'Effective communicators' there's the rub!

For my own part, when writing in these forums, I try to express myself as clearly as I can, thus minimizing the oportunity for misunderstanding.

But I don't try to aim at the "audience". I see some kind of hypocristy in the inclusion of these factors you mention, meaning that in thinking them you are automatically assuming an elevated position of "illuminator". That can often be considered condescending.

I've often felt internet communication is worthy of serious research. Because of its relative speed vis a vis normal written communications it has the social aspects of a "conversation" yet at the same time allows for the extended memory/revisional process as in the conventional essay.
It is certainly not comparable to lecturing where a certain amount of audience attention/motivation can be assumed by virtue of its voluntary attendence.

Persons using this media should therefore assess carefully what their social goals are. Some may come seeking information but some just come to chat....some to convince themselves or establish their own positions..Some for kudos.....some look for converts ....and some come for a fight. ! "Effective communication" takes place when mutual goals are satisfied.
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Now standing back from the above what is my own assessment of these paragraphs ? I am cleary trying to establish my own position by I am also "fighting" what may be a "pseudo question" on the part of coberst.

Fresco

My interest is to raise the consciousness (focus the mind) of the reader to important ideas that most readers are not conscious of. So my posts are often about new ideas to the reader and thus often not easy for the reader to comprehend. As a result this prevasive anti-intellectualism is oftn aired.

coberst wrote:


What you percieve as anti-intellectualism might also be the intellectual rejection of the ideas you present. Not saying that it is, only that it might be...

coberst,

No...your interest is in attracting converts to views such as "Lakoff (et al)'s ideas are important". You will only do this by demonstrating the utility of such ideas in an area of their interest(i.e. that of your audience). As Cyracuz points out, to assume that your potential audience is unwilling or lacks the capacity to "raise its consciousness" is invite rejection by virtue of assumed dominance. If I used your own argument about your own "unwillingness" to accept this I would expect you to reject it !

An often overlooked fundamental of good writing is having something to say. Generally that requires some thought. Everyone has opinions, and since we all believe our opinions to be correct and true few of us ever question them. Opinions require very little thought. We collect opinions from our peer group, and from those we admire in the great world. "Obviously, the world is flat. Who better expresses modern thought on freedom than Snoop Doggy Dog? All true members of the Party desire to revolutionize society" . There isn't much value to be gained in reading opinions with no more substance than writer's inner conviction of self-righteousness.

Education broadens our horizons and introduces us to looking at the world from novel points of view. Who is more likely to bring something new to the table, a person who reads Mad Magazine, or the fellow who has spent 25 years studying the subject of his written article? Personally, I like reading material written by folks who truly know their subject from long, disciplined study. Educated people are expected to keep an open mind, and to regard assertions with some suspicion until time, experience and objective analysis confirm them. Educated people SHOULD be less certain that their knowledge is Perfect and can't be improved upon by reading opposing views.

Unfortunately, education has its failures as well. Though more people are walking around today with university level degrees, it is far from certain that the percentage of educated people is any greater today than it was in 1906. People know that a college degree is a necessary qualifier for many of the most interesting and lucrative careers. They go to school and learn the essentials of their field, and avoid everything else as useless. Thank god for required curriculum or many graduates wouldn't have a clue as to fundamental history, art, literature, or philosophy. Even with required English, many with Graduate level degrees can barely express themselves in the written language.

Writing is seldom so "natural" that a person without prior experience can sit down and write anything publishable, much less something that might have a profound affect on others. To write well, one must work at it on a daily basis, and even then without careful editing, even a short essay is likely to be filled with misspellings, wrong word choice, and poor grammar construction. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it has also contributed to lazy writing filled with sentence fragments, run-on sentences and the special vocabulary of pre-teen computer nerds.

