Scientists refer to a deep summer sleep as estivation (compare to hibernation, the word for deep witer sleep). Animals estivate to escape the heat or because their food and water supplies disappear.
Waking Up Writing will estivate for a couple of months to allow me to recharge and to focus intensively on a few new projects.
If you have questions about a writing project or you need a writer/editor/communication partner, pick up the phone (225-5505, ext 321) or email me: peg.boyles@unh.edu
Scientists refer to a deep summer sleep as estivation (compare to hibernation, the word for deep witer sleep). Animals estivate to escape the heat or because their food and water supplies disappear.
Waking Up Writing will estivate for a couple of months to allow me to recharge and to focus intensively on a few new projects.
If you have questions about a writing project or you need a writer/editor/communication partner, pick up the phone (225-5505, ext 321) or email me: peg.boyles@unh.edu
Today’s microcontent mischief:
The ambiguity in this online article’s headline arises from the dual meanings of the capitalized word “Bill.” Does the headline writer mean a man named Bill, or the draft of a proposed law?
Today’s microcontent mischief:
The ambiguity in this online article’s headline arises from the dual meanings of the capitalized word “Bill.” Does the headline writer mean a man named Bill, or the draft of a proposed law?
Many people think of op-eds as expressing strong, one-sided opinions. Often they do. But an op-ed essay can also give voice to the voiceless, illuminate key sides of an issue that others have missed, or help readers understand multiple perspectives on a topic. Some of the best op-eds simply provide compelling facts intended to elevate the level of public understanding on all sides of a hot topic.
You, your volunteers, or your clientele might consider writing an op-ed, for instance, when you want to mobilize community energy and attract resources to an issue of broad public concern, or when you want to introduce the plans or the work of a community coalition.
Tips on writing a good piece and helping ensure it gets published:
A few more tips:
Strike while the iron is cold.
Peter Sandman penned this slogan in one of a series of risk communication fact sheets for managers attending Sandman’s professional seminars. It promotes the wisdom of raising public awareness on the various aspects of hot-button issues before misinformation, half-truths, and official over-reassurances have raised the levels of emotional outrage in the public at large. I think it serves well as a rule of thumb for educational risk communication campaigns, too.
Andrea emailed to ask:
I have a question for you about “every day” vs. “everyday”. I am using a publication called “Physical Play Everyday.” Shouldn't it read “Physical Play Every Day?”
My guess is “everyday” is a describing word. It has a kind of mundane meaning, as in “my everyday routine”. But “every day” is like saying “each day,” as in “I do chores every day of the week.”
I responded:
Right on, Andrea!
Everyday is an adjective (modifies a noun or a pronoun) that means ordinary, common, routine.
She wore her everyday clothes. (modifies clothes)When you want to answer the question When?, use every day, an adverbial phrase that modifies a verb.
We followed our everyday routines to ease our grief. (modifies routines)
Kids should have active play time every day. (modifies the verb have)
I commute by bike almost every day. (modifies the verb commute)
Andrea emailed to ask:
I have a question for you about “every day” vs. “everyday”. I am using a publication called “Physical Play Everyday.” Shouldn't it read “Physical Play Every Day?”
My guess is “everyday” is a describing word. It has a kind of mundane meaning, as in “my everyday routine”. But “every day” is like saying “each day,” as in “I do chores every day of the week.”
I responded:
Right on, Andrea!
Everyday is an adjective (modifies a noun or a pronoun) that means ordinary, common, routine.
She wore her everyday clothes. (modifies clothes)When you want to answer the question When?, use every day, an adverbial phrase that modifies a verb.
We followed our everyday routines to ease our grief. (modifies routines)
Kids should have active play time every day. (modifies the verb have)
I commute by bike almost every day. (modifies the verb commute)
A headline in the morning paper reads: Poke in nose not ruled to be assault.
The position of the word “not” appears to modify the word “ruled,” meaning that no ruling occurred. Reading the brief article reveals that the investigators did rule, determining that no assault had taken place.
The headline writer could have avoided ambiguity (and kept within the space constraints) by writing: Investigation: Poke in nose not assault.
The opening paragraph of the article itself serves up more confusion:
A complaint that an assistant attorney general poked a woman in the nose missed its target and has been dismissed after an internal investigation, the attorney general’s office said.The question immediately arises for the reader: What missed its target, the alleged poke in the nose, or the complaint? By the end of the article, we still don’t know.
Each little question that arises in a reader's mind as he or she interacts with a text halts the forward momentum of the reading process, however briefly, and adds to what psychologists call the “cognitive burden” of the reading task.
Writers, especially those dealing with technical topics, need to bear in mind that failures of comprehension or loss of reader interest often have their roots in poor writing and editing.
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.
Organic Farm
Don't drift or spray
I saw that sign during a recent episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes.
Whoops!
The sign-writer has warned readers not to move aimlessly around or spray (presumably pesticides).
I think he or she meant to warn: “Don’t spray pesticides directly on these premises or allow pesticide spray to drift onto our crops from outside.”
Whenever you use compound verbs (two or more verb forms joined by words and or or) in a sentence, make sure both or all your verbs agree in tense and number, and that each refers back to the subject of the sentence.
A quick way to check: Mentally or out loud, create a sentence that isolates each verb individually. In this case: Don’t drift. Don’t spray, would have revealed the ambiguity to the writer.
This one appeared recently in a response to a woman who fears her husband cares more for another woman than for her. Abby responded: “Many wives make their husbands ‘understand’ when communication breaks down through marriage counseling, and that’s what I recommend for you.”
Written like that, the phrase “through marriage counseling” creates a dangling modifier, making Abby’s advice sound as if the communication breaks down because of marriage counseling.
Abby might have confused readers less if she’d rearranged her words (and changed a few) to read something like this: “When communication breaks down, marriage counseling can help many waives can help their husbands understand their point of view.”
Responding to a woman who asked for advice about how to handle her loneliness after her husband’s suicide, and how to tell her young children about how their father died, “Dear Abby” wrote recently, “Being a survivor of suicide can be isolating, but it doesn’t have to be inevitable.”
