“I left the CIA in 1989 despite having received two exceptional performance awards during my last eight months on the job because I could not stand working with her,” writes former CIA counterterrorism expert Larry Johnson, in an article on the firing of CIA officer Mary McCarthy, who allegedly leaked classified information to a reporter.
Whoa! This reads as if Mr. Johnson won his performance awards because he couldn’t stand working with his boss. He could’ve avoided this perception by recasting his sentence to read: “Despite having received two exceptional performance awards during my last eight months on the job, I left the CIA in 1989 because I could not stand working with her.”
I like this description of his film:
[snip]
Dodo birds are famous for two things: being dumb and being dead. So when Randy Olson calls fellow biologists “dodos” in his new documentary “Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus,” it's not meant as a compliment.
Dodos were flightless, odd-looking birds discovered by Portuguese sailors in the early 1500s on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, just east of Madagascar. The birds were named after the Portuguese word for “fool” because they were fearless of humans and would walk up to hungry hunters who simply clubbed them to death and ate them. The birds were extinct by the 17th century, less than 200 years after their discovery.Olson…thinks the dodo's fate is a good metaphor for biologists in today's changing media environment. “Natural selection teaches us that as an environment changes, species that can change with the environment will survive, while those that fail to change run the risk of extinction,” Olson said in a telephone interview. “Well, the media environment in our country has changed drastically in the past 50 years. Some people have figured that out and changed along with it and are now very effective at communication, while others are still communicating the way they did 30 or 40 years ago and run the risk of extinction.”
Getting to Olson’s main point:
[more snips]
As a marine ecologist with more than 20 years of research experience, Olson ultimately sides with evolution and concludes that intelligent design is at best an idea stalled at the intuition stage.
“There isn't much to intelligent design,” Olson told LiveScience. “These guys have this really deep-seated intuition that they can look at nature and see a designer at work, but the problem is they've failed to advance it to any kind of science so far.”
Despite Olson's dismissal of intelligent design in his film, scientists come off looking even worse. During interviews, evolutionists appear stiff, condescending, inarticulate and arrogant.
Olson fears the elitism he sees among his colleagues could turn the public off to science. But it's not too late to change, he says.
To start, Olson thinks scientists should practice being concise and punchier, as opposed to long-winded and exhaustingly thorough, when talking about their work.
“It's like in mathematics when dummies present the proof of a formula in a hundred steps and the genius does the same thing in five,” Olson said. ”It's the exact same process [in science communication]. The dummy takes 12 pages to explain what everybody needs to know, while the great communicator does it in a page and a half.”
The film makes clear that if scientists can't explain evolution in a way the public can understand, misconceptions that threaten the credibility of the theory, and which creationists can exploit, will persist. One such misconception, repeated again and again in the film, is that humans are not descended from apes, as the fossil record shows we are.
For further enlightenment, read: Scientists and the Public: Barriers to Cross-Species Risk Communication,by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman.
One Extension colleague told me recently he’d just returned from giving a “static” presentation because the group that invited him said they’d found the previous presenter on the topic “too interactive.”
I don’t know the particulars of that situation—the group may have had perfectly good reasons for preferring a “static” style. But my friend’s comment came to mind as I read an interesting online essay by Peter Merholz titled, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control:
When Google launched, one reason it shocked the Web community was its focus on getting you to where you actually wanted to go. How could there be a successful business model in actively sending people away from your site?
Seven years and a $75 billion market capitalization later, that question has obviously been answered. The other search engines attempted to control your behavior. Google recognized that users maintain control, and to win they had to become users’ preferred choice.
The Web, whose sum and substance derives from its human interactions (aka “links”), offers an especially hard lesson for teachers and other professionals who want to manage what and how people learn online. The Web not only empowers all its users to develop “content,” it blurs the lines between teachers and students, writers and readers, experts and laypeople, producers and consumers.
