Archive for the 'Style' Category

A Memorial: Saul Bruckner

Published
by
Hillary
on May 27, 2010
in Administration, Asides, New York, Pedagogy, Process, Style and To Ponder
. 6 Comments

When I heard that my high school principal Saul Bruckner had died in his Mill Basin home on May 1, I was shocked, but in an aimless sort of way. It felt huge, impossible—a massive loss and somehow a very personal one. And yet while I had a vast sense that Mr. Bruckner had influenced me deeply, I had no luck when I tried to articulate that influence to the people around me. “My high school principal died,” I told my roommate. “He was really incredible.” And then I’d trail off.

So, like legions of other Murrow alums, I’ve been spending time thinking about just what it is exactly that makes me feel like I want a bust of Mr. Bruckner in my living room. Many of us appreciate the important teacher figures from our pasts, but what of the folks who didn’t necessarily teach us long division or what the Rococo period was about? What of the learning that comes from that dispersed thing known as educational leadership?– from administrators, of all people?

The first thing to mention about Mr. Bruckner is just how old school he was, in a new school kind of way. He was a truly progressive educator who didn’t need to appropriate slang or wear a whistle in order to “connect” with young people. He rose up the ranks in the New York City school system (back when it was still a Board of Education, and not a Department) as a social studies teacher, became assistant principal at Dewey High School, and eventually opened Murrow in 1974.

Edward R. Murrow High School is known for the many progressive aspects of its structure and approach, but Mr. Bruckner himself came across as a pretty subdued, non-controversial guy. You’d imagine that a principal who allowed students freedom of choice in their academic pursuits, outlawed bells and hall sweeps and detention and sports teams, gave students the benefit of the doubt when it came to unstructured time, and fiercely defended music and arts programs might be more of a hippie crusader in moccasins than a buttoned-up older gentleman in neat tweed suit jackets. Not so.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Still, those are the facts. When the Times published a short article about his memorial service, I started honing in on what I found so unique about Mr. Bruckner.  The photo that accompanied the article did it; Mr. Bruckner, with his arms folded, his red name tag jutting out from his jacket, listening intently to three students surrounding him, all of whom look like they’ve got more than one bone to pick with the guy. That was his usual posture—arms crossed, ears open, completely committed– and it wasn’t rare for Mr. Bruckner to be outnumbered. I stood in front of him this way many times, standing with my friends and shooting off at the mouth about something or other, while Mr. Bruckner stood stock-still and listened—sometimes with a bemused smile, sometimes with a look of mild judgment. Perhaps the man closed the door to his oblong office (where he also taught his 7:30am AP American History course) and privately screamed into a rattan pillow—if he did, we never caught on.

The man was consistency itself, and I’d guess that he realized just how important that was to us, to see him standing by the main entrance every morning as we entered clutching our bagels. He was an eloquent man of few words, but clear actions. Students at Murrow were allowed to lounge in the hallways during “free” periods (which weren’t called “periods” at all), but if we were obliviously sitting next to a clump of trash, Bruckner would suddenly swing around a corner to pitch it in the garbage, reminding us at once that he was boss, it was our building, and no task was too insignificant for him– or us.

Mr. Bruckner’s death crystallized for me even further when I read an article penned by one of my former English teachers at Murrow, Katherine Schulten. Ms. Schulten is now editor of The Learning Network, and she identifies five poignant lessons for educators that she took from working with Mr. Bruckner.  The final one, “Kids come first,” coupled with her description of Mr. Bruckner—kindness, intelligence, commitment and vision—packaged up exactly what I’d wanted to say all along. How remarkable to observe someone with so little (discernable) ego, a fellow who never went out of his way to strut his feathers and yet implemented such a strong vision at the same time. To be an educator who skips the bloviating and lingers on the students while constructing a school culture that follows his thoughtful concepts– and then he hangs out long enough to really see it flourish and sustain? A term that Mr. Bruckner himself taught me is the only one I can think to use: rara avis.