Whoops!
By having the subject of the subordinate clause (“it”) refer back to the subject of the main clause (“Being a survivor of suicide”), Abby’s statement implies that a person might have a choice about “being a survivor of [a loved one’s] suicide.” A gruesome thought!
I think Abby meant to deliver this message: “Surviving a loved one’s suicide can feel isolating, but isolation isn’t inevitable.”
As for the Monitor headline, for Web display or reference, you might rewrite it to read something like this: Floods bring out Good Samaritans.
All’s Well That Ends WellA good ending leaves readers satisfied, perhaps a bit startled, shaken, or amused and looking forward to more of your work. Powerful endings help readers remember what you’ve written.
Title of a play by William Shakespeare
As with a lead, a good ending can pop into your mind at any point in the writing process. You might even know how you want your piece to end before you start writing it. As you do with leads, feel free to collect, mull over and reject lots of endings as you move along.
A few points about endings:
Try to avoid summaries. An ending that begins “So, to summarize what we’ve learned in 50 years of …” consigns your piece to an ignoble death. If you must summarize, simply leave your readers with the bones of the matter, as in this famous biblical summary: “And now abide faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity.”
For more on writing endings, read Roy Peter Clark’s Write Endings to Lock the Box.
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.Blaise Pascal Pensées (1670)
A good lead sentence or paragraph hooks readers and entices them to keep reading rather than moving on to one or another of a hundred other obligations, distractions and diversions.
You might not find a good lead to your piece for awhile. Lose the old mindset that thinks of writing as a linear process where you “start at the beginning and write to the end.” Many times, the right lead doesn’t come until halfway through or near the end of a writing project (though occasionally you may come across such a great opening line or two that you'll want to write a piece just to get to use it).
Direct quotations that connect to or summarize the central theme can make good leads. A good quotation works well even if you conducted no interviews for your piece. Why? Because human beings come hard-wired for speech. Readers respond deeply and immediately to the voices of real people. Good written communication almost always involves a real person telling a story to other real people.
A good quotation can come from many sources—a snippet of overhead conversation, a formal interview, a book, a billboard, a church sermon, a road sign, a TV show, an advertisement. Any direct quote that makes a point in some fresh way related to your topic could serve as a good lead.
A question sometimes works well as a lead. “Where have all the flowers gone?” would probably compel most Baby Boomers to read on.
A few more words about leads:For more about starting well, read Chip Scanlon’s The Power of Leads.
Headline in yesterday’s paper: Officials knew of abuse, suits say.
Say, what? Those “suits” really wreak mischief when they appear in headlines, because the word has so many meanings. Remember this one?
Yesterday’s headline evokes the idiomatic meaning of the word “suits”: guys who wear suits—executive types, often government executives.
Checking the paper’s online version today, I noticed someone had changed yesterday’s title to Suits: abuse was known.
My morning paper carried a wire service article relating new research that supports a growing consensus among climate scientists that human-induced global warming contributes to the frequency and intensity of hurricanes.
I got a chuckle from a quotation attributed to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist Thomas Knutson, who described the warming of tropical waters as “the tip of the iceberg.” My paper’s editor had also selected the quotation as a pull-quote.
Neither Knutson, the reporter, nor the editor who pulled the quote caught the silliness of inserting “the tip of the iceberg” into the context of scientific discourse on global warming, tropical storms, and regional warming trends, sounds silly.
Clichés roll mindlessly off our tongues, pens, or keyboards. They’ve become such fixtures of daily discourse, we miss them while editing and proofreading. Readers often process them mindlessly. But clichés dilute and pollute intelligent prose.
To avoid them, ask the person or people who review your text to scrutinize it for clichés. The exercise will help them become more critical readers and, perhaps, better writers in the process. And next time you sit down with a newspaper or magazine, cruise for other writers’ clichés. When you find one, mentally rewrite that sentence with fresh words and see how it improves.
“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.
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.
The Professional Writing & Rhetoric Concentration in the Department of English is pleased to offer this online course, this summer:Whoa!
Mediastorm: Rhetoric in Information Age
Prof. [name deleted]
This is a course on media literacy and information age survival skills. Beginning with the advent of cable TV in the 1970s, to satellite TV in the 1980s, and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, we are living in what media critic Todd Gitlin calls a “torrent of images and sounds” which overwhelms our lives. From the “Sopranos” and “Sex in the City” to “Survivor” and C-SPAN and ESPN, we are awash in media 24/7. There can be little denial that even now, arguably still in the dawning period of the information age, in order to prevent citizens from being blown away by the data storm of information technologies (and the Internet is only the most recent and explosive of these), that education must provide not only exposure to new media tools but also some principles of critical analysis about information technology and the rapidly changing paradigms of literacy in an information society.
Beginning with the advent...?
[Take a deep breath.] There can be little denial that even now, arguably still in the dawning period of the information age, in order to prevent citizens from being blown away by the data storm of information technologies (and the Internet is only the most recent and explosive of these), that education must provide not only exposure to new media tools but also some principles of critical analysis about information technology and the rapidly changing paradigms of literacy in an information society.
Huh? The guy offering this advanced undergraduate English course may have a load of excellent information to pass along, but he needs an editor. Badly.
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.
Science is very much concerned about verifiability and repeatability and although an anecdote is certainly repeatable, verifying an anecdote is a whole other story. Scientists do fear the anecdote, and rightly so. Scientists face a lot of frustration with how the sharing of a mere anecdote is able to convince people against their theories despite the apparent strength of their scientific data….And as Batman’s embracing of the bat, his greatest fear, enabled him access to a deeper power in himself, it looks like scientists are doing the same with the anecdote. The following list compiled by Ron Graham shows where scientists are quite happily using anecdotes and anecdotal evidence:
• deciding how and to whom to apply for research grants
• deciding directions for new and unstarted research
• deciding what questions to ask human subjects in gathering empirical data
• deciding what and when to publish—Andrew Rixman at the blog Anecdote: Insight and Empowerment
I could spend all day adding to Graham’s list. But I’ve often wished writers wouldn’t pit research findings those other categories of “evidence” generally termed anecdotal. I don’t see how we can escape the conclusion that we need and operate from both.
