Fog Factor

As I have previously mentioned, I recently completed an edX Academic and Business Writing course with Berkeley (here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Part of the course required us to comment on other's posts, so we could get some interaction going. Another student invited me to comment on their introductory post. However, when I looked at it, it seemed like the writer was using a thesaurus to find very flowery words. I found giving constructive feedback hard. I didn't want to rain on their parade... but I did want to help.

Part of what they wrote was:

...on professional grounds I’m typically referred to as chef or would it be appropriative to say that I was referred as chef, as quite recently I quit the job to lay basis for my Masters in Business Studies & Administration which I supposed suited my aptitude a lot better and currently I’m undergoing the process. Now, the reason if to be admeasured, for me joining this particular course, would definitely be the imperative nature of my future career prospects but a more veridical approach to answering this question has a great deal of individualised inclination towards writing in general. Be it a business endeavour proposal writing, academically demanding letter or be it directed towards summarizing a report either for myself or my colleagues, I’ve been deep into indefinite and varied writing ventures of such nature but none appealed to me at par the level I envisage it to be. Thus, I’m here to explore the long concealed dimensions of my writing prospects alongside the quest for a spirited writing facet to ultimately foray onto feature and fantasy writing.

When I read this, I recalled Winston Churchill's approach to writing: pretty much keep it simple, smarty. His writing is used as a yardstick for direct, simple and clear messages. US publisher, Robert Gunning, came up with a measure for this, called the Gunning Fog Index in 1952. There is a site here which has a great tool for scoring our own work. We just enter our writing, click "calculate" and it will give us a total.

It's epic.

The blue paragraph above gets a score of 24.5. Winston's famous speech (4 June 1940), "We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight in the seas and oceans. We shall fight on the beaches, in the fields, in the streets, and in the hills. We shall never surrender" gets a score of 3.5. We should aim to be at 10 or below.

However, it is much harder in academic writing to keep a low fog factor. We can only do our best, and hope our editors don't try to immoderately obfuscate our transparently pellucid missive ;-D.


Sam

References:

• Churchill, W. (4 June 1940). "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech delivered to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Retrieved 4 July 2017 from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
• Gunning Fog Index (n.d.). Gunning Fog Index. Retrieved 6 September 2017 from http://gunning-fog-index.com/
• Sokolik, M. (2017). Academic and Business Writing. Retrieved 6 September 2017 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+ColWri2.2x+2T2017/course/

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Inspiration to write

In undertaking a MOOC recently on academic writing at Berkeley, I was asked by another student on the course how I got the inspiration to keep a blog.

This gave me pause. On reflection, I think I get inspiration from teaching, consulting and because I straddle four fields - management/leadership, business, sport and careers. This means that there is always something to write about. Doing any kind of learning also help me to reflect. I read a lot, as I am researching, and do a lot of writing in the various aspects of my job.

Professional media and news media also helps me to write. As I belong to a few LinkedIn groups, following the discussions often gives me a thread to expand into a post of my own. Sometimes email conversations will give me inspiration.

All those things sparks ideas to write up. Then, because daily I use www.750words.com, I use that platform and task to tease my ideas out more fully. The writing on 750words gets recycled, and the product is posted on my blog, with a image that I create.

Sometimes partial ideas will sit as drafts on my blog for a while before they are polished enough to be posted. I aim to publish three posts a week, but tend to write more than three. This means that I have between four and eight weeks of posts scheduled, depending on how prolific my writing has been.

However, sometimes it is difficult to think of topics! In some cases, what I have done is to dip into one of my teaching slides, and write a post up around it. This will happen when I am busy - overloaded - elsewhere, and this is why I have built up a buffer for these 'dry' writing times. Interestingly, it was Stephen King who taught me that (1998, p. 28):

You see, although I have published a book a year [...], I wrote two books in four of those ten years, publishing one and ratholing the other. I don’t remember ever talking about [...] what I was doing: saving up nuts.

Thanks Mr King. It's a good way to keep up a blog: write when the inspiration is there and save like a squirrel does for winter, eat the savings when food is short :-)


Sam

References:

• King, S. (1998). Bag of Bones. USA: Scribner.
• Sokolik, M. (2017). Academic and Business Writing. Retrieved to August 2017 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+ColWri2.2x+2T2017/course/

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Have you heard of cubing?

