Words in pixels

I tweaked a section of my post on how to e-mail a professor this weekend, for a reason that's interesting enough, I think, to note here. Before revision:

Avoid direct requests. They tend to sound more like orders in e-mail. For instance, "Please send me the next assignment." Even worse: "I need the next assignment." It's much better to ask a question: "Could you e-mail me with the page numbers for the next reading? Thanks."

After revision:

Ask politely. "Could you e-mail me the page numbers for the next reading? Thanks!" is a lot better than "I need the assignment."

Why the change? People who are linking to this post are often extracting the main points (in bold). Without the accompanying explanation, "Avoid direct requests" looks rather strange and counter-intuitive.

It's wonderful to contemplate the differences between words in print (amended by corrections that always stand at some distance from the original) and words in pixels.

The Torture Question

The Torture Question, from the PBS series Frontline, is available for online viewing.

I was just astonished to find that many of my students had never heard of Abu Ghraib--this link is for them, and for anyone else who wants it.

LINK: The Torture Question, from PBS's Frontline

Reality trumps the Onion

Reality trumps the Onion once again:

For years scientists at Philip Morris USA have studied how the human lung delivers a highly addictive chemical, nicotine, to the smoker's brain. Now, these same scientists are quietly laying plans to use their findings to enter, of all things, the business of treating illness.

A team of Philip Morris engineers and scientists is working on a new design for a hand-held inhaler to treat a variety of ailments, including smoking-related lung disease.

LINK: "Rx From Marlboro Man: Device That Delivers Drugs, Not Smoke" (Wall Street Journal, subscription required)

"Amish computing"

I'm getting so much spam. Hundreds of messages a day trying to seduce me by appealing to my darkest lusts and my greed. So I've gone back to basics. I stopped using my fancy word processor and installed WordPerfect for DOS, which was last updated about a decade ago, and which lets me type in gray letters on a blue screen without using any windows and without the need of a mouse. It never crashes. I also bought a little device called an AlphaSmart Neo, which is mostly sold to schools. The Neo is just a keyboard that stores text as you type it. It does nothing else. It doesn't tell the time or let me play games. It runs off of double-A batteries and the batteries last for hundreds of hours. Using the AlphaSmart and WordPerfect I've started to enjoy computing again. There is no Wikipedia, no email, no constantly changing the MP3s I'm listening to, no downloading going on. The spam still piles up but I'm not aware of it, because my email program is shut down until I want to send a message.

From an essay by Paul Ford, "Followup/Distraction." Having switched from Microsoft Word to Notepad2 for writing on the computer (as opposed to "wordprocessing"), I'm in strong sympathy with the idea of "Amish computing," as Ford calls it.

LINK: "My version of Amish computing" A related blog post

LINK: "Followup/Distraction" An essay by Paul Ford

LINK: "Are there 'good' distractions?" Further thoughts on distraction from Paul Ford: "I want to feel like I did something during my brief life besides check my email." [Via 43 Folders.]

Sanity and contemplation

David Levy, a University of Washington professor who studies high-tech communications and quality of life, acknowledges that the young have become adept at managing multiple sources of information at once, but he questions whether the ability to multitask has curbed their "ability to focus on a single thing, the ability to be silent and still inside, basically the ability to be unplugged and content."

"That's true for the whole culture," he said. "Most adults have a hard time doing that, too. What we're losing is the contemplative dimension of life. For our sanity, we need to cultivate that."

From a New York Times article with a slightly misleading title. David Levy's Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age is sitting in a stack of books I'm planning to read.

LINK: "Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up" (New York Times)

SEE ALSO: "Attention", "Multitasking makes you stupid"

Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a "plant" by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

"She was fed up," said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. "She was in her 40's. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.'"

From the New York Times obituary

LINK: "Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies" (New York Times)

LINK: "They changed the world: The story of the Montgomery bus boycott" (Montgomery Advertiser)

[To read the Times online, use mediajunkie as your name and password, or visit bugmenot.com.]

