Wanted: Strong Writers in Tech

The professional world values results. It needs clear communication, but buseinss and techn also needs to make an impact through emotion, nuance, and tone. English majors, according to Matt Asay, are adroitly suited for the task:

But too often, as I regularly tell my Marketing colleagues, we tell that story “too small.” We focus on features, on the “what” of our database product, and not nearly enough on the “why” behind the technology. Answering that “why” question is something English majors do very well.

Gifted with the ability to communicate through writing, English majors, too, are worth their weight in gold. However, it’s surprisingly hard to find good writers.

Really, really hard.

English majors, after all, have difficulty finding their way in technology. I should know: I’m an English major. I moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 — somewhat by accident, as I was working for a large Japanese trading company. And there hasn’t been a day since that I haven’t felt uneasy in the engineering-centric Silicon Valley, which prizes engineering prowess over almost everything else.

So even when we English majors are among you, we try to hide the fact that we’re more Ernest Hemingway than Brendan Eich. I’ve only recently recognized the value I bring to tech companies after literally decades of feeling self-conscious about not being an engineer.

via Business Insider | Why Every Tech Company Needs and English Major

College pushes everyone to become a little better at writing. Writing is hard work. Teaching effective criticism is even more difficult.  According to the scholar Daniel Mendelsohn, it begins with knowing yourself and knowing the “rhetoric of the form.”

I always tease them at the beginning of the semester about their writing—I say, “Whenever you write me at 11 o’clock on a Thursday night begging me for an extension on the paper, the prose is always so beautiful and the email is so wonderfully structured.”

via Learning What’s Critical « The Dish.

 

So even if you aren’t an English major, don’t give up hope. Many other liberal arts degrees offer similar grounding in writing, especially History, Philosophy,  and Area Studies.

Revisiting David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Address

I find Wallace to have given an insightful and kind convocation speech–in a field that is notable for its superfluity and self-gratification. But this view from Tom Bissell makes me sad to see how much this thought-provoking and truth-telling talk was really about the speaker himself.

Wallace was often accused, even by his admirers, of having a weakness for what Nabokov once referred to as “the doubtful splendors of virtuosity.” Standing before the graduates of Kenyon College, Wallace opted for a tonal simplicity only occasionally evident in the hedge mazes of his fiction. He spoke about the difficulty of empathy (“Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of”), the importance of being well adjusted (“which I suggest to you is not an accidental term”) and the essential lonesomeness of adult life (“lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation”). Truthful, funny and unflaggingly warm, the address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man. At the edges, though, there was something else — the faint but unmistakable sense that Wallace had passed through considerable darkness, some of which still clung to him, but here he was, today, having beaten it, having made it through.

via Essay – David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Address – Great and Terrible Truths – NYTimes.com.

 

This is Water from Patrick Buckley on Vimeo.

Do Novels Teach “Critical Thinking”? (Maybe, maybe not).

On the “subconscious conversations” that reading a massive, challenging novel entails:

Reading is geologic—it takes vast amounts of time and pressure. Worse, however, is that I’ll forget most of what I read in Eliot’s masterpiece. Even now, close to finished but still immersed in the text, I confuse characters: Was Fred Vincy the one who owed money, or was it Ladislaw? And what’s the young, ambitious doctor’s name again?

via Ambiguous Pleasures – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Creativity. (Really)

Creativity has officially attained buzzword status and it remains to be seen if teaching creativity has any lasting impact–but these attributes of “highly creative people” are intriguing: daydream, observe everything, make time for solitude, turn obstacles around, and people-watch, among others.

Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). In fact, creativity is thought to involve a number of cognitive processes, neural pathways and emotions, and we still don’t have the full picture of how the imaginative mind works.

And psychologically speaking, creative personality types are difficult to pin down, largely because they’re complex, paradoxical and tend to avoid habit or routine. And it’s not just a stereotype of the “tortured artist” — artists really may be more complicated people. Research has suggested that creativity involves the coming together of a multitude of traits, behaviors and social influences in a single person.

“It’s actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self,” Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity,

via 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently.

Author Jonah Lehrer has documented some of the more recent research on creativity–and links them to how organizations are employing these insights.  One takeaway:  Hard work matters, not just long walks or hot showers.

