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.
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.
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.“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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting piece this morning by Kelley McBride, the Poynter Institute’s ethics group leader, on the pros and cons of using anecdotes from your own and friends’ or family members’ lives to illustrate some point you want to make. Substitute “educator” for “journalist” and Quoting Your Friends: The Easy Way Out makes sense for Extension folks.
McBride concludes:
So even if you aren’t making stuff up, when you quote your friends you cheat your audience. Although our work is often informed by our personal experiences, it doesn’t have to be limited by our personal boundaries. One of the greatest joys of being a professional journalist is we get paid to meet people we would never encounter in our private lives. Difference, whether it’s rooted in race, religion, sexual orientation, political philosophy, economics, family background or geography, makes journalism rich.
There are easy solutions, of course. Say your daughter’s soccer coach is the absolute best possible example of the beleaguered volunteer in a today’s competitive world of children's sports. Or your mom is the typical senior trying to navigate the Medicare drug plan. Say you can’t find a better source…. You could reveal the connection to the audience, by slipping into first person, magazine style. You could write a column or a reported personal essay.I favor the first-person approach myself. Relating a personal anecdote or revealing my connection to the people in my story (making sure I don’t violate the privacy of a friend or family member) can encourage readers to empathize, identify, or otherwise emotionally connect the anecdote to their own lives.
Whatever you do, though, don’t give in to the temptation to make up a story or exagerate an effec just for the sake of illustrating your point.
When you sit down to write, do you bring a particular point of view to the topic?
Almost certainly. A writer’s level of interest, experience, beliefs and values, academic study, debate and deliberation, interests of funding sources, join many other factors in shaping his or her unique perspective of the topic at hand. Most of us find that long periods of study and deliberation alter our perspectives on a subject—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, sometimes repeatedly.
What point of view do you drop onto the page as you write?
Even writers with a spacious perspective may exclude or ignore legitimate aspects and conflicting perspectives of the topic, and bring subtle (or not-so-subtle) bias to the page. Readers expect that in an opinion piece or a private reflection, but deserve a neutral stance in writing presented as factual.
The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia has an interesting page describing the “neutral point of view”
the site has adopted as official policy. Although I consider the current Wikipedia entry a work in progress, I recommend the whole of it.
[snip] The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting views. The policy requires that, where there are or have been conflicting views, these are fairly presented, but not asserted. All significant points of view are presented, not just the most popular one. It is not asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Readers are left to form their own opinions.As the name suggests the neutral point of view is a point of view. It is a point of view that is neutral—that is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject.
Debates are described, represented, and characterized, but not engaged in. Background is provided on who believes what and why, and which view is more popular. Detailed articles might also contain the mutual evaluations of each viewpoint, but studiously refrain from stating which is better. One can think of unbiased writing as the cold, fair, analytical description of debates. When bias towards one particular point of view can be detected the article needs to be fixed.
Adopting a neutral point of view helps avoid various types of bias from creeping into a text. Wikipedia lists a few of them:
• Ethnic or racial bias, including racism, nationalism and regionalism.
• Corporate bias, including advertising, coverage of political campaigns in such a way as to favor corporate interests, and the reporting of issues to favor the interests of the owners of the news media.
• Class bias, including bias favoring one social class and bias ignoring social or class divisions.
• Political bias, including bias in favor of or against a particular political party or candidate.
• Religious bias, including bias in which one religious viewpoint is given preference over others.
• Sensationalism, which is bias in favor of the exceptional over the ordinary. This includes the practice whereby exceptional news may be overemphasized, distorted or fabricated to boost commercial ratings.
• Geographical bias which may for example describe a dispute as it is conducted in one country without knowing that the dispute is framed differently elsewhere.
You could probably add a few of your own. Gender bias, age bias, aesthetic bias, and bias in favor of a funding source come to mind for me.
Writing from the neutral point of view doesn’t mean the writer doesn’t have a point of view. But it does help prevent bias from creeping into our texts. More importantly, the task of crafting text in the neutral point of view usually requires unmasking our own unexamined assumptions and lack of knowledge about various aspects of the topic.
In an otherwise compelling article that ran in yesterday’s Concord Monitor about the plight of Concord’s grohomeless people during winter, I read:
But when the temperature drops, residents who usually hunker down in cars, tents and under bridges come out of the woodwork.
Whoa! That phrase “out of the woodwork” knocked me cold. In my mind, it conjures images of cockroaches, bedbugs and other lowly, despised creatures crawling out of their usual hiding places—images I feel sure the writer didn’t intend to evoke.
As a figure of speech, “out of the woodwork” doesn’t even fit the writer’s context—describing the homeless people’s fair-weather shelters: cars, tents, and bridges. It also doesn’t follow the previous sentence in this article, a quotation from Donna Muir, the First Congregational Church’s director of community outreach. “Concord’s very good at hiding its homeless,” she’d said. The quotation also ran Muir’s words as a pull-quote spanning the article’s carryover onto page 3.
