Sunday, September 30, 2007

Presentation Tip: Talk to Your Audience

Adapted from wilder presentations

Inexperienced presenters, and some experienced ones, often have difficulty actually looking at their audience.

This may partly be due to nerves—If I pretend they’re not there, I won’t be nervous—or staring at notes and slides may be a sign of inadequate preparation.

Some presenters rarely look at anyone for longer than one second, instead spending most of the time looking at the slide and talking to it. This is especially true when there are many diagrams and charts to explain. Rather than point to the information and look at the audience, the presenter points at the information on the screen and looks at it while talking.

But if we are there to talk, we should talk to someone.

I guarantee that when you look at each person in the audience for the count of 3, you will look twice as confident. You'll actually appear to know your subject and want to share it with your audience. This is one of the most important skills of professional presenters. You may think you already do this, but it’s doubtful.

How do you find out whether you maintain eye contact? The next time you give a talk, ask a colleague in the audience to time how long you look at a person. The colleague counts 1-2-3 and observes whether you look at any one person for the count of 3. Then your colleague gives you the feedback after the session.

To be a successful presenter, you must actually talk to a person, not just speak. You can train yourself by practicing with two colleagues. Talk to each one. He or she will give you a nod when you have talked for the count of 1-2-3 while really looking at them for the whole time. Darting eyes back and forth like a hungry iguana do not count. You will improve your poise and presence in front of an audience by 100% when you start to speak to each person.

With a large audience of 80 or more, it is the same. Pick one person to speak to at a time. All the people around that person will experience you speaking to them.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Writing for Style: Once More to the Lake 3

If you've been following the last three posts, you'll know that we are tracing the evolution of a profound and moving essay in the hands of a great writer. Starting with a school assignment, What I did on my summer vacation, E.B. White reforms and polishes. Here is his final draft, example courtesy of Richard Nordquist.

Final Revision: "Once More to the Lake" (1941)

White made the return journey in 1936 on his own, in part to commemorate his parents, both of whom had recently died. When he next made the trip to Belgrade Lake, in 1941, he took along his son Joel. White recorded that experience in what has become one of the best known and most frequently anthologized essays of the past century, "Once More to the Lake":

We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water. It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years. The small waves were the same, chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same color green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floor-boards the same fresh-water leavings and debris--the dead hellgrammite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday's catch. We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and went. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod. There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly and the other one--the one that was part of memory...

After breakfast we would go up to the store and the things were in the same place--the minnows in a bottle, the plugs and spinners disarranged and pawed over by the youngsters from the boys' camp, the fig newtons and the Beeman's gum. Outside, the road was tarred and cars stood in front of the store. Inside, all was just as it had always been, except there was more Coca Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and sarsaparilla. We would walk out with a bottle of pop apiece and sometimes the pop would backfire up our noses and hurt. We explored the streams, quietly, where the turtles slid off the sunny logs and dug their way into the soft bottom; and we lay on the town wharf and fed worms to the tame bass. Everywhere we went I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.

(One Man's Meat, Tilbury House Publishers, 1997)

Details from White's 1936 letter reappear in his 1941 essay: damp moss, birch beer, the smell of lumber, the sound of outboard motors. In his letter White insisted that "things don't change much," and in his essay we hear the refrain, "There had been no years." But in both texts we sense that the author was working hard to sustain an illusion. A joke may be "deathless," the lake may be "fade-proof," and summer may be "without end." Yet as White makes clear in the concluding image of "Once More to the Lake," only the pattern of life is "indelible":

When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

To spend almost 30 years composing an essay is exceptional. But then, you have to admit, so is "Once More to the Lake." Postscript (1981)

According to Scott Elledge in E.B. White: A Biography, on July 11, 1981, to celebrate his eighty-first birthday, White lashed a canoe to the top of his car and drove to "the same Belgrade lake where, seventy years before, he had received a green old town canoe from his father, a gift for his eleventh birthday."

Monday, September 24, 2007

Writing for Style: Once More to the Lake 2

We are tracing the evolution of a profound and moving essay in the hands of a great writer. Starting with a school assignment, What I did on my summer vacation, E.B. White reforms and polishes. Here is his second draft, example courtesy of Richard Nordquist.

Second Draft: Letter to Stanley Hart White (1936)

In the summer of 1936, E. B. White, by then a popular writer for The New Yorker magazine, made a return visit to this childhood vacation spot. While there, he wrote a long letter to his brother Stanley, vividly describing the sights, sounds, and smells of the lake.