Although Merholz addresses his remarks primarily to businesses, they surely apply to educational enterprises as well:
Again and again, the history of the Web shows us the value of relinquishing control. Amazon’s customer comments were originally thought foolish by those who believed negative reviews would hurt sales. Instead, they increased trust, which drove more transactions. eBay’s open marketplace eschews centralized control of buyers and sellers, instead favoring a distributed management system where individuals rate one another. Not coincidentally, Google, Amazon, and eBay have all made available their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that others can leverage their information in unforeseen and innovative ways.Many designers [and writers] find it remarkably difficult to relinquish control….They get so caught up in controlling the superficial form of the product that they neglect to appreciate the context of the experience.
The Web’s lesson is that we have to let go, to exert as little control as necessary. What are the fewest necessary rules that we can provide to shape the experience? Where do people, tools, and content come together? How do we let go in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to our [mission]?
Relinquishing control is a scary prospect because it diminishes certainty. With control comes predictable outcomes that you can bank on. But in this increasingly complex, messy, and option-filled world, we must acknowledge that our customers hold the reins. Attempts to control their experience will lead to abandonment for the less onerous alternative. What we can do is provide the best tools and content that they can fit into their lives, and their ways.
Some excellent thoughts for the day, from the University of Delaware’s writing program.
Critical reading is an active process of discovery. You discover where an author stands on an issue; you discover the strengths and weaknesses of the author’s argument; and you decide which side outweighs the other. The end result is that you have a better understanding of the issue.
Ultimately, this will lead to being a better writer, because critical reading is the first step to critical writing. Good writers look at the written word the way a carpenter looks at a house—they study the fine details and the way details connect and create the whole. The better you become at analyzing and reacting to another’s written work, the better you become at analyzing and reacting to your own: Is it logical? Do my points come across clearly? Are my examples solid enough? Is this the best wording? Is my conclusion persuasive?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When you read critically you might ask the following questions of the author as you read:
- What did you mean by that?
- Can you back up that statement
- How do you define that term?
- So what?
- How did you draw that conclusion?
- Do all experts agree?
- Isn't this evidence dated?
Or, you might think the following:
I recommend reading the whole piece and taking it to heart.
Immigration Advocates Rally Around US read a headline from an online news aggregator leading readers to the reprint of an April 10 New York Times article.
Yet when I went to look at the original article, the headline read Immigration Advocates Rally Across US.
Quite a difference in meaning! The phrase rally around, (with rally as a verb) means to gather in support of something, in this case, the U.S. Rally across (with rally as as a noun) carries the intended meaning of gatherings taking place in various locations throughout a broad geographic area.
Write freely and rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down…. It…interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place…it doesn't exist. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person, a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one.
From a letter to Pascal Covici Jr.
April 13, 1956, referenced in Paris Review,
The Art of Fiction No. 45,
John SteinbeckFifty years old and still first-rate advice.
[snip]
Invariably, the stories use words like suffers, afflicted, different. My personal favorite: special. (Could it be that people with disabilities are special just for being alive?)
Add this type of coverage up. What message hits you between the eyes? What I hear is that being disabled means being a sad, helpless victim whose goal is to inspire others.
Even though LoTempio addresses newspaper reporters and editors in her column, her comments and advice should resonate equally well with educators. We need to make sure our depictions of people with disabilities don’t veer toward stereotypes that don’t reflect the realities of their lives.
F for fast. That's how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school. Jakob Nielsen, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox features a summary of his study tracking Web users’ eye movements to learn more about how people read online.
Nielsen, the grandfather of Web usability research, tracked the eye movements of 232 users interacting with thousands of Web pages. The study revealed that people typically read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe. Nielsen lists three sequential components to the F-shaped reading pattern:
Folks concerned about rising rates of “illiteracy” among today’s youth may find today’s quotation especially apropos:
Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.
These are difficult times because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies. We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old….
The youth of today are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind throughout the door of technological awareness. The only possible door for them is slammed in their faces by a rear-view mirror society.
The young today live mythically* and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information—subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint.
It is a matter of the greatest urgency that…education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.
These words come from Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage: an inventory of effects, published in 1967—almost 40 years ago—but still startlingly fresh.* Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects…. Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.
The title of this post, McLuhan’s famous aphorism: “All media work us over completely,” explains the play on words in the title of his book. I’ve reread The Medium is the Massage many times in the 40 years since its publication, and learn something new from it each time.
