Building the UNHCE homepage

Do you have an idea for a piece you’d like to publish on the UNHCE Web homepage?  Call or email me! Please!

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:

• promoting our programs and those of our key partnerships and coalitions
• developing new forms of social capital
• encourages interdisciplinary thinking/linking between and among CE program units
• serving as a powerful social marketing tool

Tomorrow I’ll introduce some specific elements of the ideal homepage feature.

Writing an op-ed

“Op-ed” essays appear in the section of a newspaper that contains its editorials (which reflect the position of the paper itself), letters to the editor and regular columns (which differ from news in that they specifically represent the writer’s opinions). Prominently placed, op-ed essays typically deliver a compelling perspective on a topic of broad public interest. The op-ed pieces most likely to get published come from authors with strong credentials or broad personal or professional experience that qualifies them to speak to the topic at hand.

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:

• Focus on a single theme. State your purpose clearly in the opening sentences.
• Use humor when appropriate, but avoid sarcasm. Biting sarcasm often hurts people and may diminish support for your issue.
• If you plan to offer critical analysis of a situation, take the high road: criticize ideas, not people. Avoid any references that present another person in a negative light; these might constitute libel, defamation of character, or malicious slander.
• Don’t allow your passion for your topic to exaggerate and don’t state facts you can’t support. Speak simply, from the heart. Use strong, compelling facts. Aim to elevate the level of public understanding rather than tear down the arguments of those you disagree with.
• Tell a story. “Speak out” your message onto paper. Focus on the concrete, human impacts of your issue. Note how it affects real people—their environment, their family life, their health, their quality of life. If you can find a strong quote, use it. Readers respond to a real human voice.
• Don’t worry about “unbiased objectivity.” Instead, seek balance and inclusiveness. Show you’re conversant with the many aspects of a topic and understand various points of view.
• Use active verbs. Say, Burton delivered the report in May, instead of, The report was delivered in May. Avoid overusing the verb to be: am, are, was, were, be, been, being. These verb constructions rob your prose of power, may cause confusion, and can deliver meanings you don’t intend.
• Cut every word that doesn’t perform important work. Use strong nouns and strong verbs instead of cluttering your piece with adjectives and adverbs.
• Use common, everyday words. Don’t try to “professionalize” your prose with jargon and 50-cent words. Expressing yourself clearly and simply doesn’t equate with “dumbing down.” No editor ever turned down a piece of written work because she found it “much too comprehensible” or “too easy to understand.”
• If you use an acronym, write out its full title the first time, with the acronym in parentheses immediately following, e.g., University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension (UNHCE).

A few more tips:

• Target your op-ed to the readers of one newspaper, and send it out to only one news outlet.
• Try not to send your op-ed piece “cold.” Instead, if you know someone who works at the newspaper, or can finagle an introduction to the editorial page editor, call him or her, explain what you have in mind and ask for advice on getting published.
• Accompany your op-ed with a well-written cover letter, two or three paragraphs that explain a little about the experience or credentials that qualify you to write this piece, along with a sentence or two about why your topic matters to the paper’s readers.
• Don’t represent yourself as speaking for a group unless the group has given you explicit permission to serve as a spokesperson. Even then, have the group select a couple of “editors” to review your final piece before you send it out.

 

More on writing op-ed

Collaborative writing: Ready to write?

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.

Collaborative writing: Prequels, part II

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.

Etc.

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.

Collaborative writing: Prequels to writing

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.

Collaborative writing

We’ve all heard the old saw, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” But a camel seems like an ideal design for the contexts in which it thrives. If the committee that designed the camel had come up with a horse instead, people in those parts would jokingly refer to the horse as “a camel designed by a committee.”

Over months and years of editing UNH Extension print materials, I’ve come across many writing projects produced by “committee”—group collaborations—some of which involve groups within an Extension program area, others representing people drawn from two or more UNHCE subject-matter areas/UNH departments, and still others involving partners from outside agencies and organizations.

I assume the practice of joining ranks with others to produce manuals, books, Web sites and other products will continue apace, for many reasons, chief among them: most critical and emerging topics of broad public concern cross the boundaries of many disciplines, agencies and organizations. One writer offering a single perspective can’t offer the scope or depth available within a diverse group.

For decades, Extension has played a unique and powerful role as a neutral convener, bringing likely and unlikely parties to a common table to share resources, brainstorm new approaches to old challenges, and help heal the fragmented research and information base that characterizes so many current problems.

The agony, the ecstasy, the payoff
Almost anyone who has participated in a collaborative writing effort will agree: collaborating can become painful, sometimes excruciatingly so. The process can drag on interminably and product that eventually emerges can stun team members: a confusing mishmash of chaotically organized fragments, a cacophony of styles and voices, anorexic in content.

But collaborations can also yield products that are richer, broader, and deeper, more sensitive to varied audience needs, more multi-layered, more credible, and more useful to their intended readers than single-authored efforts.

Writers (and their readers) will find the Web particularly well suited to collaborative projects. Software designers have already de have developed a range of sophisticated tools that enable collaborative research, writing, editing and publishing.

I’ve found a considerable body of research in the field of collaborative writing, but most of it seems to apply to writing pedagogy (K-12 on up) rather than professionals collaborations among adults.

Of course, much of the extensive literature on group dynamics also applies to group writing projects. But writing projects have their own set of potential pitfalls, and they place some unique demands on group members.

Over the next few days, I’ll share some ideas for writing, editing, and publishing collaboratively. I’d welcome responses from any of you about the successes and failures, you’ve had with collaboratively publishing ventures.

Tomorrow’s topic: Prequels to writing: Facing the tough stuff up-front and head-on.