I returned to Belgrade. Things haven't changed much. There's a train called the Bar Harbor Express, and Portland is foggy early in the morning, and the Pullman blankets are brown and thin and cold. But when you look out of the window in the diner, steam is rising from the pastures and the sun is out, and pretty soon the train is skirting a blue lake called Messalonksi. Things don't change much. . .

The lake hangs clear and still at dawn, and the sound of a cowbell comes softly from a faraway woodlot. In the shallows along shore the pebbles and driftwood show clear and smooth on bottom, and black water bugs dart, spreading a wake and a shadow. A fish rises quickly in the lily pads with a little plop, and a broad ring widens to eternity. The water in the basin is icy before breakfast, and cuts sharply into your nose and ears and makes your face blue as you wash. But the boards of the dock are already hot in the sun, and there are doughnuts for breakfast and the smell is there, the faintly rancid smell that hangs around Maine kitchens. Sometimes there is little wind all day, and on still hot afternoons the sound of a motorboat comes drifting five miles from the other shore, and the droning lake becomes articulate, like a hot field. A crow calls, fearfully and far. If a night breeze springs up, you are aware of a restless noise along the shore, and for a few minutes before you fall asleep you hear the intimate talk between fresh-water waves and rocks that lie below bending birches. The insides of your camp are hung with pictures cut from magazines, and the camp smells of lumber and damp. Things don't change much. . .

Over at the Mills there's a frog box, sunk half in the water. People come there in boats and buy bait. You buy a drink of Birch Beer at Bean's tackle store. Big bass swim lazily in the deep water at the end of the wharf, well fed. Long lean guide boats kick white water in the stern till they suck under. There are still one-cylinder engines that don't go. Maybe it's the needle valve. . .

Yes, sir, I returned to Belgrade, and things don't change much. I thought somebody ought to know.

(Letters of E.B. White, edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth, Harper & Row, 1976)

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Writing for Style: Once More to the Lake 1

In my first class at Queen’s School of Business I found myself once again trying to explain how to be a good writer.

This Commerce program requires a high school average of 90 out of 100 to be even considered for acceptance, so the students are generally high-school stars. Here, half are below average but none believe me when I tell them that.

Most students expect to figure out how much time an assignment takes, crash straight through it and hand it in. That method will not work for writing at this level. I usually end up comparing writing to French polishing a table; you don’t apply 10 coats of varnish at once. Each coat is applied, sanded, and polished before another goes on.

So it is with writing. A quarter of the time spent thinking about it, a quarter of the time researching and writing the first draft, and half the time on at least three revisions. That’s the only way I know to write well.

The most uninspired composition topic of all time has to be "How I Spent My Summer Vacation." Still, it's remarkable what a master writer can do with such a dull subject--though it may take a bit longer than usual to complete the assignment. This example is courtesy of Richard Nordquist.

First Draft: Pamphlet on Belgrade Lake (1914)

Back in 1914, shortly before his 15th birthday, Elwyn White responded to this familiar topic with uncommon enthusiasm. It was a subject the boy knew well and an experience that he fiercely enjoyed. Every August for the past decade, White's father had taken the family to the same camp on Belgrade Lake in Maine. In a self-designed pamphlet, complete with sketches and photos, young Elwyn began his report clearly and conventionally: Maine is one of the most beautiful states in the Union, and Belgrade is one of the most beautiful of the lakes of Maine.

This wonderful lake is five miles wide, and about ten miles long, with many coves, points and islands. It is one of a series of lakes, which are connected with each other by little streams. One of these streams is several miles long and deep enough so that it affords an opportunity for a fine all-day canoe trip. . .

The lake is large enough to make the conditions ideal for all kinds of small boats. The bathing also is a feature, for the days grow very warm at noon time and make a good swim feel fine.

(Scott Elledge, E.B. White: A Biography, Norton, 1984)

Stay tuned to see how this remarkable writer creates a startling and touching essay on mortality.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Writing for Style: The Golden Bulls

The British Golden Bull is given by the Plain English Campaign for pompous, opaque prose that fails to communicate clearly.

Here are last year's winners:

A Letter from the Crafts Council of Ireland

"The re-writing of the vocabulary of intemporal Irish heritage is a possible vector for submissions on the condition that this transposition is resolutely anchored in the 21st century through a contemporary lens that absolutely avoids drifting into the vernacular."