A lost weekend

I Wireless zero
I came to a conclusion at about 2:00 this morning: pencils are a lot more reliable than network cards. Time spent getting one of the Dixon Ticonderoga Tri-Writes that I bought on Saturday up and running: about fifteen seconds in a sharpener. Time spent attempting to get the laptop network card that I bought on Saturday up and running (before giving up): about six hours. The six hours were largely a matter of looking online--for updated drivers and info on settings--and uninstalling and reinstalling the card. I also put in the usual obligatory (and fruitless) call to technical support. While browsing online, I found many discussion group messages from other people with Vaio laptops (and all manner of laptops) who have also found themselves in wireless hell, with--of course--no solutions. Do you turn on "wireless zero configuration"? Do you turn it off? Either way, it seems you lose. Wireless zero indeed.

II TV Land
Before giving up, I discovered that All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and Good Times are all on television really, really late at night. I wonder how many people remember that Good Times was a spinoff of Maude, which was itself a spinoff of All in the Family.

III My wireless solution
I bought a 100-foot ethernet cable. Doing so was a lot easier than trying to get a network card to work in a Vaio laptop. The cable doesn't even require sharpening.

IV In conclusion
I am now happily wireless-less.

Rule 7

As a college professor, I've long been giving my students (what I hope is) useful advice. Here's one of the best pieces of advice I know for doing well in college:

Rule 7

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

I found Rule 7 years ago in Learning by Heart, a book by the artist Corita Kent. It appeared in an informal list of rules, some funny, some serious, made for the students and faculty of a college art department. Rule 7 seems both funny and serious: a Zen-like joke, abolishing all the rules that precede and follow it, and a statement that's absolutely true, for makers of art and for anyone engaged in learning. Note that Rule 7 doesn't say that the only thing to do is work. Rather, the only necessary thing is work. The only way to catch on to things (or to make them happen, to change metaphors) is to put in the necessary time doing the work, whether that work is sketching, practicing scales, memorizing a declension, mapping out an argument, studying a timeline, making notes on an article, or looking up words in a poem.

Whoever thought up Rule 7 caught one of the key points of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: deeply rewarding activities require a significant investment of time and effort before they show any return. In this respect, Rule 7 differs greatly from Nike's more facile "Just do it." Rule 7 acknowledges that learning involves some struggle, that matters may not be clear at first. If you're just beginning Homer's Iliad, you are likely to feel quite lost. You can't "Just do it" when it comes to understanding an epic poem. But it's easy to catch on if you give yourself a chance by putting in the work.

It makes me happy when students recognize the truth of Rule 7 and make it their own. My students (who get Rule 7 at the start of the semester) often say that the way to do well in my classes is to "do the work." One of my wife's students just reinvented Rule 7 on his own. Seeing her on campus, he announced with delight that he had finally figured out how to do well in college: "Do the work!" Nothing could be simpler, or more profound.

A related post
Rule 7 and other rules (Who wrote it, really?)

The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing

Thinking about The Elements of Style prompts me to say something about a book that to my mind is far more useful, Michael Harvey's The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. Harvey does a much better job of showing how to make prose better--clearer, more elegant, more concise. He's a great advocate of the "plain style," and offers wonderful advice (and many examples) to help a writer, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. The Nuts and Bolts is not only the best book on improving writing that I know; it's one of the least expensive as well ($5.95 $12.00 in paperback). I assign it in all my classes.

LINK: The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing

The Elements of Style

Strunk and White's legendary "Elements of Style" was first published in 1959, and in the intervening decades, this little book on language and its proper usage has been force-fed to countless high school English students, who have read it zealously, dog-eared key pages, showered it in graphite love or else completely disregarded and forgotten it, usually at their own risk. Beyond its sage advice on matters of style, it is filled with the Solomonic rules and injunctions--"Make every word tell"; "Use the active voice"; "Be obscure clearly"--that have served as a lifeboat to both professional and amateur writers adrift on the perilous seas of split infinitives, dangling participles and weak or flabby prose.

But while "The Elements of Style" has never lacked fans or dutiful adherents, appreciation for this slim volume takes a turn toward the whimsical and even surreal this week, as the Penguin Press publishes the first illustrated edition, featuring artwork by Maira Kalman, and the young composer Nico Muhly offers a finely wrought "Elements of Style" song cycle, to be given its premiere tonight at 8 in a highly unusual, if oddly appropriate, concert setting: the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library.

Force-fed to students who have read it zealously and dog-eared its pages? Block that mixed, mixed metaphor!

LINK: "'Style' Gets New Elements"

[To read the New York Times online, use mediajunkie as your name and password, or visit bugmenot.com.]