As mentioned in previous posts (here and here), I have been taking the edX Academic and Business Writing course with Berkeley. In week four of the course, we were introduced to the idea of cubing. This 'pre-writing' concept is to simply take half an hour to plan a writing project before we start. We spend five minutes brainstorming ideas under each of the cube 'sides' below (excerpted from the course) before we start writing:

1. Describe your topic. What is its shape, size, colour, texture? Does it make any sounds? Does it taste like something? Use all your sense to describe it.
2. Compare your topic to other related topics. How is it similar or different?
3. Associate your topic with another topic. In other words, what does your topic make you think about? It might be something unexpected. Be creative.
4. Analyse the parts of your topic. How do they fit together? What do the parts say about the topic? Are all the parts equally important?
5. Apply your topic. What can you do with it? How is it useful? Who might use it? Who wouldn't use it?
6. Argue for and against your topic. What are its benefits? How might someone disagree with your topic?

I think cubing is quite a good idea for gathering different perspectives. If you are stuck with where to start, it gives you a breathing space to find a logical way in. I particularly like the opposing views perspective of side six: this is a great way to change 'hats'.

Another good tool to add to the writing arsenal.


Sam

• Reference: Sokolik, M. (2017). Academic and Business Writing. Retrieved to August 2017 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+ColWri2.2x+2T2017/course/

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Cutting the fat

Does the idea of editing text to trim the fat make you grind your teeth? Yep, it does me too. However, sometimes when we write we add in lots of redundancy that only a REALLY good prune can fix.

The wonderful thing is that, like a good haircut allows others to really see our face, a good copy-edit allows our message to stand out more clearly.

For example, on the Berkeley course I have been doing, we were asked to copy-edit a piece of writing for clarity. The original piece of writing was 204 words long. I rewrote it to 113 words, and I don't think I lost the meaning in the process.

I looked at compacting phrases, reordering and regrouping ideas to clearly show time progression. I looked at paragraph breaks so ideas were complete on their own. I looked at stripping out redundancy and trying to clarify topics. What I came up with was:

Original: Every single time I had to do a writing assignment, I was always really unhappy and miserable. Due to my complete lack of confidence as well as my total inability to express ideas of mine on paper, I believed that I had to work almost twice as hard as any other student in this world. This included spending hours and hours looking at a blank page and spending more hours editing essays of mine, just to make sure I had really appropriate content, organization, and grammar. Since English was not my first language, I was concerned that I would not do so very well at the university. When I entered the class offered by College Writing, everything changed in a positive way due to the fact that my writing skills increased throughout the semester. In the beginning of the semester, I had a lot of trouble with my first couple of essays; however, with careful analysis, patience, and my will to succeed, I started to write essays that I was quite proud of. I learned that if I could relate any topic of any essay with my personal experience, I believed that these essays were truly good, and would submit it to my instructor. 204 words

Copy-edited: I was unhappy with my past writing assignments, due to a lack of confidence and an inability to clearly express ideas, resulting in spending hours looking at a blank page. I felt I worked twice as hard as others, editing for hours to ensure appropriate content, organization, and grammar. Since English was not my first language, I was concerned that I would fail at university, but the College Writing class increased my writing skills. Initially, I had trouble; however, I learned to relate essay topics to my personal experience which helped me reach submission standard. With careful analysis, patience, and my will to succeed, I started to write essays to be proud of. 113 words

Feedback on what I came up with, and what I missed, would be great!


Sam

• Reference: Sokolik, M. (2017). Academic and Business Writing. Retrieved to August 2017 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+ColWri2.2x+2T2017/course/

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A Game of Twenty Questions

As mentioned in previous posts (here, here and here), I have been taking the edX Academic and Business Writing course with Berkeley. In week four of the course, we were introduced to the idea of using the game of twenty questions to interrogate our own ideas. There was a list of questions provided on the course which was quite useful:

1. What is your full name? Do some people know you by a different name?
2. How does the dictionary or encyclopaedia define you?
3. When were you born? What were the circumstances?
4. Are you still alive? If not, how did you come to an end?
5. What group do you belong to? How are you like others in your group?
6. Can you be divided into parts? How?
7. Were you different in the past? How?
8. Will you be different in the future? How?
9. Do you ever feel misunderstood?
10. What is your purpose?
11. What are you similar to? Why do you say that?
12. What are you different from? Why do you say that?
13. What or whom are you better than? In what ways?
14. What or whom are you inferior to? In what ways?
15. When people talk about you, what do they say?
16. Should I know any facts or statistics about you?
17. Is there someone I should talk to about you--an expert, for example?
18. Are there any famous sayings or quotes about you?
19. Have there been any stories about you in the news?
20. Should I do more research about you?

Again, this is a clever technique that helps us to start thinking about our subject in different ways. Like the other tools I have written about from the course, this too will help us to view what we are exploring from new angles.

I like it.


