The erudite linguistics blog Language Log ran a blurb a couple of days ago about an interesting psychological experiment reported in the online science journal Seed.
The Yale research confirmed many findings of Harvard psychology professor and “mindfulness” researcher Ellen Langer and colleagues that people mindlessly rate information coming from “expert” sources as more valid than that from other sources (including their own experience).In a recent study, Deena Skolnick, a graduate student at Yale, asked her subjects to judge different explanations of a psychological phenomenon. Some of these explanations were crafted to be awful. And people were good at noticing that they were awful—unless Skolnick inserted a few sentences of neuroscience. These were entirely irrelevant, basically stating that the phenomenon occurred in a certain part of the brain. But they did the trick: For both the novices and the experts (cognitive neuroscientists in the Yale psychology department), the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones.
For example, as one of an ongoing series of experiments examining people’s social relationships to computers and other machines, Clifford Nass of Stanford’s communication department and Youngme Moon of the Harvard Business School demonstrated that the mindless response to expertise extends even to machines.
Nass and Moon divided their subjects into two groups. One watched a news show and an entertainment show on a “generalist” television, labeled with a sign that read News and Entertainment Television. The other group watched the same two programs on two “specialist” televisions, respectively labeled News Television and Entertainment Television. The group who watched the specialist TVs rated the news significantly more informative, interesting, serious and higher in quality and the entertainment funnier and more relaxing that the participants who saw the same shows on the generalist TV.
Provocative implications for education.
A headline in yesterday’s paper read: Rafters take a wild ride on Merrimack.
An article about building materials for a new post-and-beam home washed downstream? A story about an old barn crumbling and floating away in the latest assault from Mother Nature?
Nope. In this case, “rafters,” refers to a couple of young women who launched a toy raft into the Merrimack River, intending to float a few hundred feet to a sandbar. Instead, they got caught in a strong current and “rafted” downstream for more than three hours before washing ashore.
The headline writer could have avoided the ambiguity by writing: Toy raft takes two on a wild ride.
A few days ago, I came across the delightful What, Exactly, is a #2 Pencil? on Tim Warner’s blog Mother Tongue Annoyances.
Read it if you’ve ever wondered about the pencil-numbering system or felt curious in general about your first writing tool. And don’t forget to check out the World Championship of Illegal Pencil Fighting video, whether or not you ever engaged in this adolescent (mostly “guy”) game.
The Apostrophe Protection Society was started in 2001 by John Richards, now its Chairman, with the specific aim of preserving the correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language.
Richards’ simple rules for apostrophes led me to The Dreaded Apostrophe, a site that simplifies the apostrophe even further, boiling the rules to one:
[snip]
I am also going to simplify matters, and having studied linguistics I know this may be oversimplification for some. But here the aim is to explain the dreaded apostrophe, not teach linguistics and old or middle English. So bear with me.English is a Germanic language. It shares much in common with modern German, although much vocabulary was later imported from French/Latin. Quick example: the German for foot is Fuss, for ball is Ball, so football is Fussball. We get the word pedestrian from the French/Latin side though. Some Germanic usage survives in English, particularly in North American English where some archaic forms remain in use - gotten for instance. The -en participle ending will be familiar to German speakers.
Like modern German, old forms of English used a genitive case ending to show possession. This is normally -es. For our purposes, that will do. For example, the English The man's coat in German is Der Mantel des Mannes (The coat of the man). Note the -es ending on Mann to show possession.
So now let's (let us) go back a few hundred years in English….[big snip-out]The old -es possessive form in English is now missing, and as I am sure you will now remember we
use an apostrophe when letters are missing.
Got it?
At his humor blog, Bantereist, Brian Sack offers a collection of signs guilty of such word crimes as homophone abuse, prefix neglect, inexplicable usage of a semicolon, negligent hyphenation, and use of an illegal apostrophe, under the collective heading Grammar Cop.
Check out this list for a few good chuckles and a potent reminder of the importance of having someone else check your copy before you distribute it widely.
A few of my favorites:Introduces and develops a topic of broad public interest or concern, tied to a timely event or a local resource. Alternatively, it could touch on something whimsical or humorous. Keeping our homepage fresh with articles related to important or emerging issues demonstrates that UNH Cooperative Extension stays informed about and responsive to these issues.
Includes some local angle or aspect of specific interest to New Hampshire people. People give birth, raise children, attend school or not, get married or divorced, seed a lawn, resolve disputes with their neighbors, become victims of violence, take care of an aging parent, commit a crime, plant a vegetable garden, hire a pesticide applicator, sell timber, suffer discrimination, establish credit, buy a house or a horse, experience a septic system failure, find or lose a job, get diagnosed with a chronic illness, and die in a particular place.