Ms. Schulten’s article got me thinking: as someone who routinely stands in front of clusters of young people and some days finds the crown of educator a very difficult one to wear, ignoring Mr. Bruckner’s legacy outside of its most general terms shouldn’t be an option. Sure, the life of an adjunct lecturer and Communication Fellow is very different from that of a high school principal, but that’s no excuse to disregard the challenge that his example puts forth. I heard the news about Mr. Bruckner’s passing during the crowded and frustrating end-of-semester crush, when students were filling my  inbox with frantic emails arguing about grades, contesting plagiarism charges, pleading for forgiveness. Some days it’s incredibly difficult to maintain empathy, priorities, and focus—the kind of focus, I realize, Mr. Bruckner persisted with, day in, and day out, for so many years.

Numerous Facebook groups have already popped up paying tribute to Mr. Bruckner, and an accompanying campaign to have the street outside of the school renamed in his honor would be a fitting memorial to a life’s work that thrived at the humble intersection of Avenue L and 17th Street. An equally moving tribute is represented by the many students who, like me, have been newly considering just what was in this special sauce and where  we might apply it ourselves. I’d suspect that it won’t just be about picking up that lone piece of trash in the hallways, but also about that particular blend of action and patience. Still, it’s an educational riddle worth committing time to: how did he do it? And how can we?

Palm-of-the-Hand Speeches

Published
by
Hillary
on January 28, 2010
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Process, Style, To Ponder and literature
. 2 Comments

Throughout his long career, Japanese Writer Yasunari Kawabata wrote a series of short short stories, which he referred to as his “Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.” Kawabata produced 146 of these stories, becoming a true “palmist,” even if his notoriety in the West is focused on his novels.  As described by the editors of the published collection, Kawabata believed that these little stories expressed the “essence of his art.”

I first read these stories in an experimental prose writing course a bunch of years ago, and the concept of these one-to-three page gems intrigued me. I was reminded of these stories this past semester, when, through my work supporting Advanced Accounting, a Communication Intensive Course, I found myself confronting palm-of-the-hand speeches. When I first learned that students had only two-to-three minutes to present their assigned material, I was skeptical. Two minutes to discuss a contemporary concept in accountancy?

As the semester progressed, and I struggled to help students condense the finer points of recording intangible assets on balance sheets, I necessarily focused on the benefits of these l’il speeches. Just as Kawabata’s stories are deeply complex while also being succinct, shorter speeches have the same potential. Translator J. Martin Holman could be talking about ACC 4100 speeches when he writes of the relationship between Kawabata’s small stories and his longer works:

“The palm-of-the-hand story appears to have been Kawabata’s basic unit of composition from which his longer works were built, after the manner of linked-verse poetry, in which discrete verses are joined to form a longer poem, the linkage between each dependent on subtle shifts as the poem continues.”

While longer speaking opportunities are still crucial for our students, these palm-of-the-hand speeches can give students a better familiarity with the basic units of composition required for larger speeches. I used to think of two minute speeches as a good exercise in summarizing, editing and brevity, but they do have their structural benefits, as well.  According to Holman, Kawabata mastered this form using certain elements (the same ones that would make any Palmist speech exiting); “juxtaposition of images,” “unique perception,” and “intriguing and memorable” plots– not reductions, but distillations of larger worlds.

There are clear positives and negatives to assigning such a short presentation, but on certain days, the luxury of having a lot of time to concentrate on just two minutes of material did seem like a very Palmist exercise. Students themselves, however, don’t always see the merits of this, and, rather than viewing it as the essence of their art, are more apt to view the assignment as the gnat buzzing around their schoolwork.  How might it be possible to elevate and enliven these palm-of-the-hand speeches to the place that Kawabata realized they deserve?

Your Signature Style and Trademark Word

Published
by
Szidonia
on December 14, 2009
in Style
. 0 Comments

Now, I am not sure whether I am still living in *the* fashion capital of the world, or NYC lost out to Tokyo or Milan a long time ago. Regardless, I like to tell the students, (my clients!), I am working with as a consultant about their linguistic repertoir while referring to the vocabulary of fashion.