Sam

• Reference: Sokolik, M. (2017). Academic and Business Writing. Retrieved to August 2017 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+ColWri2.2x+2T2017/course/

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Marginalising Marginalia

As mentioned in a previous post (here), I have been taking the edX Academic and Business Writing course with Berkeley. In week three of the course, we were asked to read an article, and provide the following: determine the article's main idea; outline our opinion of the piece and our understanding; detail anything we didn't agree with; say whether we took notes; and whether our note-taking fitted with the article.

The article was a NY Times piece, entitled "What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text", by Sam Anderson, from 2011. Anderson tells us his story of why marginalia - ie, making margin notes on books - is important for his own reading comprehension. However, I felt there was a subtext proposing that marginalia is a key interaction by a reader with a book’s author to develop a conversation which expands the reader’s understanding of the work. There is also a flavour of “if you do not write marginalia, you are not really reading properly”. Sounded a bit arrogant.

Marginalia itself sounds like a disease. Perhaps it is: a disease that destroys the pristine mind creation that an author has privileged us with. A sacrilege of the printed page. And what was that title - Someone Rolling Around in the Text - about? Did it mean "I want to behave like a dog and roll in another animal's faeces so that I can hunt it and eat it up"? Odd.

While I understand perfectly what Anderson was saying, I found myself unable to agree with his position (2011). All my writing and reading is now electronic, and I do not annotate my ebooks or audiobooks. Nor did I annotate my hardcopy books when I used to read those. It seems to me to cross a boundary that should not be crossed: there can be no conversation, because the author has no right of reply.

When I read now, I transcribe what I consider to be 'telling' sentences into a separate document, or simply copy them to a clipboard app. Then, if the piece has been meaningful enough, I will collect those items and organise them by writing a blog post about them or by citing or using them in academic work. I do not feel the need to attach my comments alongside those of an original author. Hitching my opinion to those of the author, post-creation, would contain an underlying smack of ego in my view.

As a result, I did not take notes on the article we were set, but developed an argument mentally, dipping back in and out of the article, before formalising my thoughts in writing a response as I went. That response turned into a blog post.

Marginalia is not for me.


Sam

References:

• Anderson, S. (2011). 'What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text'. Retrieved 4 August 2017 from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06Riff-t.html
• Sokolik, M. (2017). Academic and Business Writing. Retrieved to August 2017 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+ColWri2.2x+2T2017/course/

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Email: the King of Communication?

A few years ago, I had an aunt who was suffering from terminal cancer. I used to write to her every three weeks. While she was unable to reply, my cousin told me that she very much enjoyed having my letters read to her. What this led to, after my aunt's death, was the establishment of a family blog which I still write monthly. I use email to send out a link to all my family members. I built the writing habit in letter form, then found a new channel to deliver it to my various audiences.

My writing has expanded to a business blog, a private blog and academic writing. However, my most common form of enjoyable communication is actually email. Email allows me to communicate with anybody, anywhere, instantaneously. It can also be seductive. The smart phone revolution has allowed me to hear that little "ping" that says I have had a reply, and be drawn to checking my email out of hours. So pervasive is a temptation to do work out of office hours, that countries like Brazil have legislated that, if our organisations require us to have a smart phones always on, then they must pay us for any work done out of hours.

Email as a form of writing is not something that I normally think deeply about. However, an assignment on edX's MOOC, "Academic and Business Writing", asked us to "How do you think email has affected communication? Do you hate it? Love it? Explain your response." I was quite surprised with the ideas this sparked.

Because you see, I love email. I largely communicate using email. I like that I can write as much or as little as is necessary, I can add photos, I can draw diagrams, I can attach files, link videos or podcasts. I can schedule follow-up as a task, and I can drop the contents of an email into an appointment. Each email gives me a full record of exactly what has been said, by whom, and when.

Over time, I have come to dislike the phone. We have very bad cellphone reception where we live, meaning that calls often go straight to my message service, and messages are delayed. Further, there is no record of what was said on the phone, and when you're very busy it is easy to lose track of the things you need to get done. Even worse, you get double glazing sales people calling you at dinnertime.

The same is largely true of texts. Due the paucity of our reception, receiving and answering text messages is also slow, untimely, and limited. Often messages are being sent by people I don't really want to hear from, such as my telecommunications company, telling me about an email they have just sent!

But emails I will answer as they come in. I think it is the fact that I have a complete trail of all my work conversations in one place that makes it attractive; and also that any unread mail forms a task list still to be tackled. But I still need to be aware of Brazil's stance. Email should simply help us do our work. It should not overburden us, nor should we allow it to.

For me, email is still the king of communication :-)


Sam

• Reference: Sokolik, M. (2017). Academic and Business Writing. Retrieved to August 2017 from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+ColWri2.2x+2T2017/course/

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