Multiple Cites Don't Make a Right

My psychology paper was finished. The data was supported and the conclusions were valid, yet my paper remained woefully incomplete. I still hadn’t tackled an antiquated requirement of modern education– I hadn’t formatted my sources.

So yet again I ended up spending hours of what could have productive editing time on Purdue’s website, looking again at where those stupid parentheses go in APA format, and where exactly the italics segment ended. (I must not have done it right even then, since I got points taken off later for inappropriately italicizing the commas.)

Maybe right now you're thinking of citation machines. Well, they've never served me much better. The act of putting each piece of “vital” information in its specified box is almost as bad as simply following the citation procedures online.

Writing professor Kurt Schick reflects my frustration in his impassioned Chronicle of Higher Education essay titled “Citation Obsession? Get Over It!” Schick argues that students’ writing should not be judged based upon their ability to flawlessly place periods and italics. The prose, content, and style of their work should be the most essential facets of evaluation, yet more often than not, these elements somehow takes a back seat to how well students can format the copyright information of the materials they used for research.

Half of my Psychology labs were wasted on exactly how to write a paper in APA style. My exam even had a section in which we were asked to recite the exact format for a journal citation. Major portions of as much of a third of my essay grades are based on citations in classes ranging from Understanding Music to Business 1.0.

Writing these essays require tremendous investments of time and intellect, yet worrying about the punctuation of copyright information is in no way intellectual or useful. I have no quarrel with acknowledging my sources or even with citations in general; I just wonder why my life and the lives of most other college students have come to revolve around formatting, instead of insight.

--Swan (guest blogger & undergrad Kogod student)

Perry Lives Every Public Speaker's Nightmare

Rick Perry’s debate gaffe last night is every public speaker’s nightmare: what do you do when what you want to say flies out of your head faster than the post-Halloween candy stash disappears?

I tell my students that at times of panic, to pause, breathe, and ask yourself “What am I trying to communicate with this audience?”

The word “communicate,” with its connotations of civility and collaboration, always calms me down. So, after a pause which always seems longer to me than it does to the audience, what comes out of my mouth is, “I guess what I’m trying to communicate is such-and-such…” I find my brain perks up and the words come tumbling out.

If Perry had followed my approach, he might have been able to say, “Well, the third agency will come to me in a moment. The bigger point I’m trying to communicate here is that we need to eliminate wasteful government agencies.”

That wouldn’t have been a total save, but it would have kept the debate moving forward. Memory experts tell us that thinking about something else is the way to remember something, not staying frozen on the missing thought, especially while millions of Americans are watching with varying degrees of empathetic discomfort, hostile delight, or some combination of both.

One thing Perry did right was to forthrightly acknowledge his mistake: “Good thing I had my boots on, because I stepped in something deep just then,” he said, according to the New York Times.

It’s cold comfort for Rick Perry, but anxious public speakers should also keep in mind that this latest slip-up comes on top of a series of misstatements and foot-in-mouth moments.

Ultimately it’s the cumulative effect of poor speaking abilities that is turning off potential Perry supporters—not this one lone gaffe.

Be Careful What You Market For

When two Domino workers filmed a prank video at work, nobody was laughing. Less so themselves, when they ended up unemployed and facing felony charges for distribution of prohibited foods.

In the video (broadcast on the Today Show back in 2009), the two employees are in the kitchen of a Domino's restaurant, preparing food. One of them puts cheese up his nose and sneezes on a meal. Their antics go on as they get more creative with illegal kitchen practices and scatological humor.

The pair then posted the video on YouTube. Soon after, the blogosphere caught on and posts of the video cropped up like garden weeds on a rage. Two blog readers even sleuthed out the location of the Domino's restaurant of honor (North Carolina). 

Like rapidfire, the video attracted thousands of viewers, and Domino rushed to palliate the publicity disaster that inevitably ensued. News of the video spread to Twitter, and though the culprits tried to take down the video from YouTube, the video-sharing community persevered valorously: the video was reposted by other users.

This, and Rebecca Black (more than 84 million viewers and escalating), are one of many examples of viral going very big and very bad.

A Simple Kind of Magic

When Rita Skeeter coerced Harry Potter into a broom closet and forced him to spill his wizarding guts, little did she know that Livescribe’s Smartpen could have given her magic quill a serious run for her Gallions.

If you’re more of a Lord of the Rings devotee, I’m talking about the magic quill that Rita Skeeter dictated into. With a life of its own, the ebullient quill would absorb what the interviewees said and pour out fully fledged sentences.

In the real world, Livescribe created the SmartPen. This regular-looking pen comes with special paper. At the bottom of the paper, tap the word ‘Record’ with the pen’s tip. Next, write and speak at the same time. Solving a math problem? Utter your thinking process. Interviewing an AUSG candidate? Take brief notes and let her talk all she wants. Finally, tap the stop symbol at the bottom of the paper.

