The Exchange, June 2010

the Exchange

Issue 17(2), June 2010

In this issue:

Audio as an alternative to traditional documentation. Part I: What it is, why it’s important, and what you need to know

By Michael David Todaro (michael.todaro@nau.edu)

Traditional electronic documentation, which was an outgrowth of the earlier printed manual, easily migrated to electronic format once computers came on the scene. And for many, this remains the de-facto standard in electronic documentation. But as technology continues to advance and more diverse audience types seek to learn and use that technology, we must begin to re-examine and adjust how documentation is prepared and presented. In particular, we must begin to consider using the multimedia options made possible by modern computers. Of these, sound is an often-neglected option.

In this article, I’ll discuss how to produce audio-ready materials using field-tested alternative media formats (AMF) for audio. Specifically, I’ll focus on applications where it’s not possible to hire a human narrator, and where speech-synthesis software must be used. In Part II of this article, which will appear in the September issue of the newsletter, I’ll also discuss preparation strategies that will achieve uniform results, with the goal of promoting future AMF standardization.

What is an alternative media format?

With the proliferation of audio books, Webcasts, podcasts, and videos, more and more people are choosing to listen to materials rather than read them. In the case of documentation, it is getting easier and easier to find step-by-step narrated materials, particularly online. Though all of these media types fall under the general heading of “audio documentation”, we face the challenge of taking electronic text and converting it to audio. This means that, as technical writers, we must begin to re-evaluate how we are drafting documentation, and what new steps we might have to take in order to produce a spoken version.

AMF for Audio refers to the way an electronic file is arranged so that a voice synthesizer can be used to convert it automatically from text to speech. Therein lies the problem: how is the pre-vocalized file formatted, and what standards can we use to ensure consistency? For example, if you were to simply take an electronic file containing typical documentation and try to process it through a voice synthesizer, the resulting product would most likely not be suitable for a listening audience. There are simply too many things that the ear cannot follow that sighted readers take for granted.

Complicated tables, for example, cannot be rendered through a voice synthesizer, and present a number of challenges (a sighted user will always have a paper or electronic document to refer back to, but a listening user cannot be expected to memorize the layout of a table so that each reference or item in the narration relates to that layout and makes sense). Page numbers and references to them are important for the sighted reader, but to a listener they make little sense because no one is reading a physical page, and the listener must be told how long the document or section is so that they do not lose interest or become distracted. (When a listener has no way of determining the length of a recording, the audio’s effectiveness can be compromised by the distraction of having to figure out where they are in the narration.) Finally, even the concept of white space on a printed or electronic page must be modified when producing audio documentation because, like document length, the effectiveness of any printed or vocalized message relies not only on the material being presented, but also on the empty space between the important messages: without that empty space, the reader or listener will not have time to reflect on and understand each new message.

Who uses AMF for audio and why?

Historically, applications such as the JAWS screen-reader software have been used to “read” aloud the text on a computer screen. This type of text-to-speech application parses the screen line by line, and has typically been used to support blind listeners. Such programs have been useful for reading the simpler electronic texts that you might find on a Web page, and are designed to avoid such boundaries as borders and illustrations. This type of program is very effective for single screens of information, but less effective for producing final vocalized products that allow variable pitch, speed, and a standardized output format.

Today, programs such as TextAloud by NextUp are able to process large amounts of text, and this is primarily the program that I have been working with. But even though the program is very flexible and cutting-edge, there are additional steps that I must take to ensure that the final audio document is understandable and can be used in a manner consistent with the use of technical documentation. This means that a number of formatting steps must still be taken before the final audio file can be released.

AMF is a formatting method of preparing electronic text for persons who lack significant impediments to hearing, and is suitable for blind, dyslexic, visually impaired, and learning-challenged persons who can listen to the vocalized text with relative ease. Audio is also useful when the audience must focus their efforts on the task at hand, not on reading documentation. At present, AMF is a manual formatting method used by a technical writer who must correct and change items in an electronic document, item by item, and then run the newly formatted information through a voice synthesizer. This is a process that requires considerable time, depending upon the nature and length of the text. It is, however, theoretically suitable for most types of electronic text, and is particularly well-suited for large amounts of information that reside in media such as journals, case studies, and technical documentation, with technical documentation being one of the more challenging areas of application due to its more interactive nature. (There is some expectation that a technical document will provide instructive materials that require interaction of some sort, as opposed to a narrative format written in prose that requires only listening and quiet contemplation.)

