Author Archives: sdshattuck

the aesthetics of words

Posted on by
1

My sister and I were having a discussion this morning on how much we both dislike the word “impactful.” Not too long ago, “impact” functioned as a noun: “What sort of impact on our sales will this new law have?” But my linguistic eye started twitching when noun jumped to verb: “This new law impacts our sales.” What’s wrong with “affect”? OK. Full disclosure. When I read back this sentence with “impact” as a verb, it doesn’t sound as weird as it used to. Or as eye-twitching.

For a nuanced read of “impactful,” check out Anne Curzan’s post, “What to Do About Impactful?” (Thanks to MJ for that resource.)

But here’s the thing. The word sounds ugly. Can anyone call that word beautiful? “Mellifluous”–that’s a beautiful word. “Recondite”–beautiful with all its sharp edges. “Azure” — you can hear the cello, I swear.

So do we tend to use the vocabulary that pleases our ear and avoid words that beat up our ear drum? Maybe not. Do we have our idiosyncratic list of words that produces a gag reflex? Absolutely. I’m not sure “impactful” will ever leave my list.

grammar delight

Posted on by
Reply

Mention the word “grammar” and reactions tend to rage bipolar, as in, “Wow! I used to love diagramming sentences. Why don’t they teach that in school any more?” and, “Oh. You’re an English teacher? I better watch my language.”

When people I meet react to my profession with a “I better watch my language,” they’re not worried about crafting a metaphor or employing a kick-ass vocabulary. They’re looking at me as the grammar police, an attitude they learned somewhere along their journey through language arts classes and first-year writing in college. I meet these middle-aged refugees from the red-penned pages of bloodied compositions more often than you might think, and their scars still ooze that one dismissive teacher’s red ink.

I’ve written on this blog before about how grammar is not absolute but morphs according to usage; it is historically contextual (language in transition). But I want to write about the opposite of grammar gloom–I want to write about grammar delight. Yes, I was one of those ninth-graders who loved diagramming sentences. I also love jigsaw puzzles. I’m beginning to believe more and more that writers have more in common with engineers than they do with painters. Writing gets put together. Writers build with language, and grammar offers the structure of that language. (For a quick and helpful read about diagramming, check out “Taming Sentences” by Kitty Burns Florey.)

“Grammar delight” is not an oxymoron but a state of linguistic play when analyzing how a sentence holds together. I had a chance recently to reinvigorate my grammar delight while taking my first massive online open course (MOOC) through Coursera. I took Crafting an Effective Writer, a basic writing course offered through Mt. San Jacinto College–along with about 60,000 other students from about 170 other countries. We’re in our last week of the class. I enrolled in a basic writing course because I had participated in a webinar describing the evolution of this course, and I wanted to experience it as a student especially to see how community college students might use this MOOC to prepare for their first-year writing courses.

I had not realized that I’d lost some of my grammar mojo until I hung out at the Grammar Connoisseur discussion thread. There, I refreshed my understanding of absolute phrases and phrasal verbs, and I paid more attention to subordinate clauses and compound-complex sentences. I noticed that the writers posting in this discussion list and others bordered on giddy when finding an answer to their grammar questions. Building stuff is play, and I’d forgotten the fun of building sentences by talking about grammar.

I also realized that I wanted a good, solid, non-digital handbook. The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, now sits next to my bed. As soon as I finish this sentence, I’m going to go read about participial phrases.

the power of revision & the pathetic appeal

Posted on by
Reply

I followed a Facebook link to a video I just watched. The video shows an older blind man sitting on cardboard on the sidewalk in front of a huge city building. (The accents sound Scottish.)  He has a cardboard sign that reads, “I’m blind. Please help,” and a can for coins. His take is meager.

Then, a young woman with big sunglasses stops by, turns over the guy’s sign, and writes on it. We see a quick shot of the man touching the woman’s green pumps. The woman replaces the sign and walks off.

Now, folks are pouring money into the guy’s tin can. At the end of the day, the woman returns. The blind man knows her because he touches her shoes and recognizes them from her first visit. He asks her what she did to his sign, and she replies, “I wrote the same, but different words.” As the audience, we finally see what the woman wrote: “It’s a beautiful day, and I CAN’T see it.”