If that piece had come my way for editing, I hope I’d have caught the offending phrase and changed the sentence to read something like:
But when the temperature drops, residents who usually hunker down in cars, tents, and under bridges become visible as they begin a desperate search for warmer shelter.
This example demonstrates how easily clichés slip into our written work and hold their places once they get there. Working under pressure, writers often grab at whatever handy words and phrases come first to mind—“out of the woodwork,” to use that timeworn expression more appropriately.
“Freedom’s freedom,” a friend and Extension colleague pronounced during a conversation about the wave of violence on several continents that followed publication of a group of Danish cartoons with images of the prophet Mohammed, an act which Muslims consider blasphemous “Freedom of speech means the freedom to say and print whatever you want.”
Whoa! On reflection, it doesn't seem that easy.
In our own nation, for example, at least 14 states have drafted laws to restrict the “free speech” rights of groups such as anti-gay members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, who have begun picketing funerals, including those of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Members of this small fundamentalist religious sect carry signs and shout at funeral-gowers that American deaths in Iraq represent God’s punishment for this nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.
And for an mind-bending clash of worldviews parsing the Constitutional meanings of the word “freedom,” one has only to tune into a late-night C-SPAN broadcast of the current Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the legality of the Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretaps.
And who can forget the “They hate our freedom,” refrain President Bush used repeatedly in describing the radical Islamists he calls terrorists, but who call themselves martyrs and “freedom-fighters.”
Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose crooned Janis Joplin. But I wonder: Wouldn’t some folks call freedom just another word for “all we have to gain,” or “takin' what we want,” or “havin' fun all night?”
Who speaks or writes the word? Who reads or hears it? In what context? Does the right to determine meaning fall mainly to the powerful, to the meek, to the majority?
Words have almost limitless power. Words have power to evoke feelings and memories, raise or crush hopes, inspire creativity and leadership. Words have power to motivate action or foster restraint. Words have power to empower and to enslave.
But their meanings change unceasingly as words cross space, time, culture, and context.
We run a huge risk in thinking of any value-laden word as “just another word,” in assuming a word can have an absolute meaning that prevails in every context, or that others will attribute the same meanings to it that we do.
I read a lot during my late December-early January vacation. As I often do, I had four or five books going simultaneously. I read them the way I've read since childhood, opening one book at some random location, reading a bit, then picking up another and doing them same.
Books that interest me I usually read in entirely, but rarely from front to back, the way most print authors intend.
Two of my early winter reads involved writing: William Safire’s How Not to Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammar, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Long Navigator or the Mutinous Crew.
I recommend them both as fun, quick reads by great word masters that will refresh your awareness of good writing principles and when to break them.
Reading the way I do often provides me with delicious serendipitous collisions of material from different volumes. That happened as I dipped into the Le Guin and Safire books, serendipitously coming across passages in each that adress the matter of how to handle the tricky gender-referencing pronouns.
Novelist Le Guin:
Whatever the writer does has to be within the frame of knowing [readers’] shared expectations. Only if you know the rule can you break it.Here’s an example: I often use the possessive pronoun “their” in the singular. This is “incorrect,” say the grammarians, because each one, each person is a singular noun, and there is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used theirwith words such as everybody, anybody, a person; and so we all do when we’re talking…. The grammarians only started telling us it was “incorrect” along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when they also declared that “he” includes both sexes: As in: “If a person needs an abortion, he should re required to tell his parents.”
Do I have to say that my use of “their” is politically motivated, and, if you like, politically correct? It’s a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language-legislators.
But it isn’t politically incorrect. It’s just pushing it a little.
I know what I’m doing.
And now, the irrepressible and witty arch-conservative Safire:
Etymologists know that the word man, going back to the Sanskrit manus, means “human being” and is sexless. Although man and woman are differentiated in English, the universal meaning of man to encompass both sexes remains. Why accept a fiat from anti-sexism headquarters to change it now?Cool it humankind; let language change in its own time, not to fit the schedule of any –ism. Resist the linguistic importunings of those who say, “get with it man.”
Well, yeah. And the word economy derives from two Greek words meaning household management.” But the sentence: “The report notes the U.S. economy grew 3.5 percent in the third quarter,” doesn’t conjure many mental references to households divvying up the child care responsibilities or trying to stretch the food budget by planting a vegetable garden, any more than the generic word “work” covers the tasks of preparing meals at home, tending that vegetable garden, or splitting your own firewood.
Safire seems to ignore the point Le Guin tacitly honors: Even single words can trigger a frame of reference which tacitly describes a worldview that accords more value to some people, practices, or ideas than others. Mindful writing and critical reading require the capacity to make explicit the frames that underlie word choices.
From my perspective, we need to make ordinary language both more gendered and more gender-bias free.
Take it from someone who took up sports in the mid-1980’s, when women had no choice but to wear “unisex” running shorts and shoes. If the men of that day had had to wear garments designed around the shapes of female torsos and feet, the marketing term “unisex” wouldn’t have lasted six months.
