Author Archive for Ryan

Technology: Miracle or Illusion?

Published
by
Ryan
on June 12, 2008
in Fun, Golf, Technology and Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the final in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

Since golf began being widely played during the 19th century until sometime in the middle of the twentieth, clubs had shafts of wood, not metal, certainly not graphite. The heads of clubs were slivers of metal about the thickness of a frying pan, the size of a silver dollar and had only a rumor of a “sweet spot.” A comparison might be playing tennis with an old-style 80-square-inch wooden racket strung with cat gut. Golf balls were originally stuffed with feathers (called “featheries”).

Today, the technology that goes into golf clubs and balls is seriously NASA-like. But without going into any more detail about polymers and titanium, let me get straight to the point: from the wooden clubs of the past to today’s clubs that amount to swingable periodic tables, something rather interesting has failed to change, namely golfer’s scores. The average amateur score is stuck at about 100, which stinks. (Almost everyone who golfs stinks at golf, myself included.)

Is it easier to hit the ball farther and straighter with hi-tech clubs? Yes. But if you then practice less it cancels out. Thus universal mediocrity on the links.

Perhaps readers can sense where I’m going for the writing tie-in. What if all the tech-centered promises of usefulness and openness and rethinking of pedagogical frameworks that we all talk about so much have downsides that cancel out any real improvements for young people learning to communicate? In golf, you might just as well play with a crisply rolled umbrella in your hand instead of a $400, wind-tunnel-tested science experiment UNLESS YOU HAVE A GOOD, REPEATABLE SWING. In regard to writing and reading in the web-world (yes, including “web 2.whatever we’re up to now”) is any amount of access or connectivity or integrated learning or p2p or interactivity or blogging or Wiki-ing going to make a difference – or rather, is the difference worth it – if it comes at the cost of implicitly discrediting the fact that there is no substitute for sitting down and reading a whole book? Lots of whole books. Yes, hours of time with just you and the (paper) pages. It is empowering for students to direct their own learning, but how impotent is a mind left without at least some relatively deep reading? Blogs keep us connected to those who share our various interests, but how disconnected from the human spirit are we without having read great novels? How can one really appreciate good writing if the most challenging thing one reads is cac.ophony.org?

I’m trying to be a little provocatively anti-tech here, and I ask: Workers of the Post-Book Techmad Connectiverse Freedom World – are you united? Is it OK that people don’t read books and that we imply that anything that takes so long is old-fashioned, unconnected, Luddistic and lame?

Happy US Open viewing!

Extras: Best golf instruction book: Harvey Pennick’s Little Red Book. Best golf-based literature: P. G. Wodehouse, Heart of a Goof.

“Drive for Show, Putt for Dough”: It’s the Small Stuff that Matters

Published
by
Ryan
on June 11, 2008
in Fun, Golf, Interpersonal Communication, Language, Pedagogy, Style and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the second in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

One of the enduring paradoxes of golf as played by amateurs is the huge and hugely disproportionate emphasis placed on the drive. That’s the first shot on a hole, hit off a tee instead of from the grass, with the biggest, longest club in the bag. It is a powerful feeling, and often looks great too, when you smack a ball way, way down the fairway just where you wanted it, bringing a sense of satisfaction that must somehow be tied up with the primal urge to demonstrate one’s physical prowess to other would-be alpha males. Of course, most drives, even ones that go far, do not go far in the right direction. And when the monster-drive-that-almost-was ends up in the woods or in three-inch long grass, you’ve hurt yourself far more with your strong-man indulgences than if you’d have sacrificed distance for accuracy. These indisputable facts, however, seem to have approximately zero effect on the minds of most amateur golfers. As I write there are thousands of (mostly) men wasting $200-300 on drivers whose heads (the part that hits the ball) are almost exactly the same size (at 460 cm3) as a pint glass.

In the end, golf is a game of less-than-inches. About half of the normal hacker’s shots will actually take place on or around the green (the short grass where the hole is) when the ball is probably less than twenty yards from the cup. And thus the timeless phrase, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” (A variant I think I actually prefer was suggested to me by Tom: “It’s not how you drive, it’s how you arrive.”) When you need to hit the ball just 20 yards (a chip) or roll it just 10 feet (a putt) what happens is not only more difficult, but much more important than the drive. Only dedicated practice can yield even occasional success when faced with greenside subtleties. Many times I have played golf with old men – really old, not middle aged – who just tap the ball down each fairway while my pals and I are wailing away from the tee and then trudging into the woods in search of an uncooperative ball (which we will then of course try to hit as hard as possible from under a rock, giving in again to the Siren song of the heroic). At the end of the round, we find that the eighty-year-old has shot his age while we’ve stumbled into the unsatisfactory upper-nineties. The difference is that we have cool clubs and he has a good swing. We have a giant dictionary and updated thesaurus on our desk, if you will, but he knows how to write.