We usually agree that a dress code is important for their in-class oral presentations. I am also big on good posture and body language, things I take from my own dance practice and things they always pick up on, with almost no exception. What I have found myself becoming increasingly aware of this semester, however, has been the particular “fillers” students use in those pauses that intervene almost as a rule during our rehearsals. They admit that, due to lack of practice, they perform impromtu most of the time, which increases their nervousness. I tell them I understand completely, we are there in order to practice and that this is part of a process; I do not expect a polished product. I notice, nevertheless, their fear of pauses, of silence and their rush to fill those gaps in time with text, noise, something. That’s when we get all those “fillers,” like “like,” “you know,” “actually,” etc. And they get repeated a good deal! At some point in the semester, I remember having a whole lot of fun with one of my groups of students: we were laughing our heads off while watching the previously recorded presentation and counting how many times one of the presenters used the word “basically.” There was a really cordial atmosphere, so nobody took the laughter personally; we all admitted we could have done the same thing, repeating a word endlessly and never realizing it. Curiously enough, the presenter himself/herself did not notice it until I pointed out the pattern. I did not talk about repetition as such, I rather called it their “trademark phrase,” but I urged them to think about other words that could spice up their linguistic wardrobe, so to say, while filling in those pauses they dread. I also reminded them of the fact that pauses are, in themselves, very effective. Presenters should pause for emphasis, for letting the audience digest the information, etc. To go back to dance, again, it is harder to dance slowly than fast and only experienced dancers dare slow it down to a pause.

I wonder now what my own “trademark phrase” is. I am sure I have one; maybe I should record myself as well and then hit the rewind button and watch, relinquishing, for once, the power I have as the eye/I of the camera.

Torture? culture? Torture-culture?

Published
by
Ryan
on April 22, 2009
in Audience, Debating, Higher Education, Language, Liberal Arts, Media, Non-verbal Communication, Politics, Style, To Ponder, Uncategorized and What if . . .
. 1 Comment

In an undergraduate class I teach on the social and cultural history of the US during times of war we always end the semester with a discussion of the contemporary conflicts we’re involved in now — “GWOT”, Iraq, Afghanistan — and attendant domestic issues like privacy, constitutional rights, legal jurisdiction over “unlawful enemy combatants”, balance of power between branches of government, political rhetoric, etc.

This semester we read and discussed the recently released Red Cross report on US treatment of terrorist detainees, treatment which was conclusively shown to be torture. Once we got the basic history stuff out of the way, I asked students to think through whether such treatment can ever be justified — a little dime-store ethical philosophy thrown in to the history classroom. There are usually some who think there’s no justifiable use of such harsh tactics as have been regular lately. Others insist that, if torture could be known to be likely to work, then we have to leave moral absolutism behind for a more utilitarian approach — i.e. it just might be OK to do some pretty rotten stuff to someone if it saves thousands, hundreds or scores of lives. This is always an interesting discussion, but it’s one that also makes clear how much the understanding of the torture question has been framed for my students by popular culture (“24″ (the worst culprit) and the many other movies and shows we all can probably remember).

This year however, in two separate classes, something new arose: Students, on their own started advocating torturing people not to in order get intelligence that would prevent 9/11 Pt. 2, but as punishment. Eye-for-an-eye sort of thinking — you get what you deserve, and there are no real limits to what you might deserve except how egregious your own crime was.

I found this truly unsettling. How did we get here? I think that the way we got here is a good old fashioned slippery slope. On TV, the bad guys get tortured and either give it up or not, die or not, feel terrible physical pain or not — but they’re the bad guys, so in the verbal and visual rhetoric of trashy (and extraordinarily popular) TV, it seems OK to many viewers. Torture becomes a regular adjunct to justice.

In addition, there are movies every year which prominently feature torture of human beings either in the same context or as “horror films” (really sadism films), in which the torturers are bad guys, the enemy. In the second case, torture seems despicable, so in one evening of viewing a person could be treated to a rather schizophrenic overall depiction of the issue – the cruel device of the worst fiends and the necessary tool of the righteous. But also in the second case, the problem is not that torture becomes linked with justice, but rather that it becomes entertainment; it’s a fun way (apparently) to get scared for an hour or two before making out with your girlfriend or checking on the sleeping kids.

What separates us, ideally from the Taliban, among other things, is our idea that justice and vengeance are different things. What renders us humane instead of merely human is, among other things, the idea that there are some acts which are simply morally unacceptable. What separates adults from children, among other things, is that adults see the real social utility as well as the moral truth of the old saw that two wrongs don’t make a right.

As a culture, we’re letting go of these things by the way we accept depictions of torture, as both titilating and just. To have a torture culture is not just to accept depictions of torture without clear disapprobation; it is, as the term “culture” implies, to grow, to nourish torture. And so, I think, when you have a culture rife with torture perhaps you end up seeing the fruits of that tortuculture blossoming in your nice calm classroom one April day.

