I don't know how I got so lucky, but suddenly I find myself bombarded with rules about how to write SO YOU CAN BE HEARD just as I am attempting to edit a couple books.
Thought I'd share them.
From Frank Luntz's WORDS THAT WORK: IT'S NOT WHAT YOU SAY, IT'S WHAT PEOPLE HEAR
Ten principles of effective language.
Rule 1. Simplicity: Use Small Words. Don't use words you have to look up, because most (people) won't.
Rule 2: Brevity. Use short sentences. Good: Just do it! Bad: John Kerry "a bold progressive internationalism that stands in contrast to the belligerent and myopic bush administration"
Rule 3: Credibility is as Important as Philosophy: "Ultimate driving machine" "Read my lips: no new taxes." Both catchy... both true?
Rule 4: Consistency matters. "It's the real thing" 1943. "The breakfast of champions" and "M'm M'm Good" 1935. "Good to the last drop" 1915.
Rule 5: Novelty. Volkswagon (and now Mini's) promoting small when everyone else is pushing big.
Rule 6: Sound and texture matter. "Snap, crackle pop" "intel inside" "quicker picker upper" "think different" ... beauty before accuracy.
Rule 7: Speak Aspirationally. "A diamond is forever" "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." I think Obama read this book.
Rule 8: Visualize. "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" The secret to visualization is the word "imagine" The work is done by the reader.
Rule 9: Ask a question "can you hear me now" "got milk" "are you better off today than you were four years ago?" Passive becomes interactive
Rule 10: Provide Context and Explain Relevance: From "Have it your way" in 1973 to "No late fees ever" from Netflix today: Be relevant
You can't help but notice that rules 1-5 are all Strunk, while 6-10 are all White, if you are a fan of The Elements of Style
Next up, from Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Six Principles of Sticky Ideas
PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, "If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won't remember any." To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission -- sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people's expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day's worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise -- an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus -- to grab people's attention. But surprise doesn't last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the fortyeighth history class of the year? We can engage people's curiosity over a long period of time by systematically "opening gaps" in their knowledge -- and then filling those gaps.
PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions -- they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images -- ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors -- because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.
PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don't enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves -- a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas. When we're trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable Statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: "Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago."
PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic "37 grams" doesn't elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it's difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it's easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.
PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.
Finally, from George Orwell's Poitics and the English Language. Interestingly he also said "Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations."
"I think the following rules will cover most cases:(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."
It struck me that Tufte's description of "administrative debris" and its opposite, which I suppose might be called "proper interface/content integration" or an "information interface," may finally explain my penchant for hypertext as a user interface medium for many types of information display. HTML, and the web's basic architecture in general, is designed in such a way that demands that interface elements related to navigation and moving through content, areas prone to administrative debris, occur in a way that's naturally suited to the content.With hypertext, the information itself is the interface.
Bernardo A. Huberman has been, so far, the most impressive speaking in a very impressive series. and, lucky you, they just just posted the video of his talk.
The web mediates interactions among distant people on a scale that was never possible in the physical world. From vast social networks, to grass-root amateur creativity and the creation of encyclopedic knowledge, a collective intelligence is at work in ways that differ from traditional communities in style, intensity and effectiveness of interaction. I will present the results of several studies of social dynamics in the web, as well as mechanisms we have designed to access this collective intelligence while improving users experiences with digital content.
My sister-in-law just got cast in Play, by Samuel Beckett and sent me this fascinating short video of this fascinating short play.
Paul Graham says
The guys on the scavenger hunt looked like the programmers I was used to, but they were employees instead of founders. And it was startling how different they seemed....
I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.
Well, other than the fact that anyone willing to get sucked into a company team-building scavenger hunt is already a different species....
but yes, employee-ship is different. You see it over and over again; company acquired, employees leave as soon as contractual handcuffs fall off (and some before that.)
