Archive for the ‘Teaching writing’ Category
I Quit You, Right-Hand Page Beginnings
I might stop printing. But you’ll have to pry transitions from my cold, dead hands.
"...from my cold, dead hands...."
I’ve been doing things differently without realizing it. For over twenty years I’ve inserted a blank page at the end of sections and chapters so my next section or chapter can begin on a right-hand page. I admit to finding a certain elegance in beginning a new thought on the page lying flat before me and close to my right hand. It just felt right.
No more.
Most of the documents I produce for clients will be used electronically. Few even consider printing them because, well, why would you? Since the screen is always there…and since paper just gets lost anyway…and since as soon as you print something, it changes and your print is outdated…so why print something again? Current audiences will not realize how a right-hand page lies flat on a surface while a left page bubbles up and distorts—an open invitation to move forward.
It’s not just blank pages. Transitions are transitioning away. Remember when transitions were the thing: when you wanted to gently lead your reader from one topic to the next, from one moving part of your argument to the next? Some writing textbooks still talk about making transitions in your writing. But are the days of transitions—just like the days of inserting blank pages—are swiftly passing. Since everything is modular we expect to jump from topic to topic rather than be wooed along.
Nicholas Carr in The Shallows talks about the atomization of information. How books and chapters and articles are already being dismantled so pieces are available here, there and everywhere. People writing books with the help of social media use the situation when they post as they go, so potential reviewers have the opportunity to interact with the writing long before it is even put in the longer (and more expensive book form). One of the dangers is that writers will write for short attentions spans—wait aren’t those people called bloggers and copywriters?
In truth, writers have always written for short attention spans. Back when reading books was the thing smart and interesting people did, writers talked about the reader’s constant pressure to walk away from the text. That was a key motivation for the writer to make the text more interesting. In my writing classes we often lament the lack of readers (in general) and the reader’s constant temptation to click away from the text. Clicking is so much easier than walking.
Blank page insertions may go away, but I doubt transitions will. That’s because communicators still have an innate need to keep an audience interested. Blank pages may be an artifact from the printing days. But transitions are a piece of our humanness that is alive and well and will stick around until our final…transition.
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Can You Hear The Jingle When Your People Comingle?
Let your technical staff converse with the world.
Several technical clients and friends I talk with are nervous about their business model. Their ways of getting new business feel not just old-fashioned, but wasteful of time, money and the energy of strong, passionate employees. These clients develop products that depend on interaction with their customers. Their specialized custom manufacturing is not easily duplicated and requires extensive collaboration. The problem is their customers are sometimes (often?) under the impression they purchased something close to an off-the-shelf solution: something that will work right away. Those customers may not realize (or may choose not to realize) they have actually purchased a highly custom product that requires lots of detailed conversation to make it work properly. The other problem is that neither my client nor their customer went deep in talking through the expectations each brought to the purchase.
What if my technical friends approached their business with the notion of starting technical conversations on the front-end: as a way into the sale along with the way through the sale, rather than just as a fumbling, awkward add-on after money has gone between accounts? What if these firms located the people already hard at work inside the company who had a passion for telling the detailed story on the outside of the company? I’m calling these the cominglers: employees who know the details cold and, with a bit of prompting and freedom, could carry on vital, interesting conversations outside the walls of your firm. Conversations that attract new customers even as they build credibility in the industry. This is actually happening all the time as people invest in the variety of social media channels.
It’s a plenty scary thought to many managers and VPs. I can hear it now: “We don’t want our engineers talking with civilians!” But is that really what you want, given your customers’ hunger for detailed engagement before, during and after a sale? Moving past marketing’s old monologing ways involves taking steps toward engagement at all sorts of levels within our organizations. Engagement was never just the salesman’s job, which has become clearer every single day as companies move to Facebook.
As I teach college writing students, I want them to grip their firm’s innerworkings as well as to put their head up in the space where their company moves to see the context their products and services walk among. Ongoing conversations depend on these very people.
Who are the cominglers in your organization?
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Photo Credit: Steve Powers-Visual Blues
When do Technical Details Need a Public Face?
A sharp friend and colleague asked my opinion on what blogging has to do with technical writing. Both of us teach professional writing classes to upper-level college English majors. Her technical writing students recently opted to deliver assignments as single files rather than modifying them to fit a blog format. I see why: blogging requires a further step of engagement with a wider set of audiences. Blogging has a public face that is wide of the mark for writers who usually compose directly for audiences with specific technical motivations.
Blogging Is The Nonchalant Public Face
In some ways, blogging is a perfect venue for technical communication: the communicator can be as specific as she desires without worrying about capturing audience attention because the audience will find the information. Or not. While blogging must never be boring, the right audience will find details and specifics as scintillating as any steamy romance novel. But I applaud the instincts of my friend’s students. In true college student fashion, why do more work when less will suffice?
