In which vocabularies are expanded

Nice one, Howard!

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• Nope, sorry, nothing springs to mind.

I sent that video’s URL to the head of the university where I work. He has a sense of humor, so might appreciate it, but he’s not the type of performer Rosenberg is.

Our vice-chancellor is known for his great intelligence and his willing to listen to a variety of ideas and opinions. He’s also good at conveying in writing the sincerity that’s obvious when you see him in person.

Here’s an example of an email sent by the vice-chancellor to all staff this week. It could have been simply a yawn-inducing list of names with a brief “thanks everyone” to close. Instead, here are the final few sentences:

“We can all recall the lecturers we found inspiring, and a new generation is about to discover the exaltation created by teachers who bring a story to life, make clear a difficult concept, get to know their students and share their passion for ideas.

“Such students will remember the start of semester in 2010 as that hidden gate in a low wall that leads to a life barely glimpsed until now. Thank you to the staff who have worked so hard to make the campus ready for the influx, to the professional staff and student volunteers who have done so much already to make students welcome through activities and student centres, and to the academics about to begin again the great adventure of learning.”

Enthusiasm, generosity and a reminder of why we’re here. That’s a good way to start the year.

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The Winged Victory of Samothrace - statue of Nike, now held in the Louvre

Perhaps the Nisroch article caught my eye because I work at an organisation whose:

• corporate logo features Nike, the Greek goddess of victory (and was created long before the sports-shoe company)
• HR/finance enterprise system is called Themis, after the Greek goddess associated with good counsel, proper custom, procedure and social order
• new CRM(ish) enterprise system is named for Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, motherhood, magic and simplicity

Can you see a theme there?

Computer system administrators have a long history of naming their machines, networks and gadgets after gods, pop-culture figures, music composers… anything that comes in groups and provides a mental model, a metaphorical framework that helps people to organise their understanding of the analogue reality it describes.

For example, I know of one organisation that named its mailserver TARDIS and its webserver Metabelis — the webmaster was a Dr Who fan. (TARDIS is the name of the Doctor’s spaceship and Metabelis was an important planet in the Jon Pertwee storylines of the mid-1970s.)

Another enterprise named its webservers for birds — galah, budgie, parrot — and another used the names of Russian composers. If you could remember one name in a series, the theme of the series gave you a mnemonic for recalling the other names.

Another organisation named its array of proxy servers after Snow White’s seven dwarfs. This is a particularly effective example of ‘framing’: hearing the names of two or three machines, you immediately know that there should be seven in total, and with a bit of concentration you would be able to name them all. The reference to a well-known fairytale provides additional information that helps you understand the system’s size and shape.

We often don’t know or recognise the frameworks that affect our behavior and thinking. Frameworks can be a powerful tool for designers, information architects and writers. Understanding an end-user’s mental model of a task or situation can give the designer or IA clues about how to organise and present information. And the organising principle will, as often as not, be based on some kind of underlying cognitive framework.

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Suggested further reading:

• Indi Young’s how-t0 book: Mental Models: aligning design strategy with human behavior
• Donna Maurer’s presentation at Oz-IA (slides and audio) about George Lakoff’s work on categorisation — and how we regularly blur the boundaries between the categories we create
• Wikipedia article about cognitive linguist George Lakoff; his ideas about the relationship between the physical brain and the language of our metaphors are particularly relevant here

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The second headline reads: Brown moves ahead with plans for slavery. Easily misunderstood!

This image (right) is a snippet from my RSS feedreader. It shows three headlines from the Boston Globe’s education section. Because the feedreader appears in a small ‘portlet’ within my web browser, space for headlines is limited — anything more than 45 characters gets automatically truncated.

Thus the second headline in the image reads:

“Brown moves ahead with plans for slavery”

Hmm. Probably not quite the image Brown University wants to convey about itself. In fact, it’s better known as a leader in liberal arts and humanities education.

It’s ony when you click the headline and read the entire article that things become clear — Brown University is building a museum to collect and exhibit items relating to the history of slavery. So the headline in my feedreader should have said:

“Brown U plans slavery museum”

This version of the headline clarifies that “Brown” is the university, not some random person named Brown, and conveys the idea that the museum about slavery does not yet exist, but that the university is actively working to create it.

The phrase “moves ahead with” is the culprit here. It’s an example of sloppy writing, adding nothing substantial to the meaning of the headline. Worse, it takes up unnecessary space and prevents the important, meaningful word “museum” from appearing in the feedreader display. A similar effect would occur in search results for this article, or if I were reading the Boston Globe online via my mobile phone or PDA.