Initially, I thought this video underscored the power of revision. I wanted to find out more, so I googled the revised lines to find the video on YouTube (“What did you do to my sign?” The Power of Words, Motivation), and I found an analysis of the video on Nick and Sue Asbury’s blog, Asbury & Asbury–the posting is entitled, “I’m blind. Please leave my sign alone.”

Nick Asbury gives us the origin of the story in copywriting folklore, which attributes this tale to David Ogilvy. Ogilvy tells of a copywriter on his way to work who passes a blind beggar every morning. The blind beggar’s sign reads, “I’m blind. Please help.” The copywriter adds three words to the blind beggar’s sign: “It’s spring and…” According to Asbury, the copywriter’s revision in Ogilvy’s story, “It’s spring, and I’m blind. Please help,” respects the writer’s original statement and leaves room for the reader to imagine. As Asbury says, the revision is a “spare statement of fact that leaves the reader to fill in the emotional gap.” Asbury criticizes the revision in the video, “It’s a beautiful day, and I can’t see it,” because the woman is “spelling out what was implicit in the original line,” and she forgets to add the “call to action.”

Asbury says the video has gone viral, but his criticism is that the online content agency, Purplefeather, the company who made the video, needs to respect copywriting history and folklore by getting the story straight.

Purplefeather ends the video with a vibrant purple slide covered in white print stating the company’s tagline: “Change your words. Change your world.”

The viral-ness of the video has little to do with copywriting and everything to do with the genre of motivational/inspirational videos.  Listed under the “Daily Motivation” channel of YouTube, “What did you to do my sign?” gets shared as inspiration. But what is being inspired?

The woman in sunglasses never gives the man any money. It could be argued that she gave him much more by offering words that compelled passers-by to drop coins they might have otherwise kept in their pockets. It can also be argued that the woman’s peremptory actions patronize the man; she never asks permission to do anything but exploits the man’s blindness by taking his sign, rewriting it, and does not even tell the man she’s done so. Her actions are portrayed in the short video as positive–she is the one person who helps change the man’s world. Before the woman revises the sign, we see groups of unaffected people, and after she revises the sign, we see an almost frenetic montage of people walking by the blind man and bending down to give him money.

Here’s Nick Asbury discussing the original story attributed to David Ogilvy:

It’s a lovely story, which has been making copywriters feel good about themselves ever since (and possibly making blind people feel somewhat patronised). It’s usually quoted in the context of how important the ‘emotive sell’ is when pushing the latest commercial message into the minds of unwitting consumers, which is what copywriters generally do when they’re not being selfless superheroes.

The woman in “What did you do to my sign?” does come off as a “selfless superhero,” and her only spoken words at the end of the video, “I wrote the same, but different words,” indicate that she’s just taken the blind man’s writing and tweaked it a wee bit. “Thank you, love,” are the man’s final words as our anonymous copywriting superhero walks off into the urban dusk.

“Change your words. Change your world.” Indeed. No question that our perspective, which often presents itself in language, shapes our environment. Full disclosure: the video moved me. I was hooked by the words–I wanted to know how the woman revised the man’s sign so that people responded to his plea for help.

The more I researched, the less I was emotionally affected by the video. During subsequent viewings, I thought more about the history Asbury discusses, more about the overbearing stature of the woman (the man sits on cardboard on wet concrete and is on a level with her shoes), the pathos of the story and its exploitation of the viewers’ emotions as a way to sell Purplefeather’s product–words that sell. Not words that change the world. Words that sell.

I thought this posting was going to be a simple posting about the power of revision, but it has morphed into a discussion of rhetoric and the pathetic appeal. I have found videos on Facebook that do inspire me–there’s one of a guy who helps people all day long (creative ads touching heartwarming thai life insurance commercial), and I love this short video (the main actor slays me with his expressions)–but the sponsor is a Thai life insurance company. Does that contradict the video and its powerful message and emotional effect? Advertisement works because it pulls our heartstrings and hopes the twang will pry open our wallets. Doesn’t stop me from watching that Thai life insurance video again and again.

 

when do precision and complex vocabulary become jargon?

Posted on by
Reply

Spoiler alert. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have an answer for this one.

Week one of the Graduate Writing Institute hosted by the Writing Skills Improvement Program at the University of Arizona is just over, and someone stated at the end of my presentation on style that she really liked complex, multisyllabic words. I do, too.

