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.
I must start out with a painful admission. I’m a grammar-not. I know what you’re thinking, what comes to mind a grammar-naut. One of those brave explorers who thinks nothing of climbing into the control capsule of a towering no. 2 red editing pencil and blasting off. For these folks it is easy to navigate the far reaches of the grammatical universe. That ain’t me. Most of my attempts at writing leave behind the scattered wreckage of dangling run-on prepositional participle phrase clauses. Not to mention numerous misspellings and punctuation mishaps. For those of you who struggle, like me, with the mechanics of writing I offer three humble strategies that may help a bit.
A. This one is obvious and has been written about before on this blog. Find a reader and/or someone who will help with editing. Life is too short ask for help.
B. Try turning on the text reader function of your word processing program or downloading a separate text reading program. I realize this may be a bit idiosyncratic but for me, it is almost impossible to see or recognize errors on the page. However, when I hear my writing read back by a text reading program many errors ring out loud and clear.
C. Try using a graphic organizing program to help clarify connections between the ideas you are trying to express. In my experience when my ideas are jumbled there are far more grammatical and mechanical problems in my writing. Though there are many versions I happen to use Inspiration. Good luck give these a try. I'll see you out there.
In this post I would like to suggest that media literacy can be an important part of all extension education.
First a story:
I recently had occasion to talk to a group of parents attending a leadership series about the influence of media messages on children and families. The initial discussion took a turn I am guessing is common. “It’s too bad how everybody else is influenced by advertising and media messages but I’m not.” Well I used an activity available at the Center for Media Literacy website created by Carrie McLaren based on the artwork of Heidi Cody to help us all reflect on the role of media in our culture. First a slide of local natural plants is shown, including common trees such as poplar and maple. As predicted the participants could only name a few. Then a slide containing an “alphabet” derived from logos and brand names was shown, a photo of an instillation by Heidi Cody. The group easily named the source of each letter of the “alphabet.” Hey that’s the “P” from the Pez dispenser, that’s the “E” from leggo my eggo, the “I” from the ice machine etc. Needless to say the discussion took a different turn from there.
So what is my point? Well it could be that we all could benefit from more familiarity with the plants and animals in the environment around us. No doubt, but I would like to draw your attention to the other “environment” around us, the sea of symbols and symbol systems we are all immersed in day in, and day out. These symbols form messages which are created by someone, with a specific purpose in mind.
A couple of questions:
What messages from our culture influence you, and the work you do?
What messages influence those you work with?
Consider the following specific questions:
What are the messages about teens in our culture today?
What are the messages, in our culture, about parents of teenagers?
Can I as a parenting educator do my work without reflecting on the answers to such questions? I think not. I suggest that there are similar questions in all of the various fields we work in.
I suggest that critically reflecting on the popular culture messages that impact ourselves and the folks we work with is an essential part of relevant & effective education.
To view the lessen plan mentioned above, visit the Center for Medica Literacy's page The Branding Alphabet.
I was talking with Peg yesterday about email. I told her I created a folder in my email program to put all those emails that I need to keep, but don't fit with other emails into a folder with similar emails. I call the folder "Archive." I only keep emails that are waiting for an answer in my Inbox and my Outbox. With Eudora, the program runs better if there aren't a lot of emails in the Inbox and Outbox, and I'm able to find emails quickly when I need them! Peg said she was going to create two folders, "In Archive" and "Out Archive." As emails increase in number, it helps to find ways to file them efficiently so we have time to do everything else!
I hesitate to call them “guest” bloggers, these four generous colleagues who filled in for me last week to keep Waking Up Writing going in my absence. But I have no hesitation about extending my gratitude to all of them: Steve Judd, Holly Young, Lynn Tolfree, and Gillian Hodges.
What an interesting array of posts! Fine writers Lynn Tolfree and Gillian Hodges-Rapp (who has a new surname because she just got married), both work as county administrative assistants. Gillian came to Extension with a degree in English and previous experience as a professional newspaper writer and editor. Lynn has taken writing courses and aspires to a professional writing career.
I consider our organization lucky to have such thoughtful and talented wordsmiths in support roles. I’ve learned that many Extension support staff play vital, if often unacknowledged, roles as writers, editors, data collectors, graphic designers, and photographers.