The SmartPen allows you to tap onto any word you’ve written and listen to the playback of what you were saying at the time of writing that word. What’s more, with its embedded camera, it lets you upload the notes and recordings onto your computer. On your screen, click on whatever note you want to revive, and watch as it gets animated before you. Magic.

The SmartPen is your memory storage outside your brain. It combines the archaic necessity of penning our thoughts—I’m thinking caves and walls—with the utility of audio tracing. Used right, it’ll help you take less vigorous notes, that are backed by the storage of exactly what you were thinking, rather than the elaborate coding I find in my notebooks long after I forget my meaning. From my Anthro class:

key distinguishes joking manner not from serious manner

secondary text needs to be framed as not misconceived as the primary text and cause butt offence

I no longer recall what I meant by ‘butt.’

The New York Times tells us, “A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/education/05tablets.html)

Stanford professor, Larry Cuban however points out: “There is very little evidence that kids learn more, faster or better by using these machines.”

Tablets are novel because they are multi-functional. Being multi-functional is also what makes them forces of distributed focus.

Since the iPad can do things your brain can’t (like access the web), it sometimes feels like your own brain is not doing the doing. But in education, no tricks or artifice should replace a learner’s mental work-out.

There’s also a cognitive distance when we use a not-there keyboard  that somehow the pen in your fingers does not engender. Perhaps our traditional form of note-taking has been hard-wired into us evolutionarily.

So why not keep the $750 per iPad and invest instead in things like the SmartPen? It blends the agility of new, clever gadgets with the promise of old habits.

Generation BM (as in, Business Model)

When Zach Allaun, BSBA '13, and Jorge Espinoza, SOC '11 won the Brigham Young University business model competition, naturally I had to corner Zach and ask him for input about presentation and communication brilliance. Turns out, Zach’s largesse with such input is considerable, and you can now hear the many useful things he has to say at http://vimeo.com/19668109 and http://vimeo.com/19668189.

For the BYU competition, contestants had to outline  the concepts and metrics that lead them to an innovative product. For Zach and Jorge, this product is Gamegnat, a gaming site that will—with the blessing of the $15000 award—expedite and sharpen the way gamers look for gaming reviews.

In the preliminary round of the competition, Zach and Jorge sent in a video presentation. In the final round, however, they presented live before Brigham students and a panel of judges. That comparison helped them see what’s ‘special’ about presenting before a live audience of 500. ‘We wanted to do something different. It’s not trying to get as much information in ten minutes. In a video, people can go back, they can rewind to better understand the material. In a live presentation, there’s no rewinding.’

Indeed, examing that difference between the cryogenically frozen (video, or text) and the organic (live) may help you understand the role of your presentation. What are the dynamics of a real spatial and temporal relationship, between speaker and audience, that you can use to your advantage?

That’s how the pair came up with the winning presentation: one that followed a narrative arc of sorts, that told the story like a story, with chronological ‘plot’ development and a lead-up to a ‘morale.’ And Prezi helped them narrate.

‘Prezi…set us apart. Because we used Prezi,  everything [was] animated.’ They used bubbles to represent their various ideas. ‘It was kinda silly and cheesy but we were able to create a very clear "We’re moving on to the next point"…a clear delineation between step 1, step 2, step 3.  Our presentation was completely different.'

Chronology and clarity then. What about characters?

‘Did you bring Jorge and yourself into the story?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, we did,’ Zach said with a smile. ‘Our presentation had quotes for things we were saying [while brainstorming for the product]. Little things like that.’

Zach and Jorge enriched the story with a personal touch and a strong visual (of themselves as the out-loud thinkers of the process). Rather than saying, ‘This was done,’ they said ‘We did this.’ Just like active verbs (instead of passive) can give a story vigor, so can “characters” sometimes give your presentation a stronger voice.

Would he recommend the narrative-arc presentation? Certainly, ‘if you’re in a competition that’s similar in nature. We identified early on that this competition was gonna be about input rather than output.’

What about Q&A? This is arguably the most difficult thing about comps. Luckily, Zach and Jorge both have debate backgrounds that trained them in rapid-fire speech and responsivity to the unexpected.  ‘This is where we shone above. We were [good] on our feet.’ 

‘The biggest thing is confidence,' he adds, 'even if you’re saying something you’ve never thought of before. Saying “I don’t know” and being confident in not knowing the answer to a question is better than being unconfident.’

By the way, you may want to check out the two books that gave fodder to Zach and Jorge’s business model trope: The Four Steps to the Epiphany, by Steven Blank,  talks about startup success, and The Business Model Generation, by Alexander Osterwalder, lays out the 9 quintessentials building blocks of a business. Zach, indeed, seems to be part of this very Generation. He emailed me the next day with some closing tips for presenters. In true entrpereneurial form:

The presentation that wins in a competition is likely going to be the presentation that stands out from the crowd…The ultimate winner will be the team that the judges remember. A safe and conservative presentation that breaks no boundaries will only give you a shot at beating the other safe and conservative presentations, because there will always be at least one team that tries something different, and that's who people will remember, good or bad.

