nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.
And for an mind-bending clash of worldviews parsing the Constitutional meanings of the word “freedom,” one has only to tune into a late-night C-SPAN broadcast of the current Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the legality of the Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretaps.
And who can forget the “They hate our freedom,” refrain President Bush used repeatedly in describing the radical Islamists he calls terrorists, but who call themselves martyrs and “freedom-fighters.”
Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose crooned Janis Joplin. But I wonder: Wouldn’t some folks call freedom just another word for “all we have to gain,” or “takin' what we want,” or “havin' fun all night?”
Who speaks or writes the word? Who reads or hears it? In what context? Does the right to determine meaning fall mainly to the powerful, to the meek, to the majority?
Words have almost limitless power. Words have power to evoke feelings and memories, raise or crush hopes, inspire creativity and leadership. Words have power to motivate action or foster restraint. Words have power to empower and to enslave.
But their meanings change unceasingly as words cross space, time, culture, and context.
We run a huge risk in thinking of any value-laden word as “just another word,” in assuming a word can have an absolute meaning that prevails in every context, or that others will attribute the same meanings to it that we do.
Many writers use the phrases compare to and compare with interchangeably.
But for greater precision, use compare to when you want to stress the similarities between two things (people, ideas, etc.).
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
Use compare with to suggest a set of differences and/or similarities between or among things (people, ideas, etc.).
Over the past nine months, the consortium carefully analyzed the genome and compared it with the genomes of organisms that have already been sequenced, including the human, the mouse, the rat and the puffer fish. NIH News release
A situation that prompts a decision to write something probably has many intertwined and interdependent elements. Writers, especially a collaborative group of writers, can benefit by analyzing this situation in the broadest, most detailed way possible. This analysis, and the dynamic relationships among its many elements, will become the context and background for every word you’ll write.
You might begin with questions like these: Where do I (we) position myself (ourselves) within the situation? Our prospective readers? What about competing points of view on them subject—will we incorporate them as legitimate perspectives on the situation, or counter them with arguments that promote our different approach?
Some matters you’ll probably want to tend to before you begin “writing”:
Characterize your prospective readers
A lot of writers focus mostly on their own knowledge and their own, or their organization’s. expectations for a publication. They don’t spend much time characterizing their readers. Too bad! Such neglect can have consequences like these:
You target your publication at audiences whose needs and lived experience you don’t understand and maybe can’t even imagine.You deliver information that doesn’t match the level of understanding or experience of your intended readers.
You talk down to, or even insult your readers.
Your readers wonder what gives you the right to talk to them about this particular topic.
Discuss the tone and attitude your publication will take
The tone and attitude of your writing incorporate all the elements of your presentation that reflect how you see and understand your readers.
As a reader, you probably pick up a writer’s tone immediately, but as a writer, you may have trouble identifying your own. If your project will involve several writers developing separate segments of the publication, you’ll need to pay special attention to maintaining a consistent tone throughout. As with style (below), you may want to consider appointing someone to serve as the publication’s “tone and attitude monitor.”
Some questions to ask that will help develop your publication’s tone and attitude: Should the your publication adopt a conversational or a more formal academic style and tone? Will we write in the first person (I and we) and address readers as “you,” or use the third person it, he, she, them, and they? Do you think of your readers mostly as peers? Students? Clients? People who need help, people who give help, or people who support one another?
Some publications, most notably Web sites or Web pages, target many reader groups, in which case you may choose to adopt different tones for different sections of your product.
Develop a style guide
Save yourselves a lot of grief by settling all matters of style before anyone begins writing. A style guide sets forth the details of how your document or Web page will look, covering topics such as capitalization, punctuation, page format, numbering, display of graphic elements, captions, font and font sizes, whether to use italics, boldface or underlining for emphasis bold for emphasis. You may choose to adopt (UNH Cooperative Extension uses the Associate Press Style Guide, for example)
You’ll need to appoint or hire someone to monitor your drafts and final document(s) for stylistic inconsistencies. Don’t think of this as a small matter: inconsistencies of tone, attitude and style can affect reader comprehension and damage your credibility.
Agree on how you will document facts
As an organization that sells itself as grounded in research, we can’t afford to overlook the importance fact-checking. I suggest getting your group to agree that all facts will remain open to challenge by project collaborators and outside readers. New research or new challenges to old research might have disproven or called into question a “fact” of ten years ago. Readers’ “lived experience” may challenge, and even trump, a fact of science.
Consider maintaining a folder containing documentation for each of your checked facts, even if your publication won’t contain in-text citations, footnotes or a formal bibliography.
Setting facts in the contexts from which they emerged, rather than as statements of absolute facts will help ensure your credibility among subject-matter experts who read your publication.
Bring a designer into your project at its inception
If you’ve ever worked with a first-rate graphic designer, you’ll never again dismiss the design work involved designing a print publication or Web site as mere aesthetics—window dressing for your deathless prose.
Involving a designer at the very start of your project will save you time and money and get you a superior publication. She or he may suggest: formats you’ve never considered, effective ways to depict information graphically (saving words), ways to extract information into sidebars, charts, graphs, and captions.
Remember: Even bare text on a page or screen meets a reader’s eyes first as a graphic display, processed by the brain’s emotional center before the actual reading begins.
Use collaborative tools
Use email listservs, an online discussion board, Word’s “track changes” editing tool, or even one of the free online collaborative editing tools such as Writeboard (password for this mock-up: holycow)
Whatever method or methods you choose, make sure you settle in advance on a concrete plan for version control. This becomes especially important if your project will involve several writers working on different pieces of the project and several outside readers for the segments.