In addition, AMF can also be used by hearing users who wish to multitask. News, sports, weather, and books converted to speech can all be saved on MP3 players and listened to virtually anywhere, and are particularly suitable for those who learn by listening, such as “auditory learners”. These learners learn best through verbal lectures, discussions, talking things through, and listening to what others have to say. Auditory learners interpret the underlying meanings of speech through listening to tone of voice, pitch, speed, and other nuances. Written information may have little meaning until it is heard. These learners benefit from reading aloud their texts and by using a playback device such as an MP3 player. In addition to visually impaired and auditory learners, anyone who wants to take advantage of learning-while-listening can use audio documentation, such as for applications that require step-by-step verbal instructions while their eyes and hands are too busy to deal with the printed page or its electronic equivalent.

Because so many new ways of presenting audio are now available, a new approach that consolidates the way text is prepared for all types of delivery systems must now be considered. (In the future, a schema such as those available in XML will need to be developed in order to produce audio-ready text, and this is an area of technical communications that requires further exploration.)

When is AMF appropriate in technical communications?

There are many situations in which you will want to use AMF in technical communication. Primarily, you should consider AMF when the production of an audio document by a human narrator would be desirable, but is prohibitively expensive. Any time documentation has to be changed (and changes are regularly scheduled in the software development field), various sections of the documentation will be affected. Re-recording these types of changes on a regular basis would therefore make little sense because, effectively, a human narrator would have to re-record either a major work or large parts of it too frequently to make this type of text-to-speech transition cost-effective. But text-to-speech synthesizers do not share these problems. Once an electronic document has been prepared using AMF, the electronic file can then be processed and a new audio-ready file can be produced in short order.

What are the challenges of producing audio-ready documents?

During the product life cycle in software development, both major and minor revisions are expected to be released with current documentation. In the case of a standard electronic document, the Quality Assurance (QA) department can release the amended version of a document in short order after testing it. But what kinds of challenges do we face when we take the additional step of producing audio documentation?

In the case of standard electronic or printed documentation, content is changed, revision histories are updated, and then the product with its documentation is bundled together and released as a new major or minor version of the product. In the case of an audio document, however, there is the additional step of vocalizing the text and preparing an audio-ready file; the production of such a file requires more time due to the number of iterations that must be performed before the audio document can be released. In a standard electronic text, lines are added or modified, but in an audio document, the resulting audio file must be listened to, revised if necessary, and then recompiled before it can be released to QA for sign-off. This means that you cannot assume that simply putting the new text through a voice synthesizer will work without any problems. You must sit, listen to each modified section, and then make revisions to the electronic text and re-vocalize it. In the case of larger documents (where several audio files may be affected), this process may take considerable time. And if a quality assurance team is involved in the final release, then that team would be expected to sign off on the document, which means that a final listening and run-through, followed by any necessary revisions, would also be expected.

As in any new technology, there are going to be some obstacles inherent in producing standards for audio documentation using AMF. AMF for Audio is not the kind of technology that can be adopted without some text preparation because voice synthesizers can only read line-by-line. Consequently, items like tables, pictures, and even captions will need to be introduced to the listener either before the synthesizer reads them aloud, or presented as an entirely separate discussion. In addition, drawings and illustrations may need to be described: this not only takes more time, but it can also contribute to more errors in the final product.

The biggest obstacle to-date is that no XML mark-up schema has been developed to accommodate AMF to Audio. This means that, until such a schema is developed, we will have to continue preparing audio files manually.

Why standardization?

At present, there are no specific guidelines or standards (such as an XML mark-up schema) that would unify an approach to the creation of AMF for Audio. (There does exist a W3C-proposed cascading style sheet, but its use is limited to specific Web browsers and not all of its features are implemented at present. For more information, please see W3C’s document “Aural style sheets”.

When it comes to the specific conversion methods from text to audio (which, when broken down, actually begins with (1) text file to (2) audio-ready file, and then (3) from audio-ready file to (4) final vocalized file), no standard currently exists, which means that this task still must be undertaken by technical writers using trial-and-error methods.

When they are prepared specifically for blind or visually challenged audiences, individual articles, instructions, and publications must be disassembled, re-formatted, and processed through a text-to-speech program. The result must then be carefully reviewed by listening to it, and making changes to the electronic content as needed. This generally requires several iterations to produce an audio-ready product of acceptable quality.

With a standardized AMF schema, it would become possible to place more emphasis on the creation and distribution of products rather than on the product itself. In part II of this article, I’ll discuss some guidelines for producing such documents.

Michael David Todaro (michael.todaro@nau.edu) holds an MA in English (Literacy, Technology and Professional Writing) and is a senior technical writer and English instructor living in the Vancouver, B.C., area. He is very interested in the issue of disability in technical communication, and has been working to produce an Alternative Media Format standard based on his several years of experience producing audio documentation.

