Waking Up Writing

Waking Up will estivate until after Labor Day

2006-07-10T17:22:37-05:00

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

And now, a few words from an expert

2006-06-30T07:24:21-05:00

The erudite linguistics blog Language Log ran a blurb a couple of days ago about an interesting psychological experiment reported in the online science journal Seed.

In a recent study, Deena Skolnick, a graduate student at Yale, asked her subjects to judge different explanations of a psychological phenomenon. Some of these explanations were crafted to be awful. And people were good at noticing that they were awful—unless Skolnick inserted a few sentences of neuroscience. These were entirely irrelevant, basically stating that the phenomenon occurred in a certain part of the brain. But they did the trick: For both the novices and the experts (cognitive neuroscientists in the Yale psychology department), the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones.

The Yale research confirmed many findings of Harvard psychology professor and “mindfulness” researcher Ellen Langer and colleagues that people mindlessly rate information coming from “expert” sources as more valid than that from other sources (including their own experience).

For example, as one of an ongoing series of experiments examining people’s social relationships to computers and other machines, Clifford Nass of Stanford’s communication department and Youngme Moon of the Harvard Business School demonstrated that the mindless response to expertise extends even to machines.

Nass and Moon divided their subjects into two groups. One watched a news show and an entertainment show on a “generalist” television, labeled with a sign that read News and Entertainment Television. The other group watched the same two programs on two “specialist” televisions, respectively labeled News Television and Entertainment Television. The group who watched the specialist TVs rated the news significantly more informative, interesting, serious and higher in quality and the entertainment funnier and more relaxing that the participants who saw the same shows on the generalist TV.

Provocative implications for education.

Microcontent madness (part 11)

2006-06-28T09:42:44-05:00

A headline in yesterday’s paper read: Rafters take a wild ride on Merrimack.

An article about building materials for a new post-and-beam home washed downstream? A story about an old barn crumbling and floating away in the latest assault from Mother Nature?

Nope. In this case, “rafters,” refers to a couple of young women who launched a toy raft into the Merrimack River, intending to float a few hundred feet to a sandbar. Instead, they got caught in a strong current and “rafted” downstream for more than three hours before washing ashore.

The headline writer could have avoided the ambiguity by writing: Toy raft takes two on a wild ride.

Pencil

2006-06-27T15:44:45-05:00

Late and night and in the early morning hours, I often indulge in one of my hobbies: perusing blogs about language and literacy.

A few days ago, I came across the delightful What, Exactly, is a #2 Pencil? on Tim Warner’s blog Mother Tongue Annoyances.

Read it if you’ve ever wondered about the pencil-numbering system or felt curious in general about your first writing tool. And don’t forget to check out the World Championship of Illegal Pencil Fighting video, whether or not you ever engaged in this adolescent (mostly “guy”) game.

Apostrophe trouble?

2006-06-27T09:45:04-05:00

Apostrophe abusers of the world (and yeah, they very likely include you), take hope! If your likely to write sentence’s like these: “We recruited 25 subject’s,” or “The subjects name was James Applebee,” or “Parents concerned about their childs eating habits should attend this workshop,” I’ve discovered a support network for you: The Apostrophe Protection Society.

The Apostrophe Protection Society was started in 2001 by John Richards, now its Chairman, with the specific aim of preserving the correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language.

Richards’ simple rules for apostrophes led me to The Dreaded Apostrophe, a site that simplifies the apostrophe even further, boiling the rules to one:

Use an apostrophe when letters are missing.

Way to go, Patrick Nethercot!

Except when Nethercot gets into possessives, which often get confused with plural nouns. Then he forces readers into a deep thicket of linguistic history:

[snip]
I am also going to simplify matters, and having studied linguistics I know this may be oversimplification for some. But here the aim is to explain the dreaded apostrophe, not teach linguistics and old or middle English. So bear with me.
English is a Germanic language. It shares much in common with modern German, although much vocabulary was later imported from French/Latin. Quick example: the German for foot is Fuss, for ball is Ball, so football is Fussball. We get the word pedestrian from the French/Latin side though. Some Germanic usage survives in English, particularly in North American English where some archaic forms remain in use - gotten for instance. The -en participle ending will be familiar to German speakers.
Like modern German, old forms of English used a genitive case ending to show possession. This is normally -es. For our purposes, that will do. For example, the English The man's coat in German is Der Mantel des Mannes (The coat of the man). Note the -es ending on Mann to show possession.
So now let's (let us) go back a few hundred years in English….[big snip-out]The old -es possessive form in English is now missing, and as I am sure you will now remember we
use an apostrophe when letters are missing.

