D'you know what I mean?

In a slight departure from the usual fare, here's Noel Gallagher in GQ sharing his thoughts on all those titles of creative works that have nothing to do with their subject matter (a point I've put less persuasively). It made me laugh.

 

But... what f***ing winds me up about books... 

This is already the best sentence I've ever heard. 

...is, like... my missus will come in with a book and it will be titled - and there's a lot of these, you can substitute any word, it's like a Rubik's Cube of shit titles - it'll be entitled The Incontinence Of Elephants. And I'll say "What's that book about?" And she'll say, "Oh it's about a girl and this load of f***ing nutters..." Right... so it's not about elephants, then? Why the f*** is it called The Incontinence Of Elephants? Another one: The Tales Of The Clumsy Beekeeper. What's that about? "Oh it's about the French Revolution." Right, f*** off. If you're writing a book about a child who's locked in a f***ing cupboard during the f***ing Second World War... he's never seen an elephant. Never mind a f***ing giraffe.

Quite.

Standing on the shoulders of seagulls

I'm pleased to present the first guest post on this blog. Here, my friend and colleague (and Natural Sciences student) John Tweedie shares his thoughts on the challenges of communicating science: both within the scientific community and to wider audiences. John also blogs on science, Scottish football, birdwatching, and anything else that takes his fancy.

Knowledge is next to useless if it’s not shared. Knowledge is created by sharing and standing on the shoulders of the proverbial giants who came before. From town criers proclaiming a monarch’s decisions and clans and tribes sharing knowledge through song and poems to the advent of the printing press and the development of the world wide web, people have a thirst for knowledge and an urge to share it with others, be they friends or opponents, colleagues or competitors.

Emerging from the shadows of alchemy through the works of Aristotle and Archimedes and onwards through the Enlightenment to the modern day, science has developed an extensive body of knowledge and various means to communicate, both within science and to the general public.

The scientific method is the accepted way in which science is conducted — a question is posed or an observation is made and a scientist will then develop a hypothesis to find general patterns that underlie the question. Through experiment and further observation, they will refine their hypotheses and so become more confident in their outcomes.

A major part of this process — indeed the main way in which to further develop the hypotheses and build towards the more robust ‘theory’ — is communicating the findings.

There are several ways this can be done. One is to take part in conferences where peers can ask questions about methods used when conducting an investigation and their outcomes. Often these presentations can be used to test early parts of work — is the work well received, or are people picking lots of holes in it? The feedback can send a scientist off in different directions — perhaps their methods have been flawed or their statistics do not support their work. Further revisions and presentations can lead to the work being readied for publication for the wider scientific community to study.

The general process of getting a paper published is regulated by the major journals and through peer review. A paper will be sent out to reviewers who will scrutinise the paper and decide whether it’s fit for publication.

Whether another scientist can or cannot replicate the findings will lend weight to the hypothesis or result in refinements of the hypothesis. Later studies replicating the original investigation may include errors in replicating the experiments, in which case these findings must be published too. In science, negative results are every bit as important as positive results. A good example of this was the recent search for the Higgs boson — a negative result would have meant scientists having to revise their hypotheses and models, which in itself is a continuation of the process of building knowledge.

The most important part of a paper is not the conclusions, but the methods. This is where a scientist demonstrates how they went about answering their question. It’s this part of the paper that allows other scientists to attempt to replicate the experiments and observations conducted. It’s important to note that most scientists work in teams and collaborate within their institutions and with colleagues across the globe, and that published papers often represent the work of many people.

There’s a tension between new discoveries and building on previous knowledge. Scientists must be familiar with the current thinking and all that has gone before in their field.

John James Audubon is well-known for his work in the early 19th century as a field ornithologist and artist. To test whether the turkey vulture had a good sense of smell he put out hidden carcasses, and concluded when the birds didn’t find the meat that they did not have a well-developed sense of smell. Unfortunately for him, his experiment was flawed, because if he had known more about these birds he would know that they prefer fresh carcasses rather than putrefying flesh, and it turned out that the birds he was observing were in fact another species which have a poorer sense of smell than the turkey vulture.  He was also under the mistaken belief that animals can only have one well-developed sense; in other words, if a bird has a good sense of sight they cannot have a good sense of smell.

Much science is highly specialised and only of interest to other scientists, but enough is of potential interest to the general public or considered ground-breaking or to have real-world applications that could solve urgent problems facing humanity and the world today. These papers are picked up and summarised first by popular science magazines which will present as much of the science as possible but for a non-specialist but highly interested and educated audience.