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Editorial: Communicating in an atmosphere hostile to science

By Geoff Hart (ghart@videotron.ca)

Much of what we’ve been taught about communication is based on a fallacy similar to that which afflicts traditional economics: the notion that our audience is sufficiently rational that they will seek out all the information they need to make a perfectly informed decision, and that they will then make their decision rationally and objectively. Here, “rational” is generally assumed to mean “in the way we expect them to behave based on our preconceptions about the correct response”. The problem, as economists are gradually beginning to acknowledge, is that most audiences are not rational according to this definition. People have prejudices, emotions, and insufficient time or energy remaining after dealing with their routine life stresses for them to be eager to analyze complex arguments as if they were students preparing for a test. Some may be incapable of even understanding our arguments, and not because they’re stupid; understanding some arguments may require advanced training that few possess.

Journalists exacerbate the problem, as Randall Munroe pointedly remarks in his XKCD comic strip about the current oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Darryl Cunningham provides another example related to the furor over whether vaccines cause autism: there’s no evidence they do, and the journal article that proposed a connection has been soundly debunked, but you wouldn’t know this from the press coverage. Unfortunately, when we’re responsible for communicating with the general public, we must often do so through journalists (including TV and radio reporters), and that communication channel creates many problems for us. These include the media’s need to sensationalize issues, but the more serious problems are that so few journalists actually understand the science they’re covering and that journalists are trained to seek balance by providing both sides of a story, even if one of the opposing viewpoints is nonsense in any rational sense.

In such an environment, it can become nearly impossible to communicate successfully with a general audience. Indeed, no one solution will let you succeed in all cases. But by understanding each of the abovementioned problems and seeking ways to solve them, you can greatly increase your chance of success. Here are some suggestions:

Prejudices

Everyone, including scientists, holds certain unchallenged beliefs. These beliefs, whether conscious or not, affect how we think about everything we see and hear. If the beliefs are sufficiently strong, we evaluate all new knowledge based on whether it supports or contradicts those beliefs; information that contradicts those beliefs is often discarded without further consideration. Even our less-strongly-held beliefs affect the extent of our willingness to consider new information fairly. To overcome these barriers to communication, we must first understand that prejudices exist, what they are, and how they cause audience members to prejudge what we’re going to say.

Harnessing the energy of those beliefs is an important step towards helping an audience overcome its prejudices. For example, we can begin any communication by demonstrating our understanding of those beliefs. In doing so, we gain enough willingness to listen that a skillfully communicated message capable of sidestepping those beliefs rather than confronting them directly will let us build on those beliefs, or perhaps even modify them, thereby helping the audience learn something new. The key here is to recognize that communication is not a form of combat or even a debate whose only goal is winning: our goal should not be to crush our audience’s resistance, but rather to help them recognize and consider our message despite their prejudices.

Emotions

Even the most rational person is governed to a greater or lesser extent by their emotions, including anger, fear, and frustration. Given that these emotions exist and that they affect all of us, we cannot simply ignore them and hope that a purely logical argument will suffice. Scientific communicators most often fail when they assume, based on their experience communicating with scientists and engineers, that facts make the most persuasive argument in all cases. That may be true once we can convince an audience to adopt a dispassionate and objective stance towards what we’re trying to say. But we can’t get there without first acknowledging and addressing their emotions.

For example, an audience may often be angry because of something that is not even remotely our fault, or something that may be our employer’s fault. We must find a way to assuage their anger, perhaps through an admission of guilt or fault, through an apology, or by providing tangible evidence that we have done something or will shortly do something to remedy the situation. Fear is another common reaction, often real and legitimate but sometimes created primarily by a lack of understanding. Fear can be decreased by remaining calm, acknowledging the magnitude of the fear, and demonstrating that we have a clear understanding of what must be done to reduce the risk or the impacts if that risk has become actualized. We cannot deny that fear, nor can we eliminate it; all we can hope for is to find a way to help the audience deal with it. Frustration is another problem, particularly if there is a history of the audience lacking agency (i.e., having no way to exert some control over a situation). We must empathize with that frustration, and seek solutions that will ease it, such as giving audience members a chance to express their views and finding ways to accommodate their views in any final consensus. (Simply acknowledging their views is insufficient; we must provide tangible evidence those views have changed our subsequent behavior.)

It should be obvious, but nonetheless requires repetition, that all such approaches must be sincere. Most people have a well-honed ability to detect insincerity, and any perception of insincerity can undermine all subsequent attempts to communicate.