The laws and regulations, physical environment, climate, cultural ambience, demographics, and the specific resources available (or not available) in that place typically play a substantial role in people’s ability to understand a situation, meet their needs, and respond individually or collectively to challenges.
Adding concrete aspects of place to an article connects writer and readers deeply and immediately, creates a direct emotional bond of shared experience and helps build a sense of community. We can use aspects of place to promote specific CE programs, promote the interests of our local partners, demonstrate our ability to integrate resources, give voice to our stakeholders, and allow site visitors to connect visually and locally to the topic (e.g., photo galleries).
Offers something of value readers won’t find anywhere else. Leading Internet economists suggest the Net will gradually bring an end to our current concept of intellectual property (proprietary content), in favor of intellectual value. UNHCE writers can create intellectual value by offering local perspectives on global, national and regional issues; by giving voice to (or inviting) unique local solutions to common problems, by presenting a wide range of perspectives not available in mainstream information sources, by promoting local events, and by hosting online discussions of many sorts. We don’t have to be the experts. We can bring outside experts to our Web site or set the stage for our stakeholders to develop and share their own expertise there.
Demonstrates awareness of the many dimensions of the issue at hand. Most every collection of empirical facts has moral, social, cultural, economic, political, gender, age, linguistic, and other dimensions embedded within it. Most issues also have a complex inside as well as an outside. The visible, empirical aspects of a topic (what we might call its outside) include raw data, measurements, and physical resources (things). Its invisible inside includes such aspects as perceptions, memories, emotions, level of awareness, cultural aspects, values and sense of self that both writer and reader bring to the topic.
Writers enhance their credibility and demonstrate expertise when their writing shows an understanding of the many dimensions and layers of the topic at hand, through word choice, writing style, embedded links, lists of links, sidebars, direct quotations, questions for readers, and other rhetorical techniques.
Offers opportunities for readers to make choices about what they need and want to know about the topic. Many professionals continue operating from the “broadcast” mode that positions the writer as the expert who determines what learners need to know, and readers as the relatively passive learner/novice.
The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to let readers themselves make their own travel plans. As noted in yesterday's post, links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.
Links provide the glue that shapes, builds and defines the Web. Try writing two or three lead paragraphs, then use the rest of your time and your expertise to develop links that connect to related pages on our own site and links that point away from it.
Note: When you link, link deeply, not to a site’s homepage, but to the internal page or pages of a site that delivers the information you think readers might find interesting.
Don’t hesitate to change the name of a page when you direct readers to it via a link. When the page title alone doesn’t indicate specifically what visitors will find if they travel there, always provide annotation , a brief description or abstract that readers can use when deciding whether to click and go there or pass it by.
Part of my job involves recruiting material for our homepage to keep it fresh and timely, working with staff to develop Web-ready articles and appropriate graphic elements, and getting the “products” to Faye for posting. Paul (my supervisor) and Holly (my ally and sounding board) collaborate on this venture.
So, what makes a good homepage feature?
First and foremost, it should exemplify clean, easy-to-understand prose that people find interesting to read, that delivers on the promise of its title and opening lines, and that shows awareness of and respect for readers’ needs.
The homepage itself doesn’t have a specific, carefully targeted audience. Its audience includes anyone who comes to the page. Ideally, writers should use links to direct various reader groups to related materials that might interest them.
Because Internet users experience Web pages as places they go to, travel around in, and leave, writers should work to create a special ambiance that connects to New Hampshire people and piques the interest of anyone who drops in for a visit. Even if they just cruise in and out without reading anything all the way through, or don’t have an interest in the specific topics, site visitors should leave thinking, “Hey, I want to come back here soon.”
Writing for the Web allows you to write a little and point to a lot. The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to vast realms of territory, letting readers themselves make their own travel plans.
Links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide nuanced or highly technical detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.
Research shows that professionals/experts enhance their credibility on the Web as much by what they point to as by what they themselves write.
The Web uniquely empowers all users to respond, publish, comment, review, critique, and add their own ideas, as well as to build both ad hoc and enduring communities of discourse, planning, research and action. This capability approaches the ideal of engagement the Kellogg Foundation has suggested as the key to survival of the land-grant universities and the cooperative extension system associated with them: two-way, even multi-party communication to which each party brings knowledge, skill and experience and in which each individual participates as both learner and teacher.
Done well, our homepage can serve our visitors’ needs for timely information, while simultaneously serving other purposes. Some of these include:
Tomorrow I’ll introduce some specific elements of the ideal homepage feature.
Today’s microcontent mischief:
The ambiguity in this online article’s headline arises from the dual meanings of the capitalized word “Bill.” Does the headline writer mean a man named Bill, or the draft of a proposed law?