Next up are newspapers and the media — they’ll often simplify the findings, bringing out the practical applications of the science or demonstrating in what way the findings may or may not have revolutionised our knowledge about a particular topic. They’ll often put the science in context with what came before and what the science could lead to in the future.

This is where science communication to the public becomes really important. Science thrives on using precise and specialised language, often underpinned by difficult mathematics or conceptual ideas. The News at Ten is not going to devote time to talking about the intricacies of quantum mechanics: to properly understand such a topic a person really does need an education covering the basics — in this case physics — what an atom is, what it is composed of and how they interact with each other and the transfers of energy.

I have such a lot of respect for many of the science correspondents who can convey complex ideas in the few minutes they get, usually at the tail-end of news programmes. What they do is explain what the science means through using analogies or how the findings are going to find practical uses in the future. Are the results of the findings going to result in faster computers and better communications technologies, are they going to enable effective medical treatments to be created? Most people’s lives have been enriched by the work of scientists: indeed many people are still living due to research, so this is often where the excitement of ‘big science’ is really conveyed.

As much as the general media help to shape public interest in science they also have a responsibility to present it accurately. It’s all too easy to oversimplify the science to make it seem as if a study is something that has a ‘common sense’ answer, something the social sciences are particularly vulnerable to. They could misrepresent the science, leading to confusion and misunderstanding, perhaps undermining public confidence in scientists.

The media can also suggest that ideas are contentious and that there are dissenting voices out there when really there is none within science itself. This is common with climate science where the media, in a mistaken sense of balance and fair play, will allow sceptics or deniers lots of airtime, potentially giving the impression that the scientific consensus is undecided. The BBC has come under particular criticism for this, highlighted in a report by Steve Jones. Many of the sceptics or deniers are not scientists, but are opposed to the idea of what the science represents, either through ideological, political or economic beliefs, and they are particularly concerned with how countries will respond politically or economically to putting in mechanisms to slow down human-caused global warming.

Andrew Wakefield’s now discredited work on the link between the MMR vaccine and autism is a prime example of how irresponsible communication can lead to health scares, and ultimately to deaths. Parents honestly think they're behaving in their children’s' best interests, and often talk about making informed choices for their children, but when the findings of science is misrepresented it can have dire consequences. Many people do not have the scientific education to make truly informed decisions on matters like these and so the media has a responsibility to present findings accurately. This is an example where the peer review process had failed: it should have never have been published in the first case.

As such, I’d like to see scientific communication be a part of all science undergraduate training. Many scientists like to distance themselves from the media and the general public, enclosing themselves in their labs and ivory towers and working in the pursuit of pure science. However, with much science being publicly funded and ultimately having practical applications, scientists should be able to communicate to the press and media. Not everyone can be a Richard Feynman or Carl Sagan, but the ability to communicate clearly to a wide audience is something that should be nurtured. Science has many ideas and words that are used in a specialised way — theory and uncertainty are two examples which the general public do not understand — but scientists should be able to clearly explain what they mean in the context of their work. Often critics say things like ‘it's only a theory’ to shed doubt on evolution, or the public take uncertainty to mean that scientists aren’t sure about their results. These ideas and indeed all science must be clearly communicated.

There are many other mechanisms of science communication. These include popular science books, sometimes written by journalists or historians of science who bring together whole fields and present the science in context, but often by working scientists themselves. Textbooks find their place in university libraries and are only really read by students and other scientists.

Radio is where the voice of scientists is often heard by the general public, rather than their work being interpreted by correspondents as on TV. It’s this medium where they get more time to explain their ideas to the general public, and it’s here that the really good communicators excel.

Some excellent communicators and working scientists, such as Brian Cox and Alice Roberts, are able to work across all media and they really engage the public, often enthusing about science and encouraging the next generation of scientists. They present big ideas that are exciting — normally little knowledge is expected of the audience, although sometimes, like Jim Al-Khalili, they’ll present more difficult concepts, expecting the audience to keep up.

All of these examples show just how wide and varied science communication is. Science is incredibly important to our societies — its developments enable our way of life to be possible — we live longer, we can access information on any topic at any time in just a few seconds, we can travel hundreds of kilometres in a few hours, we can talk to our friends and families instantly living on the opposite side of the planet, and in the developed world we have more leisure time due to developments in technology, often derived from pure science.

We’ve put men on the Moon and to the bottom of the oceans, we’ve sent probes to other planets, one has just left the Solar System, and a rover is sending back information from another planet. We know how old our Solar System is and how long it’s expected to last.