Give this slender volume a gander. You’ll find it especially powerful for way in which its fusion of words and graphic design presages the Web, still 20 years in the future.
While almost everything has a clear beginning, middle and end the transition from one to the next should be a barely noticeable flow that culminates in a strong piece without break of voice. In school and maybe even college, we were taught that any type of exposition has an essential skeletal structure. There is the introduction, the meat of the work, and finally the conclusion. While this lesson is true in its most base form, it’s important to remember that the ‘meat’ of our work, is in fact the entirety of our work and should not be sandwiched in between a header and finale. It is and should be one.
When we compartmentalize our writing into a beginning, middle and end we create a break in the readers’ attention, a hiccup in what should be one succinct thought/point. The beauty of addressing an audience through writing is that readers are ingrained with the expectancy of structure. Readers understand that the first paragraph introduces the subject matter, that everything after that will search to elucidate it, and that the ending paragraph will try and tie everything together. By including things like, "By writing this piece I hope to........" or "I would like to take the time to explain to you......." or "Please allow me to give you some background on this........" you (whether they know it or not) insult the reader and make your writing appear more sophomoric than it probably is.
Writers may not be as bad with the introductions as they are with the infamous "In conclusion." A popular, albeit very demeaning way (to both the readers and your work) to end a piece of writing that you’ve probably spent many hours on. The effect that the statement "in conclusion" often has when it is stapled on to the bottom of your writing is that it provides a Cliff Notes simplicity to writing that has much more depth. Even with your ending, it’s important to present your point in a fresh way, to keep the reader engaged until the final, punctuated point.
In conclusion, (see what I did there) make sure your writing has an even flow. That it naturally progresses and does not abruptly end or rehash what was already said a couple of paragraphs ago. It is also a good idea to be mindful of committing as much energy and voice to your beginning and end as it is to the middle. After all it’s the beginning that will grip readers and the end that will leave them remembering.
The process of reading creates an illusion that we are simply absorbing information from a text, rather than conversing with, and being persuaded by, another human being. Karen Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers
The second comes from horror writer Stephen King:
What writing isI enthusiastically recommend both these books, Shriver’s as a valuable reference work for writers and publication designers, King’s as a powerful and entertaining memoir of the writer’s life.
Telepathy, of course. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room…except we are together. We’re close.
I sent you a table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit….You got them all. We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy…real telepathy.You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair….Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“My first thought is that reporters and editors have a job to do and they shouldn't worry about what Google's or Yahoo's software thinks of their work,” said Michael Schudson, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who is a visiting faculty member at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
“But my second thought is that newspaper headlines and the presentation of stories in print are in a sense marketing devices to bring readers to your story,” Mr. Schudson added. “Why not use a new marketing device appropriate to the age of the Internet and the search engine?” Steve Lohr, This Boring Headline is Written for Google
Why not indeed?
The headlines of news articles and titles of magazine articles, information bulletins, short stories, etc., have always served as marketing devices—“first words” that alert readers to what the piece to follow has to offer, and that lure them to read on.
But a piece in Sunday’s New York Times titled, This Boring Headline is Written for Google, describes some of the teeth-gnashing going on as newspapers move into universe of online publishing, where they discover they must develop headlines and lead paragraphs not merely for readers and steely-eyed copyeditors, but (gasp!) for search engines as well.
In the lingo of the day, the new medium requires “search engine optimization,” which writer Steve Lohr reminds us, has become a $1.25 billion business.
“[W]hen you’re also writing for search engines, … you tend to write headlines that are more straightforward,” said Lou Ferrara, online editor of The Associated Press. “My worry is that some creativity is lost.”
Whether search engines will influence journalism below the headline is uncertain. The natural-language processing algorithms, search experts say, scan the title, headline and at least the first hundred words or so of news articles.
Journalists, they say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject—and then include them in the first few sentences. “That's not something they teach in journalism schools,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. “But in the future, they should.”
Unlike hard-copy media such as books magazines, and newspapers, which offer readers plenty of visual context—clear page and article boundaries, sidebars, photographs and pull quotes, for example—headlines, titles and other online microcontent often stand alone.