Here’s Lookin At You, Kid…or Not.

Published
by
Hillary
on March 9, 2009
in Audience, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Feedback, Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Pedagogy, Powerpoint and Presentations, Process, Style and To Ponder
. 4 Comments

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRAcZ2rTGPg&feature=related[/youtube]

I love this quirky little how-to clip, mostly because the audio doesn’t match up to the video, making poor Leila look like she needs her own mandated visit to the house of corrections. But I can relate to Leila and her message, and I’m willing to admit that I stumbled upon this video in a moment of desperation, when I was brainstorming different approaches to this question of encouraging solid eye contact in oral communicating.

As most of us have probably discovered by now, when we’re providing feedback on speeches, merely repeating “you need to make more eye contact” doesn’t do the trick. (And really, why should it?) Most of the speakers we work with know full well that eye contact is something they should shoot for—they’ve seen this on speech evaluation forms and read about it dutifully in their Intro to Public Speaking class way back when. But if they commit this same “offense” in every presentation they make—staring at the PP screen, or at the floor, or at their hands, or note cards—when does the practice actually come in?

And, just as importantly, how do we invigorate our own approach to this thorny delivery snag? Some days, “make more eye contact” becomes the easy go-to, that dull phrase you know you’ll probably say before the student even begins. But isn’t commenting on eye contact just another way of saying that they didn’t make a connection with their audience? If we wanted to get all Eckhart Tolle on this post, we could extend it into the idea of being fully present (which has plenty of resonances in actor training). We all know how magical it can be when someone gives really great eye—that mixture of confidence, care, and connection– but how is it best learned?

I’ve tried a few new things in my recent quest to investigate the power of the Connecting Eyes. In the classroom, I’ve become more emboldened to push away the chairs and try out some of the better eye contact exercises that I know of, forcing people to get used to going eyeball-to-eyeball. Some of these exercises transform the room into a sort of communications gym class, which is a little hard to get used to, but not a bad thing at all. Does this have more successful outcomes in student performance? Hard to tell, exactly. But it certainly increases comfort and community among the students.

And during my BPL sessions with student groups, I’ve changed my approach. Instead of allowing the students to run through their entire presentations before I provide my feedback, I now occasionally stop them mid-stream, prompting them to re-do an entire section, this time focusing on, say, sustained eye contact. I know some of you out there have run your practice sessions like this for quite a while, but I’m just now catching on to its real benefits. I had been skeptical of the logic of isolating one element and potentially distracting the speaker with it, but I’m now thinking of these sessions as true rehearsals; if they can’t “run through” their work multiple times, what are the chances that a pattern of poor delivery will be broken?

I’m Sooooo Q

Published
by
Hillary
on September 28, 2008
in Fun, Language, Oral Communication, Style and Technology
. 4 Comments

Communication is not exactly the MTA’s forte. Between their signature garbled announcements (what’s the next stop?) to the impossibility of communicating across the vast gulf between the MTA booth worker and the puzzled tourist yelling helplessly at the glass, when they do communicate something (anything!) well, it’s cause for some serious celebration. Even the notoriously goofy advertisements on the trains (Dr. Zizmore joke, anyone?) serve as continual reminders of botched opportunities to reach the diverse train-riding audience while making substantial revenue– how many times have you seen empty ad space on our broken-down subway cars?

To make matters worse, the MTA has also been slightly slow on the uptake when it comes to wielding technology to the best of their advantage, which is why it’s perhaps no surprise that their latest stab—the new digital screens in some updated subway cars—already seem to be malfunctioning perfectly (according to my own admittedly informal survey of new train cars, that is).

And which is also why it’s interesting that something so simple manages to communicate so much: the train lines & representative letters themselves have incredible expressive power for many New Yawkers. Initially, when someone forwarded me the recent article in the Observer about the perceived changing desirability of certain train lines, I had to let out a small groan; anyone who’s interested in the brand-ification of NY neighborhoods has seen and been frustrated by this kind of article before– a few random quotes from random folks strung together to try to create a coherent snapshot of a neighborhood in supposedly wild flux.

