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.
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.
If the problem of the contemporary student is too much outwardness, i.e. too much preoccupation with role and status, then the greatest need might be for a pedagogy of inwardness, designed to reach undiscovered dimensions of self. If there is nothing there, what will have been lost by the effort?Conventional teaching, ranging from ideological harangues to the presentation of more and more empirical evidence, will probably never reach the illusions of contemporary youth and will exhaust sincere teachers. Parables might help.
At least, given the freedom of students to roam around in the parabolic form, the teacher using parables will not have added to the anti-democratic and depersonalized trends already well under way. John J. Bonsignore, In Parables: Teaching Through Parables
Why should a "research-based" educator consider using parables as teaching tools?
A few days ago, I stumbled across the extraordinary essay quoted above. Written nearly two decades ago by John Bonsignore, at the time a professor of law at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, it goes to the heart of learning and teaching.
In the essay Bonsignore explains why he used the parables of Franz Kafka in all his law courses. As a "parabolic form" that doesn't merely present facts and tie them into neat conclusions, Bonsignore suggests that the core strength of the parable lies in its refusal to make "paradoxical elements of life seem simpler and more resolvable than they actually are."
Bonsignore quotes Thomas Oden's introduction to an anthology of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's parables. In it, Oden gives five reasons why Kierkegaard used parables. The third and fourth offer a compelling answer to my opening rhetorical question: Why should a "research-based" educator consider using parables as teaching tools?
3. The parable involves indirect communication that provokes self discovery. Direct communication conveys information and, by reference to authorities, endorses certain lines of thought. By contrast, a parable presents a moral knot which the reader must untie by inward reflection and choice. Whereas direct communication creates observers and listeners, indirect communication creates participants and action. Those who prefer to "learn about the world" in a direct and controlled way, lose control of their responses when they encounter the parable. The parable carries them, willingly or unwillingly, inward toward undiscovered dimensions of self.
4. Experiences with indirect communication cultivate the capability for developing the self. Whereas direct learning does not change the capability of a person (learning simply adds to knowledge) indirect communication jolts the person out of mental routines once and for all. Rather than a simple change in information there is a change in consciousness. Like the seeds of the sower in the New Testament, the parable does not always fall on receptive ground, but even in such instances, the person is placed on notice that a world outside regular understanding exists.
Try this famous Kafka parable on yourself.
Charts, tables, and other graphics often deliver complex information more effectively than words. But bad graphics, or merely decorative graphics that convey no essential information, can annoy and confuse readers, and sometimes even deliver information that diametrically opposes what the writer intended.
Look here for some examples of brilliant displays of quantitative information (by way of Guy Kawasaki’s blog).
Some other examples:
Princeton University acceptance letter (Note: Even text serves as “graphics.”Two final points:
Take special care adding graphics to online documents, where readers have much less context from which to construct meaning.Remember that every element of a print or online document that your readers see functions as a graphic element, not only charts, tables, photos, and “art,” but also text itself (font shape, size, color, bold/italic/underlined, number of fonts on a single page, special features such as shadow, inverse, etc.), organization of white space (margin size and justification, length of words and sentences, manner of indicating a new paragraph), and color.
Be sure your words go down easy, for you may be eating them tomorrow. And remember that there IS no “off the record.”—Ron Graham
Ron Graham manages a Web site called Rhetoric for Engineers and Other Practical People. Dynamite!
Please read his post on media relations. Short, to the point, and comprehensive. Best one-shot advice on the topic I’ve seen.
2005 was the year we saw a convergence of a number sometimes contradictory language trends: the major global media became more pervasive yet actually less persuasive; the language spoken by the youth of the world is converging at an ever-increasing rate; and the Political Correctness movement become a truly global phenomenon. Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor (GLM)
Want to stay tuned to the hot topics of the day? Keep up with the latest lingo of politics, fashion, youthspeak, political correctness? For all this and more, bookmark the Global Language Monitor.
The GLM analyzes language trends and their subsequent impact on politics, culture and business (with a particular focus on Global English) by means of what progenitor and president, Paul JJ Payack, calls the Predictive Quantities Index Indicator, an algorithm that:
helps track the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, and throughout the Blogosphere. The algorithm tracks words and phrases in relation to their frequency of use and contextual usage. The PQ Index/Indicator is weighted, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, and citations in the major media.
Payack says his algorithm picks often contradict the beliefs of pundits, to wit, the fourth-quarter-2005 list of politically sensitive terms.