Decide in advance how you will promote your product
Don't wait until your book returns from the printer or your web site gos live to develop a promotional and marketing plan for it.
Think beyond the press release—way beyond. You may want to promote the availability of your product to many groups besides readers: opinion leaders, professionals who work with folks your publication targets.
Think professional organizations and their newsletters. Think well-crafted op-ed pieces and letters to the editor. Think radio and TV talk shows. Think of comments to blogs and interactive Web sites, professional listservs, client networks, business/industrial networks. Don’t forget word of mouth, posters, trade shows, health fairs, sports events (including “citizen sports” such as big footraces, triathlons, bike races).
And consider promotional efforts that reach beyond marketing the product itself:
You may want various groups of people who have no direct interest in reading the product you’ve produced to know that UNH Cooperative Extension involves itself in this kind of work.
Instead of handing off responsibility for the promotional program to the collaborator with the biggest public affairs department, the most power, the most energy, or the best writing skills, suggest working up a tentative marketing and promotional plan at the beginning.
The group question-and-answer process works well for this job: Have group members list all the ways they can think of to promote your eventual product.
If Extension professionals have done a share of the work (e.g., planning, providing technical expertise, writing, editing, designing, improvements in scope and quality), Extension deserves a role in determining how, when, and to whom the product gets marketed. (Not to mention a paycheck commensurate with our contribution.)
If your team will send people on the road to promote the product in public forums or professional conferences, ask to be part of the road team.
In the initial enthusiasm of bringing a group together to work on a writing project you care about, you may find your group charging right into the “writing,” or at least the grant-writing you hope will bring in the money your need to develop, publish, and distribute your product.
Whoa! Please take a deep breath and consider doing some upfront grunt work.
This early work may take more time than you think you can spare. But if you get it right in the early stages (which seem to have almost nothing to do with “writing”) you may save a lot of time, money, and grief. You may find the actual writing and editing work proceeds much more smoothly that you thought it would. And you’ll very likely emerge with a more refined, more interesting, and more useful product. Plus, other than a little time and a few sheets of paper, it won’t cost you anything.
Prepare for a few surprises.
Ask questions
Most of the up-front work I’ll suggest here involves simply asking questions, recording the answers, then refining and asking the same questions, again, and maybe again—even coming back to the same questions repeatedly throughout the writing/editing process.
Most of these questions can adopt a simple format: What (who, when, why) do I (we, readers, my organization) know (expect, believe, need)? What else? What have we missed?
All this questioning has two aims: revealing and refining—revealing assumptions (including your own), gaps in understanding or knowledge of the topic at hand, conflicting expectations among group members, bias or prejudice; refining individual and group awareness of the subject matter, the expectations of group members, the intended audiences and their needs.
Your questions should help you:
Get a clear sense of everyone’s understanding of the subject at hand
People coming to a task, in this case a writing project, from different disciplines and backgrounds generally bring very different levels of understanding and awareness of the topic at hand. They may have expertise and understanding of “their” side of the subject, but only a vague understanding of its other dimensions. Their vision of the team’s project may emphasize the importance of their own field of expertise, but fail even to recognize key elements others understand as important.You could ask group members to quickly list the dimensions (e.g., scientific/technical, political, economic, cultural) layers (environment, infrastructure, government involvement, and levels (individual, household, extended families, neighborhood, town, state, region) of the topic at hand
Also consider asking: Do we have enough technical expertise represented on the team, or should we consult (interview, bring on board) outside experts (including readers) before we begin writing?
Get everyone’s needs and expectations on the table
Each member of the collaborative team comes to the project with a set of expectations and needs. To make those explicit, ask questions like these:What do I expect to gain personally from the project? (E.g., career advancement, a resource for my clients, a new network, funding to support my work, new business contacts)
What does my organization (need) expect from the project? (Publicity, new funding source, chance to reach new clientele)
What does my supervisor need (expect) from the project?
How do I expect the product to serve my clientele or stakeholders?
How much time can I devote to the project each (day, week, month)?
The process
Begin with a question you all deem important. Set a tight time limit for answering it—no more than two or three minutes.
Each group member takes a fresh sheet of paper and answers the question, quickly, without discussion or time for reflection. Then people read their answers aloud.
Take fresh paper, and respond to an appropriate follow-up question, such as, What (who) have we missed? What have we forgotten?
You may find the answers getting the group deeper and deeper into the question. If so, keep asking, writing, and reading your answers aloud. You’ll find your group developing an increasingly refined “answer map” as you go along.
If you have a complex project, you may want to keep these answer sheets in a folder or binder, returning to some of the questions at different points throughout the writing project.
Why would you want to return to questions you’ve answered before you began writing? Because you may find your understanding of your subject and your ideas about the project change as you write, review, and revise. Touching base by asking the old questions will help you gauge the level of group cohesion at any point along the way.
These questions and answers could become topics for discussion or productive private reflection, but just putting unreflected answers on paper and hearing people read their answers aloud may offer all the insight you need.
Surveys
Brief surveys can also serve as tools for revealing things you need to know. Any group member can create a survey and deliver it during meetings or by email. Keep surveys brief—five or six questions—and have members answer questions on a Likert scale of, say, 1-5. Scaled surveys give you numerical data you can use in various ways: to measure agreement within the group, track progress or lack of progress, or discover that you’ve veered off-track.