I had just read Helen Sword’s “Zombie Nouns,” in which she states the following:

At their best, nominalizations help us express complex ideas: perception, intelligence, epistemology. At their worst, they impede clear communication. I have seen academic colleagues become so enchanted by zombie nouns like heteronormativity and interpellation that they forget how ordinary people speak. Their students, in turn, absorb the dangerous message that people who use big words are smarter – or at least appear to be – than those who don’t.

There’s a lot I applaud in this paragraph: Sword’s attention to a continuum–that nominalizations can both facilitate and obstruct communication–and her concern that academic elitism can derail students.

But I take umbrage at Sword’s dismissal of “heteronormativity” and “interpellation” as zombie nouns. As for heteronormativity–there’s no other word that works here. If you want to talk about how culture normalizes heterosexuality and marginalizes LGBTQ folk, that’s heteronormativity. A complex concept in one word. And if you’re a scholar in gender or queer studies, you better be able to say this word in your sleep.

As for interpellation, just browse through the web for some explanation, and you won’t find an easy one. That’s because interpellation describes complex social moments involving ideology. Think 20th-century French philosophers. Think theorists of power and culture. Think film studies. Better yet, check out the blog posting on interpellation at The Chicago School of Media Theory for a non-jargony and careful discussion. And if you’re a scholar in cultural studies, or film studies, or contemporary continental philosophers, you will need to cultivate an explanation for interpellation that pirouettes off your tongue.

The point is, academics must learn and employ specialized vocabulary. Are they going to go to a neighbor’s house for dinner and proffer a mini-lecture on their scholarly passions? Likely not. At least not using the specialized vocabulary required in seminars and in their disciplines’ publications.

Words do work. Long words often do a lot of work. Just because an academic writer uses those long words does not mean his or her writing obfuscates. I think it’s all the stuff around those long words that makes the difference between clarity and jargon.

handwriting or keyboarding?

Posted on by
Reply

I was just talking with one of my sisters, who said she and her husband pulled out a chessboard the other night and played the game. They both thought, “Where’s the controller?”

And we’re not talking 20-, 30-, or 40-year olds, either. These are two educated people in their 50s who were infected by my son’s Xbox addiction to Halo. They are almost technophobic, but they recognized that the act of playing a game with non-digital components seemed a tad foreign.

I love the feel of a chess piece–wood, marble, agate. I love the look of the board, whether it’s a simple red-and-white cardboard one or an intricately inlaid board from the Middle East, pieced together with mother-of-pearl and ebony. I like the banter, the movement, the fun of face-to-face games.

So what happens to kinesthetic and tactile connections when we only write through keyboarding and never longhand? I journal longhand almost every morning, and I’m particular about my journal and my pen–the tactile, visual, and kinesthetic matter. But my writing becomes more and more difficult to decipher because I write mostly on my laptop. Yesterday, I was at a meeting, and I noticed that taking notes on my laptop kept me physically separated in ways that my colleagues did not experience–they took notes by pen in notebooks.

How do we achieve balance?

ethical writing

Posted on by
Reply

Perhaps no other form of writing demands ethical consideration more than medical writing. So many lives on the line.

But let me backtrack a bit. All writing is ethical. Writing about the environment and religion, politics and space travel, philosophy and literature–the writer’s credibility, or ethos, encourages the reader to trust the writer–or not. We may distrust (and thus avoid) any writer who does not share our views. But a writer’s ethos can win you over, no matter your political disagreements. A writer’s ethos assures you of the writer’s character, integrity, honesty, and clear purpose.

Back to medical blogs and Shara Yurkiewicz’s This May Hurt a Bit: The Intuitions, Insights, and Growing Pains of a  Medical Student. Here’s an excerpt from Yurkiewicz’s post from 7 April 2014, “Post-Operative Check,” in which she addresses a patient who died on the operating table:

Did you know that many surgeons play music during operations? It was going so smoothly that we were humming along to “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?” It was during the bridge of the song that your blood pressure suddenly dropped. The anesthesiologist called it out. I looked at the monitor and saw numbers flashing in red.

There was a lot of red, actually. Blood in the wound, blood in the suction container, blood in transfusion bags, bloody footprints on the floor. No more than with any other patient. But I think somewhere along the way I learned to take the sight of liters of blood for granted.