All of this science has had an amazing impact and it will continue for as long as we keep asking questions and enquiring about how the world and the Universe works, with communication being at the heart of the process.

I suppose I ought to try and offer some sort of partial defence of the media's coverage of climate change. It's very hard for those of us on the other side of CP Snow's two cultures to accept that contentious issues can be genuinely settled one way or another, and we're right not to accept it in other areas: we journalists have a healthy scepticism towards authority which helps keep politicians and bureaucrats in check the rest of the time (or, at least, it does until they decide it won't any more).

There clearly is still a genuine debate about what to do about climate change, even if there's no longer a debate about the science itself (or, at least, the science so far rather than its extrapolations in the decades to come). I hope this secondary debate — essentially, should we risk short-term economic growth by trying to stem carbon emissions, or should we accept a warming world and instead spend our wealth on better adapting to it? — will now become the focus of the mainstream media's coverage. This Economist leader, for instance, seems to get the balance right.

Rights of access

A recent article in Wired on fonts for readers with dyslexia caught my eye. I'm not dyslexic so have no way of judging this objectively, but I find the text in Dyslexie easier to read than, for example, this open source alternative.  

Accessibility is something that, by law, any public sector organisation involved in publishing must take seriously: and the rest of you certainly should too. You won't always have the resources to get all of your documents translated or turned into Braille, for instance, but if you're publishing for the general public there are some basic things you can do to make your documents more accessible for readers with additional needs like dyslexia, or with levels of literacy that aren't as high as your own. For example:

• For on-screen documents, if you're publishing PDFs, a clickable table of contents based on XML heading styles (easily created in Word) helps visually impaired users with screen readers to navigate your document. Make sure headings have meaningful titles and follow a logical sequence and hierarchy.
• For websites, publish transcripts of any videos and podcasts, and include alt text for images. More information is available at W3C, but the best bit of advice I can give is to carry out extensive, iterative user testing before launching a site.

Just as many of the principles of good web writing also apply to good writing generally, so a lot of the advice for readers with dyslexia is helpful for those of us who don't have. For instance, this style guide from the British Dyslexia Association recommends large sans serif fonts with bold headings, no block caps, left alignment, bullet points, the active voice, and clear instructions given in short sentences without too many abbreviations or too much jargon. All of this stuff is good practice for effective written communication the rest of the time.

Though this be madness, yet there is method innit

Radio 4 had a useful addition last night to the points made by David Foster Wallace on the necessity of teaching formalised standard English to children who otherwise won't be exposed to it.

Noting that brevity is the soul of wit, self-made south Londoner Lindsay Johns' 15-minute lecture bemoans our tolerance of ghetto language; its speakers must be taught how to communicate the way mainstream society does, so that they can fully participate in it. The argument goes: language is power, there is an existing power structure, it has an existing linguistic structure, so outsiders need to learn it to have any access to power. Have a listen and see what you think.

 

His view — far harder for those of us who aren't black or working-class to express — is that the 'soft bigotry of low expectations' is at best counterproductive and at worst actually more racist than demanding a more clear and consistent command of vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. I've no idea how much linguistic relativism there is in today's urban comprehensives: I would have thought its deficiencies were obvious enough by now, but perhaps the fact he still feels the need to give this talk suggests the mindset lingers.

 

One might also take arms against his insistence that a hip-hop version of Hamlet is 'evil': if it acts as a bridge between no Shakespeare and pure Shakespeare then isn't that better than nothing? I don't think it's culturally relativist to say that Hamlet, unadulterated, could on first reading be intimidating for a young person with low levels of literacy and no previous exposure to classical literature, whatever their ethnicity. So there's an argument for easing them into it. A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear and all that.

 

For the white middle-class liberals he criticises, the whole thing is of course an amusing parlour game. Whenever the possibility of teaching rules of language or grammar is raised, an army of clever clogs is on hand to point out that these rules are no such thing, that the idea of 'proper' English is a Victorian myth, and so on. At their own level of ability, they're right: but as Johns articulates, inner city kids need to be taught some rules before they can successfully break any of them. As the Prince of Denmark himself puts it: "Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."

The strange English of dead liberals

Today's Telegraph has a nice quote from Peter Oborne — the paper's contrarian-in-chief — on the ongoing failure to agree a workable meaning of the word 'liberal'...

