L’Esprit D’Escalier

staircase

Things have changed, if just a little bit, in ten years. From January 2005:

I’ve been hearing dialogue everywhere, dialogue that seems to be coming from the same play.

At the end of party I went to recently, a woman told me that I talk too much.  I didn’t know how to respond, and left the party shortly afterwards, a bit confounded and mute, and afflicted with what the French call l’esprit d’escalier – “the wit of the staircase” – i.e., my mind began filling with all sorts of things I should or could have said.

So: a mind rewind.

Here we go:  “Bob, you talk too much.”

  • “True, true, true, true.”
  • “Not ‘too much,’ just ‘much.’”
  • “If you subtract the number of times I repeat myself, then you know that at least I don’t say too much.”
  • “I can tell you why: You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
  • “I just keep going until I find a word that makes you friendly.”
  • “Does that mean you don’t think I’m interesting?”
  • “What would you suggest I not have said?”
  • Or, finally: “Oh throw me away and call it a day.”

[A friend wrote me later, charmingly: “You don’t talk too much.  People talk too little.”]

repost from basil.ca

photo by Robert Basil

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So, you think you can’t write …

Dana Fontein, a fine blog writer over at Hootsuite, posted a really helpful piece this morning, “So You Think You Can’t Write: 8 Writing Resources for Non-Writers.

Many believe that they simply cannot write, or that they aren’t a “writer,” when the truth is that they really just believe they are not a good writer.

For content marketers, writing is obviously an integral component to most, if not all, aspects of the job. Everything from drafting blog posts to crafting the perfect video script requires the ability to write. While of course the act of stringing words together to form sentences can satisfy the basic requirements, writing is a skill that with time, dedication, and a desire to improve, can be mastered to an exceptional level. Just like the perfect set of graphite pencils helps with drawing, there are numerous tools available to help you improve your chances of writing success.

Bless her heart, Fontein includes two nondigital resources (books!) that I can highly recommend as well: Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (remember the birds, my KPU students?).

Among those digital resources she lists, I follow Copyblogger (“the bible of content marketing”) closely. Others were new to me. Portent’s Content Idea Generator is whimsical and fun and occasionally absurd – and therefore a fine boost to brainstorming blog-post ideas. Others include Co-Schedule’s Headline Analyzer. (The headline “Why I love kittens” earned me a lowly 51/100 score, but with some precise guidance on how to improve it.)

Fonteyn annotates these and each of the other resources beautifully.

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Mental Hygiene

In a post called “Cognitive” my good friend Jonathan Mayhew explores one of NoContest’s recurrent themes:

There is the idea that you can prevent decay in cognitive function by doing inane, mindless games on the computer, such as those peddled by lumosity.

I do the NY Times Crossword most days, and usually try to use five minutes per degree of difficulty (Monday 5, Tuesday 10, Wed. 15, etc…). I do a puzzle called kenken as well. Then I compose music or work on previous compositions. I try to work on my research every day, not breaking the Seinfeld chain. I have to figure out how to teach what I know to groups of students…

I have another goal of being able to read novels in all the romance languages. That’s another cognitive stretch. If someone can find me a novel in Rumanian or Provenzal I would appreciate it.

Really, though, my whole life is devoted to the cultivation of intelligence. That’s all I’m about. There are two or three ways of doing this. Learning to do novel tasks stretches the mind in different ways. So I have tried to teach myself to draw, to compose music, to read Italian. Delving deeply into a subject matter that is not novel, that you know very, very well, is also good. So writing a third book on Lorca… A third way is to solve puzzles or memorize poetry.

I hate that this sounds arrogant, but if I am intelligent it is because I do these things, not the other way around. If I am stupid about other things, it is because I haven’t cultivated thoses sorts of intelligences. Put me in a home depot, and I am a blithering idiot.

Jonathan’s blog is one of the best places in cyberspace. You need to put it in your feed.

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Rhythm in Class

A Faculty Focus piece published today by Linda Shadiow and Maryellen Weimar called “The Rhythms of the Semester” highlights ways professors can help students negotiate “the arc” of the course.

The early weeks hold promise and high hopes, both often curtailed when the first assignments are graded. The final weeks find us somewhere between being reluctant or relieved to see a class move on. There is an inexplicable but evident interaction between our teaching persona and the persona a class develops throughout a semester.

It’s a good discussion. The authors advise

  • Calling attention to the structure of the semester
  • Developing a community in the opening weeks
  • Revitalizing the class during mis-semester doldrums (inviting a guest speaker, for instance, or “using an unusual resource”)
  • Achieving closure in the final weeks.

The creative ferment a classroom can bring into being – educator and students together – is a most wonderful thing, and can go on beyond semester’s end.

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Thank you *very* much

The acknowledgments page to B. M. Pietsch’s book Dispensational Modernism is very funny:

I blame all of you. Writing this book has been an exercise in sustained suffering. The casual reader may, perhaps, exempt herself from excessive guilt, but for those of you who have played the larger role in prolonging my agonies with your encouragement and support, well … you know who you are, and you owe me.

These three sentences do reflect the loneliness, exhaustion, and self-doubt often involved in completing a book – or, worse, a doctoral dissertation. Gratitude in these cases is a learned response for some authors.

editing

Back in the day, as senior editor at Prometheus Books Inc., I would have conversations with authors who had omitted spouses, editors, agents and mentors in their acknowledgments page. One author refused to acknowledge *anyone* – though, following a stern recommendation, he permitted me to write a happy paragraph.

h/t Clarissa

Photo by Robert Basil

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Whither the Keyboard?