In Wednesday’s Waking Up Writing entry, I introduced the work of Michael Rich, a physician at Children’s Hospital in Boston whose research has demonstrated that the very act of using a video camera to record their own lives improves the health status of young patients, independent of any additional clinical interventions.
Rich says his research has begun to shed light on the common disconnect between health knowledge and behavior change, “because it looked broadly at participants’ illness perceptions, rather than limiting itself to a focused inquiry into explanatory models of disease origins.”
The VIA studies also reveal that insights gained from the two-way information flow changed professionals’ knowledge and behavior.
The VIA research hints at what can happen to literacy and learning when we let go of the traditional dichotomies between provider and consumer, teacher and student, expert and layperson.
Mindfulness theory
In fact, it confirms Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer’s 30 years of research into the phenomenon she calls mindfulness, which she defines as “a psychological state characterized by openness to novelty, alertness to distinction, sensitivity to different contexts, awareness of multiple perspectives, and orientation in the present, ” and contrasts with mindlessness, “A psychological state characterized by operating from a single, fixed perspective, interpretation or category, independent of context; habitual, routine.”
Her research led Langer to conclude that most formal and informal education today involves reliance “on ways of learning that typically work to our detriment and virtually prevent the very goals we are trying to accomplish.”
With conventional teaching and learning, Langer says:
Facts are typically presented as closed packages, without attention to perspective. Scientists know that research results in findings that are probably true given the context in which the work is tested...but facts are not context-free; their meaning and usefulness depend on the situation….When we ignore perspective, we tend to confuse the stability of our mind-sets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon: All the while things are changing and at any one moment they are different from different perspectives, yet we hold them in our minds as if they were constant…. Even if it later would be to our advantage to view the information differently, if we learned it mindlessly, it will not occur to us to reconsider it. When the context changes, and it always does in life, mindlessly learned behavior does not.
Questioning assumptions about learning and literacy
Langer’s work questions the assumptions that underlie many conventional notions of learning and literacy, namely that to become “literate” in a field or topic of inquiry, a student must assimilate a body of information, developed through research and vetted by experts, an approach which “presume[s] that the goal of the education process is to equip [learners] to achieve specific, desirable outcomes [pre-selected by] experts.
Rather than allowing an individual to generate new hypotheses that may be mindfully tested in the individual’s own experience, a teacher or expert often assumes that the objective is apparent and that only the means of achieving it remains obscure to the naïve observer Teaching from this perspective consists of presenting step-by-step methods of problem solving, making possible an entirely mindless type of success.
Langer acknowledges the fears that may arise among educators:
One of the fears people may have of [the mindful approach] is that nothing will remain stable, there will be nothing reliable on which they can lean for continuity. Yet we discover that by viewing the same information through several perspectives, we actually become more open to that information…. If we fail to explore several perspectives, we risk confusing the stability of our own mindset with the stability of the phenomenon itself.
Perceived stability is often in the experts’ interests because their authority rests on the stability of the categories they employ…. This capacity to find a means of shifting perspectives can be a vital element of our ability to navigate new situations, just as the ability to maintain stable categories is often critical for the expert’s authority.
A few tips writers can use to foster mindful learning
The Value of Uncertainty
Conditional language: intentional uncertainty
Invite Multiple Perspectives
E-prime
Participatory design: Confer with readers before you begin to write
Analyzing readership: classification, intuition, and feedback models
Participatory design and evaluation: Listen to readers think aloud
A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a gift certificate to a Thai restaurant for my daughter and her roommate, who live in the Washington, D.C. area, figuring they might want to use it during a hectic holiday shopping trip.
I found the place by searching online, choosing an eatery with moderate prices whose customers raved about its homey ambiance and the authenticity of its cuisine.
I ordered the gift certificate by phone, and had a hilarious exchange with a woman who answered. She’d obviously learned English as a foreign language, and had to concentrate to hear and make herself heard against the background noise of garrulous evening diners.
I couldn’t understand her soft-but-staccato, rapid-fire English, and she struggled to interpret my slow, careful articulation. She interrupted often with, “Wah? Pleece say ‘gain.” And I interrupted her with frequent interjections of, “Excuse me?”
We encountered special difficulty with the spelling of names and addresses (for example, at one point, she had the roommate’s name as Finger, instead of Ginger). Our troubles had us both laughing before we completed the transaction.
Three days later, I received a small envelope containing my credit card receipt, with everything painstakingly hand-lettered in ballpoint pen. I found myself moved by the handwriting, by the fact that someone labored over each letter, making sure to get it all right.
I’d never thought before about the deep, qualitative differences between the uniformity of a computerized font, however elegant, and the unique shape of an individual person’s hand-made letters. It this case, the handwriting delivered special meaning. It made me even more certain I’d chosen the right restaurant.