Now we come to the second wing of the modern Liberal Democrats, who have their roots in the collectivism of the first decades of the 20th century rather than the individualism of the 19th. These members greatly admire the state, while tending to be hostile to individual liberty. Bafflingly, they also call themselves liberals. But like so many other confusions of language, this is almost entirely the fault of the United States. Just as the Americans use the term “gas” for what we call petrol, so they have mangled the meaning of the term “liberal”, using it to describe those who embrace the state as a means of enforcing what they regard as desirable social goals – usually ones associated with the imposition of social or economic conformity.

As I've written before, tethering yourself to the 'liberal' mast lets you fudge the issue of whether you're really a centre-right Economist-reading type or a centre-left social democrat. In America the word now clearly means the latter, in Australia presumably still the former, while in Britain many left-wing voters assumed the Lib Dems were merely a less authoritarian version of the Labour Party (so ignoring their capture by Orange Book soft-libertarians). 

In Europe, proportional electoral systems mean parties aren't forced into uneasy SDP/Liberal-style alliances to win parliamentary representation. Anyone who isn't an ossified conservative (whether of left or right) should want the same for Britain: for the sake of our language as well as our politics. Electoral reform would allow classical and contemporary liberals to part ways: leaving each to campaign on a clearer and more honest platform, and ensuring that one of Western civilisation's greatest intellectual traditions doesn't just come to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean.

Sword's mighty pen

"Writing is a central activity in higher education across disciplines", writes Helen Sword in an example of a boring opening sentence.

 

Her treatise on stylish academic writing is a few years old now, but it's very well judged: a sort of updated version of Orwell's modern translation of Ecclesiastes, also bringing to mind Alan Sokal's great skewering of meaningless postmodern jargon.

 

It doesn't surprise me that she was inspired to write her manifesto on style — which appeared in Studies in Higher Education and which she expanded into a book — by her experiences in education, which tends to be one of the most jargon-heavy, outsider-excluding disciplines. A lot of people in education — and not just higher education — would do well to study her wise witticisms like "The crucial question for academic writers is not how to avoid jargon altogether but how to keep language at once precise and rich", "The old myth that impersonal = objective = scientifically superior still holds firm in many social scientists' minds" and "Stylish prose favours the reader, whereas stodgy prose favours the writer".

 

Much of the text I now work with could best be described as defensive: everything is hedged with an 'and/or' or an 'if appropriate' or a 'while ensuring specified guidelines are followed at all times'. Writers of passive, bureaucratic stuff like this think they're covering their backs, but really they're just patronising and annoying their readers (not that we couldn't all do with losing a bit of flab).

 

Academic writing, like political communications, is fundamentally different from corporate or organisational material in that its main purpose is usually to persuade the reader of the value of an idea, rather than just to convey information. As such, it needs to be stylish as well as clear. Higher education is more competitive than ever: a huge amount of research is now published, and most of it is excruciatingly boring and narrow enough to interest only a very few readers, if any. To stand out, academics need to be able to produce original work that draws from all sorts of areas, and to sell it in an engaging way.

 

One of her complaints is how rarely academics with interesting personal stories to tell actually let their own views and experiences come through in their writing (not a problem many journalists have). This fine piece of Swordsmanship shows why it's worth putting the effort in to bring your own voice out, even if she gets a bit carried away sometimes (funky cowboy boots and purple hair, eh?).

 

Finally, note how often the names of superstar academics cropped up in the survey of stylish peers: Pinker, Schama, Dawkins. Do they, having won fame, feel less constrained by the rules (or myths) holding back other academics: or did their stylish, ranging writing win them a big audience in the first place?

His master's tone of voice

This recent Marketing Week post on corporate tone of voice caught my eye. This figure is particularly striking — "brands [globally] spend $13bn (£8.7bn) a year on visual identity and just $2bn on verbal identity" — but it's encouraging to read of brands like O2 and Nationwide taking the war on jargon more seriously (especially as I'm a customer of both).

I wouldn't say O2's 'be more dog' billboards tell us anything useful about the clarity of the company's communications, though: the test is how easily customers can read small print and speak to call centres, not what they take from an abstract ad campaign. Attending to those small details might not win many headlines or awards, but it will help a brand quietly build a good reputation. Equally, we shouldn't assume that because a company's outlook is irreverent and unfussy it necessarily produces clear, consistent messages or makes the most effective use of communication channels. Corporate mission statements that read like Facebook status updates tend to grate.