Got it?

Signs of the times

2006-06-26T14:58:48-05:00

At his humor blog, Bantereist, Brian Sack offers a collection of signs guilty of such word crimes as homophone abuse, prefix neglect, inexplicable usage of a semicolon, negligent hyphenation, and use of an illegal apostrophe, under the collective heading Grammar Cop.

Check out this list for a few good chuckles and a potent reminder of the importance of having someone else check your copy before you distribute it widely.

A few of my favorites:

Vegetarian special

Senior center

“Food?”

Everything’s coming up roses

Reality bites

The ideal homepage feature

2006-06-23T06:19:54-05:00

Introduces and develops a topic of broad public interest or concern, tied to a timely event or a local resource. Alternatively, it could touch on something whimsical or humorous. Keeping our homepage fresh with articles related to important or emerging issues demonstrates that UNH Cooperative Extension stays informed about and responsive to these issues.

Includes some local angle or aspect of specific interest to New Hampshire people. People give birth, raise children, attend school or not, get married or divorced, seed a lawn, resolve disputes with their neighbors, become victims of violence, take care of an aging parent, commit a crime, plant a vegetable garden, hire a pesticide applicator, sell timber, suffer discrimination, establish credit, buy a house or a horse, experience a septic system failure, find or lose a job, get diagnosed with a chronic illness, and die in a particular place.

The laws and regulations, physical environment, climate, cultural ambience, demographics, and the specific resources available (or not available) in that place typically play a substantial role in people’s ability to understand a situation, meet their needs, and respond individually or collectively to challenges.

Adding concrete aspects of place to an article connects writer and readers deeply and immediately, creates a direct emotional bond of shared experience and helps build a sense of community. We can use aspects of place to promote specific CE programs, promote the interests of our local partners, demonstrate our ability to integrate resources, give voice to our stakeholders, and allow site visitors to connect visually and locally to the topic (e.g., photo galleries).

Offers something of value readers won’t find anywhere else. Leading Internet economists suggest the Net will gradually bring an end to our current concept of intellectual property (proprietary content), in favor of intellectual value. UNHCE writers can create intellectual value by offering local perspectives on global, national and regional issues; by giving voice to (or inviting) unique local solutions to common problems, by presenting a wide range of perspectives not available in mainstream information sources, by promoting local events, and by hosting online discussions of many sorts. We don’t have to be the experts. We can bring outside experts to our Web site or set the stage for our stakeholders to develop and share their own expertise there.

Demonstrates awareness of the many dimensions of the issue at hand. Most every collection of empirical facts has moral, social, cultural, economic, political, gender, age, linguistic, and other dimensions embedded within it. Most issues also have a complex inside as well as an outside. The visible, empirical aspects of a topic (what we might call its outside) include raw data, measurements, and physical resources (things). Its invisible inside includes such aspects as perceptions, memories, emotions, level of awareness, cultural aspects, values and sense of self that both writer and reader bring to the topic.

Writers enhance their credibility and demonstrate expertise when their writing shows an understanding of the many dimensions and layers of the topic at hand, through word choice, writing style, embedded links, lists of links, sidebars, direct quotations, questions for readers, and other rhetorical techniques.

Offers opportunities for readers to make choices about what they need and want to know about the topic. Many professionals continue operating from the “broadcast” mode that positions the writer as the expert who determines what learners need to know, and readers as the relatively passive learner/novice.

The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to let readers themselves make their own travel plans. As noted in yesterday's post, links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.

Links provide the glue that shapes, builds and defines the Web. Try writing two or three lead paragraphs, then use the rest of your time and your expertise to develop links that connect to related pages on our own site and links that point away from it.

Note: When you link, link deeply, not to a site’s homepage, but to the internal page or pages of a site that delivers the information you think readers might find interesting.

Don’t hesitate to change the name of a page when you direct readers to it via a link. When the page title alone doesn’t indicate specifically what visitors will find if they travel there, always provide annotation , a brief description or abstract that readers can use when deciding whether to click and go there or pass it by.

Building the UNHCE homepage

2006-06-22T09:49:16-05:00

Do you have an idea for a piece you’d like to publish on the UNHCE Web homepage? Call or email me! Please!

Part of my job involves recruiting material for our homepage to keep it fresh and timely, working with staff to develop Web-ready articles and appropriate graphic elements, and getting the “products” to Faye for posting. Paul (my supervisor) and Holly (my ally and sounding board) collaborate on this venture.