A Notice from the Eastleigh Borough Council

"Hereby in accordance with the provision of the Building Act 1984, Section 32 declares that the said plans shall be of no effect and accordingly the said Act and the said Building Regulations shall as respects the proposed work have effect as if no plan had been deposited."

A Job Advertisement for Wheale, Thomas, Hodgins plc

"Our client is a pan-European start-up leveraging current cutting edge I.P. (already specified) with an outstanding product/value solutions set. It is literally the right product, in the right place at the right time . . . by linking high-value disparate legacy systems to achieve connectivity between strategic partners/acquisition targets and/or disparate corporate divisions. The opportunity exists to be the same (i.e. right person etc. etc) in a growth-opportunity funded by private equity capital that hits the 'sweet-spot' in major cost driven European markets."

If you have a sample (someone else’s writing of course) you would like to submit, send it to info@plainenglish.co.uk

The deadline is September 30.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Writing for Style: Let Us Now Praise Editors 4

By Gary Kamiya at Salon.

It's good fun now and then to tear apart a piece and put it back together on a short deadline. Your brain is humming like a Ferrari, you've got sections marked A and B and Z and arrows going everywhere; you're rewriting the lede, racing through tricky transitions, doing some fast spot-reporting, getting rid of clunkers from every graf, and pulling together this whole 4,000-word piece in six hours. When you're done, you emerge from your office with smoke pouring from your ears. You've earned your salary and you pour yourself a well-deserved drink. You won't get any fame and glory but as an editor you don't expect any.

Some writers and editors work like this all the time. If a great reporter who can't write has a killer line editor, and they have a good rapport, it's much more efficient to work this way than to make the reporter agonize over how he's going to modulate his conclusion and the editor tiptoe around him. Not every reporter has to be a great writer. Conversely, some people who are good at moving other people's words couldn't pick up a phone, or write a piece themselves, if their life depended on it. This is why in the old days newspapers had "legmen" and "rewrite men." Sometimes I think it might not be a bad idea to bring them back.

The worst-case scenario for an editor is dealing with a writer who by talent should be a legman but who has somehow gone through his career remaining blissfully unaware of this fact. And, I suspect, some writers are aware, but like cunning parasites that attach themselves to larger animals, they ride through their careers clinging to their long-suffering editors. Years ago, I was handed a piece that was written in some unknown language, between Esperanto and pig Latin. Seizing my Rosetta stone, I descended into the foul-smelling cave and emerged hours later, having successfully translated the cryptic runes. Imagine my surprise when I later learned that the writer had used "his" piece to get a job at a good magazine. All I could do was laugh and say a little prayer for whoever would be editing him.

In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn't intended to last.

Still, editors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It's also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent -- and perhaps more training -- will be required.

We already use other readers to sort things out for us: My bookmarks are mostly referrals from writers I've learned to trust. Some utopians may dream that an anarcho-Wikipedia model will prevail, that a vast self-correcting democracy of amateurs will end up pointing readers to the most worthwhile pieces. But that is only "editing" in its crudest, most general form -- it's really sorting. In the chaotic new online universe, the old-fashioned, elitist, non-democratic system of sorting information will become increasingly important, if only because it enforces a salutary reduction of the sheer mind-swamping number of options available. The real problem is glut, and it's only going to get worse.

In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day -- and it's this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It's edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don't want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can't breathe or think.

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

So here's to you, editors, whose names never appear on an article, who are unknown except to their peers and to the writers who owe you so much. Keep fitting those delicate pieces of wood together. Use the skill it took you years to acquire. Don't give up and just slap the thing together. Make it light and tight and strong so that it sings. Someone is noticing. Someone is reading. Someone cares.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Writing for Style: Let Us Now Praise Editors 3

By Gary Kamiya from Salon

In an odd way, the exchange between writer and editor encapsulates the process of growing up. The act of writing is godlike, omnipotent, infantile. Your piece is a statement delivered from on high, a pronouncement ex cathedra, as egotistical and unchecked as the wail of a baby. Then it goes out into the world, to an editor, and the reality principle rears its ugly head. You are forced as a writer to come to terms with the gap between your idea and your execution -- and still more deflating, between your idea and what your idea should have been.