Many people think of op-eds as expressing strong, one-sided opinions. Often they do. But an op-ed essay can also give voice to the voiceless, illuminate key sides of an issue that others have missed, or help readers understand multiple perspectives on a topic. Some of the best op-eds simply provide compelling facts intended to elevate the level of public understanding on all sides of a hot topic.
You, your volunteers, or your clientele might consider writing an op-ed, for instance, when you want to mobilize community energy and attract resources to an issue of broad public concern, or when you want to introduce the plans or the work of a community coalition.
Tips on writing a good piece and helping ensure it gets published:
A few more tips:
Among the most-read sections of most newspapers and many newsletters, the Letters to the Editor section gives you (or your clientele) a chance to present your perspective on an issue and its relevance to your community, praise a volunteer or a colleague, or promote a coming event.
Because many newspapers and newsletters publish most of the letters they receive, your letter stands a good chance of getting published. A campaign that encourages your supporters, volunteers, or clientele to write letters could prove more effective for promoting an event or program than sending out a generic press release.
Before you sit down to write, learn the newspaper’s word limit on letters to the editor, then stay well within it. If you don’t edit down your letter, someone at the paper will do it for you. (Warning: Newspapers generally don’t edit out mistakes. Meticulously scrub your letters for spelling, grammatical, and other errors.)
Some papers have a Board of Community Contributors, a My Turn, First Person or Voice of the People column that lets local people sound off in a longer space with a more prominent placement on the editorial pages. People who become known for writing strong, thoughtful letters may find may it easier to get one of these longer pieces published.
Draft your letter, making your main point in the lead sentence and following up with one or two supporting points. Keep your focus narrow.
Keep your tone civil and respectful, avoiding sarcasm and personal attack. Write with power:
If you have credentials or experience that adds credibility to your voice, work them into your letter or your signature.
If possible, let your letter sit a few hours before you send it. Ask someone you trust, preferably someone who doesn’t know much about your topic, to read it for coherence and tone, as well as for grammar, syntax and “flow.”
Another alert reader did it for me this time, pointing out the ambiguity of the recent Concord Monitor headline, Men more likely to be dating violence victims.
“Did this mean that men were more likely than women to be dating the victims of violence, or that men were more likely than formerly to be dating the victims of violence?” wrote Rufford Harrison of Concord.
“Neither, it turned out. Men were more likely to be the victims of dating violence,” writes Harrison.
The context demands a hyphen between dating and violence to clear up the ambiguity.
Harrison concludes, “The hyphen is possibly the most underused and most needed punctuation mark in the English language.”
Hear, hear!
Make any sense to you? As a headline in my morning newspaper, it didn’t to me, either, until I scanned the subhead, photo and article below for context.
The article tells the story of an entrepreneur getting out of the plastic packaging business and into the biodegradable packaging business, and goes on to describe a new generation of packaging materials made from agricultural byproducts.
So the headline writer really meant to write, Businesses investing in products that rot. I imagine the copy editor or whoever did the final page layout just ran the whole piece through a computer spell-check. A set of human eyes or two would have caught the error immediately.
As I’ve written often in this space, newspapers and other print documents typically contain plenty of visual context that quickly clears up readers’ initial confusion over errors like this one and renders them merely comical.
But when headlines and other brief materials migrate onto the Internet or other interactive media, they become “microcontent,” which often gets displayed out of its original rich visual context.Hurricane season approaches, civil war looms in Iraq, scandals in Congress, H5N1 bird flu still very much a threat, genocide continues in Darfur, fraud erupts in science…
Wordsmith’s A.Word.A.Day today describes what a lot of us feel as we scan the day's news:
nostomania (nos-tuh-MAY-nee-uh, -mayn-yuh) noun: An overwhelming desire to return home or to go back to familiar places.
I also like the Yiddish proverb selected as Wordsmith’s quotation of the day: A half-truth is a whole lie.
The plethora of half-truths emerging from government and business leaders also feeds our common nostomania.
Strike while the iron is cold.
Peter Sandman penned this slogan in one of a series of risk communication fact sheets for managers attending Sandman’s professional seminars. It promotes the wisdom of raising public awareness on the various aspects of hot-button issues before misinformation, half-truths, and official over-reassurances have raised the levels of emotional outrage in the public at large. I think it serves well as a rule of thumb for educational risk communication campaigns, too.
Andrea emailed to ask:
I have a question for you about “every day” vs. “everyday”. I am using a publication called “Physical Play Everyday.” Shouldn't it read “Physical Play Every Day?”
My guess is “everyday” is a describing word. It has a kind of mundane meaning, as in “my everyday routine”. But “every day” is like saying “each day,” as in “I do chores every day of the week.”
I responded:
Right on, Andrea!
Everyday is an adjective (modifies a noun or a pronoun) that means ordinary, common, routine.
She wore her everyday clothes. (modifies clothes)When you want to answer the question When?, use every day, an adverbial phrase that modifies a verb.