My friend Clarissa writes:

Many people are lured into believing that apps can do everything a computer can and never acquire crucial computer skills. They go around brandishing their smartphones and tablets and have no idea why, in spite of all the productivity apps, they never seem to catch up. It’s especially sad to see young people get caught up in this self-defeating mentality.

typing

photo by Miles Basil

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Building a website that people trust

In an excellent article called “How Much Is Involved in Building an Authority Site” (in website-designs.com), author Steve Cartwright notes that “Authority websites have the potential to generate a tremendous amount of money, but the downside is that they can take a tremendous amount of work. However, a niche website that isn’t an authority website is almost as hard to keep updated anyway. It’s difficult to continually produce enough quality content to keep the search engines indexing your website enough so that your website remains at the top of the search results.” True, though not so difficult for individuals for whom the goal of websites and social-media is professional reputation and branding rather than financial profit. For owners of business websites, though,

How long each aspect of the authority site takes to develop will depend on your skill levels, as well as your budget. If you have the funds to hire out various aspects of the site building such as the web design and even the content creation, you’ll be able to rank higher faster. But, building an authority website still takes time. The way in which Google decides that your site is an authority site is by the age of the domain name, incoming links referencing the website, and the amount of relevant, high-quality content on the website.

When starting an authority website some experts will tell you that you need lots and lots of short highly focused articles. Each one of these should be focused on one particular topic and should include basis search engine optimization. The sole purpose of these articles is to gain indexing within the search engines. On top of this you’ll need to include some longer articles, these are your main authority articles and the idea is that these build on the grown work done by the SEO type articles. Authority articles tend to be longer than those written for search engine optimization alone, there sole purpose is to educate the audience on a particular topic. When I started Website Designs, I decided that I wanted to concentrate on lots and lots of authority articles, this is why you will not find any short SEO type posts on this website. …

If you work really hard, you can have a website up and running in about 30 days (sometimes less) depending on your own skills in terms of creating a website and graphics. You can fill it with 50 pages of content to get started, and then work on keeping it updated with fresh content on a part-time basis, but understand from the onset that it takes lots of work this is why most people don’t do it and many give up before they are successful. Spend at least equal time promoting the website as you do adding content to it. Expect it to take at least 120 – 180 days to start seeing a marked increase in traffic from search engines. Then spend time each week keeping the momentum going.

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Keeping your online presence beaming

It is a truism that dormant websites and social media platforms can do more harm to you than good, no matter how active you have been in the past. I teach my students numerous methods to keep their online presence bubbling even when they are busy with other things – the holiday season, finals – or when they are ill. I have certainly used these methods myself, in both situations, to keep my many platforms up to date.

For websites and blogs:
– Feel free to recycle past posts that have a timeless quality to them – maxims, insights, humour. (I make sure that such posts are at least three or four years old. I also make it clear that these are re-posts.)
– Point your readers to good writing posted by others whom you bookmark or follow via your news-feed (see below). There is nothing wrong with a post that is composed mostly of another writer’s thoughts. Give credit where credit is due, and Bob’s your uncle.
– Create and use an extensive photo library. A photograph with a short description will indicate that you are still “on the case.” And people like pictures.

For Twitter:
– No matter how busy or under the weather you are, you can usually get out of bed and review your news-feeds (see my own Feedly feeds); this can take as little as twenty minutes.
– Then: Tweet the posts and articles that will appeal to those who follow you.
– To make sure that you don’t spam your readers, spread out your tweets. There are numerous tweet-schedulers. I use Hootsuite and Buffer. With these I can be tweeting all day with just a few minutes’ effort in the morning.

For LinkedIn:
– Many, if not all, of your blog posts will be of interest to your LinkedIn “connections.” Post these in your LinkedIn updates. There is nothing wrong in repurposing your work this way.
– Once or twice a week, head over to your LinkedIn account and see what your connections are doing. Comment on or “like” their updates. Show that you are still attending to the work and insights of your online friends and colleagues.

So there you go: easy peasy lemon squeezy. Keep your online presence active and your ‘brand’ beaming. Have a wonderful holiday!

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Tracking Online News

Picture 1My new favourite website is NewsDiffs.org, which tracks and archives changes made to online news articles over time. Currently it follows nytimes.com, cnn.com, politico.com, washingtonpost.com, and bbc.co.uk; no Canadian publications yet, alas. Click on the image to see how a New York Times article from today has been revised.

This website can be a wonderful resource for high school and university students in writing classes.

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More on Clichés …

From professor Jonathan Mayhew:

One of Orwell’s sillier pieces of writing advice is “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Orwell advises “scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness.” But then wouldn’t he have to also scrap the metaphorical use of the verb “scrap” and the cliché phrase “has outworn its usefulness”? My point is not that Orwell is a hypocrite, that he himself breaks his own rules: that would be all too easy. Rather, the advice is simply incoherent and impossible to follow. Words tend to fall into statistical probable clusters, and part of being a language-user is to fall into some of those patterns along with everyone else. We scream in agony, or are “abundantly clear.”

We don’t just have a vocabulary of words, but a vocabulary of idiomatic expressions. As a teacher of a foreign language, I am constantly correcting unidiomatic Spanish, things that would make no sense at all to a native speaker of Spanish. What Orwell calls dead metaphors are just idiomatic phrases. We call them clichés because of old printer’s jargon. You could keep the moveable type for a particular phrase together in one place so you didn’t have to reset it every time. Another word for this was a stereotype. Knowing clichés or idiomatic expressions and using them correctly is part of being competent in a language.

I’m not saying that you should reach for the cliché as your first resort, or that you should never try to reduce your unthinking usage of them. I try not to use the phrase “makes a valuable contribution to the field” in a book review, for example, because that is THE cliché phrase in that genre. But generally speaking, clichés are simply the way things happen to be said in a particular language.

In linguistics this is known as “chunking.”

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