A few days ago, I blogged here about a remarkable experiment in healingconducted by Michael Rich of Boston Children’s Hospital. It briefly touched on Rich’s experiment in which young asthmatic patients videotaped the events of their daily lives and recounted their experiences with asthma in front of the camera.
The mere act of recording the “anecdotes” of daily life improved the health status of these young patients, for whom previous medical interventions had failed. The project also yielded an astonishing range of data useful for educating clinicians themselves.
That word anecdote covers a lot of terrain: first-person narratives, stories, parables, teaching tales, fables, fairy tales, myths, gossip, old wives’ tales. I’ll stick my neck out by proclaiming that all have important uses for teaching, learning and empowered decision making. And like research findings, each anecdote has specific limitations.
Anecdotes can get at the deepest levels of beliefs, values, and feelings that drive huiman behavior. Anecdotes can force readers/listeners to confront their own unexamined assumptions, in ways that science cannot.
Some forms of anecdote promote the uncertainty and ambiguity that characterize mindful learning. Other anecdotal forms can resonate at many levels of language and meaning.
Take a look at this interesting post on the idea of anecdote circles.
Tomorrow, I’ll report on a novel use of one anecdotal form—parables—used in teaching prospective lawyers.
Planning to write a little blurb cautioning writers to use adjectives mindfully, since this pesky part of speech often communicates subtle bias or tells readers what to think and feel, I chanced upon Geoffrey Pullam’s provocative February 18, 2004, post to the blog Language Log.
A snippet (I hope you read the whole post):
What do these writing experts think they are doing trying to take something as subtle as how to write well and boil it down to maxims as simple as the avoidance of one particular grammatical category? Are they... Well, I'm really going to need an adjective to say this... Are they insane?Look, you don't get good at writing by deleting adjectives. Writing is difficult and demanding; you can learn to get moderately good at it through decades of practice writing millions of words and critiquing what you've written or having others critique it. About 6% of those words will be adjectives, whether you write novels or news stories, whether they're good or bad.
The exception is that if you belong to the academic chattering classes—the literary experts who tell other people to avoid adjectives—the frequency goes up to over 8% in your academic prose. As in so many other domains, the very people who tell you not to are doing it more than you are. As Bertold Brecht put it:
Those who take the meat from the table
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.
Powerful stuff. I don’t think it contradicts what I’d planned to say, but I do think it deserves to stand alone.
Commenting she found it “refreshing to my could-care-less-how-it’s-spelled self,” an Extension colleague sent me the link to this humorous piece, which shows that readers can comprehend pretty well even when writers don’t pay much attention to correct spelling.
Sometimes spelling does matter, though, and your spell-check won’t offer a remedy.
A headline in the Concord Monitor last week carried news of the Australian citizen executed in Singapore for “heroine trafficking.”
One wag asks in a letter to the editor today, “Has Singapore suddenly become the center of an international white-slave ring, or do you just need a new headline writer?”
Many problems arise because we writers confuse the written product with the communication that happens when a reader assembles meaning from our words on the page (or screen).
Pick up a book, a magazine or a brochure—a final, written product. It occupies physical space. It has shape, size, weight and other physical attributes. We can count the words and paragraphs and commas and the number of pages.
But the actual communication between writer and reader via the written word takes place in what we might call psychological space, the invisible, immeasurable realm of intentions, meanings, ideas, information, concepts, theories, feelings, arguments, worries, beliefs, values, doubts, perceptions, imagination, questions, answers, linguistic sophistication, moral awareness, and worldview—the raw materials and eventual attributes of written communication.
Words on a page differ from words in psychological space. On the page, words lie susceptible to dictionary definitions and tests of factual recall. In the private, invisible psychological spaces where communication happens, words trigger memories and sensation, invoke symbolic interpretations. If a reader doesn’t know the words (or the language) or can’t discern their meanings from context, the words have no meaning at all. Words can communicate in ways the writer never intended, or even imagined.
The message here: As writers, we can’t equate merely having written a book, a fact sheet, or an article with having communicated, much less taught or educated a reader in the ways we hoped we would.
To gauge our strength as communicators, we need to engage often with readers at various stages of the writing process—before, during, and after. Especially for important documents, we need engage readers of both genders, readers both within and outside our target audiences, readers of various ages, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds. We need to listen to their feedback and ask for their help in revising our words.
Steve Judd sent me this doozy of a headline from the Business section of yesterday’s New York Times: “Reading X-Rays in Asbestos Suits Enriched Doctor.”
The humor, of course, derives from the double meaning of the word “suits,” both “suits of clothes” and as a short form of “lawsuits.”
To avoid microcontent mishaps, check carefully for double meanings, dangling modifiers, and ambiguous adjectives. Before you publish important documents, ask two or three colleagues to scrutinize your titles, headings and subheadings for gaffes.
“New research taps into placebo effect: Low expectations may affect results,” reads a headline in the morning paper.
Which results do the low expectations affect? The results of the “new research?” Readers don’t find out until they get into the meat of the article.
Doctors have long thought the placebo effect was psychological.Now scientists are amassing the first direct evidence that the placebo effect actually is physical, and that expecting benefit can trigger the same neurological pathways of healing as real medicine.”
The problem with the headline—especially if it became divorced from the context of the article that follows, as might happen if the headline appeared as a Web links—involves the physical proximity of the words “research” and “results.” Results typically follow from research, so readers may become momentarily confused.
Each moment of confusion stops the forward momentum smooth reading requires. Such moments accumulate, contributing to the overall cognitive burden of a reading task.
The headline writer might have avoided the confusion by writing, “New research into placebo effect: Patient expectations affect healing.”
Confused about whether to use e.g. or i.e. when giving examples?
The latest grammar hint on the Association for Communications Excellence (ACE) writing special interest group's Web page should end your confusion.
Revulsion. That feeling that all this stuff you have written is stupid, ugly, worthless—and cannot be fixed. Disgust. Peter Elbow, Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process
Most writers have felt nauseated about their writing at some point in a writing project. It can strike at any moment, even at times when your enthusiasm for the topic runs high and your words flow freely.