Complex concepts

The most interesting science is complex—often extremely so. This means that even the scientists who study it and who have spent many years attempting to master their subject may not have simple explanations or answers to questions. In some cases, the complexity is irreducible, and the full implications of a situation cannot be communicated in a single “sound bite” suitable for the evening news. This is particularly true in the presence of uncertainty: if you don’t know the answer, it can be difficult to explain this in a way that doesn’t make you look like an idiot (and therefore untrustworthy) for not knowing.

In such cases, the task becomes one of understanding the essential take-home message you must deliver. That message must always be simpler than the longer message you would prefer to deliver. Although you may do considerable injustice to the complexity of a problem by oversimplifying, presenting the core message in a defensible but incomplete manner generally offers an acceptable compromise. Compare the following approaches:

Journalists

Well-trained, competent science journalists certainly exist, even in mass-media channels, and they’re our best hope for getting out the right message. But they’re in the minority. The majority who cover science, particularly on television, don’t understand science and don’t understand that not all viewpoints are equally credible and worthy of airtime. In such cases, we face the problem of seeing uninformed, non-credible speakers given as much air time as the informed, credible speakers who have the information that must reach the public. We also face the problem of journalists who present the wrong information because they were overwhelmed by too much information and missed the key message. Whenever we must rely on the media to spread our message, we must therefore use the same tools our opponents use if we hope to have our message heard and accepted:

The goal of communication with typical journalists is to establish enough of a human connection that they will trust you and really listen to what you have to say. You can then give them a message they can repeat quickly and simply. Do this better than “the opposing viewpoint” and your message will be prioritized.

Succeeding despite these obstacles

Each of these suggestions requires a profound understanding of how the underlying obstacles affect the audience’s willingness to listen and absorb your message, and accepting that your understanding must change from situation to situation. There’s no shortcut; each time, you’ll have to think through the full complexity of the communications context from the audience’s perspective. Getting them to listen with minds at least partially open is the indispensable first half of the battle. Telling them the take-home sound bite, simplified until the compromises may make you wince, is the equally crucial second half. If they’re still listening, you’ve gained enough time to explore the issue in more depth, fleshing out the message and finding ways to keep them listening respectfully while you do.

If you’ve participated in any success stories, why not share them with readers of this newsletter?

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Tantalizing titles

by Joseph E. Harmon (harmon@anl.gov) and Alan G. Gross (agross@umn.edu)

Like literary titles, technical titles must capture a reader’s curiosity and convince them to start reading. Technical titles function differently from literary ones. Titles to poems, novels, or plays tantalize us with a vague hint of their content: All’s Well That Ends Well, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Remembrance of Things Past, Pale Fire, Cryptonomicon, and Servants of the Map. We only learn their real significance upon reading the work itself. In contrast, technical titles often convey their significance right from the start.

Even in something as serious as cutting-edge science, an occasional joke or literary reference does surface. A relatively recent example is Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin’s “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptionist programme”, an evolutionary biology paper with a title making reference to both a famous Venetian basilica and Voltaire’s Candide. But modern scientific titles are usually far more sober. “Ambipolar diffusion of a collisional plasma diffusing through an inhomogeneous magnetic field” is the norm. In contrast to their literary brethren, scientific titles are full of abstract terms; they seek to squeeze a maximum amount of technical information into a minimum amount of space.

Scientific titles were not always this way; they evolved over time. A typical 17th-century title on the subject of biology is “An account of the nature and differences of the juices, more particularly, of our English vegetables”. Compare that with a typical title in 20th-century biology: “Formation of a DNA-soluble RNA hybrid and its relation to the origin, evolution, and degeneracy of soluble DNA”. Though 17th-century titles tend to be general, they can also be fairly precise. Take the following from an early French journal: “Observation of a precise conjunction of a satellite of the planet Saturn with a fixed star”. By the 18th century, specificity is the rule. For example, we have the English title “An account of an experiment made before the Royal Society, touching the proportion of the weight of air, to the weight of a like bulk of water, without knowing the quantity of either”. In the 19th century, not only is specificity the rule, but titles are also more likely to contain technical terminology. Here is a typical title from a German journal: “Concerning the electromotoric effect of selenium heated until it glows, discovered by Mr. Fritts in New York”.

Even compared with 19th-century titles, typical modern ones are meaner, leaner, stripped of anything personal or openly literary—“Observation of coherent optical information storage in an atomic medium using halted light pulses” headed an important experimental article in Nature in 2001. Even if we assume Nature readers are familiar with the technical terms employed, does this title work? Our answer is yes, but with reservations.

