Introduces and develops a topic of broad public interest or concern, tied to a timely event or a local resource. Alternatively, it could touch on something whimsical or humorous. Keeping our homepage fresh with articles related to important or emerging issues demonstrates that UNH Cooperative Extension stays informed about and responsive to these issues.
Includes some local angle or aspect of specific interest to New Hampshire people. People give birth, raise children, attend school or not, get married or divorced, seed a lawn, resolve disputes with their neighbors, become victims of violence, take care of an aging parent, commit a crime, plant a vegetable garden, hire a pesticide applicator, sell timber, suffer discrimination, establish credit, buy a house or a horse, experience a septic system failure, find or lose a job, get diagnosed with a chronic illness, and die in a particular place.
The laws and regulations, physical environment, climate, cultural ambience, demographics, and the specific resources available (or not available) in that place typically play a substantial role in people’s ability to understand a situation, meet their needs, and respond individually or collectively to challenges.
Adding concrete aspects of place to an article connects writer and readers deeply and immediately, creates a direct emotional bond of shared experience and helps build a sense of community. We can use aspects of place to promote specific CE programs, promote the interests of our local partners, demonstrate our ability to integrate resources, give voice to our stakeholders, and allow site visitors to connect visually and locally to the topic (e.g., photo galleries).
Offers something of value readers won’t find anywhere else. Leading Internet economists suggest the Net will gradually bring an end to our current concept of intellectual property (proprietary content), in favor of intellectual value. UNHCE writers can create intellectual value by offering local perspectives on global, national and regional issues; by giving voice to (or inviting) unique local solutions to common problems, by presenting a wide range of perspectives not available in mainstream information sources, by promoting local events, and by hosting online discussions of many sorts. We don’t have to be the experts. We can bring outside experts to our Web site or set the stage for our stakeholders to develop and share their own expertise there.
Demonstrates awareness of the many dimensions of the issue at hand. Most every collection of empirical facts has moral, social, cultural, economic, political, gender, age, linguistic, and other dimensions embedded within it. Most issues also have a complex inside as well as an outside. The visible, empirical aspects of a topic (what we might call its outside) include raw data, measurements, and physical resources (things). Its invisible inside includes such aspects as perceptions, memories, emotions, level of awareness, cultural aspects, values and sense of self that both writer and reader bring to the topic.
Writers enhance their credibility and demonstrate expertise when their writing shows an understanding of the many dimensions and layers of the topic at hand, through word choice, writing style, embedded links, lists of links, sidebars, direct quotations, questions for readers, and other rhetorical techniques.
Offers opportunities for readers to make choices about what they need and want to know about the topic. Many professionals continue operating from the “broadcast” mode that positions the writer as the expert who determines what learners need to know, and readers as the relatively passive learner/novice.
The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to let readers themselves make their own travel plans. As noted in yesterday's post, links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.
Links provide the glue that shapes, builds and defines the Web. Try writing two or three lead paragraphs, then use the rest of your time and your expertise to develop links that connect to related pages on our own site and links that point away from it.
Note: When you link, link deeply, not to a site’s homepage, but to the internal page or pages of a site that delivers the information you think readers might find interesting.
Don’t hesitate to change the name of a page when you direct readers to it via a link. When the page title alone doesn’t indicate specifically what visitors will find if they travel there, always provide annotation , a brief description or abstract that readers can use when deciding whether to click and go there or pass it by.
Part of my job involves recruiting material for our homepage to keep it fresh and timely, working with staff to develop Web-ready articles and appropriate graphic elements, and getting the “products” to Faye for posting. Paul (my supervisor) and Holly (my ally and sounding board) collaborate on this venture.
So, what makes a good homepage feature?
First and foremost, it should exemplify clean, easy-to-understand prose that people find interesting to read, that delivers on the promise of its title and opening lines, and that shows awareness of and respect for readers’ needs.
The homepage itself doesn’t have a specific, carefully targeted audience. Its audience includes anyone who comes to the page. Ideally, writers should use links to direct various reader groups to related materials that might interest them.
Because Internet users experience Web pages as places they go to, travel around in, and leave, writers should work to create a special ambiance that connects to New Hampshire people and piques the interest of anyone who drops in for a visit. Even if they just cruise in and out without reading anything all the way through, or don’t have an interest in the specific topics, site visitors should leave thinking, “Hey, I want to come back here soon.”
Writing for the Web allows you to write a little and point to a lot. The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to vast realms of territory, letting readers themselves make their own travel plans.