I characterize nausea as a unique species of writer’s block. I lose my enthusiasm. The topic feels hopelessly complex, and my wordsmithing powers grossly inadequate to capture what I understand of the subject at hand. As a novice freelancer, I let go of more than a few great opportunities because writer’s nausea shut me down, sometimes after weeks or months of research.
Peter Elbow, one of my favorite writers-who-writes-about-writing, devotes a full chapter to nausea (from which I took the opening quotation) in Writing with Power, a fine book first published in 1981. Mercifully, the chapter runs only two pages (pp.173-175).
Like Elbow, I’ve learned that, while I can’t prevent the nausea or predict when it might strike, I don’t have to give in to it. Writes Elbow:
First of all, recognize it for what it is: a stupid game you play with yourself, a sneak attack by demons….
For me the demons take many forms, but they all have the same ultimate aim: to keep me from wrapping up and winding down that piece of writing. They want me to quit.
Elbow warns writers to understand how “writer’s nausea” leaves us in an emotionally and intellectually weakened state. Nausea impairs judgment. It flips some physiological switch that makes it almost impossible to find the right word or get the right sequence of words and ideas.
Some remedies:
Take a fresh sheet of unlined paper and conduct a five-minute freewriting exercise, in which you simply express you rage and frustration about getting stuck with your project. You can also do this exercise by speaking aloud (very loud, if you can find a private place).If you have time, leave the project for an hour—or a day. Do something physical. Take a walk. Clean the office kitchen. Take out the trash. Split some wood. Hang the wash. Put your mind on the task at hand, not the piece of writing you can’t finish.
Ask a colleague to read what you’ve written, even if you only have a few rough paragraphs. Ask for help, not mere feedback. For example: “The subject seems too complex for an 800-word article. Can you suggest a way to narrow my focus?” “These two [aspects of the topic] seem connected, but I can’t find the words that create a bridge between them. Can you help?” “I keep having the feeling my piece breaks down here on the second page. Where did I go wrong?”
Muddle through without attempting a rewrite or a major revision. Tidy up as best you can. Settle for whatever you can muster today. Get it done. Ship it off. Let it go. With any luck, you might just have an empathetic, first-rate copy editor at the other end.
Last week I received an email notice announcing an Ornamental Weed Management Symposium scheduled for early January. “Hmm,” I thought. “What a great idea! Someone else shares my appreciation of weeds as ornamental plants and wants to teach folks how to grow them.”
I opened the attached flyer about the event and read: Ornamental Symposium: Advances in Nursery Weed Management. All the latest on keeping weeds out of nurseries growing ornamental plants. Nothing about ornamental weeds themselves.
Another humorous example of how adjectives run amok unless writers pay close attention to 'em.
Chip Scanlon, who teaches and writes about writing for the Poynter Institute, a couple of months ago wrote a piece called What Lies Beneath: The Iceberg Theory of Writing
In it, Scanlon quotes Hemingway: “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”
If good writing consists in large part of knowing what to leave out, I think it also requires having an abundance of material to leave out.
It seems counterintuitive to many people that good writers begin with an abundance—often a super-abundance—of material. The more material you have to work with, and the greater a diversity of sources you’ve drawn upon, the richer and deeper a piece of writing you can produce.
Your material can come from experience and experiments, from cogitation and imagination, from reading books and articles, interviewing people, listening to lectures and overhearing conversations, from tuning in to TV and radio shows, participating in blogs and online discussion groups, and a hundred other sources.
But, by the end of a writing project, most of what you’ve learned and thought about won't show up as words on the page. The depth of your understanding of the topic contributes grace, balance, dignity, and authenticity to the relatively few words that do appear.
From an article on changes to the state’s ServiceLink program, a network of centers that help senior citizens link up with health and wellness benefits and programs: “Aging experts have long advocated for programs that care for seniors in their homes, not institutions.”
Hmmm. Do the “aging experts” refer to folks with expertise in aging, or to experts getting along in years themselves? The writer might have avoided that moment of confusion by changing the subject to “gerontologists,” or “experts on aging.”
Verbal: a word formed from a verb that takes on the function of nouns and adjectives.
A headline in my morning paper read, Professor: Give victims $200,000 check, choice. Its subhead, Rebuilding programs won’t help, he argues, raises a question.
Did the writer mean that rebuilding-programs won’t help, or that reconstructing certain programs won’t help?
In the first case, the writer would have used “rebuilding” as the present participle of the verb rebuild, an adjective modifying the word programs. In this instance, a reader could infer the writer meant that programs to rebuild the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast cities.
On the other hand, the writer might have wanted to use “rebuilding” as a noun, a grammatical construction known as a gerund. Rebuilding won’t help. As a verb form, a gerund can take an object—in this case, the word programs. (Rebuilding what? Rebuilding programs.) As a gerund, “rebuilding” could refer to “programs” as diverse as GED tutoring, dental care for poor children, and financial counseling for seniors.
The headline writer might have avoided reader confusion by writing something like: Professor: Give victims $200,000 check, choice: Don’t focus on rebuilding, he argues.
Headlines, sub-headlines, titles, email subject lines, photo captions, and other brief summary statements serve readers as abstracts of the meaning writers intend to deliver to readers.
The brevity of such “microcontent,” coupled with the fact that it usually stands alone, and often in bold, italicized, or otherwise highlighted text, makes mistakes in spelling, word choice, grammar and syntax especially conspicuous.
Irradiated meet in markets soon, reads a hilarious blooper headline from the Take 2 humor section at the American Journalism Review Web site. The headline introduced a story on irradiated meat in Hilo's Hawaii Tribune-Herald. Take 2 ran the blooper under its own humorous headline, A High-Energy Affair.
Sometimes trying to say it in fewer words means big mischief, as in this misguided advice from the Hudson Hub Times of Stow, Ohio: Have Fun at Prom; Don't Drink, Do Drugs.
The take-home message: Draft and scrutinize microcontent with great care.