But there is one theme is his essay I dislike: the use of the word humans (I dislike his emphasis on prgrammer as well, but one fight at a time.) Are all humans alike? Uh, no.
One big mistake I made when I was first a manager was assuming all designers were alike, and that they were all chomping at the bit to make crazy big things. In particular, there was one designer who just churning out banners. I figured s/he was dying to do something a bit more meaty; but when I moved this designer onto an interactive project they were simply miserable and no amount of extra mentoring time made a lick of difference. Only retuning this person to their 9-to-5 ad slot job returned their equilibrium and -- yes it's shocking-- joy. Since then I have seen many other folks suffer; big problem people stuck on a website when the redesign was over slowly going mad with "optimization," and optimization people getting the deer-in-a-headlight look when it's time to start a big project for a new product line.
More recently, I've seen employees star-struck by the silicon valley startup stories suffering in silent embarrassed misery, able only to leave by proclaiming the company f*cked up, which --even if true-- is an excuse for getting the hell out. Is joining a tiny startup a good idea? Hey, we promise you roller coaster thrills AND all the visits to office depot for ink cartridges you can eat (literally, since we can't really replay your expense account. Want some more stock?)
When you are in a start-up and like it, it's hard to quantify why it's so awesome. No health insurance, you get to figure out what's wrong when the network doesn't work, you get to deal with the blue screen of death yourself, you get to answer the six a.m. east coast what's this on my credit card call in exchange for what? Freedom to make your own crappy decisions?
It's worth it for me.
I'm like a cat, only slightly domesticated. I'm not a wolf, I won't die inside a company, but if you dump me on the side of a highway I'll be fine. Perhaps a bit wilder than that: every so often I have to go walkabout, with no guarantee of return to my food dish.
But there is no shame in being dog-people, and I hate that Paul Graham's essay suggests there is something wrong with you if you are.
I'm sorry if you are trying to leave a comment on this blog. This may be the final straw. I think I may finally move to Wordpress. it breaks my heart, since I helped with early versions of Movabletype. But it just gets stinkier and stinkier every single release.
For those who do not follow me on twitter or see my statusi in their many locations, I hurt my back.
It's a long story, beginning with a fall almost ten years ago, and another fall almost five years ago and then years of Yoga holding back pain at arms length. But I've been working two-three jobs (Linkedin, Boxes and Arrows, Cucina Media) and I skipped a couple yoga practices and one weekend I found myself taking care of Amelie while Philippe worked (we are both workaholics) and noticing I had a dull annoying pain in my back. And then I lifted our tiny elf (only 25 pounds!) out of a shopping cart and knew with a dark certainly something was wrong.
But I have rallied many times in the past from the "something is wrong" moment. I did what I always do-- ibuprofen, ice, careful stretches and slept with the wedge. The wedge is a good friend to me in times of pain. It's a triangle shaped pillow I bought at the physical therapist's the second time I was hurt. It goes under the knees, and keeps your body in the correct neutral position while you sleep. So I did my magic and went to bed, certain I'd wake up better. But I didn't. I was still in pain. I went to the doctor, got medicine, got steadily better and then I went to SXSW. I was on two panels! How could I not go!?!
Well, SXSW was amazing, and I had a terrific time, although my back continually troubled me. The pain shot down into my foot, rendering it weak and forcing me to limp around and almost never sit. But I was okay, not too much pain. I was funny and informative at my panels, and I even got the courage to stand up at fray cafe and tell the story of the time I reached enlightenment (a good story for another time!) I got on the plane home feeling proud of myself for conquering a number of fears. I nearly canceled my Guy Kawasaki panel because I was convinced I had nothing to say of interest. I bless Rashmi who insisted I join, because by the time the panel ended, Guy was turning to me at each question asking if I had a "christina-ism" for the audience. I felt like a superhero, the feeling you get when you do something you were convinced you couldn't do. At the airport I was preening as I hobbled through security.