Blogging is the more spontaneous and casual cousin of technical writing that allows for quick and specific responses to real questions. Blogging allows more free-form communication about timely issues and provides room, resources and the expectation of responses from an engaged audience—all of which scares lawyers and regulators in a regulated industry. Blogging also makes information and specific insights searchable by a wide variety of people. In a college writing assignment, that public face is not needed and simply represents another process for the writer.
But there may be good reason for writing teachers to find ways to make blogging a more attractive part of the technical writing assignment.
Detail-Delivery Is Changing
For a long time the forms of technical communication have been stable: manuals, instruction sheets, assembly instructions, monographs and the like. We wrote these forms for the reading pleasure of the poor soul faced with a bag of parts or the new customer opening a new piece of software. But today audiences are using technical details in all sorts of new settings. Plus: my technical clients want very much to join the social media frenzy. They just don’t see how they can, given the narrow technical audience they cater to. What they don’t notice is that the very technical resources in their company that have focused on the traditional forms of communication could actually be repurposed for delivery of technical information outside the usual forms. This information could be loaded into a blog-type form that has the advantage of being searchable. The point: let customers find you.
Why go to this extra effort? Simple: no one likes being sold. Finding new forms for communicating technical detail may well be the best marketing investment your company can make. That’s why I think academics and industry, English professors, communication managers and marketers all need to open fresh ways for technical communicators to speak to wider audiences. The future I see has technical and promotional walking hand in hand to satisfy the human need for specificity.
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I’m Writing a Book called “ListenTalk”
I’m writing a book about talking and listening. I’ve become crazy about what happens in our best conversations: we come alive. We learn something about another person and in the spontaneous moment of creation as we frame up words to describe our own situation, we often suddenly learn something brand new about ourselves. Something we didn’t know before we started talking. I’ve begun to think that when we are in conversation, we are more truly ourselves. And the best conversations have a way of making us very present to each other.
I call this book “ListenTalk: You’re Boring. Let’s Change That.” I think we were created to be in constant, deep, creative, spontaneous conversation. Not just with each other, but with God. That’s why parts of the book develop a theology of communication, starting with God’s act of creation, where His speech-act created dirt and air and giraffes and coffee beans and people, among other things. So you can see that with my book I hope to bring together something of JL Austin’s work on communication with a commitment to faith. Maybe I’m trying to do something impossible. I’m not sure. In a few days I’m scheduled to talk with a philosopher and speech-act theory expert at the University of Minnesota. I’m interested in his response to my notion of combining these things.
Two more pieces of this book project capture my attention in a big way.
Derrida and Welcoming the Other
One has to do with Derrida’s notion of welcoming the other. I recently finished James K.A. Smith’s “Jacques Derrida Live Theory” (Amazing: the book retails for $120! No wonder I cannot afford most of what I read) and was pleased to see a philosopher working from a faith perspective dealing with Derrida’s thoughts. I was impressed to see overlap between Derrida’s notion of welcoming the other into conversation and the God of the Bible’s commitment to welcoming the other. The Bible talks about reconciliation, and that definitely includes welcoming the other. What reconciliation does not mean (and here is where Derrida is particularly helpful in helping throw off some of my Christian cultural baggage) is making the other like me. We’re all tempted to make those around us like ourselves. But that effort misses the point of the kind of conversations that will sustain us.
Is Prayer a Model for Conversation?
Pulling more from theology than communication theory or philosophy on this last point, one of my chapters looks at prayer as the Bible talks about it and posits that we were meant to communicate with each other along these lines. Nothing really mysterious or unorthodox, I just wonder if the way we communicate with God (listening followed by moments of intense listening, and then very frank speech) is meant as a model for how we communicate with each other. Maybe listening is to take more of our effort than talking, which is a lesson advanced people of prayer seem to know.
Social Media is a Way Forward
This book ends with the notion that people of faith are currently presented with a rich opportunity to create and be in conversation. People of faith would do well to place ideas out in the public common areas, since there are far fewer gatekeepers, and see how people respond. This is part of the class I teach at Northwestern College called “Building Community using Social Media.”
What do you think? Would you read a book like this?
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The farmer and the cowman can be friends, but would either want their kid to study English?
All it took in Oklahoma was a rousing dance—and a few right hooks—to convince farmers and cowmen–two different disciplines–they could hang together. But a few generations later, getting their grandkids to combine art and commerce in the college classroom requires a completely different kind of dance: one few are prepared for and even fewer seek.
Momentum is building (again) for those questioning the value of a liberal arts education. Sameer Pandya, a lecturer at UC-Santa Barbara wrote recently in Miller-McCune, of his soul-searching when a student asked for advice: whether to major in something she found fascinating or something that might produce a job at the other end of the coursework. He said what anybody with a bias toward the liberal arts says: choose what you enjoy and the work will take care of itself. But privately he backtracked as he worked through the cost/benefit ratio: just how will the dollars spent reading F. Scott Fitzgerald help the student outside the classroom? And “Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It,” a recent book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Driefus, has given the debate legs, and will surely be a topic of conversation as students lament tuition bills and make the way back to school (or not).