A common complaint is that the language organisations use is often shaped by backroom technicians rather than frontline communicators, who end up having to work as translators so the public can understand what their colleagues are on about. If it's not possible to involve sales and marketing staff in the terminology process from the start of a project, it can at least help to have a comprehensive style guide that acts as a jargon-to-plain English dictionary.

This is all particularly true on social media. Corporate communicators are nowadays encouraged to speak to customers in their own language online; this is sensible, but it requires a solid grasp of who those customers are and what their language is like. As with every other aspect of the internet, risks and potential rewards are both magnified.

A final related point is that marketing folk tend to be more aware of the need to avoid jargon than senior management, who often need to be persuaded of the value of both plain English and social media. The best managers are instinctively open to such developments, won't treat them as tick-box exercises and will both invest and take part in relevant training: but this is more proof that good external communication depends on good internal communication.

Brands that aren't aware of these issues often end up annoying the public and losing customers. Now, why not have a look at a fellow comms guru's advice on a few things firms can do to avoid annoying journalists and losing press coverage?

The open society and its enemies

Thrill-a-minute hedonist that I am, I've spent the week reading Facts are Sacred, the Guardian's new book on data journalism, and The Signal and the Noise by clever clogs Nate Silver. The usual low standards of Guardian subbing are met, but ignoring that there's some interesting content. I note that the New Statesman, New Scientist and several marketing magazines have also devoted recent front covers to big data.

Nate Silver is impressive on the limitations of data; what he really advocates is an approach combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as a Bayesian method of improving one's probabilistic forecasts as the evidence changes. His advice — again, equally applicable to anyone in business, politics, communications or journalism — is to be consciously aware of your own biases if you want to overcome them and see the situation objectively. You hardly need me to add to the mountains of textbooks already written on how institutional groupthink and inertia have brought down many once-mighty companies. The challenge is to constantly apply this scepticism to your own positions.

At the risk of coming over all Blairite, there is also an open/closed distinction at work here, and the point applies as much to mindsets as datasets — and it cuts completely across traditional left/right or even liberal/conservative lines. As a recent Economist piece put it: "Our ideological sympathies are not good predictors at this point of how we feel about issues of digital privacy and electronic freedom. The fact that these issues don't have a clear ideological colouration yet is important because they are among the most crucial issues of the 21st century."

I would summarise this as the division between those whose instinct is to make information more widely available, and those whose instinct is that it should remain the preserve of responsible gatekeepers of knowledge — between:

• insiders and campaigners exposing malpractice, and those who find it more convenient not to confront such issues
• those of us who believe a free society must protect the right to get things wrong if we want to get anything right, and those who believe newspapers should only publish stories approved by committees of self-appointed guardians of truth and decency
• those of us who value freedoms over feelings, and those who think that their right not to be offended trumps everyone else's right to think, investigate, publish and leak without fear

We could list more examples, but the point is that this battle against banal illiberalism will define the era of big data and big brothers. Those of us working in communications are at the frontline, so we might as well get ourselves on the right side. If you're a journalist: understand how data can be used both to find and to illustrate stories, carefully craft and submit FOIs,¹ resist the lure of churnalism; if you're in PR or marketing, convince your bosses to make openness and clarity an integral part of your brand, develop a responsive social media presence that makes this a reality, and never let the cover-up eclipse the crime.

As YouGov's Peter Kellner says: "knowledge is not only preferable to ignorance in principle; it also makes for a healthier society in practice". Encouragingly, one of the 10 design principles on the new gov.uk site is: "Make things open: it makes things better." What we really need is for this message to filter up to ministers and senior civil servants, and down to middle managers.

The point isn't that we need to be anti-capitalist or anti-government in principle; just that, to make both of these essential parts of our society work better, we need to keep a close eye on them from inside and out. As citizens we have to hold public bodies and global companies to account every bit as ruthlessly as we hold producers to account when we choose whether or not to buy their goods and services. As employees we need to fight institutional cultures that prioritise the organisation above the consumer or the public.

Erring on the side of this openness is good for society; whether it's good for individuals is an entirely different question.

---

1 I recently did this in my capacity as an elected member of Dowanhill, Hyndland and Kelvinside Community Council, and after waiting nearly a month was told by Glasgow City Council I'd need to pay a fee of £90 to get the answer I was looking for. But don't let that put you off. ;-)^↩

What a tangled website we weave

I've written favourably about the new gov.uk site before, and this week I see they've also published their style guide and content guidelines.

For comparison, here's the house style and plain English guide I helped write for my present employers. The Economist, Guardian and BBC style guides are also useful reference points, particularly for anyone coming in to an organisation that hasn't yet developed its own rules.