“It would be wonderful if the recipe for all kinds of creativity was to take showers and play ping-pong and go on vacation and go for walks on the beach, but when you really talk to people in the creative business, they want to tell their romantic stories about the epiphanies but then if you push them, they say even that epiphany had to go through lots of edits on it and iterations and lots of hard work after we have the big idea. And that’s a big part of the creative process too, and it is not as fun. In fact, there’s evidence that it makes us melancholy and a little bit depressed. But it’s a crucial part in creating something interesting and worthwhile. If creativity were always easy or about these blinding flashes, Picasso would not be so famous.”

via Fostering Creativity and Imagination  in the Workplace | NPR

Forget Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead. | Entrepreneur.com

An argument for systems over goals:

If you’re a coach, your goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day.

If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.

If you’re a runner, your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month.

If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a million dollar business. Your system is your sales and marketing process.

Now for the really interesting question:

If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still get results?

via Forget Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead. | Entrepreneur.com.

 

Holiday 2013 Reading List for Young Creatives

Tis the season for booklists, and reading is a wonderful thing.  Books make great gifts–and without weighing into the delivery mechanism (False dichotomy? Buy ebooks from independents and everyone wins who matters?)

This is my favorite list for students and seekers of an intellectual bent–with The Circle for the Google/Facebook fans, The Flamethrowers for creatives, Americanah for bloggers, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (post-Gatsby viewing because Baz Luhrman is irresistible), and Tenth of December because everyone says you should (and its good.)  Finally, if you are thinking about studying abroad, consider Necessary Errors.

via 2013’s 20 Best Books for Every Kind Of 20-Something – PolicyMic.

 

How To Write About Politics: The Engaged or Detached Style?

I wanna be a de-tached writer, I want to live the life of danger….Yes David Brooks, this is a good mantra for what we need in our political discourse.

Also, detached writers have more realistic goals. Detached writers generally understand that they are not going to succeed in telling people what to think. It is enough to prod people to think — to provide an idea or piece information that sets readers on a train of thought that takes them far in front of whatever you put down.

The detached writer understands that, at the top level, politics is a bipolar struggle for turf. But the real fun is down below, sparking conversations about underlying concepts, underlying reality and the underlying frame of debate.

via Engaged or Detached? – NYTimes.com.

 

How to Read in 2013 – Ross Douthat

Unlike my waistline, political discourse in the US needs serious broadening.  So I heartily recommend Ross Douthat’s advice on the NYT.  He recommends expanding our horizons by reading from other political perspectives, broadening geographic representation (Le Monde? Folha de Sao Paulo?) and adding  links to gReader (or your mail box if you so choose to proceed old school) from “outside existing partisan categories entirely” such as First Things, Reason magazine, Jacobin, or The New Inquiry.

Good advice, indeed via How to Read in 2013 – NYTimes.com.

 

booklist | the signal and the noise – bookforum.com

Call me a fox (and why you should call yourself one, too):

Hedgehogs, Silver says, are those who believe “in governing principles about the world that behave as though they were physical laws.” Foxes, by contrast, “are scrappy creatures who believe in a plethora of little ideas and in taking a multitude of approaches toward a problem.”

The author casts himself as a fox, and he thinks you should be one, too. As Silver explains, predictions typically fail when people—hedgehog people—ignore new information that conflicts with their worldview. And to remind us of how far afield the hedgehogs can wander, he cues up plenty of humiliating tape. There’s the economist who predicted a nine-percentage-point victory for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential ballot, based on an outmoded Vietnam-era model adapted from the computation of troop casualties. And there is the whole battery of Kremlinologists who missed the imminent decline of the Soviet Union because of their hidebound views of how communist leaders retained power. The heroes of The Signal and the Noise are those who stay nimble, forever incorporating new ideas and new information without drowning in a sea of extraneous data—people, in short, like Nate Silver.

via the signal and the noise – bookforum.com / current issue.

 

Great Books Summer Program

Call me a geek but this sounds like a lot of fun (as does the track on film).

Great Books offers membership in an international community of enthusiastic young learners and distinguished college faculty who read and discuss Great Books and Big Ideas. You will discuss the likes of Plato, Jefferson, Tolstoy, Borges and Vonnegut with other young people from around the globe who love literature just as much as you do!

via Great Books Summer Program – Reading Camp for Middle and High School Students.

The premise?  A middle-aged academic named Ilan Stavans at Amherst looks for a way to realize his dream teaching the “humanities whole–capable of expanding instead of narrowing the concept of who we are.”