Good scientific titles tell us what was done or discovered and, space permitting, how it was done or discovered. This title succeeds on both counts. In it, we learn that the authors have stored “coherent optical information”. We also learn that they accomplished this feat by slowing light pulses to a complete stop in an “atomic medium” (a small cloud of sodium cooled to near absolute zero). After having digested that title and grasped the gist of the discovery being reported, curious scientists from many different disciplines would want to read more details.

Yet, exemplary as this title is, we think it can be made to focus more on the essential points. Key to a tantalizing technical title is what we call the “nucleus noun”; that is, the noun within a noun phrase that all other words modify. Technical titles work best when the nucleus noun embodies the essence of the article’s main knowledge claim. For this particular title, the nucleus noun is observation, and all the words to the right act in a support role:

Observation [nucleus noun] --> of coherent optical information storage in an atomic medium using halted light pulses

But what does it mean to say that the authors “observed” information storage? Does that word add much? The key to this paper is really the storage of optical information, not its observation. The authors and Nature editors might, we realize, take issue with our reading. Still, for the sake of argument, let’s change the nucleus noun from observation to storage simply by deleting “observation of”. Here’s the result:

Coherent optical information <-- storage [new nucleus noun] --> in an atomic medium using halted light pulses

The emphasis now lies on the nucleus noun storage, with modifiers to the front and back of it. Next, let’s shift the new nucleus noun to where it will stand out more—in the prominent first position:

Storage [nucleus noun] --> of coherent optical information in an atomic medium using halted light pulses

However, our revision still has a slight ambiguity: who or what is actually “using halted light pulses”? A little rearrangement and revision of the modifiers after “storage” can fix that problem:

Storage [nucleus noun] --> of coherent optical information by halting light pulses in an atomic medium

Now we have a title that clearly tells us what was done (“storage of coherent optical information”), followed by how it was done (“halting light pulses in an atomic medium”).

Suppose that instead of optical storage we wanted to emphasize the truly startling achievement of bringing light pulses to a stop in an atomic medium. Then we would rearrange the nucleus noun as follows:

Halting [new nucleus noun] --> of light pulses for storage of coherent optical information in an atomic medium

This fourth alternative has the advantage of a cause-effect structure: the “halting of light” is the cause, the “storage of information” the effect. In both this final revision and the original title, the nucleus noun names an action: to halt in the former, to observe in the original. We prefer the former because it refers to an action central to the major claim being made. But whatever version of the Nature title one prefers, the key message here is that the nucleus noun dominates and controls the title’s meaning. As a general principle, tantalizing technical titles closely align the document’s gist with the nucleus noun. This principle really only works, however, with technical titles expressed in the form of sentence fragments. You will have to read Chapter 3 of our book to learn more about technical titles expressed as complete sentences.

Joseph E. Harmon (harmon@anl.gov) works for Argonne National Laboratory as a coordinating writer and editor, and is a senior member of STC. Alan G. Gross (agross@umn.edu) is a professor of communication studies at the University of Minnesota and author of many books and articles. This article is based on Chapter 3 in their book The Craft of Scientific Communication, recently published by the University of Chicago Press. They also collaborated on Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present (with Michael Reidy; Oxford University Press, 2002) and The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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Greetings from the Land of Total Nickels

by Bob Johnson (wordfixer@yahoo.com)

Previously published in Science Editor 28(5):162-163. September/October 2005.

“Zounds! I was never so bethump’d with words Since I first call’d my brother’s father dad.”—William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John

“Sorry to do this, but I’m out of uno’s. I’m going to have to give you change in—like—total nickels.”

Writer Anne Lamott recently overheard the above sentence at a country inn in California. The language employed (or disemployed, depending on your point of view) is the subject of a chapter in Do You Speak American? by Robert MacNeil and William Cran. The book is the companion publication to the three-part PBS program of the same name.

The chapter mentioned above, “Language from a State of Change”, catalogs the many ways in which Cal-Speak is influencing the language of the rest of the United States, and slowly—deviously?—that of the entire English-speaking world. Influenced by having heard Mr. MacNeil speak a few days ago, I decided to devote this month’s column to a review of words, language trends, and books and sources about them.

If you missed Mr. MacNeil’s PBS program, you should visit its companion Web site. The site is endlessly informative and entertaining and, among many other things, includes a clickable map (“Radio America”) that lets you listen to audio clips of local residents collected from 95 stations from all 50 states so that you can hear regional usage and accents. I also enjoyed the Q-and-A section featuring the opinions of noted language expert Edward Finegan (click on “Ask an Expert”).