This isn't easy. You have to let go of your attachment to the specific words you've written and open yourself to what you were aiming for. You need enough confidence in yourself to accept constructive criticism, some of which can feel like your internal organs are being more or less gently moved around. More than just about any other non-artistic activity -- therapy and, yes, sex are possible exceptions -- being edited forces you to see yourself, or at least what you've written, the way others see you. It is a depersonalizing process in some ways, yet having to stand outside yourself deepens you as a person. You need to grow a thick skin in order to have a thinner, more sensitive one.

The good news is that you're not (yet) throwing yourself on the not-so-tender mercies of the readers, but putting yourself in the hands of a smart, sympathetic reader who only wants to clean up your dangling participles, remove your factually incorrect assertions, and turn your Rod McKuen-like treacle into something fit for public consumption. At a certain point, most writers realize this and come to truly value their editors. (Some authors, weary of what they see as a serious decline in the quality of editing in book publishing, go so far as to hire their own editors.) That doesn't mean that the relationship isn't capable of going wrong, or that a writer doesn't inwardly pop a bottle of champagne on those occasions when an editor sends a draft back with next to no changes.

Actually, some writers -- especially old-school reporters -- come to rely on editors too much. Every editor has had the experience of being the recipient of the dread "notebook dump," in which the disjointed, undigested contents of a month's reporting are dumped from a notebook onto the page. At this moment, the editor has to rip off his meek Clark Kent disguise and reveal himself as a writer or, more accurately, a rewriter. (Rewriting someone else's prose, no matter how convoluted or illogical, is never as hard as writing your own. It's still more like knitting or doing a jigsaw puzzle than inventing something.) It isn't just notebook dumps that require massive rewriting, either -- sometimes even good pieces by good writers go off the tracks in really weird ways, and an editor gets called in to clean up the mess, like Mr. Wolf in "Pulp Fiction."

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Writing for Style: Let Us Now Praise Editors 2

By Gary Kamiya from Salon

Good editors work with and not against a writer. They calibrate how aggressively they edit according to how good the writer is, how good the piece is, the type of piece it is, the kind of relationship they have with the writer, how tight the deadline is, and what mood they're in.

But an editor's primary responsibility is not to the writer but to the reader. He or she must be ruthlessly dedicated to making the piece stronger. Since this is ultimately a subjective judgment, and quite a tricky one, a good editor needs to be as self-confident as a writer.

Most good editors are tactful in communicating with their writers. Bedside manner is important. It isn't so much that writers are sensitive plants -- some are, some aren't -- as that there is a fundamental difference in what each party brings to the table. An editor needs to remember that writing is much harder work than editing. Sending something you've written off into the world exposes you, leaves you vulnerable. It is a creative process, while editing is merely a reactive one.

Of course, some writers are more vulnerable than others. Daily news reporters tend to be like old suits of armor, so dented and dinged by years of combat that they are impervious. When I was an editor at a daily newspaper, I worked with some reporters who had been so ground down by impossible deadlines, column-inch restrictions, and that soul-destroying newspaper specialty of cutting pieces from the bottom that you could replace every adjective in their stories with a different one and they would just shrug.

I've also worked with writers who have reacted to my gentle suggestion that one of their precious, ungrammatical commas might perhaps be removed as if I'd insisted that Maria Callas perform "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" as the final aria in Bellini's "Norma."

Like a savvy football coach, an editor learns which players need the stick and which the carrot. Most writers understand that their editor is not a half-literate, envious wannabe who takes perverse joy in mangling their prose, but a professional who is paid to make their work better.

Still, the moment when you -- and now I -- open the e-mail your editor has sent you in response to your story is always fraught with anxiety. You've exposed your soul, or at least part of your brain, to another person. What will they do with it? The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit. And learning how to be edited teaches you a lot about writing, about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Writing for Style: Let Us Now Praise Editors 1

They may be invisible and their art unsung. But in the age of blogging, editors are needed more than ever.

By Gary Kamiya from Salon Jul. 24, 2007

I've wanted to write about editors and editing for years, but since I was one of that invisible tribe myself until a year ago, it felt unseemly. But now that I have switched full time to the other side of the desk, I can gush without stint. [That's what you think, bub -- Ed.]

To people not in the business, editing is a mysterious thing. (Actually, it's mysterious to most bloggers, who despite having been in existence for less than 10 years, probably outnumber every writer who ever wrote. But more on them later.)