All else held equal, the guy who spoke too fast and stumbled over his words because he was so excited about what he was saying will beat out the guy who gives a textbook delivery. Textbook deliveries are commonplace in these kinds of competitions. True passion, however, is not.

I Challenge You to Do Nothing for 2 Minutes!

With its relentless focus on productivity and efficiency, the business environment tend to stress, well, stress over relaxation.

But now researchers are finding that doing nothing is actually really good for the brain. It turns out that down time is as important as sleep for allowing the brain to consolidate learning.

Especially downtime outside.

But what if you can't get outside and are stuck at your screen? Try a visit to

http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/

which the New York Times reporter Matt Richtel, who writes about digital distraction, posted to his blog.

A while back I aired this radio commentary about a related topic--falling asleep while listening to the sounds of the surf. There's something almost primal in the soothing sounds of the ocean.

Anyone else trying to build a little downtime in their busy days?

The Incredible Tale of Cognitive Overload

As instructors, or students looking to instruct, we use slideshows a lot. With every new slide we impart a chunk of the story: the story of a product’s evil half-sister, the story of how an industry found happily ever after. With every slideshow we want our audience to acquire meaningful learning (deep understanding of the story and its many characters) through multimedia instruction (teaching that uses words and pictures).  

Ideally, the listeners can not only recall the story (retention), but can also integrate their acquired knowledge with stories of their own (integration).

But sometimes we get swept away by our narrative potential: we use too many words and pictures. It is the equivalent of the writer who obsessively pounds her reader over the head with metaphors (much like this post). In Nine Ways To Reduce Cognitive Overload in Multimedia Learning, Richard E. Mayer observes that multimedia learning is acutely sensitive to cognitive overload. He reminds us that audiences have a limited capacity for cognitive processing. Handling that capacity, feng shui’ing the space in the listener’s brain, can mean the difference between "good" and "meaningful" story-telling.

There are infinite ways to overload, and you have done or seen half of them. Possibly the most egregious is simultaneous appeal to two cognitive channels. Suppose you want to represent a product’s life cycle with words and animation. Teaching too much and too fast means listeners will not meaningfully translate the visual into the verbal, and the verbal into the visual. By the time viewers select germane words or picture from one segment, the next one is underway, stifling the ability to retain and integrate. Life cycle? What life cycle?

But alas, the Fairy Godmother brandishes her presentation wand. She cuts the presentation into bite-sized segments, with time in between so that the viewer can complete each cognitive process. Ever the erudite mentor, she also suggests pre-training which means first teaching the components and terms of the to-be-learned idea. For instance, tell your audience what ‘growth’ and ‘maturity’ signify before unveiling the life cycle graph.

And you're off to the ball.

Silly Little Things

I'm kicking off the blogmester  with lexical habits we should kick! Topping the list are puns like the one I just used.

Ok, if you have a penchant for puns, and direly need them in your life, that's fine - I can't change you. Overused puns are hardly a pressing matter, just an irksome one. Don't be confused, though, by the many raised eyebrows, eye-rolls and other eye-proximate facial expressions that people are shooting at you (yes, shooting).

More salient is the ubiquitous use of everyday words in a way that disregards their intended use and their most fitting context. They're words that slip in and out of colloquial speech haphazardly. As speakers, we have transplanted them into so many contexts, that we often stray from their actual meaning. And as speakers, we can get away with that. As business writers, however, it is a cause for distraction. Not because misused words are an offence to the Queen's English -- linguistic purity is not the goal here -- but rather because they offend clarity of meaning.

Even in 2011, clarity and sense should be the quintessential sisters of business writing.

So here they are, the viral perpetrators. Let's call them,
SILLY LITTLE WORDS (inspired by the book Grammar Grams, by Stephen K. Tollefson):

basically - In speech, we use it as a loose connector, flying everywhere, or to help us go into an explanation ('Basically, CBC is awesome because...') In writing, it can dull the formality and freshness of your text. Opt instead for essentially, ultimately, in effect, and only when you must point to a 'so what?'

actually - This is basically's spoiled cousin.

real - as in, 'a real big problem.' The word is more of a problem. Use instead considerably, or simply very.

etc. - More appropriate for memos or lists, and less so for extensive reports and research papers. Go with and so on, and other concerns...

factor -  This is the word that tries too hard. Reason, cause, consideration are all good, humble substitutes for the less scientific portions of your text.

reportedly - You are reporting it, so it's redundant. Or if you read about it, it has been reported, so it's redundant. It's a 'duh' word.

correlate - Is relate what you mean? A smaller word can often carry your meaning more clearly, without confounding the reader.

And here's something as silly as these words, from http://tpdsaa.tumblr.com/. Recognize the symptom?