When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail. Abraham Maslow
Mindfulness researcher Ellen Langer has found that suggesting a learner (1) consider other possible ways of interpreting information while reading text or listening to a lecture, (2) try to think about a topic from other people’s points of view or (3) find ways to make the information relevant to their own lives improves many measures of learning.
Like conditional language, these techniques help learners stay open to fresh ways of reassembling learned information when life confronts them with novel challenges where they could use old information, functions or categories in new ways. In The Power of Mindful Learning, Langer writes:
When faced with something that hasn’t been done before, people frequently express the belief that it can’t be done. All progress, of course, depends on questioning that belief. Everything is the same until it is not… Once we generate possible ways of doing something, even if they are low-probability bets, the perception of a solution’s being possible increases enormously.
Langer’s mindfulness research suggests that when writers encourage readers to examine factual information from other points of view or make information relevant to their own lives, they provide their readers with powerful decision making tools. She writes:
Mindful decision making, as opposed to decision making passively based on data assembled by outside observers, is a process of active self-definition…. When we rate our own behavior, it is often in our best interest to generate novel criteria. This capacity to find a means of shifting perspective can be a vital element of our ability to navigate new situations, just as the ability to maintain stable categories if often critical for the expert’s authority.
Most facts exist in rich contexts. We could view them from differing perspectives or try to understand them from another person’s point of view. (Langer suggests, for example, examining the “facts” in a standard Civil War history text from the point of view of a young slave woman.)
Yet most contemporary writing, not only popular books and articles, but also textbooks and academic papers, tends to present information in universal, absolute statements of fact, stripped of most of their context.
A mindful approach to learning rejects ideas such as “right answers” and “bodies of essential facts everyone should know” in favor of encouraging learners to generate alternative viewpoints and perspectives.
Many writers assume a single perspective toward their topic without realizing they’ve done so. Typically, they also make assumptions about their readers, about the stance they want readers to take toward their material and about how they want readers to think about them.
Writers also often forget that emotional, ethical, intellectual, social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, historic and even spiritual dimensions come embedded within most factual narratives, as well as age, race, ethnicity and gender-based biases. Part of the work of opening our writing to multiple perspectives might involve uncovering these dimensions of our work.
How can you invite readers to generate multiple perspectives on your topic?
• The most basic technique involves simply suggesting readers to consider varying perspectives as they read. You might write:
Despite the well-publicized potential negative consequences of obesity, research that shows Americans of all ages continue getting fatter and fatter. This fact sheet explores some ideas about why, but we encourage you to think for yourself about this topic. Put yourself and your family into the situation as you read. Question the information and try to come up with hypotheses of your own.
• As the writer, you might begin by asking and answering questions like these of yourself:
Have I presented a single, absolute, context-free perspective on the topic? If so, does that perspective contain unexamined assumptions?
If you answer yes to these questions, sometimes simply unearthing and stating the bias you bring, especially if you phrase it in such a way that holds open the option for other interpretations, will allow readers to process the information more mindfully. For example
This article provides information about a chemical weed eradication program from the perspective of conventional farm economics: Perennial weeds have begun to compete with farm crops and increase the farmer’s costs, thereby reducing farm profits. Approaches not covered here include strategies that might have prevented those weeds from becoming established in the first place and reducing perennial weeds by planting cover crops that outcompete weeds.
• You could also brainstorm multiple perspectives for yourself. If you’ve immersed yourself in a topic through intensive research and reading, this exercise may bring fresh insights to your own research and teaching. Examine an emotional aspect of your topic, for example, or two or more conflicting ethical perspectives. Try to look at your topic from the perspective of another academic or scientific discipline.
• Try to examine your topic through the eyes of a reader of the opposite gender, someone from a different socioeconomic stratum, another nationality, or with a different worldview.
To view an answer as right or wrong, we must freeze the context in which the answer is being evaluated. Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning
I remember vividly the day about 25 years ago when I picked up Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
The simple act of turning a line drawing upside down and focusing on the relationships among its curves and angles, rather than trying to “draw” a face or a foot, enabled me to produce a reasonable facsimile of Picasso’s famous sketch of Igor Stravinsky sitting in a chair.
The deceptively simple action abruptly changed my way of seeing and washed away decades of belief that I couldn’t move beyond stick-figure drawing because I had no “artistic talent.” Edwards’ exercises helped me understand that I could overcome an apparent disability by finding a new way to approach the task.
Intentionally inserting specific elements of uncertainty into your writing may help accomplish for readers what turning an image upside down did for my drawing, namely foster dramatic changes in awareness, expand creativity, and motivate behavior change.
I use the term uncertainty* here to mean verbal strategies that present facts in ways that help readers remain open to other interpretations or ways of using the information when the context changes. Uncertainty in this context offers a counterpoint to absolutism, our default method for delivering factual information.
Absolute vs. conditional language
Absolute language, which includes words such as never, always, all, certain, always, and impossible, as well as most verbs of being, closes off alternative ways of interpreting the facts presented, freezing them into a single, static, context-free perspective.