Go here to learn about most frequently spoken word on the planet.
Disclaimer: While I find the GLM lists interesting, amusing, and informative, I won’t vouch for the algorithm or its accuracy, despite the fact that numerous credible news and information sources cite its findings as authoritative.
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.— Joseph Stalin
Concrete, specific nouns and verbs communicate more precisely than abstractions because they create images in the reader’s mind. Abstract language not only communicates less effectively, but writers often use it — unconsciously or deliberately — to deceive or put distance between themselves and their readers.
William Lutz devotes an entire chapter of his book The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore to a discussion of the malicious consequences of abstract language in public speech. Below, a brief passage from that chapter, Abstracting Our Way into Doublespeak:
Notice the progression from concrete to abstract in the lists below:1996 red Toyota Camry
Toyota
New car
Automobile
Motor vehicle
Vehicle
Private transportation
TransportationThe higher the level of abstraction the more detail we leave out, the more we ignore differences, and the more we concentrate on similarities, no matter how few or how tenuous these similarities might be. When I talk about transportation, I am including only those aspects of the 1996 Toyota Camry that place it in a category that includes bicycles, airplanes and trucks.
Phil
Maine Coon
Male cat
Mammal
Vertebrate
Animal
Living thing
ThingBy the time we get to ‘thing,’ we’re a long way from Phil.
The less abstract our language, the more concrete and specific we are because we are using language that includes a lot of detail…. Language that is more concrete and specific creates pictures in the mind of the listener, pictures that should come as close as possible to the pictures in your mind.
Highly abstract language is a common form of doublespeak, especially among politicians…Using a high level of abstraction we can call the new dump, a “resources development park” and sewage sludge “organic biomass.” Such terms do not call to mind any specific picture because they are so far removed from the concrete reality they are supposed to symbolize. In fact, such terms do exactly what their creators want them to do.
Posted by pboyles at 3:55 PM
If you rely on computer tools to do your proofreading, please consider asking two or more human readers to scrutinize your written copy before you publish.
To better understand why, visit this recent post and comment at Blogslot, a blog for copy editors.
Despite this apparently widespread need, few people are formally trained to write about numbers. Communications specialists learn to write for varied audiences, but rarely are taught specifically to deal with numbers. Scientists and others who routinely work with numbers learn to calculate and interpret the findings, but rarely are taught to describe them in ways that are comprehensible to audiences with different levels of quantitative expertise or interest. — Jane E. Miller, The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers
Whether your project involves writing a dissertation or a grant, reporting your research, developing fact sheets, or drafting a newspaper article for a general readership, you’ll often have to present numerical concepts, either embedded in your narrative text or in graphic formats such as charts, graphs, or tables.
And you might well do it more effectively if you had a copy of Jane E. Miller’s The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers: The Effective Presentation of Quantitative Information at hand. Miller, who teaches research methods and statistics at Rutgers, produced this compact, well-written reference to help writers and speakers bridge the disciplines of statistics and expository writing. Every Extension office should stock one.
People trained in the hard sciences who struggle with expository prose will find Miller’s frequent use of poor, better and best examples of numerical representations extremely useful. Writers who suffer statistics phobias will find comfort in Miller’s clean, succinct, non-jargonistic approach to the subject, which also serves as a reference (or refresher) for basic statistical concepts.
Miller’s book will not only help you present numerical concepts clearly, accurately, and honestly, but it will also help you become a more critical reader.
The publisher has posted a study guide for the book. You can check out the table of contents and test your own strengths in communicating numerical concepts by doing some of the problems provided after each chapter listing.
Did anyone catch The News Hour on PBS last night? The show’s Mediawatch Unit aired a segment that examined the phenomenon variously called citizen journalism, participatory journalism, hyperlocal, grass roots, do-it-yourself, bottom-up, social media, and user-generated media. PBS calls it “We media.”
Enabled by new technology—“social software” (such as blogs and wikis), Internet-connected mobile phones and other handheld wireless devices that also shoot still photos and video—the new media erase the conventional distinction between “content developers” and their “audiences.” By extension, we may also say they’ve begun to alter the conventional boundaries between teachers and learners, experts and laypeople.
The News Hour segment featured a New Hampshire online community newspaper, The Forum, which serves a four-town area encompassing Deerfield, Nottingham, Northwood, and Candia. Check it out!