The biggest problem I see with most of these articles is that their discussion of New York history seems to cover on average about three years, give or take a few months. As some irate comments to the article noted, New Yorkers who can recall when the Q wasn’t the Q or the R wasn’t the R look upon this obsession with particular train lines with bemusement. I grew up listening to my parents refer to subway lines by their old-school avenues, which I always found odd-sounding: “Did you take the IRT there?” “Doesn’t the 7th Avenue line stop there?” (Whaaa?) The Observer article engages in its own short-sighted historicism, looking all the way back to the roaring ‘00s to declare the Q the new L; eh?

I wonder if coveting a Chosen Train Line with static, starry-eyed love serves to cut down on the level of advocacy for better and more functioning trains across the board, or if it instead creates a neighbor more rooted in and concerned about where they live. The urge to want a transportation arrangement that is convenient, safe, and reliable is natural, but there seems to be something else at play here. What is it about the process of attributing status to certain subway letters/lines that feels like another lame fetish of the me-me-me-and-also-me generation?

I’ve sat through numerous student presentations (often by international students) who are shocked to discover upon arriving that our subway system looks like the old, neglected bohemoth that it is. A comparative analysis of the Hong Kong subway system, say, or the St. Petersburg subway, versus ours, is an embarrassing enterprise to be sure. I have the impulse to be protective of our train stations, to defend the long history that has made them what they are, and yet there’s something in the logic of these presentations that I can’t argue with. I sat in a shiny new Q car the other day, and couldn’t stop staring up at the broken screen above me that was promising that 34th Street would be the next stop– after we had already past 34th Street twenty minutes before and were hurtling towards Coney Island. Indeed, the MTA has given the very fabulous Q very fabulous new train cars and yet still can’t figure out where we’re headed.

A very long sentence

Published
by
Diana
on June 27, 2008
in Style and Writing Instruction
. 5 Comments

I am currently teaching a writing course, and a day after explaining compound sentences, and minutes after preparing a lecture on eliminating wordiness, I picked up Philip Roth’s A Plot Against America and came across the following mammoth and dazzling sentence.

“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark, dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard her complain of having been pointedly ill-treated in Elizabeth as a girl, it was not until she married and moved to Newark’s new Jewish neighborhood that she discovered the confidence that led her to become first a PTA “grade mother,” then a PTA vice president in charge of establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and finally the PTA president, who, after attending a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis, proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on January 30 – President Roosevelt’s birthday – that was accepted by most schools.”

While this sentence is not a-typical for Roth, it certainly is for the most of us. It’s important to note that it does not break any grammatical rules (it isn’t even a run-on), and that even my overly-sensitive grammar check didn’t have a problem with it.

I shared it with my students to illustrate that run-on doesn’t necessarily mean long, and to point to the fact that wordiness is not simply about the amount of words, but the meaning of the words: Roth has no redundancies here.

How to Tell A Story

Published
by
Luke
on June 27, 2008
in Fun, Interpersonal Communication and Style
. 1 Comment

Arabia

Peter O’Toole, on Fresh Air, telling Terry Gross about shooting the dangerous scene pictured above for Lawrence of Arabia.

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I love how O’Toole takes her question and turns it into a narrative, reveling in the details, painting a picture, and ending with a bang. As is often the case, Gross asks a follow-up question that leads to a coda by O’Toole that sums up not only the moment and the story, but also his entire approach to life.

“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.

The Passive Voice Is Loved By Me

Published
by
Jenny
on February 19, 2008
in Language, Style and Writing Instruction
. 4 Comments

Somebody sometime was told by someone that the use of the passive voice is incorrect. Since that time, writing teachers have taken pen to paper to mark out, to rid the English language of one of its most poetic grammatical constructions: the passive voice.

I’m always surprised by how many writers and teachers of writing vehemently believe that the passive voice is wrong, in the same way that, say, subject-verb agreement errors are wrong.

If you’ve never considered this before, consider it now: style books are political. Moreover, they are personal and biased, based on the writer’s own predilections for language.

If I ruled the universe, students would not use style books to learn to write. They may read them in order to obtain an appreciation, however, of the opinions of other writers. To read about writing is a beautiful thing. What students would use to learn how to write would be great writing. (They would read Tristam Shandy.) Reading great writing is what teaches great writing.

And great writing is full of the passive voice; it breaks all the rules prescribed by handbooks on style.