Links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide nuanced or highly technical detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.
Research shows that professionals/experts enhance their credibility on the Web as much by what they point to as by what they themselves write.
The Web uniquely empowers all users to respond, publish, comment, review, critique, and add their own ideas, as well as to build both ad hoc and enduring communities of discourse, planning, research and action. This capability approaches the ideal of engagement the Kellogg Foundation has suggested as the key to survival of the land-grant universities and the cooperative extension system associated with them: two-way, even multi-party communication to which each party brings knowledge, skill and experience and in which each individual participates as both learner and teacher.
Done well, our homepage can serve our visitors’ needs for timely information, while simultaneously serving other purposes. Some of these include:
Tomorrow I’ll introduce some specific elements of the ideal homepage feature.
Language or style that is less engaging, less stimulating than the competition is, frankly, dead on arrival. Whether you strive as a journalist, novelist, [fact-sheet writer]…something distinctive, some umami-like deliciousness has to emanate from your words or they go off to oblivion. Most writers feel themselves on the scent of such expressiveness, but just a few bounds short of seizing it. — Arthur Plotnik
The title of Arthur Plotnik's book, Spunk & Bite: A writer’s guide to punchier, more engaging language & style, pokes fun at the Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the thin classic style manual that has served up the rules for good writing since 1918.
But Plotnik doesn’t really quibble with the classic rules of the trade. Instead, he says his book targets “those whose basic composition skills are as adequate as the next writer’s, but who itch for creative ideas, smart locutions, and realistic takes on language for today’s media.” But, he adds, lively writing, “Is not…about out-shouting the next writer or trashing the language authorities.”
Plotnik articulates a painful awareness many editors develop: “I feel the anguish of dead writing. I can see dead writing. I see language that follows all the rules, but lacks the vigor and inventiveness ever to rise off the page.”
I loved reading Spunk & Bite and recommend it to any writer. Its lively writing makes it hard to put down, but Plotnik has organized the content into brief, digestible subchapters, with lots of sidebars and examples drawn from newspapers, magazines, journals and literary works, making Spunk & Bite a book you can pick up sporadically, open anywhere, and learn something in four or five minutes.
“Writers aiming for clarity, accuracy, timeliness—and for readers who eagerly interact with their words and read all the way through—must do more than merely recite empirical facts, interpret data, and display personal expertise,” writes Plotnik, “especially in an age where another take on the subject remains a click or two away.
If you aim for this kind of writing, spend some time with this book.
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.
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.
Writers who’ve labored days, weeks, or even months over a big project –a grant application, an instruction manual, a series of fact sheets, a final report—often become fiercely attached to their products.
Opening a piece of writing to critical review by editors or representative readers takes courage. It takes even more courage to resist defending, explaining or justifying what you’ve written.
Readers process information through many filters; pay special attention to comments that reflect readers’ discomfort with beliefs, values, and power relationships you may not realize have come through your words and images.
Take responsibility for every instance of reader confusion. Say to yourself, “Hmmmm. I need to take a look at that,” and to your critic, “Hmmm. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.” If you have time after the reader has completed the review, ask for suggestions about how to fix this or that problem in your document.
Then take a step back and examine each comment in turn. Become your own critical reader. Remember, even though you’ve asked for feedback, you don’t have to follow through on every criticism. Just pay attention to all of it.
Freewriting your early drafts and using branching exercises to help organize your work will help keep you from becoming too attached to your work at the front end of the writing process.
Research has shown that readers struggling with badly written or poorly designed documents have an overwhelming tendency to blame themselves for their confusion, especially when the document comes from a source perceived as authoritative.
Over many years of conferring with writers and designers about text and visuals I or other readers found confusing, I’ve found many all too willing to blame readers, too, instead of themselves. “Yeah, I suppose it’s too technical for average readers, but I didn’t want to dumb it down.” “I was trying to educate them. They have to be willing to work harder to understand.” “It’s the best I can do. I just don’t have time to work on revising it.” “At least a dozen colleagues read my final draft and nobody had any trouble with it.”
As someone who earned her living for many years as a freelance magazine and newspaper writer, I learned early and painfully to assign all errors of reader comprehension to myself or the graphic designers responsible for the visual display of what I’d written.
Readers may experience a wide range of problems—with texts, layout, visual elements and the rhetorical interplay between and among them—that pass right by writers and designers. Getting uninvolved readers to engage with your drafts or finished products can help you identify the most serious flaws in your document from a reader’s point of view.