We followed our everyday routines to ease our grief. (modifies routines)
Kids should have active play time every day. (modifies the verb have)
I commute by bike almost every day. (modifies the verb commute)
A headline in the morning paper reads: Poke in nose not ruled to be assault.
The position of the word “not” appears to modify the word “ruled,” meaning that no ruling occurred. Reading the brief article reveals that the investigators did rule, determining that no assault had taken place.
The headline writer could have avoided ambiguity (and kept within the space constraints) by writing: Investigation: Poke in nose not assault.
The opening paragraph of the article itself serves up more confusion:
A complaint that an assistant attorney general poked a woman in the nose missed its target and has been dismissed after an internal investigation, the attorney general’s office said.The question immediately arises for the reader: What missed its target, the alleged poke in the nose, or the complaint? By the end of the article, we still don’t know.
Each little question that arises in a reader's mind as he or she interacts with a text halts the forward momentum of the reading process, however briefly, and adds to what psychologists call the “cognitive burden” of the reading task.
Writers, especially those dealing with technical topics, need to bear in mind that failures of comprehension or loss of reader interest often have their roots in poor writing and editing.
Language or style that is less engaging, less stimulating than the competition is, frankly, dead on arrival. Whether you strive as a journalist, novelist, [fact-sheet writer]…something distinctive, some umami-like deliciousness has to emanate from your words or they go off to oblivion. Most writers feel themselves on the scent of such expressiveness, but just a few bounds short of seizing it. — Arthur Plotnik
The title of Arthur Plotnik's book, Spunk & Bite: A writer’s guide to punchier, more engaging language & style, pokes fun at the Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the thin classic style manual that has served up the rules for good writing since 1918.
But Plotnik doesn’t really quibble with the classic rules of the trade. Instead, he says his book targets “those whose basic composition skills are as adequate as the next writer’s, but who itch for creative ideas, smart locutions, and realistic takes on language for today’s media.” But, he adds, lively writing, “Is not…about out-shouting the next writer or trashing the language authorities.”
Plotnik articulates a painful awareness many editors develop: “I feel the anguish of dead writing. I can see dead writing. I see language that follows all the rules, but lacks the vigor and inventiveness ever to rise off the page.”
I loved reading Spunk & Bite and recommend it to any writer. Its lively writing makes it hard to put down, but Plotnik has organized the content into brief, digestible subchapters, with lots of sidebars and examples drawn from newspapers, magazines, journals and literary works, making Spunk & Bite a book you can pick up sporadically, open anywhere, and learn something in four or five minutes.
“Writers aiming for clarity, accuracy, timeliness—and for readers who eagerly interact with their words and read all the way through—must do more than merely recite empirical facts, interpret data, and display personal expertise,” writes Plotnik, “especially in an age where another take on the subject remains a click or two away.
If you aim for this kind of writing, spend some time with this book.
Organic Farm
Don't drift or spray
I saw that sign during a recent episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes.
Whoops!
The sign-writer has warned readers not to move aimlessly around or spray (presumably pesticides).
I think he or she meant to warn: “Don’t spray pesticides directly on these premises or allow pesticide spray to drift onto our crops from outside.”
Whenever you use compound verbs (two or more verb forms joined by words and or or) in a sentence, make sure both or all your verbs agree in tense and number, and that each refers back to the subject of the sentence.
A quick way to check: Mentally or out loud, create a sentence that isolates each verb individually. In this case: Don’t drift. Don’t spray, would have revealed the ambiguity to the writer.
Those of us who learned to type on typewriters rather than computer keyboards learned the convention of putting two spaces after each period. Typewriters gave all letters the same space on the line (monospacing). Adding two spaces after a period helped readability by indicating clearly the end of each sentence and the beginning of another.
Most fonts developed for modern computer typography use “proportional spacing,” which compensates for the varying widths of individual letters by giving some letters more space than others. Notice:
e
i
l
q
s
m
w
The ease of reading proportionally spaced computer-generated text has changed the standard from two spaces to a single space after a period. If you still use two, look closely at your text. You may notice wavy white lines meandering vertically through your pages, which may distract and annoy your readers.
If you can’t break the habit, simply do a “find” and “replace” as one of your final proofreading tasks. “Find” two spaces and “replace with” only one. Then hit “replace all.”Writers, even professional journalists, often confuse the two forms of this homonym .
The word “aid” always means “help.”
The word “aide,” always a noun, means “an assistant.”As a verb: “They provided first aid to support the injured driver until the ambulance arrived.”
As a noun: “The U.S. pledged more than $4 million in humanitarian aid to victims of the Indonesian earthquake.”
“He works as an aide to U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg.”
“She volunteers as a nurse’s aide at the local hospital.”