A timid question will always receive a confident answer. – Henry Lytton Bulwer, diplomat and author (1801-1872)
Reading this quotation a few weeks ago got me to thinking: How do I question the reports and articles I read? How do I question those of my colleagues? My own?
Often I forget to ask any questions at all.
What kind of answers would I get if I asked bold, courageous questions whenever I engage with text?
News mixed for women in workplace, read the headline on an interesting article about gender disparities in earnings that persist despite gains for New Hampshire women in recent decades.
Out of context (when, for instance, the headline might appear in a list of articles or a list of links online), the headline causes a little confusion, since the word “mixed” can serve as either a verb or an adjective.
So the reader might wonder before reading the story (as I did): Who mixed the news for women?
A rewrite that offers more clarity in less space: Working women gain, but still lag.
[I]t’s easier to sound like you’re making sense than to actually make sense. – Erin Kissane, Attack of the zombie copy
Just in time for Halloween, Steve Judd sent me a link to the humorous Attack of the zombie copy, a recent post to the blog A list apart.
Perfect timing, not just for Halloween, but for this season of Extension reporting. Although reporting may make you feel like a zombie, you probably want to guard against writing like one.
Read Attack of the zombie copy for fun. Read it for homework if you find yourself writing sentences like this: “Our interdisciplinary collaborative diversity initiative experienced significant progress in furthering three of the four Key Objectives identified in the Draft Planning Document developed in a prior funding cycle.”
A list apart author Kissane recommends starting with an outline. I believe in freewriting first and writing up a quick outline during the revision process to bring order to your final product.
No matter what strategy you work from, you may want to begin by asking: At the heart of it, what do I really want to say here? and write your answer down, using the most concrete, precise words you can muster.
Another useful cure for zombie prose: Occasionally read what you’ve written aloud. If it sounds dead and empty, revise your words until they sound more like you speak.
The University of Chicago claims Werner Heisenberg (father of the Uncertainty Principle, one of the foundations of quantum mechanics) as one of its 78 Nobel laureates, although Los Angeles Times writer Karen Kaplan asks, “Did Heisenberg even spend more than a few months in Chicago?” (Gives an ironic twist to the notion of “uncertainty principle,” when no connection between the physicist and the University of Chicago appears in Heisenberg’s biography.)
In a widely-distributed article on “Nobel inflation,” Kaplan notes that many universities, which demand rigor and precision in research and academics, disregard their standards when laying claim to Nobel laureates.
“Counting Nobel prizes is the ultimate academic sport…a no-holds-bared exercise in selective memory ands fuzzy math,” Kaplan writes. “Nobel prizes make schools attractive to prospective students, faculty and donors, conferring the aura of a winner.”
She cites universities that proudly claim as “their” Nobel laureates professors they’ve fired, and two which lay claim to the same volunteer they refused to hire for pay.
Because “A university does many things,” many schools may claim a single laureate: one because he earned a bachelor’s degree there, another because he attended graduate school there, another where he currently sits on the faculty, or holds emeritus rank, yet another because the laureate delivered a series of guest lectures there.
The take-home message for me from this punchy little piece: Writers and readers need to remember the implicit rhetorical plasticity of simple words, titles and descriptions, no matter how apparently reputable the source: “Werner Heisenberg, of the University of Chicago…” or “University of Chicago Nobel laureate, Werner Heisenberg...,"
Most words and phases allow a broad range of interpretation. Neither writers nor readers should assume that others will interpret a word or phrase the way they do.
In my local paper, the article ran under the headline, “Universities experience Nobel prize inflation.” Experience? That seems like a strange verb to use when the article itself clearly suggests “engage in” as the better choice.
My local paper had a caption yesterday under a photo of the chef at a new restaurant, presenting “a grilled beef tenderloin wrapped in apple smoked bacon dish from the restaurant.”
Eh?
I flashed on the appearance of that “beef tenderloin wrapped in apple smoked bacon dish.” The photo revealed that the dish (platter) itself didn’t wrap around the grilled tenderloin, so I suspected the apple smoking process applied to the bacon, not the dish.
This caption needs a rewrite to deliver the caption-writer’s original meaning. One possibility: “Restaurant chef Robert Steele presents a grilled beef tenderloin wrapped in apple-smoked bacon.”
Writers need to pay special attention to captions, headlines, email subject lines and other brief informational summaries, especially in online documents, where they become “microcontent.”
Microcontent can provide essential contextual or navigational cues for readers, but only when constructed carefully. Microcontent like the caption above raises distracting questions in readers’ minds that slow the reading and may cause confusion.
Converse From the Latin con=with and uersari=to turn [ideas] around.Content From the Latin con=with and tenere =to hold
The history of our word conversation carries with it the sense of movement and varying perspective, both of which have found their way into the theory of mindfulness. Information processed mindfully remains active and dynamic, available for the learner to use in new contexts.
Yet we typically think of writing as an act of producing content, filling a space with words and ideas. Content carries the idea of a fixed amount of material, a fixed perspective, information held together by single point of view fixed by the writer.
Content or conversation?
Producing content generally implies that you the writer-expert will disgorge what you “know” and believe others should or want to “learn.” Having a conversation implies a back-and-forth wrestling with the subject matter, viewing it from varying angles and asking questions of it using your words and ideas as a fulcrum or a jumping-off point. Conversation implies interactivity, opening your words and ideas to questions, challenges and new insights.
This difference reveals itself dramatically when we think of Cooperative Extension’s charge to develop programs that foster multi-party engagement, rather than expert transmission.
Eventually your words will fill a certain amount of space on the page or on a computer monitor. All writers face space constraints, but having a limited space does not require a limited mindset or a single fixed stance towards the information. The conversation doesn’t have to end with your book, article or fact sheet. The best writing whets the reader’s appetite for more, more involvement with the topic, more of what you write.
So, how can you converse with your readers, rather than simply filling a page with content?
You might start by conversing with yourself, out loud or on paper. State your intention. Why do you want (or have) to write this piece? Why do you think someone else should read it? What assumptions do you begin with?