Lynn’s thoughtful post on the value of trust—“Trust is telling the truth, even when it is difficult, and being truthful, authentic, and trustworthy in your dealings…”—reminded me of the importance that political scientist Robert Putnam accords trust. In his 2000 best-selling book Bowling Alone, Putnam presents trust as both the foundation and the result of a rich store of social capital, and notes a strong correlation between high levels of trust and civic engagement.
Holly’s post on the Crisis Protocol Team contains an invitation to all staff to weigh in on one or more of the many aspects of the team’s work. I know I plan to, and I hope many of you take time to feed in to this important new initiative.
Well, I gotta go. Steve’s post really tripped my trigger. My inbox contains nearly 6,000 messages in serious need of management. My outbox contains almost as many. Yikes!
Thanks again, guys!
Chris Conlon and I are co-chairs for UNH Cooperative Extension's Crisis Protocol Team. Our goals are to work towards an organizational mind set to recognize crises and step in as appropriate (prevention, preparation, response, recovery)
and integrate UNHCE into the emergency response system in New Hampshire.
Others on the team are Kathy Jablonski, Bob Edmonds and Deb Maes. Our specific tasks include conducting a risk assessment, creating a communications plan and organization-wide incident report, updating county disaster manuals, conducting/providing staff training, posting web-based resources for the public and our staff, developing tools for rapid response work and mapping organizational assets.
This is an important task, and staff suggestions are welcome to any one of us. We look forward to providing a comprehensive plan that will help staff in emergencies such as the devastating floods of this past weekend.
I think people hope for improvement in their lives, and many of those people look for what they can do to make improvements. In my own search, I read articles about communication, leadership, and teamwork. The article Trust Rules! The Most Important Secret is one I found particularly valuable.
How important is building a trusting work environment? According to Dr. Duane C. Tway, Jr. in his 1993 dissertation, A Construct of Trust, people have been interested in trust since Aristotle. Tway states, “Aristotle (384-322 BC), writing in the Rhetoric, suggested that Ethos, the Trust of a speaker by the listener, was based on the listener's perception of three characteristics of the speaker. Aristotle believed these three characteristics to be the intelligence of the speaker (correctness of opinions, or competence), the character of the speaker (reliability -- a competence factor, and honesty -- a measure of intentions), and the goodwill of the speaker (favorable intentions towards the listener).”
Tway defines trust as, “the state of readiness for unguarded interaction with someone or something.” He developed a model of trust that includes three components. He calls trust a construct because it is “constructed” of these three components: “the capacity for trusting, the perception of competence, and the perception of intentions.”
The capacity for trusting means that your total life experiences have developed your current capacity and willingness to risk trusting others. Many people are unwilling to trust because of their life experiences. In many work places, people are taught to mistrust as they are repeatedly misinformed and misled.
The perception of competence is made up of your perception of your ability and the ability of others with whom you work to perform competently at whatever is needed in your current situation.
The perception of intentions, as defined by Tway, is your perception that the actions, words, direction, mission, or decisions are motivated by mutually-serving rather than self-serving motives.
Additional research by Tway and others shows that trust is the basis for much of the environment you want to create in your work place. Trust is the necessary precursor for:
feeling able to rely upon a person,
cooperating with and experiencing teamwork with a group,
taking thoughtful risks, and
experiencing believable communication."
The article finishes with the statement: "Trust is telling the truth, even when it is difficult, and being truthful, authentic, and trustworthy in your dealings with customers and staff. Can profoundly-rewarding, mission-serving, life- and work-enhancing actions get any simpler than this? Not likely!"
I find that a good bit of the reading and writing I do is in the form of email. The website 43 Folders has many tips for dealing with the ever expanding volume of email we each process. Here are some links and some of my favorites:
Five fast email productivity tips
Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.”
The basic idea is to firewall processing as a discrete phase you go through no more than every hour or two at the most. For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.
If you can knock off a reply the first time you see a message, do so. But if you accumulate items that need a bit more attention, concentrate on getting them all in the right place, and then go back to your work—return only when you have time to start chipping away. Above all, don’t let unprocessed mail live in your inbox: this is a lazy habit that invites procrastination, guilt, and inaction.
From Eudora.com:
Also, the In, Out, and Trash mailboxes are the primary mailboxes in
Eudora. These mailboxes are loaded into memory upon startup of Eudora -
so if they get excessively large, you risk causing slowdowns in Eudora
and you may increase the chances of Data corruption. It is a good
practice to routinely Empty Trash and to transfer old messages from the
In and Out boxes to other mailboxes in Eudora.