Online communication uses lots of microcontent, small chunks of information that can be automatically identified and re-used by multiple applications.

Common examples of microcontent:

Headlines, captions on images, subheadings, link text, the text in a web page’s <title> tag, and an email subject line

To write great headlines, you need to master three things:

1. an understanding of the rules of grammar
2. a grasp of how web applications use microcontent (I’d suggest starting with content management systems, blog publishing software, search engines and RSS feedreaders)
3. regular practice and feedback

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References

William Strunk Jr (1918): The Elements of Style. See especially the section titled “Omit needless words”

Jakob Nielsen: Write for reuse (article 2 March 2009), Microcontent: headlines, page titles, and subject lines (article 6 September 1998) and list of articles about writing for the web

Wikipedia articles about microcontent and the related concept of microformats

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The byline says the article was posted 7 minutes ago and updated 8 minutes ago, which is logically absurd.

I saw similar inconsistencies on other ‘breaking news’ articles at the same web site. Articles in the ‘breaking news’ category can be updated several times in a single day, or even within an hour or two of first being published.

The timestamp is added to such stories so that readers know how fresh that breaking news really is. In contrast to a site that’s updated only once or twice a day, you are more likely to trust — and return to — a news web site that seems to be abreast of current events.

A well-built content management system should be able to automatically insert the timestamps and check that they are consistent. It’s worth making certain that your CMS is configured correctly to enable this.

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Earlybird registrations are open now, and close next Tuesday 9 September.

Earlybird registrations are A$660, or A$550 if you quote the discount code MR0243. Register online at the conference web site.

The conference will be held in Sydney, on the weekend of 20-21 September.

Who should attend?

• Designers of navigation, organisation, labelling and search systems that help people find and manage information more successfully,
• Librarians, webmasters, and content owners responsible for creating taxonomies and information architectures,
• Application developers who design web and software solutions and select the technologies and staff to support them,
• Project and business managers needing to understand the benefits and challenges of information architectures in electronic information spaces.

[cross-posted at SneedleflipsockTheBlog]

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Source: xkcd.com, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, maths and language.

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Usually it comes from someone in the under-30 age group.

This week, I spotted an example in the written word:

It seems that even in spite of the sizeable advertising budgets for the campaign, nobody has tweaked to the notion that the most successful political YouTube videos don’t follow the tried-and-true ‘politician in front of flag promising more money and fewer taxes’ model.

Sloppy sub-editing, or perhaps an emerging new usage based on mis-hearing of the original?

Reading aloud is often recommended as a way check the quality of your writing. Reading aloud to yourself, you are likely to stumble over awkward grammar and difficult words.

For detailed proofing, try reading your draft backwards and aloud — this can help you to focus on the spelling of each and every word.

Read your work aloud to a friend. Ask her to let you know when an idea is unclear, if your logic seems faulty or when she doesn’t know which character is speaking.

Even better, ask somebody else to read the piece aloud to you. Hearing your words in someone else’s voice is a bit scary, but worth the effort. Listen for the gasping as your friend encounters long-winded or over-complicated sentences. Pay attention to the places where he emphasises the wrong word — you may need to fix the punctuation or restructure the whole sentence for clarity.

Of course, none of these strategies will help if you genuinely don’t understand the difference between “twigged to” and “tweaked to”. You can improve your general knowledge about language by reading more widely — novels, poetry, any kind of book that isn’t work-related and isn’t a throw-away magazine or train-station newspaper.

According to a recent report by the US National Endowment for the Arts (PDF 3.3 Mb), people who read frequently for leisure:

• are likely to be good at reading and writing
• are more employable than people who don’t read regularly
• tend to get better-paying jobs, with more opportunities for career growth
• are more likely than non-readers to attend cultural events, play or watch sports, be creative and do charity work

Having more than 100 books in your home is also good for your kids — according to the same study, children raised in a reading-friendly household tend to do better at school than kids raised in a less-bookish environment.

Further reading

BBC Skillswise - proof-reading: fact sheet, worksheet and quiz to test your proof-reading skills. The BBC Skillswise web site is a self-help resource for adults who want to improve their literacy and numeracy.

Wikipedia: definitions of proof-reading and copy-editing, two different kinds of editorial work.

Blog post by Peter Cooper (2004): “The Editing Process.”

Anna Goldsmith offers “Five Easy Steps to Editing Your Work,” in a post at Copyblogger.com.

Beware Muphry’s [sic] Law of Editing ;-)

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