This latest addition is an impressive bit of work: most of it accords with what we're already doing in our publications, and while there a few points I would quibble with (they advise against writing out numbers below 10, for instance) there are certainly a few more we could incorporate (eg on SEO).

It would be nice to see this applied consistently across the whole public sector and its sub-guides; gov.uk could act as a sort of BSI for these (though I'm not sure what my pals at Hansard would make of that). If David Cameron's looking for a house style tsar, I hereby throw my hat into the ring.

Hearts and minds

Victoria Macdonald at Channel 4 News had a good blog post on jargon in healthcare communications yesterday. She suggests that the political challenge of reorganising the NHS might be a lot simpler for managers and civil servants, if only they communicated with a suspicious public in something nearer plain English:

"Those speaking for change did not argue their case particularly well and at times seemed either exasperated or even patronising. I know they did not mean to come across that way but years of reporting the NHS has shown me that often those working in the health service do not know how to speak plain English and regularly fall back on jargon as well as making assumptions that people and patients know as much as they do about complicated statistical models of health care."

As well as helping to win arguments like these, taking clear communication more seriously could save lives. The approach of a senior manager at one of my employers — "if you can't convince them, confuse them" — seems, sadly, just as common in the healthcare sector as everywhere else.

The next large scale innovator disruptor in the quickly dying education market?

A pal writes in:

"Not sure you'll get all this — you need to read the pompous piece it's responding to but I thought it was such a hilarious pricking of a balloon that I thought you should point to it in your blog."

Done!

Testing, testing

I see the grammar debate is back in the news.  Rather tediously, and like so many of these issues, the argument often collapses into two unappealing opposites, when a perfectly sensible and uncontroversial middle ground needn't be beyond our wit.

On the one hand, there is the view that there is no such thing as standard grammar (as argued, rather eliptically, by Michael Rosen) and that, as Charlie Higson puts it, "You can't teach English without teaching grammar, it's inherent."  On the other, there is the view that grammar does have fixed rules and that these need to be not just taught but regularly tested.

I argue that one need not be a linguistic prescriptivist with a sort of Euclidean belief in a set of immutable laws — arbitrary archaisms governing when to use 'shall' and when to use 'will', how to not split infinitives, and so on — to recognise the value of having a decent grasp of the forms of sentence structure and orthography commonly used in British English to facilitate clarity in written and spoken communication.  The sad reality is that many children will not be exposed to this outside the classroom and will not have them on hand when they first go for an interview.  The controversy seems to be about whether teaching critical analysis of Shakespeare, Burns, Orwell and the rest of them will automatically embed a working grasp of these useful conventions, or whether this needs to be done separately and explicitly.

Here comes the smug middle-ground bit, and the plug for my employers.  In Scotland, I think we've got the balance about right now.  At SQA we've recognised that this osmotic assumption is a bit out of date.  That's why we've taken advantage of a new, modular setup to include distinct units in Literacy that will be incorporated into English (and Gàidhlig) courses.  In much the same way, we've acknowledged that teaching the -ometries in Maths doesn't necessarily produce numerically competent and confident school-leavers, so we've done the same with Numeracy units.  We've also opted to combine continuous coursework with final exams, which again seems to me preferable to a system of assessment based entirely on one or the other.

(Perhaps this is all unnecessary though; the best argument we could present to teenage boys is that a good grasp of grammar will help you get not just jobs but girls.)

It's depressing that this gets hijacked into another interminable left/right argument.  By now, we really should be able to agree that if grammatical rules aid clarity and comprehension we should keep them, encourage them, and teach them to children; if not, we shouldn't bother with them.  Why we can't just accept this principle then work out the details, rather than turn it into a partisan political debate, is completely beyond me.  How many other countries do this?

Perhaps the reason is that, as Chris Cook puts it, "90% of education 'commentary' reflects the writer's own school neuroses."  I couldn't possibly comment...

The political scientist

After Margaret Thatcher died, this leaflet from her third (but first successful) parliamentary campaign did the rounds on Twitter:

As an editor, I can't help noticing that there are four pages of the stuff, not to mention the usual assortment of random and pointless capitalisations (some things don't change).