So, what makes a good homepage feature?
First and foremost, it should exemplify clean, easy-to-understand prose that people find interesting to read, that delivers on the promise of its title and opening lines, and that shows awareness of and respect for readers’ needs.

The homepage itself doesn’t have a specific, carefully targeted audience. Its audience includes anyone who comes to the page. Ideally, writers should use links to direct various reader groups to related materials that might interest them.

Because Internet users experience Web pages as places they go to, travel around in, and leave, writers should work to create a special ambiance that connects to New Hampshire people and piques the interest of anyone who drops in for a visit. Even if they just cruise in and out without reading anything all the way through, or don’t have an interest in the specific topics, site visitors should leave thinking, “Hey, I want to come back here soon.”

Writing for the Web allows you to write a little and point to a lot. The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to vast realms of territory, letting readers themselves make their own travel plans.

Links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide nuanced or highly technical detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.

Research shows that professionals/experts enhance their credibility on the Web as much by what they point to as by what they themselves write.

The Web uniquely empowers all users to respond, publish, comment, review, critique, and add their own ideas, as well as to build both ad hoc and enduring communities of discourse, planning, research and action. This capability approaches the ideal of engagement the Kellogg Foundation has suggested as the key to survival of the land-grant universities and the cooperative extension system associated with them: two-way, even multi-party communication to which each party brings knowledge, skill and experience and in which each individual participates as both learner and teacher.

Done well, our homepage can serve our visitors’ needs for timely information, while simultaneously serving other purposes. Some of these include:

promoting our programs and those of our key partnerships and coalitions
developing new forms of social capital
encourages interdisciplinary thinking/linking between and among CE program units
serving as a powerful social marketing tool

Tomorrow I’ll introduce some specific elements of the ideal homepage feature.

Kill Bill,Vol. 3?

2006-06-21T14:42:41-05:00

Today’s microcontent mischief:

GOP Kills Bill to Police Halliburton

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?

Writing an op-ed

2006-06-20T07:20:44-05:00

“Op-ed” essays appear in the section of a newspaper that contains its editorials (which reflect the position of the paper itself), letters to the editor and regular columns (which differ from news in that they specifically represent the writer’s opinions). Prominently placed, op-ed essays typically deliver a compelling perspective on a topic of broad public interest. The op-ed pieces most likely to get published come from authors with strong credentials or broad personal or professional experience that qualifies them to speak to the topic at hand.

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:

Focus on a single theme. State your purpose clearly in the opening sentences.
Use humor when appropriate, but avoid sarcasm. Biting sarcasm often hurts people and may diminish support for your issue.
If you plan to offer critical analysis of a situation, take the high road: criticize ideas, not people. Avoid any references that present another person in a negative light; these might constitute libel, defamation of character, or malicious slander.
Don’t allow your passion for your topic to exaggerate and don’t state facts you can’t support. Speak simply, from the heart. Use strong, compelling facts. Aim to elevate the level of public understanding rather than tear down the arguments of those you disagree with.
Tell a story. “Speak out” your message onto paper. Focus on the concrete, human impacts of your issue. Note how it affects real people—their environment, their family life, their health, their quality of life. If you can find a strong quote, use it. Readers respond to a real human voice.
Don’t worry about “unbiased objectivity.” Instead, seek balance and inclusiveness. Show you’re conversant with the many aspects of a topic and understand various points of view.
Use active verbs. Say, Burton delivered the report in May, instead of, The report was delivered in May. Avoid overusing the verb to be: am, are, was, were, be, been, being. These verb constructions rob your prose of power, may cause confusion, and can deliver meanings you don’t intend.
Cut every word that doesn’t perform important work. Use strong nouns and strong verbs instead of cluttering your piece with adjectives and adverbs.
Use common, everyday words. Don’t try to “professionalize” your prose with jargon and 50-cent words. Expressing yourself clearly and simply doesn’t equate with “dumbing down.” No editor ever turned down a piece of written work because she found it “much too comprehensible” or “too easy to understand.”
If you use an acronym, write out its full title the first time, with the acronym in parentheses immediately following, e.g., University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension (UNHCE).

A few more tips:

Target your op-ed to the readers of one newspaper, and send it out to only one news outlet.
Try not to send your op-ed piece “cold.” Instead, if you know someone who works at the newspaper, or can finagle an introduction to the editorial page editor, call him or her, explain what you have in mind and ask for advice on getting published.
Accompany your op-ed with a well-written cover letter, two or three paragraphs that explain a little about the experience or credentials that qualify you to write this piece, along with a sentence or two about why your topic matters to the paper’s readers.
Don’t represent yourself as speaking for a group unless the group has given you explicit permission to serve as a spokesperson. Even then, have the group select a couple of “editors” to review your final piece before you send it out.