Conditional language places limits or “conditions” on statements of fact, which helps the reader’s mind stay open to other ways of understanding the same facts when they appear in a novel context. Conditional terms include some, most, maybe, often, perhaps, likely, unlikely, typically, usually, possibly, one way of....
An experiment in mindful writing
Mindfulness researcher Ellen Langer and colleagues have conducted dozens of experiments that compare various aspects of learning by absolute words and texts with those acquired through conditional language.
In one experiment they slightly modified the text of one chapter of an exam required for stockbrokers and others who want to sell securities. Their modifications consisted of rewriting all absolute statements of fact in conditional language. For example, these statements:
Municipal bonds are issued by states, territories, and possessions…as well as other political subdivisions. Such political subdivisions would include counties, cities, special districts for schools…. Public agencies such as authorities and commissions also issue municipal bonds.
rewritten conditionally now read (emphasis mine):
In most cases, municipal bonds are issued by states, territories, and possessions…as well as other political subdivisions. Such political subdivisions may include counties, cities, special districts for schools…. Public agencies such as authorities and commissions may on occasion issue municipal bonds.
Only a close reading would detect these subtle changes, but they mattered significantly to student readers in this experiment.
After recruiting undergraduate subjects and dividing them randomly into two groups, researchers asked one group to study the original version and the other half to read the “conditional” version of the text. After 25 minutes of study, the subjects took two tests, one of factual recall (multiple choice), the other asking the subjects to put the material to creative use.
Both groups performed equally well on the multiple choice test, but the conditional learners outperformed the traditional learners in the test of creativity, which included asking students to “name as many uses as you can think of for municipal bonds.”
Significantly, the conditional learners also reported enjoying the material more than the conventional learners.
Putting learning to use in life
I think about the value of conditional language when I imagine a food service worker receiving instructions about handling food safely, a logger taking safety training, or a 12-year-old learning CPR and other emergency first aid techniques during a baby-sitting course.
Typically, these students will “learn” in a quiet, distraction-free setting organized by the teacher for the purposes of instruction.
Yet how can the manual’s written words or the teacher’s oral instructions possibly anticipate the food service worker’s need to adapt the lessons to the chaos and pressure of the restaurant kitchen on a night nearly half the staff has called in sick, and she’s come to work herself with a sore throat and low-grade fever? (She doesn’t get paid when she doesn’t show up.)
How will the logger put what he’s learned to use when his partner goes down, pinned unconscious under a fallen tree, his cell phone and radio won’t work in the remote site, and he doesn’t know the area?
And what will the baby-sitter take from the manual, the teacher’s words, and even the hands-on practice, when the baby chokes just as the power goes out in a fierce windstorm?
To manage well in those new contexts, won’t these students need to summon and organize responses based on more than passing grades on the multiple choice test?
*By uncertainty, I don’t mean the sort of ambiguity and abstraction that characterize bad writing.
I also don’t mean the kind of linguistic uncertainty deliberately crafted to evade or deceive, typically full of passive verbs and abstract concept nouns, but empty of people--like this message broadcast to the general public two days after an explosion ripped off the roof of the # 4 reactor at the Soviet Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26, 1986, expelling eight tons of radioactive material:
An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl power station, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Those affected by it are being given assistance. A government commission has been set up.
Uncertainty creates the freedom to discover meaning. If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty and no opportunity for control. The theory of mindfulness insists that uncertainty and the experience of personal control are inseparable....Expert observers tend to focus on particular features of a situation that enable them to hold variables constant…. Perceived stability is often in the experts’ interest because their authority frequently rests on the stability of the categories they employ.
One of the fears people may have of an educational system that creates a place for several perspectives is that nothing will remain stable, there will be nothing reliable on which they can lean for continuity. Yet we discover that by viewing the same information through several perspectives, we actually become more open to that information…. If we fail to explore several perspectives, we risk confusing the stability of our own mindset with the stability of the phenomenon itself. Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning
If you want readers to come away from something you’ve written with the capacity to reassemble and put to creative new uses what they’ve learned, rather than merely an ability to recall factoids, you may want to weave uncertainty and ambiguity into your statements of fact.
This advice may sound counterintuitive—if not heretical—but it has a strong research base. A bit about some of it:
Mindful vs. mindless
For more than 30 years, Harvard University psychology professor Ellen Langer and colleagues have conducted research into the state of attention Langer calls mindfulness, which she defines as “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context.”
She distinguishes mindfulness from its opposite state, mindlessness:
When we are in a state of mindlessness, we act like automatons who have been programmed to act according to the sense our behavior made in the past, rather than the present…we are stuck in a single, rigid perspective, and we are oblivious to alternative ways of knowing.