Now, take a point of view from which you question your original assumptions. Question the facts you plan to put in your publication—have you stated them as absolutes, or have you qualified them by placing them in appropriate contexts?
Consider stating (in writing) what you and other experts don’t know about the topic.
Ask what role you assume as the writer. Imagine writing from another perspective that enables readers to interact more meaningfully with the material you present.
Read what you’ve written aloud from time to time, assuming the role of a critical reader.
As you write, visualize talking with someone about your topic.
Consider beginning with a question. Answer it. Ask another, and another. Keep writing down your answers. Use conditional language; work to eliminate absolutisms.
Suggest that readers find correlations between their own experience and aspects of your topic.
Consider using personal pronouns: I, you, we. Humans come hard-wired to respond to human voices and personal pronouns suggest real human voices.
Consider asking: Can I present this information from a different point of view? Then try to do it.
Consider ending with a question, maybe one you’ve often asked yourself.
I'm not sure whom to blame for the pathology of apology. I just know it's not me, and I'm sorry, but that's the last word. Scott Libin, The Pathology of Apology
Google effective apologies and you come up with nearly two million Web pages, white papers and fact sheets from sources ranging from conservative religious organizations to the Harvard Business School, offering almost identical language on the healing value of effective apologies.
The effective apology typically includes these elements:
1. A common understanding of the exact substance and nature of the offense, or perceived offense. (Example: “Yesterday on the telephone, I said….”)2. Recognition of responsibility or accountability on the part of the one who offended. (Example: “I could have chosen other words.” “I spoke without thinking.”)
3. Acknowledgement of the pain or embarrassment that the offended party experienced. (Example: “It’s understandable that was upsetting to you.” “If someone had said that to me, I would not have liked it, either.” But not, “I’m sorry you’re so easily hurt.”)
4. A judgment about the offense. (Example: “I was insensitive.” “What I did was wrong.”)
5. A statement of regret. (Example: “I’m sorry I used those words.”)
6. An indication of future intentions. (Example: “In the future, I will try to think about the impact of my words before speaking.” “I hope we can have a relationship of mutual respect.”) Elements of an Effective Apology, Columbia University Ombuds Office
We can probably agree on the relative absence of the simple, heartfelt apology from our public and corporate discourse, our schools, and homes. Making an effective apology requires both emotional intelligence and wordsmithing skills. A bad apology can make a bad situation much worse.
Scott Libin’s column on the topic today offers a cogent first-person reflection on “the specific disorders that can afflict apology and drain even a well-intended effort of almost all impact.”
I recommend it, along with Jill Geisler’s companion piece, In Praise of Sorry Leaders, as good medicine for curing your own apology pathology (if you have one) and for understanding why you sometimes end up feeling so bad after the bad guy has finished apologizing to you.
Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the liabilities of the conventional outline: namely that it commits you psychologically to a chronological order you might want to abandon later in the writing process. If you learn something new or your perspective on your topic changes as you compose your draft, you may find it nearly impossible to incorporate your new learning or leaning into your text.
But sometimes we get caught in a horrific time crunch and have to write in a hurry, working more like news reporters on deadline than like academics with a long planning horizon.
I recently came across this column by Poynter Online’s Chip Scanlon, entitled Five Boxes to Build a Story Fast: A Suggestion from Rick Bragg. Scanlon writes cogently about writing and editing as a senior faculty member for the Poynter Institute.
In this column, the last of five in a series called “Helping Writers Take Charge: Five Tools for Editors,” he notes that Pulitizer-winner Bragg doesn’t write from outlines, but uses a “five-box” system for getting the job done fast.
Here I scavenge Bragg’s five points and slightly modify them for the kinds of writing Extension professionals typically do: reports, fact sheets, newspaper articles, etc. Together, they offer a sequential plan for developing a rough draft ready for revision and editing, but constructed loosely enough to accommodate new learning and a change of emphasis.
Begin with five sheets of unlined paper as the five “boxes” in which you will construct the guts of your writing assignment.1. On the first page, write your lead, a sentence or two that contains a compelling image, a great quotation, or some detail you think will draw readers into your topic.
2. On the second, write a “nut graph” [great term!] that sums up what you intend to write about. A nut graph not only helps you focus on the meat and substance of your writing project, but—in the metaphorical sense of the nut as a seed—on your subject's generative possibilities, the ways the summary paragraph could grow and expand.
3. On the third page, write a new image or detail that serves as a segue to the bulk of the narrative to follow.
4. On the fourth page, jot down the supporting details that will plump out your article or fact sheet.
5. For the final page, come up with what Bragg calls the “kicker,” an ending paragraph featuring a strong quotation or image that leaves the reader with a strong emotion.
“Emotion?” you exclaim. “I’m writing a fact sheet!”
Without getting too deeply into the neuroscience, remember that the emotional centers of the brain respond to an event more quickly, and often more strongly, than the so-called “thinking brain.” Skillful writers understand that emotion not only helps sustain readers’ interest and focus their attention, enabling them can absorb and integrate the factual information, but also provide much of the impetus motivating behavior change.
A September 20 Associated Press article entitled Housing prices wound young: rents highest in nation quotes economist Russ Thibeault: “I think it is really hard on young households who are scratching their heads and saying 'Can I afford to live here?’”
Can “households” scratch their heads and speak?
I see a lot of this kind of fanciful language: The Boston Globe has learned…. The administration worried.... The 18th-century saw numerous technological innovations.....
Drives me nuts!
I don’t think abstract or impersonal entities such as households, newspapers, administrations, and centuries (eras, decades, months, etc.) can learn, warn, see, or scratch their heads.
Like the pathetic fallacy, which attributes human aspirations, emotions, feelings, thoughts, or traits to events or inanimate objects, nouns that can’t logically complete the actions of the verbs dilute meaning and raise questions in the reader’s mind that can bog down the reading process.
Writers could deliver more clarity by choosing subjects that genuinely match the action of verbs they follow. So:
This is really hard on young householders, who are scratching their heads….
Globe reporters Dwindle Fahrenheit and Olive Appel learned yesterday…. (Or, even more daring, We learned yesterday….)