The use of the trés californienne “like” in the opening sentence provides an example of what linguists call “quotatives”—narra­tive signposts that keep the hearer on track or function as oral “two-wiggled-fingertips” (quote marks), much as go or to be all did in recent years. (“And so I go, ‘Wait, you can’t do that!’ And he goes, ‘I can too!’” “And I was all, ‘Who does she think she is?’”) But beyond strict quotation, Cal-speakers like to verify that the listener is following the sense of the utterance, or use like just as a filler, especially in the phrase it’s like, which seems to be this year’s conversational corn-borer worm. Read more on these topics at Like, Quote Me and He Goes, and I'm Like.

Are you a word-dog?

“Word-dogs” reading this column (see Barbara Wallraff’s March 2005 column will also enjoy Paul McFedries’s The Word Spy, a “Web site... devoted to lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases”. Suggestion: “My Favorite Words”.

Test your WOTY

Lexperts should also visit the American Dialect Society (ADS) site. Click on “Words of the Year” (WOTY). Entries date from 1990 to 2004, with nominations continuing up to the present. Test your wordcraft against that of its members: Pick the word that best captures the year, the decade (1990s), the century, or the millennium, then test your picks against those of the ADS. (No fair peeking.)

The other side of the smile

Lake Superior State University (LSSU), in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, publishes an annual List of Banished Words culled from submissions of its worldwide logophiliacs. It’s interesting to see that the ADS’s top choice for 2005 is also that of LSSU, but for different reasons.

World Wide Words

World Wide Words, by Michael Quinion, is an enduring favorite of this logophile. Quinion “writes about international English from a British perspective”. Type third world (is there a first or second?) or naked street (rest your beating pulse) into the site’s search engine for some illuminating reading. Chuckle: One of London’s designated naked streets is Exhibition Road.

A.Word.A.Day

I subscribe to this service. Run by Anu Garg, this site is a sumptuous banquet for the linguaphile (one of Garg’s coinages, that word may now be found in the pages of The American Heritage Dictionary).

Quick!—Under the Copy Desk!

Ruth Walker wrote an interesting piece (“A Vanishing Syllable”) about a controversy that “raged” (briefly) in the copy department at the Christian Science Monitor over wood versus wooden baseball bats. Her view: Attributive nouns such as wood in wood bats are more-and-more muscling into realms traditionally reserved for adjective-noun couples. Following Walker’s mention of it, I tried Googlefight.com (not affiliated with Google) to test some variations, nonstandard formations, and illiteratisms (underway/under way/under weigh; alright/all right; I seen/I saw), but found it unreliable.

In Other Words

This recent (2004) book by Christopher J. Moore explores words and usage from around the world. A quick glimpse: Strangers in a foreign country played a game wherein they were asked for a word that summed up their faraway home­land—“the thing that each person most looked forward to on their return”. An Italian chose tavola (table). A British citizen chose privacy. Moore writes, “Table has implications for an Italian, and in Italian, that it does not have for the English or in English. It speaks of aspects of family life and of good fellowship, of mealtimes both as rituals and celebrations, of a whole world of food preparation and kitchen conversa­tion and all sorts of other things that only an Italian could justly describe.”

RIP, Eleanor Gould Packard

Copyeditor for more than a half-century at The New Yorker (she started in 1945 and never missed a day of work), she had abilities in that realm that were beyond legendary. Legions of famous writers and fans attested to her talents. New Yorker Editor David Remnick said that she always strove for “a kind of Euclidean clarity—transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions.”

Remembering Doctor Sam

Finally, I can’t conclude this column about words without remembering Dr. Samuel Johnson on the 250th anniversary of the publication of his dictionary. In an appreciation in the 17 April New York Times, author Verlyn Klinkenborg quoted Dr. Johnson’s self-described task as trying to capture “the boundless chaos of a living speech” and said that “Johnson published his dictionary not as the conqueror of the language but as the person who knew best how unconquerable it really is”.

I think Dr Johnson would love the state of the language were he alive in the 21st century.

Don’t take any total nickels.

Chuckle of the month

Bumper sticker, parking lot of local spay-and-neuter clinic: “I ♥ my cat so I had her ♠.”