Next time you have an important writing project completed or in the works, consider learning how real readers perceive your work. Conduct a “think-aloud” session in which they tell you what they think. This doesn’t have to take much time or forethought.
• Recruit two or three people who don’t know much about your topic to read your draft.
• Carefully explain your single purpose: to improve your product for readers. Make sure to note that your project will in no way test the tester him/herself.
• Tell your test readers you won’t use what they say in any way that could identify them, or for any purpose but improving your document.
• Ask the reader to summarize his or her overall impression of the document.
• Then ask the reader to “think aloud” as he/she interacts with your text, by saying whatever comes to mind while reading through it.
• Take careful notes or tape-record what each reader says. Ask for clarification if you have trouble understanding something the reader says, but don’t prompt him or her with questions or comments.
• Consider getting informed written consent if you tape readers’ remarks. You may want to use this approved consent form.
In her pioneering work Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers, Karen Shriver summarizes three separate, approaches to audience analysis:
The classification driven approach emerged in the 1960’s to help professional communicators profile and segment “target audiences.” This method usually begins with communicators brainstorming a list of demographic and “psychographic” (e.g., beliefs and values, work and spending habits, lifestyle) characteristics of the people they hope to reach with their publication.
While the classification-driven approach helps move writers away from the comfortable writer-centric approach to their writing by considering the needs and expectations of their readers, the approach has serious pitfalls. These include what Shriver calls the tendency to “fossilize the reader” as a static compilation of demographics and psychographics, as well as the risk that writers will mischaracterize their readers. This approach also glosses over the how-to steps and techniques writers and designers might use to translate their analyses into text and image.
The intuition-driven approach has communicators mentally constructing one or more readers, constructing or imagining real human readers as they write. With this approach, writers imagine themselves dynamically involved with the imagined reader or readers, conversing back and forth, mentally playing the role(s) of readers.
Shriver notes that, as with the classification-driven approach, intuitive-model theorists rarely offer explicit instructions for how to invoke that mentally constructed reader using textual and graphic clues. The model also offers little encouragement for writers and designers to question their own mental models of readers.
Like the romantic vision of the craft of writing, this model tacitly assumes an inborn talent for writing, coupled with appropriate doses of inspiration that guide the writer’s talent.
The feedback-driven approach seeks to overcome the major limitation inherent in the classification- and intuition-driven models—namely, that the analytical or intuitive images writers construct of readers may or may not correspond well (or at all) with the needs, expectations, values, beliefs and experience of real readers.
Feedback-driven readership analysis takes advantage of the strengths and techniques of classifying and imagining readers, but then engages real readers in conceiving, drafting, reviewing, evaluating, and updating documents. This participatory design approach, pioneered since the 1980’s, draws upon research from many disciplines, including cognitive psychology, reading comprehension, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistics, neurobiology, rhetoric, ergonomics, organizational behavior, anthropology, and others.
The first assumption of the feedback-driven approach to readers, that readers should become part of the document design process early and often, leads to a second assumption: When writers, engage readers at any stage of the writing and document design process, they must listen empathically and attentively, taking care not to challenge, judge, criticize, or otherwise attempt to modify readers’ responses.
When subject matter experts prepare to write, they may review relevant research, look at academic and even popular writing on the topic, and consult professional colleagues or experts in disciplines that touch the topic at hand.
But many expert writers ignore the fuller contexts in which their readers might absorb and use written information.
In many instances, writers could save themselves a lot of time and produce much better material if they conducted informal consultations with a few prospective “readers” before they sat down to write and considered this exercise as important to writing a good informative piece as getting the science right.
How do you do it? Just find two or three folks you think of as part of the audience for your text. Say, “I’m planning to develop a Web site/write a fact sheet/produce a user manual on (West Nile virus, raising grass-fed beef, safe weight loss, the effects of divorce on children, caring for an aging parent, what to do if you lose your health insurance…) and I need your help framing it. What do you think people want and need to know about the subject? You’ll find many people feel honored that you asked for their help.
Now just sit back, listen and maybe take notes. Ask for clarification or elaboration if you need to, but try not to correct or challenge the speaker.
Do you have to incorporate everything people say they might need to know or want to learn into your document? Of course not. But just listening to people outside your area of expertise may help you remember important details of an instruction sequence you’ve long since forgotten, discover an important reader-centered angle on the topic at hand, or an emotional concern you’ve never considered.
Extension writers have special vulnerability when we offer generic, context-free information about a situation with which have no direct experience, or when our gender, economic class, family situation, community setting, differs dramatically from that of our readers.