The Forum, which went live last August, even scooped the Union Leader in breaking the story that a contingent from the N.H. National Guard had been dispatched to Louisiana to aid Hurricane Katrina relief.
If you listen to the News Hour segment all the way through, you’ll catch some information about wikis, a form social software that enables collaborative editing—in short, allowing any site visitor to make editorial changes to content on a wiki site. Our own Cooperative Extension system will next year roll out a Web portal called eXtension, whose editing will take place in a wiki environment. We’ll all have an opportunity to receive wiki training allowing us to participate in content creation and editing. Stay tuned!
The primary difference between the old journalism and the emergent participatory journalism? Multi-directional content creation.
Old media function primarily as“broadcasts”, with a central source distributing information/entertainment to an “audience.” In contrast, “we” media technologies allow almost anyone to participate in formats dubbed “many-to-many.”
Communication experts studying these new media predict they will change the nature of expertise, authority, teaching, and learning, as well as concepts of trust, communication, community, and intellectual property.
Hang on for a wild ride!
I encourage you all to sample the wares at PowerReporting: Thousands of free research tools for journalists, by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Bill Dedman, who last month assumed the post of managing editor at New Hampshire’s own Nashua Telegraph.
Dedman won a Pulitzer in 1989 for a series of articles in the Atlanta Journal Constitution called The Color of Money, which described racial discrimination in mortgage lending
Not just journalists, but all writers, will indeed find many thousands of useful online resources at PowerReporting. For example, you might want to visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, “A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics; provides background material and explanations of First Amendment and intellectual property-related laws; they are also compiling a database of people/sites that have received cease-and-desist notices. There are ongoing topics, news updates, and reports on the current ‘weather.’”
I discovered a page that leads to all manner of government alerts, and another that lists a vast array of online calculators (in case you want to count the frequency of words in a document, adjust the dollar figures for inflation in the U.S. for any year from 1913 forward, or convert any world currency to another).
You can find full-text state statutes and legislation, a page of resources that help you research companies, and another page containing a very useful “search tools chart” that lets you compare features on some of the best search engines and directories on the Web.
Dedman even has a humor page. I liked hitting the “Take 2” button in the upper right of the homepage of the American Journalism Review.
Take 2 offered this blooper headline from the Associated Press: Bonus permits enable 809 hunters to kill two deer. Another “take” that struck my fancy—an editor’s parody that actually got published in the Philadelphia Enquirer: To comment briefly on editorials, call 215-854-5060. The Editorial Board members will roll their eyes and chuckle at your remarks. No doubt closer to the truth than whatever the Inquirer usually tells readers the Editorial Board members will do.
A timid question will always receive a confident answer. Henry Lytton Bulwer, diplomat and author (1801-1872)
This quotation came via today’s Wordsmith. It got me to thinking: How do I question the reports and articles I read? How do I question those of my colleagues? My own?
Ask yourself what kinds of answers you might get if you asked bold, courageous questions of the writer the next time you engaged with text (including your own). Give it a try!
Laboring over the impenetrable prose of the textbook’s statistics unit during a research design course in graduate school, I chanced across the utterly fabulous online statistics text, Concepts and Applications of Inferential Statistics, by Richard Lowry, a professor of psychology at Vassar College. I bookmarked the site for handy reference, particularly when I need to understand the statistical design and data analysis of a journal article.
I admire the site’s organization and navigation strategy, its comprehensiveness, and its comprehensible prose. Lowry offers an equally first-rate companion site called VassarStats, which contains numerous utilities and statistical function calculators of for those moments when you need to calculate a pesky two-way factorial ANOVA for independent samples or fit an observed frequency distribution to the closest Poisson Distribution.
If you’ve shied away from studying statistics because it seems too difficult, need an occasional brush-up on some esoteric statistical procedure, or find yourself in need of an interactive calculator to plug your data into, you may want to bookmark Lowry’s site yourself.
I sent Lowry an email thanking him for the enormous effort of getting his sites online, and especially for his flowing, easy-to-read prose, so radically different from the several statistics texts I’d consulted in my search for understanding.
Lowry’s reply illustrates the strength of the us/them linguistic barrier that influences so many students to steer clear of the hard sciences. In part, it reads:
Sometime back in the mid or late 80s I published a little introduction to probability theory …. As the manuscript was making the rounds with editors and reviewers, one of the latter wrote something along the lines of: It's a fine treatment of the subject, though the style is altogether too poetical. That will give you an idea of how literate treatment of a topic is regarded in the sciences….