Top administration officials worried….
The numerous technological innovations of the 18th-century include….
Reading a wire service report in yesterday’s newspaper headlined Gene found to control urge to eat, a friend remarked, “Oh, here’s a reporting error. The reporter writes, ‘Yale scientists have proven that the gene, AgRP, makes a protein that feeds brain cells that give orders about when to eat and how much.’ That violates a central rule of reporting facts. She should have written, ‘Yale scientists say they have proven….’”
Too picky? I plead guilty to having broken that rule myself.
In this case, though, I find my friend’s criticism dead-on. The small contextualizing word “says” would have delivered a big difference in meaning, especially in conjunction with the word “proven.”
If I’d edited that piece, I might also have replaced “proven” with “demonstrated” or “shown.”
I will tell you something about stories. They aren’t just entertainment. They’re all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.Leslie Marmon Silko, from the homepage of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics, Health Science Center, University of Texas in San Antonio
I hope most of you will find the time to print and read Dr. Jerald Winakur’s essay, What Are We Going To Do With Dad?, published last month in the policy journal Health Affairs. Read it if you provide, or have ever provided unpaid care for an elderly parent. Read it for the wealth of empirical, economic, medical and political information it offers. Read it as the work of a fine writer.
But read it mostly for the power of its narrative voice. Use it as a model for finding your own voice and helping others find theirs.
For all of his clinical knowledge and training, his connections, and his years of experience as a geriatrician, Winakur can’t “answer” his title question, What are we going to do with Dad?
I do not know the answer. I do not have a pat solution for my father or yours—neither as a son, a man past middle age with grown children of his own; nor as a doctor, a specialist in geriatrics, and a credentialed long-term care medical director.
He discovers simple storytelling as the most powerful tool for facing and living with the decline of his 86 year-old father. Here’s another excerpt:
It’s rarely talked about, but acute hospitalizations are the most dangerous times for the elderly. Even if they have never before manifested any signs of confusion or disorientation, it is in the hospital—in a new and strange and threatening environment, under the influence of anesthetics, pain pills, anti-emetics, and soporifics—where the elderly (competent or not) will meet their match. Add to this the iatrogenic mishaps (caused by the "normally expected" side effects and complications of standard medical procedures) and the human errors (mistakes in drug dosing, the right medication given to the wrong patient)—now multiplying in our modern hospitals like germs in a Petri dish—and it is almost a miracle that any elderly patient gets out of the hospital today…After four days and nights in the hospital, I knew I had to get my father out of there. His doctor came by and told me that his heart failure was better and that his dementia evaluation did not show a treatable or reversible cause. But he didn’t like the way my father looked—he was agitated and sleep-deprived and deconditioned, a perfect candidate for some time in the SNU [skilled nursing unit]. And, after all, here I was, his senior associate, the medical director of the SNU. Surely my dad would get good care there.
I took my father home. I knew if I didn’t get him home at that moment, he would never come home again.
In addition to his medical practice, Winakur teaches at the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the San Antonio Medical School. The Center uses film, poetry, and fiction to teach medical students languages other than science, to “ground our discussions in an emotional reality and promote truth-telling…not so much to inculcate empathy, humanity and ethical conduct in the students, but simply to keep alive their innate humanity, integrity and empathy.”
The power of narrative prose—storytelling—takes both writers and readers into psychological terrain where how-to instructions, scientific explanation can’t go. In the large matters of human life: birth, coming of age, love, suffering, pain, hate, death, the voices we speak with and hear through our stories inform, provoke, reward, soothe and connect us to each other like nothing else.
Yesterday I made reference to an unfamiliar term—concept noun—as one of the culprits that “depopulates” prose, increasing its abstraction and making it more difficult to read. A few people asked about it.
I wrote:
Characterized by passive verbs, absence of personal pronouns, and an abundance of abstract concept nouns, depopulated prose, written in that fourth voice Bresler calls the “non-person,” has become so common it now serves as the default style for academic, science, and business writing.
I learned about concept nouns from Bill Zinsser’s 1976 classic book On Writing Well: An informal guide to writing nonfiction. Zinsser defines concept nouns as “Nouns that express a concept…commonly used in bad writing instead of verbs that tell what somebody did.” He gives a few examples, which include these two:
The common reaction is incredulous laughter.Bemused cynicism isn’t the only response to the old system.
“What is so eerie about these sentences is that they have no people in them [italics added],” writes Zinsser. “They also have no working verbs—only “is” or “isn’t.” The reader can’t visualize anybody performing some task. The meaning all lies in impersonal nouns that embody a vague concept: “attitude, hostility, “tension,” symptom.”
Zinsser’s rewrites:
Most people just laugh with disbelief.Some people respond to the old system by burning cynical; others say…
We encounter concept nouns every day in academic, bureaucratic and business writing. Most of us unwittingly pepper our own prose with them, too. We choose concept nouns because they give us a quick way to encompass a lot of compressed technical terrain. But in the process, they create such high levels of abstraction they can render the prose incomprehensible.
For example, notice how the abstract concept nouns in this passage, chosen at random from a paper* aimed at professional risk communicators, depopulate and contribute to the overall confusion in this text:
This initial finding was further reinforced by studies which concluded that personal influence was both more frequent and more effective than any of the mass media, and influence in primary groups is effective in maintaining a high degree of homogeneity of opinions and actions within a group. There are instances, however, when face-to-face communication breaks down due to some barriers such as low self esteem, inappropriate choice of words, incongruity of verbal and non verbal messages, predispositions that take people in other directions, and inappropriate place for communication.
Try rewriting this passage so it makes sense and delivers concrete meaning. Put people in. Choose vigorous verbs and more precise nouns.
*From Issues in Planning & Designing Risk Communication, Clifford W. Scherer and Napoleon K. Juanillo, Jr., Cornell University Department of Communication, Risk Communication Workshop Background Paper, 1991.
But first person, second person, and third person are not the end of it. Some people are so trained to delete references to people in their writing that they depopulate their sentences. They write in what I call the non-person. –Ken Bresler, Depopulating Sentences and Writing in the Non-person
I urge you to read Ken Bresler’s excellent essay on depopulated prose linked in the quotation above.
