How to improve writing (no. 5 in a series)

Words in a memo inviting faculty to a discussion of mentoring:

The facilitator of the focus group will be [Name].

Here are the sorts of nouns that writers turn to to dress up what they have to say.

Focus group comes to us from the worlds of market research and political analysis, where people are chosen to form a cross-section of a much larger population. If people are showing up without being selected, they might have a wonderful conversation, but they won't form a focus group.

Facilitator is a noun without clear meaning. To facilitate is to help bring about or make easier. So what might a facilitator in this context do? Send invitations? Encourage people to attend? Reserve the room? Arrange for refreshments?

How might things be said in clear, precise language?

[Name] will lead the discussion.

An active verb instead of to be; four words instead of eight; six syllables instead of thirteen. Over 50% off!

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Happy New Year

Tomorrow is the first day of the Chinese New Year. Happy New Year. 2005 is the Year of the Rooster.

For more about the Chinese calendar, click here.

How to improve writing (no. 4 in a series)

On a sign at the entrance to the Student Union:

Seattles Best

Yikes. Presto, chango:

Seattle's Best

Now that's a sign befitting a university campus.

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PBS series

3009 students: Slavery and the Making of America airs on WILL-TV in two two-part installments: Wednesday, February 9, 8:00-10:00 p.m., and Wednesday, February 16, 8:00-10:00 pm. Watching any or all of it would give you some extremely helpful background for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

From the PBS website:

Slavery and the Making of America is a four-part series documenting the history of American slavery from its beginnings in the British colonies to its end in the Southern states and the years of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Drawing on a wealth of recent scholarship, it looks at slavery as an integral part of a developing nation, challenging the long held notion that slavery was exclusively a Southern enterprise. At the same time, by focusing on the remarkable stories of individual slaves, it offers new perspectives on the slave experience and testifies to the active role that Africans and African Americans took in surviving their bondage and shaping their own lives.

You can learn much more about this series here.

Poetry recordings on-line

3703 students: For a tremendous archive of RealPlayer files, via the Factory School, click here. You can find H.D., Eliot, Frost, Pound, Williams, and almost 200 other poets.

E-mail from Norman

From my friend Norman, who works as a translator:

I decided to pop for a copy of Tufte's essay . . . . We translate a lot of PowerPoint presentations and I have had to sit through my share as well. The only good one was last November at a conference. A professor of linguistics used PP slides the way we used to use handouts (i.e. he did not read his presentation from the slides). Needless to say there were no bullet points.

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Edward Tufte, the author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and other books, has written a devastating essay on PowerPoint:

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint is available here.

And for the ultimate in PowerPoint satire, Peter Norvig's famed PowerPoint version of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

The Waste Land as graphic novel

Various modern poems have been turned into comic books (most famously by Dave Morice), but only one (to my knowledge) has been turned into a full-blown graphic novel. For the original and more recent covers of Martin Rowson's The Waste Land, click here and here. Rowson turns The Waste Land into a film noir detective story.

David Lehman on The Waste Land

the first poem of the 20th century
in which bad sex is a metaphor
for the failure of civilization

From the poem "November 23," in The Daily Mirror.

WCW, PR

3703 students: Here's a link to the Paris Review interview with William Carlos Williams.