I see some parallels in Scientists and the Public: Barriers to Cross-Species Risk Communication, and Decision-Making Styles: A comparison of Extension Faculty and the Public from the June 2005 Journal Of Extension. In both articles, the underlying theme is the importance of recognizing that other people think, react, respond, and feel differently than scientists, Extension Specialists, Extension Educators, or any one group. That does not mean that either is "right," just different. Both articles state that many times people make judgements based on values, not only on "the facts." In our democratic society, the majority makes our decisions; this way the decisions benefit the majority of the people. In Extension, it is important that we provide the most complete information, explained in a simple manner, so the public can understand the situation before making their decisions. Extension is the link between scientific research and the public, so being able to communicate well is essential. In good communication it is important to realize and acknowledge where the other is and start there. Each of us has different life experiences that have brought us to our current beliefs.
In Cooperative Extension we are helping people learn, and to do so we need to understand how people learn. People learn best in different ways, some by seeing, some by hearing, and some by doing. Imagine a blind man insisting that a deaf man learn with the same method that works for him; the deaf man cannot learn the same way. In helping people learn, we need to keep in mind learning differences. Differences are positive when we learn from each other, because together we learn more than each could learn alone, with one style of thinking.
Decision-Making Styles states, "Most important, specialists can anticipate that their rational-decision making style will be off-putting to a large portion of the public that cares more about who is affected. To feelers, the thinkers can appear 'cold blooded' and indifferent to less tangible or less measurable concerns. Where the specialist uses the developed thinking function to assess risk inherent in decisions, some of the public will use a developed feeling function to assess risk. The two assessments, thinking/feeling, of the risk in a decision--the human, economic, social, or environmental values--can be very far apart. Thus, a specialist's thinking (T) point of view when measuring the value of a stand of trees may be hotly debated by those whose feeling (F) preference measures the value of trees in more subjective ways." Rather than either group believing there is "one right way of thinking," it is helpful for both to realize the other has a different decision-making style. A quote by Dandemis says, "Do not condemn the judgement of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong." Decision-Making Styles concludes that "one of the possible outcomes of misattribution is that the 'other' is considered ignorant or difficult. The more defensible argument is that the public [, or the Specialist] is simply using a different decision-making style."
Decision-Making Styles proposes that Cooperative Extension should "assess the type of those with whom they are communicating and [...] have the knowledge, skills, experience, and motivation to shape their communication and programs to be more effective. We see this training as a fundamental part of what Extension must do to adapt to the challenges and changes the Cooperative Extension System now faces as it strives to remain relevant in a changing world."
I found a great resource today, the Librarian's Index to the Internet
Would you like to read a newspaper in India? The Kashmir Times Online
See the flag of Botswana? Flags of the World (FOTW)
Learn more about the invasive plants of New England? Invasive Plant Atlas of New England (IPANE)
The Librarian's Index to the Internet (LII) Mission Statement is, "The mission of Librarians' Index to the Internet is to provide a well-organized point of access for reliable, trustworthy, librarian-selected Internet resources, serving California, the nation, and the world."
On the "About" page, LII says, "We at LII have a rigorous commitment to data quality. Every site entered in the LII database is reviewed at least twice--sometimes three or four times--before it goes 'live.' An active weeding program keeps us current--while sites change and die all the time, our weekly report nearly always has under 100 'dead' sites. To best serve our public and library users, we focus on gathering and organizing high-quality resources. We do not include sites that are purely commercial with no informational content."
There are many web sites that are not listed, but they welcome suggestions for new sites. You can also sign up for a free subscription to "LII New This Week," a weekly email newsletter of the most recently added resources.
“Language gives us ideas, including ideas of experience. Images give us experiences, including experiences of ideas.” Brian Stonehill
“Visual literacy puts a virtual squeegee in our hands -- a way of keeping the windshield clean as we hurtle down the information superhighway."
Brian Stonehill
Critical thinking has been identified as an important skill in state school standards for decades. However, it is mostly in regard to print media. Increasingly, educators are recognizing the importance of expanding our notions of literacy to other media, especially for our children who have grown up surrounded by visual media and high end technology to enhance that media. The focus of media literacy is to provide youth with the knowledge and skills to develop critical thinking in regard to the powerful media messages that surround them.