It would be nice if people were to think through what they would like to say before sitting down at the keyboard. Is what you have to say been said already, and what is it that you can add to the discussion in writing? What are the important points and sub-points in your thought? Which points should go first to support and carry the reader's interest further into the essay? Is the opening sentence to the essay, and each paragraph "interesting" and capable of capturing a reader's attention? Have you linked the dominant idea of one paragraph with the main concept in the following? What citations are necessary (not just pretty, but really useful to the reader), and how can they be integrated into your essay seamlessly? Just the process of thinking through what you will write will improve your chances of writing material that people will want to read, and might even profit from.

I've found that sentences averaging around 14 words organized in a simple declarative structure works pretty well as a foundation to essays of around 1000 words. I like 1000-1500 word essays. They are long enough to treat a simple subject, yet not so long as to "turn-off" the average reader. I'm also fond of compound sentences used to elaborate on the subject of the sentence. I rely far too much on the old three dots, and really should use the colon and semicolon more.

When writing here, I try to avoid specialist terms. Those who know how to work inferential statistics don't need to be told about it, and it would be difficult to teach a skill that took an academic year and many years of experience in a few words. Whenever a common old Anglo-Saxon word can be used, use it instead of some "learned sounding" foreign term in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, or Urdu. Don't insult the reader, they are innocent bystanders that you are trying to reach, entertain, inform, persuade, or whatever. You as the writer are responsible for what you write, and if no one twiggs to your meaning ... (theres those nasty dots again) ... whose fault is that but your own?

You can't satisfy everyone. Sometimes you can't even satisfy anyone. The best that can be done is to regard your communications with the world through this marvelous media seriously. Respect your potential audience by remaining courteous and by sincerely trying to help others. It isn't necessary to write on every subject, or to write on one topic 12 times a day. Pick your subject carefully, think about it and how your writing will add to the discussion, and then, perhaps off-line, write a draft. Read your first draft over carefully and weed out all the trash. Can the same thing be said in fewer words without losing the clarity of your thought? Is that wonderful turn of phrase really advance your meaning?

Of course, if you have nothing to say beyond a bold opinion all you need is a few hundred prejuritive terms and lots and lots of time to waste. Life is too short and filled with too much suffering to waste. I firmly believe that we can and should use whatever time we have in improving our understanding of the Universe we live in. The reward for scholarship and careful writing is the satisfaction that one may help others along the path to greater understanding.

Fresco

We are aware of many things but are conscious (focus of attention) of much less. I suspect we only become conscious of a matter that floats all around us when somthing kicks us in the head. I try to kick the reader in the head, gently.

I explain cognitive science for the purpose of raising the consciousness of the reader to something very important that is going on. People generally must confront a new idea many times before they become conscious of that new idea. I am the begining of that long chain og kicks.

One should not look to the Internet forum for knowledge, it is only good for consciousness raising. To look for knowledge on a forum is non sense.

Asherman

Your post is good enough for me to claim it as my own if I did not already have so many good ones.

I don't agree that one can't acquire knowledge here on A2K. I've learned a number of factletts from Setanta, and as a consequence, I believe, my understanding of some historical topics has been improved.

Just the other day I found that my belief that LBJ's Great Society greatly increased the cost of government, was too simplistic and at least not entirely true. People are all the time bringing new things to my attention that I might never have given much thought to if left to my own devices. People are interesting, no matter their station in life. I once had a janitor who was functionally illiterate give me a lesson in humilitiy and charity far better than any sermon might have done. To learn, you have to be open to input.

BTW, if you are interested in Communications Theory, try locate Dr. Wilber Schramm's books on the topic. He was publishing during the '60s, and his models are still quite useful.

Communications problems is one of the most common complaints organizational fixers, encounter. For awhile I did some consulting on organizational problems on a part time basis. After studying the client's organization and his problems, I would write a short report giving my findings and several alternative approaches to "solving" the problem. Communciations problems were so common, that I wrote a "boilerplate" section on organizational communications:; its problem sources and implications. As I recall the boiler-plate was about half a page, and then I would add between half and one and a half pages specific to the client's problem. Everyone has communications problems, and the ways to improve communications are also pretty standard.