By listening to prospective readers, you might learn that, despite credentialed expertise, you lack the direct experience to appear credible to your intended readership. That might lead you to change your approach to the subject, giving voice to your readers’ interests and concerns by stepping out of the picture yourself entirely, and deciding to help people with direct experience speak for themselves to their peers.
A working assumption of feedback-driven methods [of document design] is that audiences should be part of the document design process as early and as often as possible during planning and revising. Karen Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers
How does a busy writer bring readers into the writing and visual design processes, “early and as often as possible”?
The simple answer: Find one or more willing readers and ask them to help you. Then listen closely.
But even before you begin to write, ask yourself a few questions to help unearth your own assumptions:
Start with yourself as writer. How do you want to present yourself in this document?
• Authoritative single source of information? (a common UNHCE persona)
• Subject-matter expert who collects and organizes a range of others’ professional knowledge and opinion on various dimensions of the topic?
• Thinker who challenges the current state of knowledge on the topic?
• Fellow-traveler trying to make decisions based on imperfect understanding?
• Someone who values the experience and background readers bring to the document?
• Someone who understands that facts don’t exist independent of context?
• Someone who understands that the topic may have moral, emotional, political, economic, and social aspects?
• Many or most of the above and more?
Many writers don’t realize they have many choices about the “voice” they will choose to present factual information in writing. Understanding the persona you intend to project through your writing will help you understand (a) the image real readers may say they form of you (the writer) as they read, and why (b) readers do or don’t see you as having the necessary experience, skills, or sensitivity to address this particular readership on the topic at hand.
Research shows that readers’ needs, beliefs, values, culture, age, gender, and experience condition what they will take away from a document, or even whether they will bother to read it at all.
Research also shows that people who do read what you’ve written most likely will form images of you and your character, how you visualize them, whether you even “qualify” to speak to them on the topic at hand, how you expect them to behave towards what you’ve written, as well as of themselves.
Interview research Holly and I conducted last year with 24 UNHCE administrators and other leaders revealed that, with rare exceptions, CE units don’t pre-test or evaluate the quality or impact of their written materials directly, as separate from other programming components.
Instead, leaders told us they and their staffs tend to rely on informal feedback from professional colleagues (“I usually grab someone in the hall and ask them if they have time for a quick review.”) or indirect post-publication feedback (“We get the grant.” “We have a good turnout.” “We make changes when clientele complain about something.”)
UNHCE professional and support staff collectively spend thousands, probably tens of thousands, of hours each year writing, editing, revising, designing, printing, mailing, displaying or posting to the Web tens of thousands of written communications products—our survey revealed more than 50 different formats, from newsletter articles to fact sheets, reports, briefing books, posters, training manuals, policies and procedures, career guides and meeting minutes.
With all of the other planning and evaluation requirements of the job, pre-testing and post-evaluating your important written materials looms as a terrifying prospect for most of you, especially when I suggest that you not only need to deliver facts clearly, precisely and comprehensibly, but that you should consider evaluating your persona and the image of UNHCE your documents project, the beliefs, values and culture of your primary audience, and how you expect your readers to interact with the facts and ideas they present.
But the prospect appears time-consuming and terrifying only if you think you have to do all or most of the work yourself. I’ll spend next week blogging about a new model of collaborative writing and document design, one that brings readers themselves into the process early on.
When people experience difficulty in understanding either texts or technology, they tend to blame themselves…. Unfortunately, this tendency appears…resilient even in the face of the real culprit: poorly designed texts and/or poorly designed technology…. Learners…need better ways to distinguish problems that are their own fault from those that are not. They need better ways to recognize when they are learning and when they are not. Karen Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design
Substantial research with students, consumers and others reveals that readers who can’t understand a text blame themselves much more often than they blame the writer, graphic designer, or, in cases involving products such as VCRs and telephones, the product designer or manufacturer. Shriver writes:
People’s bias towards blaming themselves has potentially serious long-term consequences—perhaps leading them to believe that they are incapable of dealing with complex technology and reducing their interest in new technology. This is a serious worry in documents and technologies designed for the elderly or the physically challenged. A wider problem…is the real possibility that students of any age may be led to believe they are too incompetent to understand either the subjects they study in school or the topics and technologies they must learn on the job.
The situation goes beyond frustration over learning to operate a VCR, understand a geology text, or understand a workplace procedure. Last year, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a branch of the National Academies, issued a report entitled Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion, which stated that half of all American adults—90 million of us—have difficulty understanding and using health information, a collective illiteracy the IOM suggests “may lead to billions of dollars in avoidable health care costs,” not to mention the toll in emotional and physical suffering, adverse health effects, and lost workplace productivity.