Mindful learning: context, perspective, making distinctions, generating alternatives
Langer began her career researching how people learn and comparing the consequences of various ways of learning. She writes, “Whether the learning is practical or theoretical, personal or interpersonal; whether it involves abstract concepts, such as physics, or concrete skills, such as how to play a sport, the way information is learned will determine how, why and when it is used.”
Her research led Langer to conclude that most formal and informal education today relies on “ways of learning that typically work to our detriment and virtually prevent the very goals we are trying to accomplish.” With conventional teaching and learning, Langer says:
Facts are typically presented as closed packages, without attention to perspective. Scientists know that research results in findings that are probably true given the context in which the work is tested….but facts are not context-free; their meaning and usefulness depend on the situation….When we ignore perspective, we tend to confuse the stability of our mind-sets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon: All the while things are changing and at any one moment they are different from different perspectives, yet we hold them in our minds as if they were constant.
Under this pervasively mindless teaching/learning style, Langer argues, “Not only do we as individuals get locked into single-minded views, but we also reinforce these views for each other until the culture itself suffers the same mindlessness.”
Information processed mindlessly commits the learner to a single way of understanding it. Langer writes:
Even if it later would be to our advantage to view the information differently, if we learned it mindlessly, it will not occur to us to reconsider it. When the context changes—and it always does in life—mindlessly learned behavior does not.
Learners tend to process information received unconditionally, devoid of context, in mindless fashion because they have little motivation to question the information or look at it from other perspectives.
Receiving information in absolute, context-free format often results in what psychologists call a premature cognitive commitment, “a rigid belief that results from the mindless acceptance of information as true without consideration of alternative versions of that [same] information.”
Langer has particular concern for information delivered in absolute statements of fact by experts and authority figures. Research shows people tend to accept information less critically from sources perceived as “expert.”
Conditional language
Much of Langer’s experimental work has focused on the language of teaching, learning and self-talk. She and her colleagues have demonstrated in many settings, with subjects ranging in age from young children to elders 80 and older, that people learn best when they receive facts in conditional language, the language of could, might, seems to, some research shows, etc.
When we are told that something “could” be, we understand immediately that it also could not be, or could be something else. When we teach important information, information about health, how to pilot an airplane, air-traffic control, bridge or building safety, and so on, we need to allow for exceptions, for information that goes beyond these common instances… Students learning such information must be open to factors that could operate in a new context. If we simply memorize the known past, we are not preparing ourselves for the as-yet-to-be-known future.
Langer’s research has demonstrated that merely suggesting that a learner imagine other points of view or other possible ways of interpreting information while reading improves learning and fosters more creative used of the learned material. She writes:
When faced with something that hasn’t been done before, people frequently express the belief that it can’t be done. All progress, of course, depends on questioning that belief. Everything is the same until it is not…. Once we generate possible ways of doing something, even if they are low-probability bets, the perception of a solution’s being possible increases enormously.
So, how can writers build mindful uncertainty into their texts? I’ll offer some suggestions in tomorrow’s post.
[E-prime] forces one relentlessly to confront sloppiness, laziness, fuzziness, blandness, imprecision, simplistic generalization, and a half dozen other all too frequent characteristics of casual prose. As a self-administered exercise, this single restraint on style, with all the discomfort that may ensue, offers more real insight in an afternoon than one can gain from a year's worth of spoken precepts. Cullen Murphy, “’To Be’ in Their Bonnets,” The Atlantic, February, 1992
If someone asked me for a single tip a writer or editor could take to improve almost any text, I’d answer: Translate the text into e-prime, a dialect of standard English that eliminates all forms of the verb to be*.
Linguist D. David Bourland began writing in e-prime in the late 1940’s and advocating publicly for its use in the late 1960’s. Bourland and other e-prime proponents claim that avoiding verbs of being in writing and speaking helps (1) sharpen critical thinking, (2) unmask hidden assumptions, (3) more accurately and honestly represent the facts at hand, (4) resolve apparent contradictions, (5) elevate the level of public discourse on a topic, (6) motivate change, and even (7) reduce stress.
E-prime performs this impressive work, they say, by forcing its users to move beyond Aristotelian logical structures that view the world through all-or-nothing, either/or, right-or-wrong lenses.
Nearly all uses of the verb to be create static, absolute statements that fix the mind in a single, perspective, treating facts as absolute, unchanging, context-free, or universal. Verbs of being reduce complex, highly differentiated subjects to simpler, more abstract conceptual nouns and adjectives
Think about it: When I write that something is, or was, or will be, I equate my subject with its predicate, robbing my subject of important contextual details of time, place and circumstance, and often obscuring the speaker or the subject behind the action.
Consider the statement that begins a fact sheet: Insect x is a serious pest of…. Here, the writer aims to introduce the insect as an economic liability for farmers and home gardeners. But consider that the crop-destroying insect may also provide food for birds, bats and amphibians, serve as a sensitive indicator of the presence of certain environmental toxins, or produce a self-protective substance of interest to medical researchers, making it so much more than a simple pest.