I doubt, by the end of her political career, she would have stood on a platform of 'BENEFITS UP' — but I think, policy aside, it tells us a lot about how political communication changed in the second half of the 20th century.  Fast forward to her leadership of the Conservative Party and her time as prime minister, and compare her first endearingly amateur leaflet with these very influential, clear and direct adverts.  First, the Saatchi campaign that got her elected:

Then the advert I most associate with her time in office, 'AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance':

We don't tend to think of Thatcher as one of the great political communicators — admirers and detractors both point more to her unshakeable ideology and her force of personality as the secrets of her success — but we might remember how much of the professionalised media management Blair, Mandelson and Campbell perfected in the New Labour era began with her and her press secretary Bernard Ingham.  Perhaps, also, her dislike for nuance, subtlety and intellectual contortion allowed her to present simplified, easily understood messages in a way that has often eluded highbrow leftwing opponents.

The one epitaph being consistently applied by both friends and enemies is that 'you always knew what she stood for'.  In politics I'd prefer to live by Keynes' maxim, and my instincts would always favour consensus over a 51% strategy: but we can't deny the power that the Thatcher brand held for so many people for a remarkably long time.  The appeal of that uncomplicated approach, and the way her image personified her ideas, surely holds lessons for today's corporate and organisational communicators.  Like Supermac, and in a way her biggest rivals Tarzan and the Welsh Windbag never matched, the Iron Lady embraced an opponent's epithet and turned it greatly to her own advantage.

However, I think today marks the moment the brand overreached itself; achieved Thatcheration point.  A ceremonial funeral (a state funeral in all but name), complete with several hundred serving members of the armed forces, a cancellation of PMQs and a silencing of Big Ben, seems to me fitting only for a head of state, not a former head of government.  That conservatives fail to grasp the difference shows the hold she still has on their worldview.

I hope, then, I won't upset anyone by suggesting that now is the time to lay the brand to rest, not to immortalise it.

Act in haste, repent in waste

I picked up this slightly al dente leaflet at my work the other day. They were going to get them pulped, but they hate waste more than they hate proofing errors...

Health prevention of literature

A co-conspirator sent this image in from his place of work:

'It seems like no matter what nationality you are, the slide into stale painting-by-numbers corporate lingo is exactly the same,' he added. Very well put, which is more than we can say for whoever produced the unfortunate poster.

Still, as health advice goes, it's not as disturbing as this sign I saw in Singapore a couple of years ago:

I think that rivals the KEEP OUT: DANGER OF DEATH sign I saw on an electricity substation in Plockton for the least appropriate use of Comic Sans yet.

Tricolon cancer

It seems classical rhetoric has a place in modern communication strategy after all. Have a look at Cancer Research's use of omne trium perfectum in this new poster I saw on the underground this week: I think it works very nicely. They're also taking Owen Jones' advice and telling stories rather than quoting a bunch of boring facts and stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A lot of charities have turned into political lobbying machines and so become distrusted by a jaded public; the more organisations like Cancer Research can show that they stick to their basic purpose, the more they can convince us to fund them. I think campaigns like this will certainly help.

How's that squirty inky stuff workin' out for ya?

I've written a lot in favour of the principles of plain English and Orwellian language generally, so I enjoyed Ed Smith's piece in the New Statesman challenging the ideas the great man laid out in Politics and the English Language. The penultimate paragraph was especially well put:

Orwell argues that the sins of obfuscation and euphemism followed inevitably from the brutalities of his political era. In the age of the atom bomb and the Gulag, politicians reached for words that hid unpalatable truths. By contrast, our era of vague political muddle and unclear dividing lines has inspired a snappy, gritty style of political language: the no-nonsense, evidence-backed, bullet-pointed road to nowhere.

 

It's very hard to disagree with that, particularly with the point about evidence-based policymaking, a phrase often used as a figleaf for policy-based evidencemaking. But I think the wider argument rests on something of a misreading of plain English; of when it needn't be used and when it must.

Any clear and honest communication of a political message is obviously a challenge both to bureaucratic or academic jargon that overcomplicates issues, but less obviously a challenge to the dumbing down that oversimplifies them (which seems often to be confused for plain English). Owen Jones is quite perceptive in noting that the left are particularly guilty on the former score, and the right on the latter: though we could hardly accuse Obama, say, of subxaggerating his backstory.

It's perfectly possible to be insincere with simple, straightforward language. Speaking honestly ought to be just as important as speaking plainly. Finally, it seems to be stating the obvious that plain English is necessary when the writer's primary purpose is to communicate clearly, but might not be when it isn't. A commentor on Stephen Poole's Guardian piece puts it perfectly:

I think you misunderstand the point of plain English a bit (but then in fairness, perhaps some of its adherents do as well). Most people wouldn't expect poetry to be written in plain English. But most people wouldn't expect poetry in a letter from the council, or a bank. Those are the kinds of communication plain English needs to be used in, so that everybody is able to easily understand information that directly affects their lives.