Bob Johnson (wordfixer@yahoo.com) writes the “Word Hawk” column for Science Editor, the bimonthly publication of the Council of Science Editors (CSE). Following university training as a biologist, Mr. Johnson discovered a love for writing and editing, holding senior positions at Annual Reviews, Frost & Sullivan, SRI International, and Applied Biosystems. He is a member of the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences (BELS). He also has a degree in French. In 2000, Mr. Johnson was language arts editor for the statewide California High-School Exit Examination (CAHSEE). He was a reviewer of the AMA Manual of Style, 10th Edition (2007), and the CSE’s Scientific Style and Format, Seventh Edition (2006). Currently self-employed, his recent work includes editing two books: Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.? (Pera 2008) and the two-volume Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions (Greenberg 2007).

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Book review: Participation and Power

Simmons, W.M. 2007. Participation and Power: Civic Discourse in Environmental Policy Decisions. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. [ISBN 978-0-7914-6996-5. 204 p., including index. $21.95 USD (softcover).]

by Katherine J. Hall (kjhall@u.washington.edu)

Previously published in Technical Communication 56(2):179-180, May 2009.

Risk communicators and environmental consultants will find some of their sacred cows skewered in W. Michele Simmons’ critical analysis of public participation in environmental issues. However, technical communicators can take heart: Simmons seeks to elevate and expand their field and make it a foundation of environmental policymaking. Her novel approach would make user-centered design the centerpiece of environmental policy and shift the policymaking model from risk management to a participatory design process focused on “producing an effective, appropriate, and just risk policy” (p. 110).

She contends that the very institutions that mandate public participation, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, actually marginalize citizen power by approaching risk as an expertly defined, rather than a socially constructed, problem. Current models of risk communication and public participation, she says, are ineffective for involving the public in decisionmaking in ethical and significant ways.

Simmons describes herself as an “activist researcher” and draws on the theories of Michel Foucault and Paulo Freire to examine power relationships in environmental public policy decisions. Her case study is a policy on disposal of the VX nerve agent at an Army depot in Indiana. The Army’s standard process led to a predicted decision in favor of incineration that left citizen participants feeling ignored. Only after they protested to Congress and the media (and after national standards changed) did the Army consider alternate disposal methods. Simmons describes the Army’s approach as “pseudoparticipation” and finds that the procedures that are supposed to involve the public in the chemical disposal process actually inhibit discourse.

The book grew out of Simmons’ dissertation at Purdue University; much of the focus is on constructing theory. She proposes a “rhetoric of ethical participation and just policy debates” (p. 18) in which rhetoricians and technical communicators would intervene in decision-making processes and produce policies that are “more ethical . . . appropriate, efficient, and economical” (p. 107) than those produced through current institutional processes.

Simmons is particularly harsh with Vince Covello, whose widely used definition of risk communication assumes that citizens, given enough information regarding risk, will come to the same conclusions as the experts. She would rather view citizens as experts in their own realm. Like M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer, she views environmental impact statements as an obstacle to dialog. She describes public meetings as “discourse obstacles” (p. 48) and proposes an expanded model that brings technical policy discussions into the realm of civic discourse, crossing traditional boundaries between rhetoric and technical communication.

As a rewritten dissertation, the book retains too many academic vestiges. A more thorough edit would have excised repetition and structured the book to better serve its potential audiences. However, it offers a fresh view of both rhetoric and technical communication and should be of interest in both disciplines.

Katherine J. Hall (kjhall@u.washington.edu), PhD, edits Northwest Public Health, the journal of the University of Washington School of Public Health. An STC senior member, she won “best of show” in STC’s 2008 Puget Sound publications competition.

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Book review: A Manual for Writers of Research Papers

Turabian, K.L. 2007. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers. 7th ed. Revised by W.C. Booth, G.G. Colomb, J.M. Williams, and the University of Chicago Press editorial staff. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. [ISBN 978-0-226- 82337-9. 466 p., including index. $17.00 USD (softcover).]

By David Kowalsky (david.kowalsky@necam.com)
Previously published in Technical Communication 56(1):66-67, February 2009.

In the late 1990s, the widespread use of the Internet and personal computers began to radically change the way college students went about researching and writing papers. For A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations to remain relevant in the new age of the Internet, the University of Chicago Press was faced with the daunting task of doing a major revision. The result, published in 2007, was the 7th edition of the book commonly known as “Turabian”. The name refers to Kate L. Turabian, the original author of A Manual for Writers, which was first published in 1937 and has for several decades been considered the standard reference for students on “Chicago Style” citations.

When deciding whether you want to buy a new edition of a reference book, there often is the question of whether there have really been enough changes from the previous edition to justify making the new purchase. This is clearly not an issue with A Manual for Writers. Part 1, “Research and writing: From planning to production”, is a completely new step-by-step guide to the art of research and writing that was adapted from the authors of The Craft of Research (University of Chicago Press, 2003). For students looking for help with writing any type of college-level research paper (long class paper, BA or master’s thesis, or PhD dissertation), this section covers every step of the research and writing process.