I was scared. I stopped watching them stitch and stared at the monitor, which suddenly seemed like my closest connection to you. They called out the medications they were giving you to raise your blood pressure.

Yurkiewicz writes here as a fourth-year medical student. She has everything to gain by keeping the secrets of the operating room and nothing to gain by writing a blog post addressed to a dead man except the intangible-ness of ethical writing: respect for the dead, witnessing those last moments, pulling back the operating curtain, and remaining true to her experience. She is honest.

I consider Edward Humes’ Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash ethical writing because not only does he tell the eco-horror, he also investigates solutions. I trust him more because he doesn’t leave me a screaming puddle of apocalyptic seizures. The eco-horror: each of us Americans will generate 102 tons of trash by the time we get to our own cosmic recycling; about 28 billion pounds of food, or about 25% of our food (likely more) gets thrown away; Americans throw away 694 plastic water bottles per second. The solutions (or at least ways to make some change): the Garbage Project begun at the University of Arizona in the early 70s, the Artist-in-Residence program at the San Francisco Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Facility, the creation of the Chico bag and the Bag Monster, and the Trash Track program through the M.I.T. SENSEable City Lab. So Humes scares me, informs me, and gives me some hope.

And ethical writing means ethical research. When I found out that Alberto Rios had been named the first state poet laureate of Arizona in 2013, I posted a snide comment on Facebook about a likely connection between a state’s ranking in educational excellence and whether or not that state had a poet laureate. I was snarky. I was literarily self-righteous, convinced of the connection between inculcating a love of poetry and boosting educational standing. Then a pesky inner voice said, “How do you know?” So I had to go to the Library of Congress website and research ALL of the states and their poet laureates. And guess what? I was wrong. Massachusetts, a clear contender for educational excellence, has NEVER had a state poet laureate. I posted an apology to Facebook. That’s ethical: I was snarky, I researched, I was wrong, I apologized. The snarky part wasn’t ethical. All the stuff after the snarkiness.

avoid Hoovering

Posted on by
Reply

You may read the title of this blog post both literally and figuratively.

1) Literally – When you have committed to writing time, DO NOT break out the vacuum cleaner because all of a sudden you feel dust bunnies nipping your toes when they’ve lain dormant for the last three weeks. We all have our go-to distractions. That pressing email. That load of laundry. That new blog you want to read. Get to know these accomplished detour inviters. Banish them from your writing time.

2) Figuratively – Do not write in a vacuum. Writing is solitary enough. Find a writing group or writing buddy. Find a mentor. Find a face-to-face encounter that nourishes your growth with this craft.

I just participated in the DIY MFA‘s Weekend Writing Sprint. Writing Instigator, Gabriela Pareira, emphasized this idea of building community and finding mentors. Check out the website to find ways to avoid the vacuum. But not during your writing time. Put down that Hoover!

at times, only fiction will do

Posted on by
1

I have been searching for the impossible.

I want to read from the perspective of inside a demented brain. Looking out at the world from that place, what do I see, hear, feel? How?

There are some blogs and articles by those with early-onset dementia or Alzheimer’s, who describe their experience. But I want to know what my mom sees, how her brain trundles along or crackles. Who can record that landscape?

In interviews about Beloved, her novel on slavery and the Middle Passage, Toni Morrison discusses the unspeakable nature of slavery and names artists as the healers, the ones who must perform rites of exorcism and redemption.

And so I find a description of what I think it must be like in my mother’s brain when I read a passage from Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Alfred Lambert, the octogenarian patriarch of the novel, has Parkinson’s and dementia. In this passage, he attempts to eat a snack prepared by his daughter, Denise, a chef:

But Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. . . . and no sooner had he re-confirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip’s living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer of new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world; which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catch-up, he preferred more and more to spend his days down among the unchanging historical roots of things. (66)

There are other such passages, and I marvel at how well Franzen’s imagination and language translate the interior of a demented brain into something we recognize, a moment when we say, “Yes. That’s exactly how I thought it might be.”

 

science writing

Posted on by
Reply

What genre most compels you to read? What genre have you not yet explored but might like to?

I’m not sure why I became more and more intrigued by science writing. Some instigation came from working at an engineering-heavy university. My attempt to bridge the campus chasm between engineering and liberal arts was to propose an honors seminar called Engineering Words: The Art of Writing Science.