The point is: do sweat the small stuff – which brings me to writing. Mark Twain addressed this point when he said something like “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” I still (cringingly) remember writing “poems” in middle school classes and figuring that the more multi-syllabic adjectives I could shove into the description of something the better. Good poetry must mean using superficially intense, longish words right? This was not unlike equating your golf prowess with your expensive, grotesquely large driver: an attempted shortcut that usually yields really embarrassing results. To get good at using metaphor a never-ending, effort. To craft a truly clear and useful sentence can ultimately take hours. Whether at its more basic levels (making sure you have an antecedent for a pronoun, subject-verb agreement) or in the mysterious and elusive quest for a meritorious style, what matters is not the flashy phrasing but the effective communication of your worthwhile perceptions, ideally in a way that effects or informs your reader in salutary ways. A golf shot starts with envisioning exactly how and where you intend the ball to fly or roll. A piece of writing begins with envisioning what information you want to convey. The good shot and the good essay are thus both instances of successful translation, and neither comes easy, and neither can be purchased.

(Another crazy and endearing thing about golf – though not so much like writing – is that the best professionals sometimes make very stupid, very costly mistakes. Read about an infamous instance.

Linked Pursuits: Writing and Golf

Published
by
Ryan
on June 10, 2008
in Fun, Golf, Revision, Writing Instruction and literature
. 10 Comments

Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the first in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.

Golf can be a bit of a mystery to those who have never played. Mainly it probably appears (a) boring and (b) much easier than it really is. Writing can also look that way to the uninitiated, and in fact golf and writing have a lot in common.

Both are solitary, addictive pursuits of an ultimately unreachable perfection. How, you ask, is golf solitary, what with all the crowds and the playing partners and the caddies in the pro game, let alone the beer-imbibing camaraderie-filled version more common to hackers like me? First because, even when you’re betting (thanks to a handy little invention called the handicap system) you’re always pretty much competing against yourself. Second, golf is intensely mental in its requirements – you have to try to remain calm and make measured decisions in the face of literally infinite small disasters and somehow shake off the feelings of deep depression and self-abuse that can accompany them: golf looks so doable and yet it’s so insanely difficult – again, like good writing (watch Tiger Woods: his menacing rage after a poor swing is always transformed in the space of half a minute into what I can only call a fierce serenity of absolutely purposeful concentration as he prepares for the next shot)Tiger. For comparison, think about those blues you get when you receive back your dissertation draft all marked to hell by your advisor — it’s really hard to stop moping and continue sometimes.

The mental pressure in golf results in large part from the fact that one spends drastically more time thinking about hitting shots than actually executing them (as writing takes so much longer than reading). A swing takes about a second; it can take you ten minutes to find your wayward shot in the bushes, as cac.ophony blogmaster Luke Waltzer can tell you. And what does one ponder while walking from tee to ball or lining up a putt? Where are my feet? Is my posture right? Am I standing too close or too far from the ball? Should I try under or over those trees? Is my grip too tight or too loose? Am I keeping my left arm straight? Am I keeping my head down? (Yes, simply watching the ball proves to be very, very difficult.) Full swing? Half swing? Wind direction? Topography of the green? Location of water? (It pulls putts toward it if it’s sizable.) These are just a few questions that go into every shot.

The key of course, like with writing, which has its own army of minutia to consider in each sentence, is, through practice and patience, to make as much of this as possible automatic. If you never spend time either writing or reading, each comma and each “its” vs. “it’s” decision can be a tiresome burden. If you never spend time either writing or reading, then it can be hard to even know where you went wrong – just like in golf, merely figuring out what to work on to improve can be an extraordinarily daunting propect all its own.

This Thursday the United States Open begins at the beautiful Torrey Pines Golf Course in California, where almost every hole offers up a vista of the Pacific framed by those craggy little west coast tress that look so picturesque against an evening sunset. So we will take the opportunity this week to talk about where golf meets communication/writing. I encourage everyone to tune in to watch a bit of the action and then (consistent with public safety) to grab a club and try to hit a ball where you’re aiming – beware: it’s as easy to get hooked as it is to slice. (Also, everyone interested in pinnacles of human achievement should consider taking time just to witness Tiger – in golf he’s Bird or Jordan, he’s Gretsky, he’s Ted Williams or Dimagio, he’s Faulkner or Dickinson, he’s Rembrandt; he’s someone your grandkids will have heard about.)

Fore!

Profiles in Silence

Published
by
Ryan
on November 9, 2007
in Interpersonal Communication, Language, Oral Communication and Politics
. 2 Comments

Students upon whom we try to impress the importance of clear communication would not have been able to look for an example to the roster of current presidential candidates last night.