Characterized by passive verbs, absence of personal pronouns, and an abundance of abstract concept nouns, depopulated prose, written in that fourth voice Bresler calls the “non-person,” has become so common it now serves as the default style for academic, science, and business writing.
Depopulated prose invariably bogs down readers and can leave them feeling exhausted from the effort of trying to suck some meaning from the words. Bresler notes that writers themselves often have to work harder to remove all references to people than if they had allowed references to themselves and to other real people flow naturally into their prose.
I recently read an article in my local paper about the evolution of al-Quaida, in which the writer dropped a direct quotation attributed to “the final slide in a PowerPoint presentation about Al-Quaida presented at numerous U.S. Government forums this year.”
Yikes! Talk about writing in the non-person. I find it scary enough that speakers would use PowerPoint presentations to inform government forums on an important topic, but even scarier to see a journalist quoting a PowerPoint slide as a source.
As a reader, I deserve to know the name of the person who spoke or wrote the words appearing on that slide, the names of the person who developed the presentation, the person who gave the presentation, and the main categories of officials who attended the “numerous government forums.”
Vilest of all is the habit of throwing together several nouns into one ghastly adjectival reticule: Texas millionaire real-estate developer and failed thrift entrepreneur Hiram Turnipseed...
From the style guide used by journalists contributing to the British Economist.com comes this page of warnings against using “Americanisms”
Salty, dry, and pithy, the page makes a great read. American writers would do well to take much of the advice it offers British journalists. Especially the injunction not to “verb nouns or adjective them”:
So do not access files, haemorrhage red ink (haemorrhage is a noun), let one event impact another, author books (still less co-author them), critique style sheets, host parties, pressure colleagues (press will do), progress reports, trial programmes or loan money. Gunned down means shot. And though it is sometimes necessary to use nouns as adjectives, there is no need to call an attempted coup a coup attempt or the Californian legislature the California legislature.
Thanks to Steve Judd for sending me the URL for the style guide.
Feeling intimidated by a looming writing project? Try imagining a reader as you sit down to write.
Imagine a back-and-forth conversation between you and someone who knows little or nothing about your topic.
Imagine what might make this person curious, “hooked” on what you have to say. Imagine what he or she might need to know as background and context before you can broach the topic at hand. Imagine what your reader might already know about some dimension of your topic. Imagine what questions the reader might ask.
Then, as you begin to write, “talk” onto the page. No matter what format you’ve chosen, put yourself in the role of a reader and ask questions. Taking the role of writer, pose questions. Ask your reader to reflect from his or her own experience.
Practiced regularly, "reader imagination" exercises can improve your writing immeasurably. At the very least, it will help you appreciate the writing process as a two-way (or even multi-directional) conversation between and among human beings, rather than simply disgorging what you think you know.
The next step, of course, involves getting real readers engaged with and responding to your drafts early and often. I’ll blog more about readers next week.
Rhetoric is the study of effective speaking and writing. And the art of persuasion. And many other things. — Gideon O. Burton
If you have an interest in effective oral presentations and writing to deliver maximum impact, I recommend visiting Silva Rhetoricae (The Forest of Rhetoric).
I love this online textbook of classical rhetoric, created and maintained by Gideon O. Burton, an assistant professor of early British literature at Brigham Young University, for its spare and elegant design and its density of quality content.
Many people use the word “rhetoric” in a pejorative sense (“Oh, he’s just spewing rhetoric.”), but this 2000-year-old discipline concerns itself with the art and science of communicating to persuade through the construction of sound arguments and careful documentation. Propaganda more appropriately describes a systematic attempt to persuade through deception. Rhetoricians study propaganda techniques in order to understand and counter them.
You might think you have no interest in rhetoric, until you begin poking around in Silva Rhetoricae and clicking on a few of the glossary terms or opening some of the content pages. The site’s intelligent design and succinct writing lends itself to casual browsing. A visitor can learn something important in just a few minutes at Silva Rhetoricae.
Left and right frames called Trees and Flowers form the site’s navigation bars. Burton displays the content itself in a central panel in brief, manageable tidbits, each rich in detail and cross-links to related ideas or concepts. The “trees” link to content segments; the “flowers” offer a huge glossary of rhetorical terms. Each flower gives you not only a definition, but a pronunciation, examples, links to related terms, and links to primary sources.
Although the site itself serves as a complete textbook of classical rhetoric, Burton understands the rhetoric of the Web, which demands a nonlinear approach that puts the reader in charge of navigation. I can’t recommend this site highly enough as a model of good visual rhetoric.
Small errors can create enormous shifts in meaning.
Header on a small news item in the Concord Monitor July 5, 2005: 1 bugler suspect arrested, 2nd sought.
Bravo to Thom Linehan’s excellent July 7 Waking Up Writing post, “There’s a buzzin’ in my ears.” Thom touched both eloquently and humorously on one of my favorite topics and poses some important questions.
Jargon and buzzwords (“jarbuzz”) infect academic, professional, corporate, and government cultures alike. We encounter it so routinely in both popular and professional literature that we accept it as normal speech and lapse into using it ourselves. We lose our capacity for critical reflection on our own and others’ words.
Unlike propaganda, jarbuzz doesn’t so much distort facts or deliberately attempt to deceive as it robs both oral and written speech of its meaning.
Some buzzwords originate as jargon or street slang—words people who share a common profession or culture coin to describe aspects of their common experience. This jargon can serve as a potent social binding force; sometimes it coalesces spontaneously and spills out of its origins to become an important cultural force in its own right–think Hip-Hop, Rap, ‘Netspeak, etc.
But it can become pernicious when it escapes the cultural confines of its origins, as when academics use it to puff up their prose and distance themselves from their listeners or readers.
I think a lot of what ends up as jarbuzz, such as Thom’s example of “learning organization,” starts off as straightforward, sincere attempts to articulate new concepts, ideas, methods, or outlooks. The people who invent these words and phrases generally do so within a carefully-described context.
The terms pass over