I studied MIT’s graduate program in science writing. I browsed bloggers who wrote for Discover and National Geographic. I chose the reading list.

I admire writers who take complex events or ideas and explain them with a metaphor, analogy, or image that makes plain and clear what previously befuddled. Here’s Lisa Margonelli’s paragraph from Oil on the Brain on how a refinery works:

Refineries are molecular butchers, dissembling crude oil and shaping it into smaller, reusable components. Crude arrives as a stew of hydrocarbon chains — some as short and gassy as methane, which consists of 1 carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms, and some as long and heavily sludgy as the asphaltenes, which can have 150 carbon atoms surrounded by messy scrums of hydrogen atoms. Mixed in you’ll also find sulfur, salts, nitrogen, and metals. A refinery sorts these molecules by size and behavior and then cuts and re-forms as many as possible to make the 3- to 12-carbon molecular variety pack that is gasoline. (50)

Notice how Margonelli captures our attention with the image of a “molecular butcher” and then delineates the chemical components in what could be a stupefying list but which instead informs and delights with phrases like “short and gassy,” “surrounded by messy scrums,” and “molecular variety pack that is gasoline.”

Right now, I’m reading Edward Humes’ Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, and I appreciate how he introduces a novel concept (that we’re addicted to trash) by focusing first on the individual. Humes describes hoarders, and he begins with a recent example from 2010 of an elderly couple. In Chicago, Jesse and Thelma Gaston were rescued from their trash-filled home: “A broken refrigerator lay in the kitchen, half buried and resting on its side, as if buoyed up by the sea of bottles, cans, cartons and sacks engulfing it. No room in the house could be called usable or even safely navigable; the stairs were blocked, the furniture buried, the garage packed floor to ceiling” (2). Humes goes on to say that some experts would like this mental disorder codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as “disposophobia” and then moves on to demonstrate how we have all become hoarders–trash addicts–even if we’re in denial.

In his first chapter, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Humes introduces us to Big Mike, “who has helped build something unprecedented: the Puente Hills landfill, largest active municipal dump in the country” (19). Here’s one paragraph describing this landfill and how it is built:

The football-field-sized plot at the center of activity atop Puente Hills is called a “cell,” not in the prison-block sense, but more akin to the tiny biological unit, many thousands of which are needed to create a single, whole organism. As with living creatures, this cell, titanic as it is, represents a small building block for the modern landfill–the part that grows and reproduces each day. A dozen BOMAGs, bulldozers and graders swarm over this fresh fill every day, backing and turning and mashing and shaping, their warning gongs clanging and engines roaring in a controlled chaos, mammoth bees crawling atop the hive. (20-21)

I am not a scientist. My degree is in comparative literature. But I look to science writers to teach me science, to use language to hold my hand across the disciplinary divides, to make science literacy accessible and desirable. Good science writers read like accomplished novelists, in my book — they tell riveting stories, they offer conflict and rich characters, they practice their craft in clear, organized, and aesthetically memorable ways.

So what genre will you explore? I admit to never having read a western. I think it might be time.

follow your curiosity

Posted on by
Reply

I am fascinated by wind turbines. And I don’t know why.

If I sat down and wrote about wind turbines, I would learn why those spindly, whirling, giant metal beings in wind farms draw me to them.

I would list my questions–there are so many of them. What happens to turbines when a tornado strikes? How far down into the ground do the turbines need to be planted in order for them to stay anchored during bad weather? What keeps the blades attached? Is there an elevator inside the wind turbine shaft? What are the ecological effects of planting a wind farm? Who maintains the things? How much electricity does one wind turbine generate? Who legislates wind farms? What kind of legislation is needed?

That’s a small start. My questions generate more questions. I told you. I’m fascinated.

I can bet that I’d write a kick-ass piece on wind turbines, not because I’d do the research well, but because my curiosity propels me and creates a passionate attention to the subject.

Driving across Texas this past summer with my son, I kept jumping up and down in the passenger seat and pointing out the line of turbines stretching across distant mesas. And I encountered a writing challenge: what metaphor, what simile, what image could I use to describe these beings?

I have finally found that image. I’ll share it when I finish that piece.

Trust your curiosity. Follow your questions. Respect your meandering mind. Your writing muscles will thank you. Your inner child who always asks “Why?” will delight in the play.