The Democrats spend time talking about Bush’s expansive notions of presidential power, the mistakes of the war and the dangers and illegalities of Guantanamo and waterboarding. Republicans tend to stress the importance of stability in Iraq and the necessity of adjusting the legal posture of the US in the face of the threat of terrorism. Most on both sides agree that the Justice Department needs some serious rehaabilitation after Attorney General Gonzales’s politicization of that department and his eager, crass participation in efforts to legalize torture.

All these issues were central to the debate over the confirmation of new A.G. Michael Mukasey. He was confirmed last night by a slim but comfortable margin. But the following Senators/candidates decided not to weigh in officially, and simply did not cast a vote either way: Clinton, McCain, Biden, Obama, Dodd. To me that silence speaks volumes.

Symposium Thought

Published
by
Ryan
on May 3, 2007
in Symposium
. 1 Comment

I was thinking this evening walking to the train about how someone had commented that the moring speaker at the Symposium was “great but did not talk about communication.” I think that’s not quite correct. If we think back to the stories he related, they were all basically about LISTENING, a pretty important part of communicating. In the end listening is probably more than half of communicating. Communicating is not just what we say and how we say it, it’s what we hear and how we’re heard. Think how different BLSCI would be were it’s name “The Bernard L. Schwartz Speaking Institute.”

Conservatism of Style

Published
by
Ryan
on April 17, 2007
in Language, Non-Standard English and Symposium
. 0 Comments

I have been thinking along the following lines in the run-up to the New Rules Symposium:

It can be difficult to keep up with the evolving etiquette of smiley faces, exclamation points, or appropriate 21st-century saluations and signoffs — something might not have been acceptable a year ago but is commonplace today. I would propose however, that there are two rules that always remain relevant, rules that will point any writer in the right direction whether in 1807 or 2007. Those are: clarity and correct perception of context. Is my meaning transparent? Is what I am writing likely to distract or offend the reader?

If those are the questions we ask each time we hit “send” then we will tend to phrase our writing conservatively, which is a good thing. No boss who receives your memo is going to care if you’re the very last person to employ emoticons, but he sure might if you’ve chosen to be part of the emoticon avant garde. This of course does not mean conservative thinking. The idea is only to decrease the chance that your style distracts from the thought you wish to convey.

Communicating with Congress

Published
by
Ryan
on April 16, 2007
in Politics
. 1 Comment

I read this morning that Atty. General Gonzales prepapred in mock questioning sessions from Monday to Saturday for his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday this week. Call me crazy, but you don’t need to spend over a hundred hours preparing just to tell the truth or remind people of earlier truths you’ve told. Poor guy — he’s going to have to respond to a interrogation as intense and long as Justices Roberts and Alito did, except without the communicative skill or clear conscience that served those two so well in their performances.

Trying to Listen Earlier

Published
by
Ryan
on December 2, 2006
in Blogs and Blogging and Pedagogy
. 1 Comment

Recently I had students in a class I’m teaching fill out some informal surveys about the course — what they’ve liked and not liked, what they found difficult or interesting, what they would change, how they would compare our class to others, etc. As I was reading through them I came across several things that I realized would ahve been great to know about a couple months ago, things that no one ever mentioned in class but were close to universally agreed upon.

I’m thinking that if I use a blog in the future I will try to include a component for general comment on the class, hopefully making anonymous comment possible, so that I don’t get to the end of the semester before finding out about details of how students are experiencing the class. It’s always a humbling reminder to discover things that, despite all your best intentions, you as a teacher had been blind to for three months, sometimes things that would have been really easy to address or adjust along the way. Even when as a teacher you try conscientiously to be attentive to what students are thinking a challenge remains because students are often to hesitant to say say something. I’m hoping maybe somehow a class blog could help to cultivate a more free-flowing exchange of ideas from the beginning of the semester.

Diagnostics - Beyond the Numbers?

Published
by
Ryan
on October 6, 2006
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs)
. 0 Comments

As I’ve been coding diagnostic writing samples I’ve been thinking that there is some really interesting information here well beyond the quantitative data we focus on. For instance, students’ “post” samples in English lit classes like 2850 seem very often more in-depth, more thoughtful than their “pre” samples. Many of them admit to having been sceptical at the beginning of class (”This has nothing to do with business” etc) but then go on to describe how they feel that through a seemingly unrelated (required) class they have improved their analytical skills, changed their outlook on the world, stopped being intimidated by poetry, learned about enriching their understanding of literature via an author’s biography and historical context, and so on.

Perhaps I’ve just come across classes with really good professors. I’d like to think though that what we really see in such cases is proof of the necessity of the humanities — and not only for their own sake — and qualitiative support for the importance of CIC-type classes overall.

Also, on a slightly less rosy note, it seems to me that there are several courses that are technically CICs but that really demand a fairly paltry amount of intensive communication over the course of the semester. I’m not volunteering for this, but it might be interesting if someone explored the general qualitative content of “post” samples against the syllabi and writing/speaking/reading demands of the courses.