I lifted a suitcase full of swag --including heavy magazines-- into the overhead bin, out of the overhead bin, into my car, out of my car. I went to bed with the wedge, and woke up broken. Iwas in light pain when I laid still, in horrid screaming (literally) pain when I moved. I called up the recommended specialist and found her practice was full, but I could see her partner. Dr SooHoo is a Asian woman of utterly indeterminate age -- she could be 26 or 46 -- whose defining characteristic is million mile eyes. Each time she looked at me, I felt she was in the next room or maybe the next county. I cringed as I walked for her, unable to do so normally. I found out I couldn't walk at all on my right heel, I had no strength in my right foot or big toes, and found the getting on, rolling over and getting off the table resulted in me crying in pain. I told her that I had numbness along my leg and I had known about pain and pins and needles feeling, I didn't know my leg was dysfunctional.
It is a bizarre feeling to look at your toe, know that you are trying hard to press it up against the doctor's hand and see with your eyes it isn't going anywhere. Your mind says you are moving the toe; your eyes see nothing happening. I went home with a stockpile of medicines, and looked them all up. A steroid, a opiate-acetaminophen blend (vicodin) and "mellow yellow" a muscle relaxant. Wikipedia entires were amusing: the one on my muscle relaxant wondered aloud why it wasn't abused more often. Hopeful, I downed them immediately. The next day agony was worse, and I called up the doctor begging to supplement them with something-- aspirin, ipuprofen, tylenol, something. I was told that "I was on a lot of drugs" and not to take anything else. I'll admit I was mostly1 obedient, using ice and heat but not ingesting anything else. The next day the pain has receded slightly so that as long as I lay still i didn't have much pain. And the weekend went on like that. I never got high on my amazing selection of drugs. I don't know if pain makes you sober, or if she just didn't give me anything fun, or if my metabolism is unwilling to let me have a good time. I watched two seasons of Dexter, a season of Dead Like Me, a season of House, and I'm moving through Friday Night Lights (I hate football, yet I'm enjoying it.) TV (from Netflix ondemand) turned out to be the single best drug to distract me. The alternative was watching the ceiling. When I could focus, I read:
,
.
A weak later the doctor, realizing nothing was improving, changed the drug prescription to one that worked on nerve trouble, and finally I start to feel some relief. I have a MRI first thing Monday morning, which I'm excited about (remember, I watched a season of House!) and then we'll know. Or rather, I hope we'll know. Surgery may be in my future. I'm walking with a cane like a 70 year old woman who didn't drink her milk. I want this to be done. It's been three weeks next Monday. I'm pretty done with this.
1. "Mostly" means a large scotch around 4 p.m. when the pain meds had worn off but it wasn't time for the next dose. God will forgive me, but will my liver?
I was just trolling through slideshare recent crop of social media themed slideshows, and I was amazed at how well the themes of good presentation have permeated people's minds. Pictures, one point per slide, simplicity: here is an example
But you know what? These slides are completely useless to me unless I want examples of good design. An old, ugly, 20 bullet points a slide would be more valuable. I think two things are going to have to happen if PPT has any hope of even slightly standing alone
Mics for ipods are very very cheap, it seems to me this second path is the right one. even if the place you are presenting at doesn't have their sh*t together enough to podcast, you can at least place a miced ipod on the podium and capture your own voice.
Anyhow, I'll be interested in where this trend goes; I suspect a solution is critical at least to slideshare's life. Pictures are nice, but they aren't that useful without the story that accompanies them.
Example of the wrong kind of slides for a presentation, yet so very right (and so very viewed) on slideshare.
The Wired article on Free has an excellent list of ways free can happen; the one I think we are all familiar with is advertising. We also are all aware of how traditional display advertising has lost favor to more accountable approaches such as contextual advertising of the Adsense/Overture model. But not all content lends itself to effective contextual advertising. Rouxbe has found a way to up the awareness and feeling of gratitude shown an advertiser by making them not the sponsor of the site but rather the sponsor of you using the site.
This is a very clever approach, in my opinion. I'd love to know how effective it is.