Many times over the past 20 years, people have asked me, "What exactly does an editor do?" It's not an easy question to answer. Editors are craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons -- sometimes all while working on the same piece.

Early in my editing career I was startled when, after we had finished an edit, a crusty, hard-bitten culture writer, a woman at least twice my age, told me, "That was great -- better than sex!" I make no such exalted claims, but there's no doubt the editing process can be an intimate and gratifying experience for both parties. Although, to pursue our somewhat dubious metaphor, there are also times when writer and editor, instead of lying back and enjoying a soothing post-fact-check cigarette, stare emptily at the ceiling and vow never to share verb tenses with anyone again.

When an editor's lucky, the piece comes in chiseled in immortal Carrara marble, every semicolon in place, ready to be wheeled into the Uffizi Gallery -- that is, straight to publication. (A very rare event.) A good editor knows when to leave a piece alone. Practically every writer has had the unfortunate experience of crossing paths with editors -- often inexperienced ones -- who feel the need to do something, just to show they're doing their job.

This is almost as frustrating as the too-many-editors problem, in which a piece bounces from a senior editor to the managing editor to the executive editor, each of whom gives contradictory instructions, and finally ends up in the hands of the editor in chief, who after Olympian reflection pronounces that it was better the way it was when it started. It is experiences like these that lead writers to engage in one of their favorite pastimes: bitching and moaning about the lameness of editors.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

PR Attacks on Wikipedia

O.K. So I haven't been very diligent adding to this blog lately. Mea culpa. No great excuses, except that I've been busy getting my courses at Queen's University off to a good start.

You may have heard about the attacks on Wikipedia lately - corporations hiring PR firms to change the entries about them for the better. You can find out more at the links below. Just another reminder that words can mis inform and mislead as well.


Be A Citizen Journalist

a project of the Center for Media & Democracy

Featured Participatory Project: Help Expose the Attempts to Spin Wikipedia (Week 2)
Source: SourceWatch Project on Tracking Attempts to Spin Wikipedia

Last week we started a new participatory project to expose the government agencies, corporations and lobbying groups that have been censoring, whitewashing or otherwise spinning Wikipedia. (See CMD Senior Researcher Diane Farsetta's great blog post for some background on this sordid tale.) So far we've logged several attempts at spin into the respective SourceWatch profiles, including:

The information here is obviously very important and, thanks to SourceWatch's high rankings in Google searches, easily accessible to citizens, journalists and policymakers checking out the record of these politically active and high social-impact organizations. There are many dastardly edits left, however, and we need your help to make sure they aren't lost to history. There's no need for technical expertise, just head over to the SourceWatch page for the project, where there are complete instructions, examples and an email hotline for support.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Presentation Tip: Storyboard Your Titles

From Wilder’s Presentations

You have decided on your talk's objective. Now you have to create the headlines that go with it.

The easiest way is to write the titles to each section or each slide before you put in the details. You now have the top-level overview. Put in only the information that fits with these titles and key points.

For example, here are six title slides from a 20-minute web presentation for the National Investor Relations Institute.

Presentation title: Preparing and Delivering Tips
Subtitle: Convincing and Charismatic Investor Presentations

Slide titles:
  • Script/Slide Ideas to Save Time
  • Bring Out Your Passion
  • Prepare Your Group for Questions
  • Stop Talking When You Are Ahead
  • Breeze Through Tough Questions
  • The TANGO of Investor Relations: Follow and lead in the "dance"

When you storyboard your titles before making the slides, it will be easier to decide which charts to include and which to leave out. Spend the time up front so you save time in actual slide creation.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Writing For Fun: How I Met My Wife 2

Here's the rest of Jack Winter's satire on English prefixes that usually turn a word into the opposite meaning: un, dis, non, etc.

How I Met My Wife, Jack Winter, The New Yorker, July 25, 1994.

So I decided not to risk it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make head or tails of.

I was plussed. It was concerting to see that she was communicado, and it nerved me that she was interested in a pareil like me, sight seen. Normally, I had a domitable spirit, but, being corrigible, I felt capacitated—as if this were something I was great shakes at—and forgot that I had succeeded in situations like this only a told number of times. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings.

Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had not time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. Wanting to make only called-for remarks, I started talking about the hors d’oeuvres, trying to abuse her of the notion that I was sipid, and perhaps even bunk a few myths about myselfs.

She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savoury character who was up to some good. She told me who she was. “What a perfect nomer,” I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.