Yesterday I came across a great website, an online library dedicated to the individual who began the media studies program at Pomona College.
He was killed in an automobile accident back in 1997. Before his death he was putting together notes for a book entitled “Screen Smarts: Visual Literacy for the Age of Multimedia.” A section of the Brian Stonehill Online Library contains much of the information he was planning to use in his book. It is an informative and entertaining introduction to media literacy. He describes the need for individuals and the culture at large to become aware of the methods of visual manipulation. “Media literacy begins, therefore, with visual literacy – with a way to recognize, that is, the rhetoric of images. Behind all images lie a dozen basic elements of visual communication – the alphabet, as it were, of our pictures. A grasp of these key elements can help to unlock the arts of visual persuasion.” He was passionate about the need for medial literacy, and used the analogy of “the sea of images” and the need for “swimming lessons” to keep us afloat. He defined media literacy as “the ability to view audiovisual material (media based) skeptically, critically and knowledgeably.”
“How to avoid drowning in the oncoming flood of trivial images --that's a question that we all face today. Between the 500 channel cable universe that lurks menacingly in the near future, to the profusion of pictures already pouring from our TVs and computer monitors, it's suddenly sink or swim in a flood of mostly trivial images. Visual literacy offers, in a sense, a series of swimming lessons, a way to turn the couch potato in each of us into a wised-up watcher.” Brian Stonehill
One of the most important values we cherish as Americans is the freedom to make our own choices and direct the course of our lives. The field of media literacy gives us the tools to consciously consume media, to participate actively in the "reading" of the messages, to teach our children to question the messages they see and hear. Here's a place to begin....
Deconstructing media
Who created this media message? What is the purpose of the message? Who is the intended audience? How can you tell? What techniques are being used to grab the attention of that audience? What techniques are being used to persuade?
I have been wondering about buzz words. You know, new words or phrases that emerge and seem to capture something that had been missing. Suddenly the phrase is everywhere and it is difficult to imagine talking about that topic without using the buzz word.
An example:
I was recently at a very productive work team meeting where the phrase “learning organization” came up as the perfect way for us to get an idea on paper. At the time I thought I knew what that meant and it seemed to express something of great import. Whilst driving back to the office I began to reflect on the matter and was not so sure I knew what was meant by a “learning organization.” A quick Google search revealed no less than 51,700,000 links and numerous definitions.
Some observations:
Buzz words seem to be linked to a social group, profession or other specialized knowledge community.
The original knowledge group context that created the phrase has imbued the buzz word with implicit assumptions and values.
There can be a disconnect between the everyday “self-evident” meaning of the words in a buzz word phrase and what the people who invented the phrase mean when they use it. I know what learning means I know what organization means but do I really know what is meant by learning organization?
Carrying a buzz word from one context to another without understanding what is implicit in the phrase could mean being misinterpreted.
Some questions:
Does a buzz word describe something or actually shape our understanding of something?
How much responsibility does a writer have to research a buzz word before using it?
Are buzz words and jargon the same thing?
Perhaps if you respond we can generate some aggregate synergistic functionalities!
For the cynics at heart, I introduce you to Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary (formerly known as The Cynic's Word Book).
This irreverent collection of alternative dictionary definitions is of interest to any person (writer or otherwise) fascinated by the derivation of words; awed by quotations of poetic waxing; and possessed of an acerbic wit.
This book humorously illustrates how one's perspective colors the meaning of words.
Bottom Line Up Front: When communicating with others, try using the Bottom Line Up Front technique to make it clear what the thesis of your communication is and what action is expected of them.
Have you ever finished reading a memo or position paper and find yourself unsure what the point was or what you were expected to do about it? Do you think anyone might have felt that way after reading one of yours?
The Bottom Line Up Front technique states clearly, at the beginning of a communication piece, the crux of an issue and what you are asking the reader to do with the information. I use this method in constructing memos by including a paragraph titled "Bottom Line Up Front" write after the "Subject:" line. If the reader were to ignore the entire body of the memo, but read the Bottom Line, they would still know what issue I was addressing and what action they need to consider. The body of the memo is used to layout the situation, possible and recommended courses of action, and the consequences of various responses.
Try the Bottom Line Up Front technique the next time you need to write a memo or lengthy communication, it really helps frame the issues and bring clarity to what needs to be done.