 

Frustrated narcissists in damp garrets are welcome to shovel as much allusion, amphibology and aureation into their fevered, ne'er-to-be-read ramblings and rants as they can manage: but please keep them away from writing letters for HMRC.

Nowt in front of the children

The story about a school in Middlesbrough taking a stern line on non-standard English caught my eye the other day, as did Tom Chivers' take on it.

I agree with Chivers and Wallace that the interests of the learner count most: rightly or wrongly, children will become adults who will be judged on how they speak, and anyone who claims not to judge others by what comes out of their mouths has lies coming out of their own. But I would add that clear communication demands quite a high degree of formalised English. I can (usually, pretty much) understand what any of my fellow Glaswegians are saying to me, but a non-native English-speaking visitor (or even a non-Glaswegian native English speaker) might find himself completely confused by the local vernacular — as when my guest from London was surprised to find two sausages in his 'single sausage' order. Expect plenty of similarly sidesplitting examples of native miscommunication when we host the Commonwealth Games next year.

It's both more considerate and more efficient to be able to speak and write in a recognised and clear form of English. That's not to deny the richness that regional language adds to British culture and the English language; it often saddens me to hear people in parts of East Anglia or the southwest speaking a homogenised estuary English when two generations ago they would have had a distinctly local accent and vocabulary. I don't envy teachers the task of finding the right balance between preserving this heritage while instilling a globally vital form of communication. Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that, as English speakers, it's only local forms facing extinction, and not our whole language.

There's also a third category of people (usually politicians, academics or middle managers in large organisations) who think that because they don't use local slang they're in command of 'proper' English, but whose idea of communication is to stuff sentences with jargon, obfuscation and words that generally add nothing to the meaning. This often comes down to a lack of intellectual confidence: they imagine that plain English is somehow unsophisticated English, or try too hard to compensate for not having much of interest to say.

The sad truth is that this lack of confidence often stems from something missing in their own schooldays — so perhaps we should applaud anything to prevent the urchins of Middlesbrough becoming the bullshitters of tomorrow.

Save the data

This week we learned that Glasgow (my home town) has been volunteered to host a pilot project to collect and use urban data more efficiently. The idea is to link up real-time info about transport, traffic and energy to make delivery of related public services more responsive. Even in a medium-sized city like ours, the amount of relevant data my fellow citizens generate would seem to make this a huge job.

According to some data I just found on the internet, 90% of all the data that exists was created in the last two years. The challenge of sorting through all of this stuff, and condensing or consuming it for some useful purpose — for research, for commerce or just for fun — is becoming one of the great communications challenges of the age. Essentially, the job of any professional communicator has always been to sort through a lot of data and transform it into useful information: in journalism this means bringing out the salient facts of a story, in marketing the key selling points of a product or service, in PR a bit of both. But how do we go about sorting through the deluge of data that exists now?

  

JISC's rather good newsletter has some ideas about how we as individuals and institutions might go about this daunting task. I liked point 6, though it doesn't seem a particularly risky claim to suggest the visualisation of information will increase. The project to display interactive information about every bomb dropped on London in WWII, explored on the next page of the newsletter, is a fascinating example.

It's worth remembering that not all of this is new. This Economist article from 2007 on the history of graphic displays of information contains some examples that are just as impressive and eye-catching now as when they first appeared centuries ago. It's hard to think how today we could better illustrate the disaster that was Napoleon's campaign in Russia than by Minard's chart, while Playfair's beautiful depiction of wheat and labour prices seems to anticipate the Manhattan skyline. The dismal science can be fun too.

The JISC piece also leaves out the problem of institutional bottlenecks: right now I'm trying to explore visual.ly and easel.ly, but the browser on my work computer is obsolete and my attempts to get IT to upgrade it have so far proved futile. The potential for big data is exciting, but any big organisation generating the stuff is also liable to be sluggish in working out how to deal with it.  Big is not always beautiful, as this Guardian article explains. Mountains of data are of little use if your local council only consults 42 people about a major planning decision, then ignores them and does what it wants anyway.

One final point: as with all technology, the information revolution merely magnifies existing trends in society and human nature to produce new opportunities and new dangers. Might the disturbing extent to which American politics has become polarised be at least partly a feature of the ease with which readers, viewers and listeners can now avoid accessing opinions they find unfavourable?