Choosing headlines and titles that attract search engines and that make sense to online searchers means choosing words and phrases that actually tell online searchers/readers what the document covers. Headlines for the Web can’t use puns, metaphors, allusions, slang, idioms and other figurative language that doesn’t make sense out of context.
In some respects, writing titles (and text) for the Web resembles working in the terse poetic format known as haiku. In its strictest form, haiku doesn’t allow figurative language, but merely reports direct experience. Yet I’ve never heard a critic complain that haiku lacks creativity, nuance, resonance, or substance.
Except for informal spech, or when you need to quote someone directly—“Hey, you, get offa my cloud,” drop the “of.”A simple “off” will do.
He ordered the warden off his property.
Get off my back!
I had trouble getting off my horse.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.—Herbert Alexander Simon, economist, Nobel laureate (1916-2001)
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. What an interesting concept: attention consumption. I wonder if part of the energy drainage we feel from the assault of information comes from the quality of attention we “pay.” Buddhists have a concept often called “bare attention.”
It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories. It just looks. [Bare attention] registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it were occurring for the first time. It is not analysis, which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process…
Mindfulness creates its own distinct feeling in consciousness. It has a flavor—a light, clear, energetic flavor. By comparison, conscious thought is heavy, ponderous, and picky.—Bhante Gunaratana
Bare attention, rather than draining energy, may increase it, or at least increase the “flavor” of energy in one's mind.
Also, I’ve observed in myself that energy drainage comes not so much from an overabundance of information as from its fragmentation. I call this a poverty of integration, not attention.
I’ve just discovered the Jargon Files, a jewel of an online resource for writers published by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. The foundation developed the Web site to “call attention to the troubling use of jargon throughout the foundation world.” [Substitute Cooperative Extension for philanthropies or foundations when you peruse this page.]
Why? The use of jargon, and the confusion it creates, can damage or undercut even the most-well-intentioned of foundation efforts - making it difficult for everyone to clearly understand and effectively discuss the ideas and issues that drive foundation grantmaking and related activities.
To “help improve the quality and clarity of speaking and writing [and] to catalogue and comment on examples of misused words and phrases,” the Clark Foundation enlisted Tony Proscio, a former associate editor of the Miami Herald.“
Proscio writes compellingly, often with bite and humor, about why we should consider abandoning many of their cherished words, because we’ve misappropriated, twisted or diluted their original meanings, or they’ve become clichéd, tired, shopworn.Proscio on empowerment:
Provide / ReceiveHere is an example of that most pernicious of all forms of jargon: the ideological shibboleth. To establish one's bona fides as a person concerned about the poor, the disenfranchised, or even ordinary people in general, it is essential in every setting to use EMPOWERMENT - as early (and, in some circles, as often) as possible.
The coiners of EMPOWERMENT invested it with only the broadest meaning, perhaps to make it usable in nearly every context…. Foundations now must be careful to empower grantees, communities, individual residents of those communities, voluntary and civic associations, the poor, those who help the poor, and even those who do not help the poor, but would if they were empowered. Scarcely a grant is made anymore without someone or something being solemnly empowered, normally with a timely infusion of money.
No one wants to “get” or “give” anything. It seems too ordinary, not to say materialistic. But they would be pleased to RECEIVE, and feel duty-bound to PROVIDE. It's another example of how a well-meaning writer inadvertently takes a plain idea and turns it into something pompous, without the least intention of doing so.
Stakeholders
For moreIn most civic and charitable projects, the people with a “stake” in the results are legion. When people try to improve schools or health care or Social Security, who has a "stake" in the results? Answer: All of us—every last woman, man, and child. Half the time, STAKEHOLDERS is a passable substitute for “all the living, and even a few of the dead.” As such, in any practical context it is useless noise.
The only explanation for the spectacular success of STAKEHOLDERS in the philanthropic demimonde is that the word sounds tantalizingly like its cousin “stockholders.” For those with a painful, gnawing envy of Wall Street and all its blandishments, the desire for stockholders must have the merciless pull of an addiction. (Funny, that: Most actual denizens of Wall Street would be delighted to give their stockholders the heave-ho, as long as they could hold on to the capital.) Among Wall Street wannabes, a word that gives the thrilling feeling of stock without the nuisance of actually paying dividends would naturally be a big hit. For those with a chemical dependence on the gibberish of high finance, STAKEHOLDERS is something like methadone: It eases some of the craving, without inflicting the harmful side-effects of the real thing.