The IOM report defines health literacy as:
the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic information and services needed to make appropriate decisions regarding their health. At some point, most individuals will encounter health information they cannot understand. Even well educated people with strong reading and writing skills may have trouble comprehending a medical form or doctor's instructions regarding a drug or procedure.
I contend that most of the blame for health (and other forms of) illiteracy rests squarely on the shoulders of writers and documents designers.
What if teams of writers and the people who design graphic displays for texts worked from the assumption that they, and not their readers, must take responsibility for any failure of comprehension on the part of readers?
Furthermore, what if the situation at hand requires that readers gain a full comprehension of a technical procedure or scientific process? This would mean writers couldn’t “dumb down” their texts, but would have to ramp up the quality of their verbal and visual rhetoric, and the interplay between them.
And of course, it would require the collaboration of real readers, early and often in the project development process.
Through a writer’s tone, attitude, style, choice of words and graphics, and other features of a document, readers understand how the writer expects them to behave toward the written material.
Think about this the next time you begin reading something. Does the writer (and the designer, if the document contains graphic elements that interact with text to deliver essential meaning) see you as a passive, non-critical receiver of information offered in absolute, context-free statements? As an active, curious co-learner? As a sparring partner, daring you to read critically and challenge their statements of fact? As a partner in applied research, expected to try things out in your own life?
Writers can and should examine their drafts, asking: How will a reader imagine me? How does she think I imagine her? How do I expect her to respond to this material?
To practice on someone else’s writing, consider the opening paragraph from this Ohio State University fact sheet, titled Gardening with the Elderly.
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.
Consider this paragraph (and take a gander at the chart that follows) from the perspective of a robust, 75-year-old Master Gardener who has a part-time job with the city parks and recreation department teaching horticulture to young children, and competes in short-course triathlons for fun. Now ask:
What persona does the writer assume? What assumptions does the writer make about his readers? How does the writer expect his readers to engage with this material?
Consider the ways communicating in writing differs from communicating face-to-face (f2f). F2f communications take place in a rich physical context that engages all the senses to deliver meaning.
Communicators can “read” the inflections, the slight hesitations, the changes in speed, pitch, tone, and volume in other people’s voices. You can observe (or communicate via) changes in body language: a raised eyebrow, a quizzical expression, a smile, a nod of assent, a scowl of disagreement.
Formal f2f communicators can manipulate many features of the physical layout, including seating arrangements, relative comfort of the chairs, lighting, room décor. They can add the smells of flowers, the tastes of good food, musical interludes or background sounds. All these and other elements of context contribute to the quality and substance of the communicative exchange.
Creators of written texts have to deliver all their context through their skill with words, page design, and understanding of the technology used to produce and deliver the text.
I consider Karen Shriver’s Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers (Wiley Computer Publishing, 1997) essential reading for anyone serious about communicating through writing or designing print pages or computer interfaces.
Schriver, formerly co-director of Carnegie Mellon’s Communications Design Center and pioneer in the field of document design, currently works as an independent scholar.
Rigorous scholarship and a researched-based orientation make Schriver’s work particularly valuable, in particular her focus on research that brings real readers into the writing process to evaluate what a document actually communicates (intended or unintended).
Until very recently, Schriver notes, most writing instruction focused on (1) the craft of writing: the prescriptive, technical how-tos and how-nots, the grammar, the sentence structure, the organization and flow—devoid of what Shriver calls “rhetorical context” or (2) the romance of writing, which focuses on developing the inner vision of the writer and designer. Shriver notes that the romantic tradition considers writing as involving talent, or “special gifts,” unanalyzable and unteachable.
In the Dynamics of Document Design, Shriver revitalizes and expands upon the rhetorical tradition.
Popular images paint rhetoric as the art of deceit. However, these images of double-talk and deception have almost nothing to do with the rhetorical tradition that has come down to use from classical Greece and Rome.Rhetoricians are concerned with understanding all facets of communication…Rhetoric deals with improving the quality of human communication through the ethical use of language. Rhetoricians abhor the idea of using visual or verbal tricks to take advantage of the audience.
“More than anything else, it is the explicit attention to the needs of the audience that separates the rhetorical tradition from the craft and romantic traditions,” Shriver writes.
Over the next few posts, I’ll write about some of the research Shriver cites that involves engaging real readers in the writing process.