Writing letters to the Editor

2006-06-19T07:20:05-05:00

Among the most-read sections of most newspapers and many newsletters, the Letters to the Editor section gives you (or your clientele) a chance to present your perspective on an issue and its relevance to your community, praise a volunteer or a colleague, or promote a coming event.

Because many newspapers and newsletters publish most of the letters they receive, your letter stands a good chance of getting published. A campaign that encourages your supporters, volunteers, or clientele to write letters could prove more effective for promoting an event or program than sending out a generic press release.

Before you sit down to write, learn the newspaper’s word limit on letters to the editor, then stay well within it. If you don’t edit down your letter, someone at the paper will do it for you. (Warning: Newspapers generally don’t edit out mistakes. Meticulously scrub your letters for spelling, grammatical, and other errors.)

Some papers have a Board of Community Contributors, a My Turn, First Person or Voice of the People column that lets local people sound off in a longer space with a more prominent placement on the editorial pages. People who become known for writing strong, thoughtful letters may find may it easier to get one of these longer pieces published.

Draft your letter, making your main point in the lead sentence and following up with one or two supporting points. Keep your focus narrow.

Keep your tone civil and respectful, avoiding sarcasm and personal attack. Write with power:

Cut weak descriptive words: e.g., very, fantastic, extremely, extraordinary, wonderful, great, terrific).
Don't waste space with old clichés: e.g., “tough as nails,” “stepped up to the plate,” “at the end of the day,” “when all is said and done,” “worth its weight in gold.”
Don’t “professionlize” your letter with important-sounding words and jargon. Choose common, everyday words. Write “lives,” rather than “resides,” “help,” instead of “assist,” “before” instead of “prior.”

If you have credentials or experience that adds credibility to your voice, work them into your letter or your signature.

If possible, let your letter sit a few hours before you send it. Ask someone you trust, preferably someone who doesn’t know much about your topic, to read it for coherence and tone, as well as for grammar, syntax and “flow.”

For want of a hyphen

2006-06-15T07:40:54-05:00

Another alert reader did it for me this time, pointing out the ambiguity of the recent Concord Monitor headline, Men more likely to be dating violence victims.

“Did this mean that men were more likely than women to be dating the victims of violence, or that men were more likely than formerly to be dating the victims of violence?” wrote Rufford Harrison of Concord.

“Neither, it turned out. Men were more likely to be the victims of dating violence,” writes Harrison.

The context demands a hyphen between dating and violence to clear up the ambiguity.

Harrison concludes, “The hyphen is possibly the most underused and most needed punctuation mark in the English language.”

Hear, hear!

Don�t rely on spell-check (Part 2)

2006-06-14T10:55:47-05:00

Businesses investing in protects that rot.

Make any sense to you? As a headline in my morning newspaper, it didn’t to me, either, until I scanned the subhead, photo and article below for context.

The article tells the story of an entrepreneur getting out of the plastic packaging business and into the biodegradable packaging business, and goes on to describe a new generation of packaging materials made from agricultural byproducts.

So the headline writer really meant to write, Businesses investing in products that rot. I imagine the copy editor or whoever did the final page layout just ran the whole piece through a computer spell-check. A set of human eyes or two would have caught the error immediately.

As I’ve written often in this space, newspapers and other print documents typically contain plenty of visual context that quickly clears up readers’ initial confusion over errors like this one and renders them merely comical.

But when headlines and other brief materials migrate onto the Internet or other interactive media, they become “microcontent,” which often gets displayed out of its original rich visual context.

Nostomania

2006-06-13T09:27:34-05:00

Hurricane season approaches, civil war looms in Iraq, scandals in Congress, H5N1 bird flu still very much a threat, genocide continues in Darfur, fraud erupts in science…

Wordsmith’s A.Word.A.Day today describes what a lot of us feel as we scan the day's news:

nostomania (nos-tuh-MAY-nee-uh, -mayn-yuh) noun: An overwhelming desire to return home or to go back to familiar places.

I also like the Yiddish proverb selected as Wordsmith’s quotation of the day: A half-truth is a whole lie.

The plethora of half-truths emerging from government and business leaders also feeds our common nostomania.

Strike while the iron is cold

2006-06-12T19:23:50-05:00

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.