Part 2, “Source citation”, still covers the two Chicago styles of citations (notes-bibliography and author-date styles), but has new, expanded coverage and examples of how to cite online and electronic sources, including blogs. Though the rest of the book covers the same topics as past editions, it has been extensively revised to follow the recommendations of the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2003; reviewed in the November 2004 issue of Technical Communication).

The final part of the book, “Style”, includes typical style-related topics such as spelling and punctuation, but also the mechanics of using quotations and graphics. There is an adequate bibliography (divided into various disciplines) and index. Also deserving attention is the appendix, “Paper format and submission”, which is a set of guidelines that are widely accepted for formatting research papers, theses, and dissertations for submission.

There is no doubt that A Manual for Writers has a target audience of students, ranging from an undergraduate writing a class paper for the first time up to an advanced researcher writing a PhD dissertation. The authors are still careful and should be commended for stating that “No book can prepare you for every aspect of a research project. And this one won’t help you with the specific methodologies in fields such as psychology, economics, or philosophy, much less physics, chemistry, or biology” (p. 4). The University of Chicago Press strategically positions A Manual for Writers as part of a series called “Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing”. If you are looking for a book that goes into more depth on such topics as style, research, or editing, other books in the series are conveniently listed on the page opposing the main title page.

This book has a great deal of potential for crossover use to technical communicators who work outside academia. This is especially true because there are still technical communicators who work in areas where they are required to write formal reports. Also less obvious is that the comprehensive style section may be useful for those creating or updating an in-house style guide. Junior-level writers may want to consult the whole section on “Presenting evidence in tables and figures” as they look for ways to improve the effectiveness of the information they provide in these media.

Booth and colleagues have successfully revised the content of the 7th edition to better reflect the reality of how students research and write papers in the Internet age. However, shouldn’t there be concern about the book becoming outdated again and students preferring to consult resources online instead of buying the actual book? My major suggestion for improvement is to go the route of the Chicago Manual of Style: For the next edition, include a CD version with the book and also sell it separately. Make updates available online or on CD and even consider a subscription service to access the entire contents of the book online.

David Kowalsky (david.kowalsky@necam.com) is a technical writer for NEC Corporation of America. He received his MA in East Asian studies from Washington University (St. Louis) and a certificate of technical writing and editing from the University of Washington. He is a senior member of STC’s Puget Sound Chapter.

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Fun on the Web

Mindboggling math

To many readers, that title may seem redundant. But math is mindboggling in the best way: it stretches the mind, at least when it’s comprehensible. And sometimes all it takes is the right teacher to find a way to make something comprehensible. Consider, for example, Steven Strogatz explaining the concept of infinity. If you’re facing a thorny challenge communicating science to someone—even a 6-year-old kid—read this article for inspiration.

PhD comics

If you’ve survived the endurance marathon required to receive a PhD, or even if you’ve merely dipped your toes into the murky waters of grad school, Jorge Cham’s “PhD Comics” will bring back some memories. Speaking of things mathematical, Cham also provides a helpful take on communicating statistics to the media. Share it with your local journalists; they need all the help they can get.

Database of periodic tables

The periodic table of the elements may be one of the most brilliant data graphics ever: it not only compiles an enormous amount of information in a tiny space, but also provides deep insights into the structure of matter based on how the elements are arranged and juxtaposed in the table. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that you could teach an entire course based on nothing more than the periodic table. But there are a great many variants on this table, including some that are “just for fun”. (The “elephant” periodic table is one of my favorites purely for its carefree and cheerful spirit.) Visit them at the Internet Database of Periodic Tables.

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Parting thoughts

“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.”—Poul Anderson

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“A new study shows that large doses of Vitamin E do not protect against heart attacks and cancer, and might actually raise the risk of heart failure. The study was published in this month’s Journal of Things that Scientists Told You to Do Last Month That Turned Out to Be Harmful This Month.”—Dennis Miller

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“Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get them, get them right, or they will get you wrong.”—Dr. Thomas Fuller

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“If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.”—Vannevar Bush

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“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”—Albert Einstein

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“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”—Carl Jung

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“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”—Edwin Schlossberg

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“The path to wisdom does, in fact, begin with a single step. Where people go wrong is in ignoring all the thousands of other steps that come after it.”—Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

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“What we need is a complete overhaul of our assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, which which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.”—Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society

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“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.”—Sir William Osler

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“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”—Alvin Toffler

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“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best—and therefore never scrutinize or question.”—Stephen Jay Gould

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