Amen. How to formulate an argument is central to communication of any kind. I feel it should be taught hand-in-hand with elementary grammar (hopefully it is, in some places... it sure wasn't in my school). Especially in abstract topics like philosophy, it is easy to confuse the different elements of an argument: questions are unwittingly presented as if they were evidence, the evidence is conflated with the thesis, or whatever.

Whenever it comes time for my students to write a paper, I always make them write up a preliminary summary of the structure of their argument. I ask them to state what their thesis is, and to summarize the evidence in support of it. There are always a handful of students who will answer those questions with the same content, in which case I point out to them that they are not yet making an argument; they are making observations. The latter is an important step toward the former, of course, but they should not be confused with each other. If, when pressed to state what their thesis is, they can answer the question only indirectly (i.e. by saying what the thesis is about, where it came from, what it is intended to lead to), it's a sure sign that they haven't yet ironed out their argument.

About a year ago, the NY Times ran an article about how businesses and companies are starting to pay more attention to the writing skills of its employees, even those whose jobs only ocassionally require writing. The article noted that bad-writing was no longer being looked upon as something that academics and perfectionists nit-pick because it is something that can, in the form of a badly communicated memo or missive to customers, potentially cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Bookmark - this looks interesting. Good topic.

KP

Asherman and Shapeless,

I would be interested in your views on how the particular properties of this medium might affect the structure of the communication.

coberst,


As a side issue, if you scan my own threads you might note several of us are fond of discussing a reality where "persons" and "objects" are inseparable. In Lakoff's terminology the metaphor might be called "non-duality". The communication "problems" would seem to be of a different order to the ones you highlight, i.e. "rationality" is itself under scrutiny.

An interesting issue. Some weeks ago I started a thread that is loosely related:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=75983&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

The first thing that should be mentioned, of course, is that not every thread is trying to be an argument; some of them are intended primarily to ask questions, make general commentary, or whatever... so only in a few cases would I expect the stuff I mentioned in my last post to apply to what one finds on A2K. (Then again, I can think of more than one thread in P&D in which a poster made a series of thematically related but not coherently connected claims, an A2Ker asked the poster to clarify what the point is, and the poster was unable to articulate a thesis.)

One thing that makes the online format unique is that it's a weird hybrid between an off-the-cuff live debate and a prepared, pre-outlined argument: one one hand, the discussions that happen here usually take the form of a conversation, with A2Kers chiming in in more or less immediate reaction to what someone else has said; on the other hand, the fact that we are able to meditate on what we say before we post it can sometimes make discussions feel like mini-academic papers in motion (I mean that in a good way!). If we were really committed to doing so, we could probably use this as a way to "raise the bar" on the kinds of discussions that happen here--if we all promised to research and refine our answers before posting them, or whatever. But I'm not sure I would want to see that happen... it is true that online forums provide a lot of opportunity for genuine learning, as Asherman points out, but I'll freely admit that sometimes I don't want anything out of A2K except mindless cocktail-party chatter.

Shapeless wrote-



That's pretty sensible on the grounds that that's all there is to get anyway.
Anybody who expects anything else might as well be pissing up a gum tree with a monkey watching with temporary curiosity.

Spendius,

....believe it or not some of us might be here for slightly more than that!

Irrespective of content it might be one of the few openings for some of us to have a "decent conversation". Unless you ae fortunate enough to have "thinkers" on tap this is a reasonable exercise ground for keeping mental faculties in trim. One advantage I have noticed which seems to come from this semi-conversational mode is that my speed of response to formal lecture materials or documentaries has increased. I am less likely to be "mesmerized" by a speaker.

Fresco

I have followed briefly your thread on non-locality.

I have tried to comprehend QM and have some vague ideas about such things. My best understanding came from Feynman and his book QED.

I do understand that QM has given technology a giant leap forward. But it seems to me that the value of QM rests in technology and any interface between the world within the atom and our world of interrelationship is far too conjectural for me.

I can understand why it appeals to people and I think that it is important to follow what ever arouses your curiosity. For me it all seems too sci-fi.