Reworking the sentence in e-prime, I could write with greater accuracy: Most New Hampshire vegetable producers consider insect x a serious pest of….
As this example shows, editing verbs of being from your work often causes a subtle shift in perception, from single-pointed, absolute, and static, to a matter of opinion, a datum of private observation. In presenting research-based facts, sticking to e-prime will help a writer place the facts and findings within specific research context(s).
As a linguistic discipline, e-prime encourages mindful problem-solving. It prevents both writer and readers from forming the premature cognitive commitments inherent in statements such as, That’s true (or false), or That’s impossible. It forbids questions that encourage closed thinking and single-perspective responses: What is the truth of the matter? What is the prognosis?
A few more points:
E-prime makes writing in the passive voice almost impossible.
The research design was completed, the statistical consultant was hired and subjects were recruited in only five days. It took the team only five days to finish the research design, hire a statistical design consultant, and recruit subjects.
By eliminating the passive voice, e-prime assigns accountability for the action of a sentence.
Mistakes were made. Dr. Green made mistakes.
E-prime reveals the invisible thinker/speaker/writer behind the words, making the writing more accurate or honest:
It was discovered that five children were missing. The classroom teacher discovered that five children did not board the bus.
Making origami birds from visual instructions isn’t hard to do. I had no difficulty making an origami bird from visual instructions.
Preventable medical error in hospitals is a leading cause of death in the U.S. A 1999 study by the National Institute of Medicine ranks preventable medical error as a leading cause of death in the U.S.
Writing in e-prime helps force writers to make explicit the concrete, specific details that lie below the typical abstractions and generalizations:
The parents are to blame for the situation. The police blame the parents for the situation, even though the child said his parents don’t speak English and didn’t understand the rules.Once I decided to teach myself to write and revise in e-prime, it took me a few weeks to move from rough, awkward phrasing to relative fluency. From a purely stylistic perspective, revising any text into e-prime will make your prose livelier, more concrete, more accurate, and easier to read. I’ve found writing in e-prime often generates startling new insights into the topic at hand. Try it and see for yourself.
*Forms of to be: be, am, is, are, been, was, were, being; also contracted forms ending in ’m,’re, ’s.
More:
To Be or Not To Be: E-Prime as a Tool for Critical Thinking
List of many other e-prime papers
For a contrarian perspective (e-prime has fostered lively debate among linguists):
The Top 10 Arguments against E-prime
During crises, beliefs, feelings and values that typically remain implicit in most words (especially verbs and nouns) come into sharp relief.
One example: For days, media critics and bloggers have engaged in hot debate over photographers' and news reporters’ use of negatively charged terms such as “looting” and “gangs of thugs” for black victims of Hurricane Katrina, while using more neutral words such as “finding” or “taking” to accompany nearly identical images or text involving light-skinned people.
The editor of at least one metropolitan newspaper asked his staff to use the neutral word “taking” instead of “looting.” Randolph D. Brandt, editor of the Racine, Wisconsin Journal Times wrote in a letter to a Poynter Online forum:
I've instructed our news desk to change references to “looting” in picture captions to “taking,” and let readers draw their own conclusion from the context. I can't know whether somebody taking battery-powered tools from a ruined hardware store is "looting" or trying to find something he can use to get grandma out of the attic or fix his boat.We're not there. We can't really judge.
I like the reflection offered by Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, on covering the crises in ways that honor the social contract which binds us all together. Although Clark speaks directly to working journalists here, we could all take his words to heart in reflecting mindfully on what we read during moments of crisis here and abroad:
This is our fear: that civilization is a thin tissue covering the surface of an angry mob. Our collective fears of violence, of strangers, of the poor, of the dispossessed with dark skins, provoke our flight or fight response. Shoot to kill. Zero tolerance. What do you expect?All this has profound implications for the news media. This is not a call for self-censorship, but for a deeper, richer and more nuanced rendering of the news:
• As we cover this crisis, we should continue to distinguish different layers of culpability, from stealing for family on one end to rape and murder on the other.
• Remember that the social contract in a democracy requires the government to keep the peace and protect the people. This provides us with an opportunity for watchdog journalism – to hold the powerful accountable for their accomplishments and failures.
• The hidden divisions in America of race and class are now fully visible. Most of us who deliver the news or receive it had no idea what it means to be poor in a big city, to lack the transportation, money, or knowledge to avoid the monster from the sea. It’s time to re-dedicate ourselves to telling the untold stories of the poor, and to creating a picture of the here and now that leads to justice and not recrimination.
• A single accurate image of a young male African-American looter may reveal an uncomfortable truth and do no harm. But an endless succession of such images creates a distorted image of society that can stigmatize all people of color. The images from New Orleans are so powerful and varied, that there is plenty of room for solid news judgment matched to compelling storytelling.
• It’s become too easy in this crisis to depict African-Americans as either the purveyors or victims of violence. In fact, black Americans will play out all the dramatic roles that make this story so vivid: not just criminal or victim, but protector, parent, child, law-enforcer, politician, soldier, reporter, friend. Our job is to capture all these roles to tell the fullest and fairest story.