It is clear we need a new educational model that rewards thinking and practical skills. But wait: who ever said thinking and practice were poles apart?
One of my jobs is to teach professional writing classes to college juniors and seniors. These are (often) talented students who have made their way through the rudimentary composition classes and exhibit ongoing interest in writing in a work setting. Some even envision themselves using the skill to make some coin. I teach because I earn my living as a copywriter, which means I serve organizations, companies and advertising agencies by thinking and writing. I teach because writing is fun (really!), and because these interested students are excellent communicators who participate in lively discussions. And I teach because I have an axe to grind with those who think they can find themselves only by writing poetry or short stories. Don’t misunderstand: I’m a great fan of poetry and short stories. But there’s a mood that begins somewhere in undergraduate education, perhaps even earlier in high school, that applies the romance of the fiction writer or poet to our own scribbly ways. We think the more we burrow into our selves, the more we tell our stories or embellish stories we make up, the more we’ll figure out who we really are. I believe there is much truth in that notion, but the burrowing-in may not lead where we want to go. And it may not lead to the place we need to be.
There is another way to personal formation.
I tell my writing students that poetry and short stories are good—indeed, very good—but that you can also learn quite a lot about yourself, you can grow in your craft, and put beans and rice on the table (even Spam sometimes), by writing for others. Yes—serving others through writing. It’s not an easily-caught vision for poets and fiction writers, frankly. Because of clients—they’re always changing my words! And because the technical detail clients use to serve their customers can feel, well, boring. There is very little room for plot or the arc of a story in a brochure or print ad. Right? And yet, it is precisely these missing artful bits that are helping to change the face of communication as restless writers find new ways to communicate with audiences—new ways that break down the old forms. I’ve seen the short-story writing student effectively bring story into a product brochure—to excellent effect. In our changing communication world, where corporate monologue is even now giving way to engaging dialogue, it’s the writers who resist the high walls of the old forms that will move us all forward.
That’s why I think the farmer and the cowmen’s grandkids will help us establish this new communication frontier as they find themselves making friends with art and commerce, with every use of their English degree.
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Blinders, Diamonds and Choices
Do our life choices change the reality around us? Or do our choices fit us with a set of blinders so we pay attention only to what is of immediate interest? Winifred Gallagher in “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” argues that our senses are fine-tuned to track the smaller set of interests that are important to us. Her masterful book shows the physiological and neurological changes—and the enormous benefits—that happen when we pay attention. But it is also true that life choices change the reality around us.
You'll be glad you read this.
A few of us have been reading the minor prophet Amos. Amos spoke against the treatment of the poor—over and over again. That’s what prophets do: with little personal authority (Amos was a shepherd), they get tricked-out with a much larger message (larger audience, bigger content, massive ramifications) and they…say it. Out loud. Come what may.
Which is what Amos did. He spoke out against nation after nation for taking advantage of their helpless (among other things). He had a special harangue against nations that should have known better, nations who should have had top-of-mind recollection about how they were recently saved from helplessness themselves.
As we talked about Amos, I mentioned how the poor seem almost invisible today. There are the homeless, but because I’m not paying attention (I’m not actively looking for them), I don’t see them. A couple students in my “Writing for Community” class are doing a masterful job bringing attention to the faces and people-ness of the homeless here. But how can I, how can we begin to see the poor among us? And more importantly, how can I/we keep from choices that trample on them? This spot hints at the effect of our choices:
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Write news based only on Facebook and Twitter?
In our “Writing for Community” class yesterday we discussed the difference between blogging and journalism. It’s getting harder draw a firm line between who is doing what, but the code of ethics about fact-finding and fact-checking remain key differentiators.
Stan Schroeder at Mashable offers the story of five French journalists who lock themselves in a farmhouse in France for five days and “write news based only on what they read in Twitter and Facebook.”
The success of their news gathering and sifting for facts will require great ingenuity. But I’m reminded of Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk whose influential writings about current events were based largely on letters he received rather than rapt attention to media.
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Passion is the Preferred Communication Tool
"Haircut, please." "Meet me in your lot in 15."
Clay Shirky, writing in “Here Comes Everybody,” argues effectively that with the lower transaction costs for forming groups (caused by social media), there are more possibilities than ever to pull a group together for most any reason. Dan Pink wrote yesterday of a social media-driven mobile hair-cuttery he saw at Google headquarters. Whether your focus is major profits, minor prophets or mingling in Provence, there are all sorts of new opportunities for banding together around a passion. All it takes is strategic use of the tools freely available, plus the willingness to reach out.
I’m asking my Writing for Community class to brainstorm the contours of the opportunity before them as they seek to build communities. With a passionate leader encouraging group sharing, what sorts of things are possible? We’re already seeing examples every day, from the high-schooler who tried to get released from being grounded by amassing thousands of fans on her Facebook page (her parents remained unimpressed) to the seemingly spontaneous “I’m with Coco” protests.
Depth of passion may well be the limiting factor. Just what am I willing to do to make my point? How far out will I reach?
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conversation is an engine 