The Professional Writing & Rhetoric Concentration in the Department of English is pleased to offer this online course, this summer:Whoa!
Mediastorm: Rhetoric in Information Age
Prof. [name deleted]
This is a course on media literacy and information age survival skills. Beginning with the advent of cable TV in the 1970s, to satellite TV in the 1980s, and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, we are living in what media critic Todd Gitlin calls a “torrent of images and sounds” which overwhelms our lives. From the “Sopranos” and “Sex in the City” to “Survivor” and C-SPAN and ESPN, we are awash in media 24/7. There can be little denial that even now, arguably still in the dawning period of the information age, in order to prevent citizens from being blown away by the data storm of information technologies (and the Internet is only the most recent and explosive of these), that education must provide not only exposure to new media tools but also some principles of critical analysis about information technology and the rapidly changing paradigms of literacy in an information society.
Beginning with the advent...?
[Take a deep breath.] There can be little denial that even now, arguably still in the dawning period of the information age, in order to prevent citizens from being blown away by the data storm of information technologies (and the Internet is only the most recent and explosive of these), that education must provide not only exposure to new media tools but also some principles of critical analysis about information technology and the rapidly changing paradigms of literacy in an information society.
Huh? The guy offering this advanced undergraduate English course may have a load of excellent information to pass along, but he needs an editor. Badly.
“Your welcome.”
Time for a reminder! If you mean “you are,” use the contraction “you’re.” You’re welcome. You’re not alone. You're double-parked.If you want to show possession, use “your.” Please reboot your computer. Your hair is on fire. You can pick up your son at the Northfield police station.
FDA asked to end drug ad warnings, read the headline on an interesting piece in Saturday’s newspaper. The article concerned a coalition of advertising and PR firms (Coalition for Healthcare Communication), partly funded by drug companies themselves, petitioning the federal Food and Drug Administration to strip the fine-print drug-ad warnings, arguing that the current regulations on direct- to-consumer drug ads “over warn and under inform” consumers.
The Coalition wants all drug ads simply to carry boilerplate warnings that advise consumers to discuss the drug’s potential health benefits and risks with their doctors, skipping the fine print that provides details.
“While some may think it desirable to tell consumers about all side effects and contraindications, no matter how clearly this information is communicated to consumers, a significant number will lack the education or background to comprehend or act on it,” the petition reads.
A policy analyst for Consumers Union disagrees, suggesting the ads need “clearer, but not less, information.”
The same paper carried an article about the “Health Buddy,” an electronic device used by the Concord Visiting Nurse Association to monitor various health indicators of 33 elders and other patients with chronic illnesses. The system keeps electronic tabs on health measures such as weight and blood pressure, and asks the user to respond to a series of pre-recorded questions. The recorded information gets transmitted to a full-time VNA staff person who responds with a phone call or a referral when the data indicates a potential problem.
People who use the electronic system receive training and “lessons,” including information about diet and other self-care measures.
These articles provide evidence of extraordinary shifts in both healthcare costs and health management responsibilities from doctors and hospitals to individuals and families—the people we persist in calling “consumers.”
Futurist Alvin Toffler calls these new consumers—people who “consume” some elements of health maintenance and illness treatment in the marketplace, and “produce” others for themselves—“prosumers.”
Clearly this new generation of prosumers needs clear communications: about preventive care and illness management, about when to rely on themselves and their support networks, and when to consult a medical professional, about the pros and cons of a particular drug, procedure, or medical device.
But who should develop the instructions? Should we rely on advertisers and public relations firms to deliver balanced information we need? Should we rely on information developed by health insurance companies, or medical professionals: doctors, pharmacists, dieticians, chiropractors?
Should prosumers trust information developed by individuals or professional groups that stand to benefit materially from the information and the behavior changes associated with it?
Doesn’t it make sense for healthcare prosumers themselves (consulting whatever experts they choose) to direct the collection, writing, continuous updating, and delivery of health information they need to protect themselves and their families?