An article in Army Times provides a painful example in which the writer himself doesn’t seem to notice the linguistic dissonance between his two information sources. In a piece entitled Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans, Joseph R. Chenelly opens with:
Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
The writer continues the combat theme, describing the violence in the streets as "the insurgency in the city."
He concludes, without emotional segue, with a bit from one of the troops under Gen. Jones’ command:
“This is making a lot of us think about not reenlisting.” [Spc. Cliff Ferguson of the 527th Engineer Battalion] said. “You have to think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who will turn around and shoot at you. We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came here to help.”
Combat operations? Little Somalia? Insurgency? Here to help, not fight a war?
Looting? Taking? Finding? Trying to survive?
Especially in moments of crisis, beliefs and values creep through the words we use to speak to each other, and to ourselves, internally, as well.
An article in the Arts & Entertainment section of yesterday’s Concord Monitor quotes painter Melissa Miller: “The photographs are dull. If you saw them, you wouldn’t see anything in them. But the beauty is there.”
“If you saw them, you wouldn’t see anything in them,” doesn’t make sense unless the reader understands something of the idea of scales (or levels) of meaning in language.
Here, the first “see” means simply taking in the visual image with the eye. But, “you wouldn’t see anything in them,” refers to a psychological level of seeing—appreciating, comprehending, understanding, or interpreting aspects of the image beyond the purely representational.
I use the words scale and level to describe an important property of language we might call its “verticality.”
In the example above, the first use of “see” describes a single type of seeing: what happens when the eye registers the image. The second use of the same word incorporates the sensory act of seeing, but also transcends it, by suggesting that the mind, the emotions, and/or the moral sense could become engaged in interpreting the image using a different type of “sight.” This places the second instance of “see” on a different (higher, richer, broader, denser) scale of meaning from the first.
Good writing always features strong, concrete language that delivers unambiguous literal meaning. But great writing takes readers beyond the literal meanings of words, engaging readers' psychological (non-literal, non-sensory) responses to deepen and amplify the meaning of the message.
Think of text as graphic elements on the page. Writers typically don’t have much say in the design and format of the publications in which their work appears, but they do control the shapes and patterns created by their flow of their words.
A reader's eye scans the page and receives many messages before the words begin to register their intended (or unintended) meanings. A dense block of long words, long sentences and long paragraphs intimidates the eye and paralyzes the mind.
White space creates a restful, inviting visual environment. It helps determine the pace and rhythm of your work. Create white space mindfully as you revise and edit.
Offer generous page margins. Keep most of your words, sentences and paragraphs short. Rather than indenting paragraphs in your document, keep your text flush left and leave vertical extra space between your paragraphs. (Exceptions: adacemic or journal style guides that specify indented paragraphs.)
Two cautions:
Don’t leave too much white space. Readers may interpret too much emptiness as a sign you don’t have much to say.Vary the lengths of words, sentences and paragraphs to avoid a choppy, childish style most readers find annoying.
Can you call a piece of writing “unbiased and objective”?
Consider that every time you speak or write, you make a subjective decision to choose one set of words instead of another, based on your skill with language, your cultural background, your experience, your knowledge of the topic, your beliefs, values and emotions, the circumstances that gave rise to your words, what you want listeners or readers to take from your words, and a host of other factors.
Every time you, the listener or reader, take in someone else’s words, the words pass though similar invisible filters before they translate into meaning.
These subjective filters at each end of the communication process make it possible for one piece of writing to influence different readers in dramatically different ways. They help explain why one set of words can fall dead on the ear or eye, while another set of words presenting the same idea rouses people to act.
Balanced, thoughtful, mindful, easy to understand? Perhaps.
Research-based? Maybe.
But “objective and unbiased”? Probably not.
Most writers find it difficult to uncover the assumptions hidden in their writing. Yet unacknowledged assumptions often come through clearly to readers who see the topic from a different point of view.
The paragraph below introduces an Ohio State Extension fact sheet entitled Gardening with the Elderly. Can you identify some assumptions hidden in what the writer presents as objective and factual prose? What clues reveal his unacknowledged biases?
Many changes occur as a person ages. These changes impact a person's physical, emotional and cognitive abilities as well as social roles. Gardening can be used in a therapeutic way to address these issues and improve the elderly person's physical and emotional conditions, cognitive ability and social interactions. However, many of the changes involved in aging must be addressed by modifications in gardening practices, situations and tools. Changes that occur with age are listed in the following chart as well as the impacts of the changes and the gardening adaptations that can result in continued participation.
Your perspective on a topic may have become so bred in the bone you can’t get enough distance to identify your assumptions and biases on the topic at hand. It helps to ask others, especially members of your target readership, for help rooting out your own assumptions.
To examine a piece of writing (including your own) more critically, it also helps to ask questions like these of the text: