Lynne Sebastian- Presentation
Lynne: I have three things that I am going to pass out. The first thing is a short bibliography, the things that you actually got as readings, I have little extras on them. The second thing is a big test for you, and that is a set of exercises that we're actually going to do as a group. There are three exercises, numbers 1, 2 and 3, and they are collated together but not stapled together. So as this bunch goes around, you have to make sure you each have one of each of the exercises. And this is a paper that I will talk about.
I had all kinds of confusion about what to do when I got here. I sent to Anne this morning a heartfelt e-mail about 'I don't understand'...and I had two kinds of confusions in particular, and one was I actually made myself a little chart, the low pre-columned table, and in one columns I had the principles from the SAA book. And in another column I had the course (???) that all of you who are course preparers are making. And in the third column I had the topics for those of us who are advisors. And I though if I can see all three of these together I'll be able to (???) and I never did. So I am going to do the best I can, but I am still not exactly sure how these three categories of things are supposed to come together. So I thought I'd tell you that up front.
The other confusion I had was ok, I am supposed to talk about Public Outreach. And my question in the end was, well, 'Am I supposed to be instructing the people who are here in the topic of public outreach to make them smarter about it? (Which seemed silly to me, given that we have such important representations in this group) Or am I supposed to try to give people materials and ideas and possible readings for their students, and exercises that will teach students about public outreach? (This seemed only slightly less presumptuous, because almost everybody here has serious credentials in public outreach).' But I figured I'd take the less presumptuous route.
So, what you have in the readings you got from me ahead of time, plus what you have now that is going around is things that I have used in working with students, although my students generally are not university students, they are people in the (???) profession, because I teach continuing professional education courses. Although I do some of these with students at the university as well. So there are some readings that I've found useful for people at that level and some exercises and ideas to get students of whatever type to think about public outreach as a (???) component of archaeology, in the practice of archaeology. (2907)
It was interesting when I first started thinking about this, because I went through the book, 'the book', again: Teaching Archaeology in the 21st Century, and Susan had a wonderful (???) statement in there that the problem that was being addressed by the task-force was that traditions of academic training have not (???) with changing context with the practice of archaeology. And the whole concept of this was that (???) as Rosemary pointed out, is going into non-academic archaeology (???) but when I began thinking about the public outreach component of that, it occurred to me that I don't think that this is a problem that is unique to folks that are going into CRM, I think this is a problem of training students in the public outreach realm no matter where they're going to be in archaeology. And as I started thinking about this I thought when kids come out of college with a PhD in Archaeology, what are the three things that they are expecting to be able to do? If they are going to go in the academic job?
(???): Teach!
Bill Lipe (???): Write, publish
(???): Research.
Lynne: (???) effectively, and what proportion of the time that they are in school are they taught to do each one of these things?
Bill Lipe (???): Zero...most of them have teaching assistantships.
Lynne: But that is learning by doing...are they taught to teach?
(???): Sometimes...maybe 10%...
Lynne: Ok, and teaching to write? Not having them write, but teaching them to write?
(???): That's a bigger part...
Lynne: Yes, but maybe 15%...and the whole rest of it used to do research. And anyway, when Jerry (???) and I were editing 'American Antiquity', we came to a (???) once where we said, you know what? It's really depressing that when people get our of college, they're expected to do these three things and we spend all our time teaching them how to do this. And that's why we get these papers for American Antiquity that are so bad, because people are not being taught technical writing. And, how many good teachers have all of us had in college? And how many bad teachers? Both teaching and writing are things people are born with the skills for, but you have to improve those skills a lot with some techniques. I can't turn anybody into (???) or Hemingway but I can teach them to do decent technical writing, which is one of the things that I do. What's really interesting is that these are the skills that you need for public outreach. And it doesn't matter whether you're going into academic archaeology or CRM archaeology, or whatever. These are the things that people need to be able to do to do public outreach.
So, what I am going to focus on in my time today is these three things. And some of the readings that I've given you are actually applicable to some of these things. And are certainly applicable to the principles from the book. But the skills that I am going to talk about, you know trying to give to kids to do their public outreach are basically this basic sets of skills. I am not going to say a lot, as much about research, and mostly focused on writing and teaching people about the past. But I do want to say a couple of things about research, and that is...it's all very nice to spend a lot of time going on and on with your colleagues about platform preparation or the various ways of calculating minimal number of individuals of animals, and to obsess over this endlessly. But if you're doing research that is going to be communicated to the public, and if you are not doing research that's going to be communicated to the public you shouldn't be doing it at all, there are some things that you need to be sure are good components of your research. And these are the ideas that I had, and I am going to ask you for other thoughts that you'd like to add to this.
The first thing (???) to me is focus on life in the past. Endless things about dates, and settlement patterns, and microbotanical remains and artifacts are not good in (???) themselves. They are good because they are supposedly teaching us about life in the past. And you have to remember to bring the research back. So, one of the things I always emphasize is don't lose track of the folks. How many things have you read in archaeology when you got to the end, and asked 'what does it have to do with anything? What has this told me about life in the past?'. You're dealing with the public, any set of publics, you've got to say focused on live in the past. You've got to make sure that people can make the link between your bone awl and your display case, and what it was used for and how people related to this thing. I was teaching (???) class for a bunch of oil and gas guys which is a tough crowd, and one of them finally said to me very seriously 'what exactly is it with you archaeologists and charcoal?' Because he'd been reading the site reports that his contractors were sending him in, every time that there was a piece of charcoal in the survey, they recommended the site is eligible. And he was really having a hard time imagining what this fetish was that we had with charcoal. So I explained to him about radiocarbon dating, and the preservation of food remains, and all kinds of stuff, than it was like: 'Oh! OK.' So, it's so easy to lose track of the folks of the past. So my first rule is to focus on life in the past, not on stuff. The stuff is a means, not an end.
The second thing that is related: 'connect with people'. Find a way to help the public connect with people in the past. One of the best sites I ever dug before that was this site that had...it was a Hopi site...had a ventilator shaft and had been closed up, because people were planning to come back (???) and it didn't happen. But they had put mud around it, and there were handprints in the mud. And you could put your hand in this 1000-year old handprint, and that was the most amazing thing to people, especially I had Hopi children coming out to the site, and they could put in these handprints that was an ancestor of theirs, but even you know, just the (???) who came out to the site though it was so incredibly cool to be able to put their hands on the handprint. Just little things like that help people realize that these were human beings a long time ago. My husband and I went to the site on a (???) project (???) shelter, and one of the things that we found in the site were these little (pinch-pie) vessels (3352), and we call it (???), and we found the three (???) parts of the site. But there was a little plate, about this big around, and there was a little ball, about the same size, and a little jar about this high. And they had been pinched out, and they were fired, but there were little kid fingers, little fingerprints, and you knew looking at these things that what happened, you know, mom is making pottery, kids bugging her life, so she gives the kids little lumps of clay and says Ok, here, make your own, and then took these vessels and fired them along with her own pottery. You could connect with that mother in the past so easily. And this is what grabs people, this is what gets people excited about archaeology, it's the sense that there were actual people in the past who were doing the same things that we do, and solving the same problems we do, just using different technologies and different skills, sometimes.
(???): As part of that I think we all get often asked what is the coolest thing you ever found? And if you just say 'oh, this artifact', it just drops dead. What is it connected with? Footprints, handprints? Any of those kids of things, it doesn't have to be the most...
Lynne: I always use the (???) as my answer to that...
(???): Yes, I use footprints. Those are the things that, because that connects them to people, it's not just the objects...
Lynne: Exactly, and the other related thing is 'tell a story', people need to be able to tie this to people. If you have an artifact to tell a story is even better. Everybody knows the story about the broken biface (???), the cave side, you find this beautiful biface that was down to the last flake and when the guy did it, it had a hinge fracture and snapped right off. And you have one piece there with all of the tip that broke off, with the debitage and the other piece is on the other side of the cave. My husband was in a site in Utah called Cowboy Cave, and one of the things that they found was a sandal, beautiful sandal. And embedded into the bottom of it was a coprolite and the strap of the sandal had just been cut...just cut off the sandal and leave (???). But stories, things that you can see, the mother and the pinched pots. Use whatever tools you can to get people to sense that these are people in the past just like us, living in a world that we are just barely able to imagine.
Go for big ideas. There is nothing that makes me madder to go to some kind of public outreach thing where we find out that they ate corn. We all already know that they ate corn, even the people who don't know much about what archaeology is, has figured out that they ate corn. This is not an exciting discovery. If you got to engage the public, go for high-level things. I had to go and give a talk at the Grant County Archaeological Society once, Grant County Archaeological Society is in the most conservative part of New Mexico, and they are about this far (???) pothunters. I was the state archaeologist at the time, and they don't think much of those in the enforcement line of archaeology. So I was prepared for them to be a tough crowd, but I decided that I was going to talk about (???) with social organization and political organization. And try to figure out how we can understand that kind of stuff at the past. I was a little nervous about it. But I went down there and I gave them the full show. And I talked about how to make these interpretations of the past, and what the different competing models of what the social and political organization in Chaco was. They kept me there for two hours after the lecture asking me questions. And then they said, if we organized a field trip to Chaco, would you go with us and talk about this stuff? Because this is so exciting! And I figured, if I can catch the Grant County Archaeological Society, I mean, you have to work hard to make these kinds of interpretive complex issues understandable to the average person in the public, but it's a whole lot more fun than just showing them pretty pictures of archaeological sites and claim they ate corn. So, don't underestimate the ability of folks in the past to (???). If you can do it right you'll really grab them...(3667)
So, these are kinds of my rules for research issues and the public. Is there anything that I should have added to this?
Anne: Just repeating something that came out of Rosemary's presentation...whenever it's possible to use whatever ethnographic information you can get about what the public is in this particular context. So the fact that you had semi-pothunter audience helped you decide that it might be really great to explain to them what great things you can do in the context. But to frame that in a way that they would get the message without being offended by. So, knowing your audience...what I call ethnographic data, really really helps you reach them...
Lynne: Yes...you don't want to say: we shouldn't be digging up these sites because we won't be able to learn in the past...you know, because that just shuts (???), but...
Nancy: And you know, that's more work too that we have to do, we don't give the same talk in every venue, and you both gone to the concert where the stars say 'Oh, it's great to be here in Ohio, I mean Indiana...'. So you can't do that, it's a lot of work, but whoever invites you should be able to give you some clues (???) own students, maybe you can find out beforehand with some pre-test or something what their background knowledge is, like those things Rosemary was saying...what do they already know? Or what are the stereotypes...
Anne: Yes, because we make a mistake if we stereotype students. That's sort of where the problem is...
Vin: I agree with your list, and I just wanted to mention that the bullet that said 'connect with the public' not only fits our anecdotal experiences but I recall Elaine Davis's dissertation. Elaine is now the public education coordinator at Crow Canyon, and herself as an educator, a K-12 educator, before she got started. But in her dissertation she reviewed a whole bunch of literature on (???) and the topic was 'Teaching Archaeology to K-12 students", and one of the main things I remember from reading her dissertation is a whole literature that basically shows that if the student connects with the material in some direct way, they remember it. That's a key, so that's not just anecdotal.
Rosemary: The ethnographic work on museum research is that idea of residence...
Lynne: Right, they have to have that one thing that they can connect with. I thought that was really interesting, and the jewelry maker (???) who was looking at the beads and said: 'we got it right'.
Rosemary: Yes, it's basically that...
Ruth: I was thinking that when you were talking about making a story in order to connect them, and kind of engage the interest of anybody. Sometimes we can also build a real story out of the process of what we do. So how we figured it out how we felt when we were doing the process of discovery of whatever we were doing? Just to bring in to the idea that we're not just faceless archaeologists but that we actually all have personalities ourselves and histories and so on.
Lynne: Yes, we did not take that arrowhead and held against our foreheads, and figured the stuff out.
Ruth: Why did we think up, you know, why are we interested in scatological story, for example? What did we feel?
Liz: As sort of as an extension of that (???) exciting times doing tours of the sites, and giving them not just how we figured it out, but trying to empower with them to draw their own deductions (???)
Messenger (???): I was struck, and I am sure everybody knows this, but I wanted to make explicit the fact that those (???) for public in archaeology are also the keys to teaching.
Lynne: And in fact when I come to the 'teaching people to teach' that's really the (???). Ok, so that's all I wanted to say about the research component of this, because I think we do spend a lot of time teaching students how to do research, we just need to remind them that the research task has a component for the public. And as I say, if there is nothing in your research design that enables you to do those four things, you shouldn't be digging the site, or doing the survey.
But I wanted to talk next about writing. One of the things that I do in my day job is teach a course called 'Technical Writing' for CRM professionals. And what I want to do now is to use some of the stuff from my Technical Writing course that I think would work equally well with students, when you are trying to get them to think about how to write for anybody, this is not just about writing to the public, it's writing for anybody. So, the exercises, which I hope you have one of each of the exercises. It's a part of my writing class, one of the things that I say is I have three rules:
- Focus on the reader. It's amazing how many people ignore this individual. I mean, unless the thing that you're writing against is your diary, writing is as a social contract between you and one or more other people known as readers. Your job as the writer is to take the information that is in your brain and somehow deliver it to these other people through the main (???). And if you fail to do that, it doesn't matter how brilliant your ideas are, you might as well be stupid, because you're not delivering the project, you're not meeting your the social contract. So, one of the first things I say is keep in mind who the readers are, and this is something that Rosemary talked about in terms of the audience for museum exhibits, the same kind of thing. Who are the readers? And one of the things I always tell people is your stuff may go wider than you think, so write it for a wider audience than you really think. If you're writing a CRM report it may only go to the (???) and to the federal agency, but it won't, because of the client...this is the oil and gas guy. And he needs to understand this. It may find its way into the newspapers if you're working on a project that gets good media coverage and people may want to read the report. If you aren't doing a good job and it's federal money you might find yourself on 60 Minutes. You need to think about where this information is going and write if for a wider audience, not just write it for colleagues. Even if you're writing it for your colleagues, you need to keep them in mind and maybe think that not everybody knows all the details of things. So, one of the things about keeping the reader in mind is to know what they know and what they don't know. My example of the oil and gas guy and the C14 dating, what is the deal with charcoal? We go and politely write about oh, it's got charcoal, therefore it is eligible to the national register, well, why? Don't make those leaps of intuition or leaps of knowledge that your readers may not ba able to follow even if they (???) your colleagues.
(???): But certainly (???) publish.
Lynne: Choose you language carefully, we all talk about how terrible jargon is, but it's contagious, we catch it from one another. And one of the things I do in the follow up writing exercises in my class is to do things that purposely force people to exercises, follow-up writing exercises that purposely force the participants to not pick the easy word, because that's what jargon is. And we've heard it so many times so it's easier to just throw a jargon phrase in there, instead of thinking about how to write clearly, how to write well. This doesn't mean talking down to people. It's like the Archaeological Society issue, you can talk about very abstract concepts in very simple language, but you have to teach yourself to do that. It's really easy to show that your concept is complex by using complex words. Organize your writing in ways that make it easier for the reader to follow. Give them the map and signpost. In this essay, I am going to talk about four reasons for this...reason number one is, and follows a long discussion saying, ok, having completed reason number one, I am now going to move on and talk about reason number two, which is, and keep giving people these little signposts so they know where you are in your discussion. It makes the reader a lot more comfortable. How many times have you read something where (???) back several pages to see if you could figure out where is this now? How is this related to what I was reading? Where are they going with it? We should never have to do that. Give them little signposts even they (???): point number three is, and point number four is, etc. It really helps the reader and that's what you are supposed to be doing.
D. Snow: Lynne, the most difficult dissertation I ever had to work with, other than my own, of course, came from a student whose mother was a middle-school English teacher. And this doctoral student not only thought that she really had a handle on how to write, but because of that was almost (???) and it was extremely difficult to get that person to follow that last rule. And...
Lynne Sebastian (continuation)
Lynne: When I teach my Technical Writing class, that's the (???) I come up against from previous knowledge.
Nancy White: My son just came home and said absolutely he was not allowed to write point one, point two, and point three. And the difference between teaching them the creative poetry and technical writing has to be made clear too, because for creative writing, it does look stupid to put point one, two and three, but for us if it is the only way, I mean, it could be done more creatively too, but people don't understand there are different styles. Technical writing is not even a subject that introductory college students understand the meaning of.
Anne: Here is a bigger, theoretical, sociological issue involved here as well, because whatever ways that we establish our (???) interest among our peers is mastering technical jargon, and it's also one of the ways that we establish ourselves as experts to the eyes of the public. So it takes a tremendous amount of confidence on the part of even a professional academic to disclose the thrust of their research in ordinary language. But in order to do that, but it's necessary to do that if we are really going to open ourselves up to multiple voices, because that's an incredibly important key to do it.
Lynne: Well, you know, I think that this is not the way you establish yourself as an expert.
Anne: I (???) it's just contagious...
Lynne: Yes, its contagious. We catch it from our colleagues, because we think we ought to sound like that, and yet, if you think about the people who are most readable, who clearly are wonderful archaeologists, they all write like that.
Anne: And yet if you are standing in front of a bunch of pothunters, and one of them asks you a question that you find really threatening and challenging, it's almost impossible not to find yourself speaking in four-syllable words. It's a (???) for an academic to do that.
Vin (???): From all these issues I sort of think about where they apply...which level of the curriculum and how they apply. And a lot of these technical writing issues, I think, are especially important not at the sort of base level but at the sort of maybe graduate level. And just to echo something that Anne was just mentioning, I am a big believer in simple language and I once made one of my graduate students who wrote a very fine dissertation on "rocks" to do a global search and replace in his dissertation in every occurrence of the word 'lithic', was replaced by stone or rock. There was a great deal of resistance to this, in part because and he was a very good student, and also somebody who came to graduate school with a lot of experience in the field, said that if I do this my writing won't sound scientific. So I forced him to do this and I think he eventually sort of came around and wasn't too resistant, but then when he submitted his dissertation to a publisher, and it eventually was published, with only minimal use of the word 'lithic', one of the reviewers actually (???) on this and said: 'we scientists speak differently than the way it's written, and this does not sound scientific, and all the occurrences of the word 'rock' should be changed to 'lithic'. I guess the point is, it's not just for this little thing that it's kind of out there, there is real pressure.
Lynne: It is amazing how much argument I get from my students on the subject of passive voice...oh, I couldn't put a personal pronoun in there...
Joe S.: This is an incredible issue, and obviously I guess the only way to do it is to start peeling back the various layers of public they've been writing to, the ultimate one being two or three people in the (???) who are experts (???) and you've got to flood those guys with jargon, because otherwise you're not a professional, then there are the ten people who can basically understand what you're saying but aren't focused on your particular period (???) that down. And then finally you get to the public, and then there is this huge (???) where you really have to do effectively what you're saying, you know, go to words like 'stone', 'pottery' instead of 'ceramics', whatever it is. And then you have to make that jump and it's probably harder to peel back when you've gotten to the top in the traditional educational structure, you've gotten your PhD and you're an expert on whatever, and then to try and make that jump backwards is a very very difficult thing.
Lynne: And jargon has its place. You know...debitage, we could use every time the little bits of stone are leftover after you hit a rock with another rock to make a stone tool. But that would be silly. And even with the public you can use useful jargon terms like that, you just define them the first time. Like we have this word, and this is what this word means, blah, blah, blah. And after that you can use it. So, it's not that jargon is necessarily bad, and it is a shorthand way that we communicate with our peers all the time and it would be silly for us to go back to some kind of circumlocution to do it. It's just, don't use the 'easy word,' think.
Bill Lipe: One of the other points I'd like to make, language is a tool in the technical field, so it's very hard not to have technical terms, because it's a way that things can be defined more precisely. So, the position that you should never use technical terms in the field is completely defensible I think. However it's also possible to write at a different level for a difference audience without using technical terms and cover in general the same things. I am glad you are not on the side of those who think that all archaeological reports should be written at the same level. The other thing is that this is something that really has to be and should be addressed at the undergraduate level.
Lynne: Yes, because technical writing is a skill, creative writing is an art. And you are either born good at it, or you're not. And people can help you to be a little better, but nobody can make you a good creative writer. And technical writing is a skill, and you can learn particular tools to make you better. Some people are always going to be not very good writers, but by using a simple set of tools they can write comprehensively.
Rosemary: This whole discussion reminds me forcibly of the use of a book by Howard Becker, who is a sociologist, called 'Writing for Social Scientists' and it's available in paperback from the University of Chicago, it's very small. Becker is a more cultural of sociologist, or certainly on our side, but the book itself I routinely require graduate students to read it, because one of the things it does is actually go through and discusses this issue of why is it that when you're writing your thesis, the subtitle is how to start and finish your thesis, book, or article, why is it that graduate students routinely start doing this (???) language and I have found that it's more effective than my telling the students this thing, and because a book by other person reinforces and of course this guy is really good, he is a big deal. But a lot of the things that are coming up he discusses in this in ways, with examples, and students have real aha moments...and they say: 'Yes, that was my motivation'. He has a whole section where a student of his writes an exchange about why she feels that she can't risk not using the (???) approach and that it's easy for him to say 'do this thing' because after all he's got tenure. And he does a really nice job of sort of addressing those kinds of real world constraints. I think it would be real useful, it's not an archaeology book, you have to follow it in sorts of other ways.
Bill Lipe: The problem is distinguishing as sort of (???) uses of technical writing from phony uses. It's hard to imagine an article in molecular biology that didn't have a lot of technical terms. Most of our concepts and technical terms are fuzzy enough that you can often get by without them. You perfectly have to find that it may be better viewed (???) there certainly is a role for technical.
Nancy White: Just to mention that sometimes discreet use of jargon can be empowering for the audience. And if we are trying to reach the public and they right away learn they're not arrowheads, they learn the right term. I've had to specially (???) with coprolite because everybody remembers that. Or even in (???) we can't say it's a little pot with four feet, we have to say tetropodal because we're trying to pretend to be scientists or whatever. The undergraduates have this inside, view that makes them...
Ruth: I am sort of following on from that and kind of listening as we talk around the table here. What's coming out is that text is a tool of power and it's a tool of authority and it should be treated as such. And that technical text is a tremendous tool of authority. And I think that what in a way we can empower and we can democratize technical text. We can democratize text in general, we can really empower our students by explaining but rather than hiding what the jargon is about, saying to really bring out why jargon is used, what that work means. Why do we use the term arrowhead...or why don't we use the term arrowhead but we use other words? Why do we use the term lithic? To take an extreme case from my own research in Catalhöyük They insist on using the word 'fire instalation'. We're never allowed to use the word oven or hearth or anything like that, and it's in order to, because all of these words have baggage, (Lynne: right, have functional baggage) they have functional baggage and that the interpretation should be something that you do explicitly, that's part of the technical writing is to explain why you're using particular words.
Lynne: I don't envy your having to explain to the public why you're using fire installation...
Ruth: Well, you know, you can do it. And if you, rather than say, we use the word fire installation because that makes it sound more scientific, that's not why we do it. Well, that is why we do it. But we do it because we haven't yet interpreted this thing. How would you interpret this?
(756) Messenger: (???)
Lynne: Well, let's not go there...Ok, moving on, the first exercise, exercise number 1 has to do with this issue of using language to engage the public. And the assignment here for you is (it's really the first time that I think about this, I really hope none of you authors. I teach this for CRM folks, so I never had to think of that). But this is from a book of Tim Earl's and I just picked it off the shelf because I was looking for examples, so I picked out the first sentences of several papers. And used these to ask the question with the assumption you wanted to know about chiefdoms. Which of the following open sentences appeal to you as a reader? That would make you most likely to want to read them? Less likely and probably least. This is just relative to each other. The whole notion of this is thinking about language and thinking about drawing the reader into what you're doing. So, just take a minute and grade them in 1,2 or 3. For 1, the ones you'd most like to read; 2, a little bit less; and 3 a little bit less. I got a real surprise the first time I did this, so I'm really interested to see what this group accomplishes.
Maria (???): Are we gonna reveal the author's names?
Lynne: No, I don't think I remember. If you are the reader, and you come to this book, and we assume you want to know something about chiefdoms at all. How would you, as a reader, respond to this? Just be yourself, and average intelligent reader. (884)
(986) Lynne: No, I mean, if you would be tempted to read it, give it a 1, if you would not be as tempted to read it give it a 2, if you would be less tempted to read it give it a 3.
Rosemary: We are ranking all of them
Lynne: Yes, you are ranking each one of them, 1, 2, and 3.
(1055) Lynne: Ok, the first sentence. How many people gave it a one? How many people gave it a 2? And, how many threes?
---See results of exercise with Erin---
Number two, how many ones? Twos? And threes?
Number three, how many ones? How many twos? And how many threes?
Number four, how many ones? How many twos? And how many threes?
Number five, how many ones? How many twos? And how many threes?
And, number six, how many ones? How many twos? And how many threes?
Lynne: But, basically what we are seeing here is that number 3 and number 6 got really high scores, and numbers 1, 4 and 5 got much lower. So lets look at what it is about those that people liked and didn't like. Ok, the people that really liked number three, what is it about number 3 that you liked?
Anne: There are people in this story.
Ruth: It engages you immediately.
Lynne: You know what, when I taught this class for the first time, that sentence got the lowest score. I and it just (???) the heck out of me, because you know I was all prepared to talk engaging the public and bringing (???) and it was like: oh, well it's too personal, you know, it's not scientific. Well yeah, but if people don't read it what difference is it going to make? You know, I think this is a great opening sentence, because you know, as a couple of people have said, it draws you right in. You want to know what happened, how is the topic of chiefdom's going to come into this? What's going to happen?
(???): But if you are an author you feel that you are taking a risk writing such a sentence.
Lynne: You got it! And think of the most successful authors and that...people sell lots of books. Thinks about David H. Thomas, think about Kent Flannery, or people like that who took the risk of reaching out, and you know, they do very well with their peers. It is a risk management thing. I think that people are a little bit afraid of that sometimes. But, you know, if you do well, I really pays off, and certainly in cases where you are writing for the public this kind of thing is critical, but even when you are writing for your peers, I mean, we are all, you know, educated archaeologists here and yet most of us thought that's really intriguing...
Bill Lipe: As a reader, though, you are taking a risk investing in this because you really don't know where it's going
Lynne: Well, you know it's in a book of chiefdoms, so you figure it's going there eventually.
Bill Lipe: (???) it is an attractive opening but you know, you really don't know what (???) talk about. So, it's a risk in making a judgment whether to read this first or something else.
Joe Watkins (???): I think another risk too is that you do question, well is this going to be scientific or is this going to be anecdotal. And that's always been almost (???) many people, oh that's nice anecdotal...
Lynne: Yes, and you know, it's certainly it's a risk (???) in a sense, I think it's a risk (???) I'd rather risk this one than you know some of the ones that I've actually (???) and read.
Liz (???): mentioned that it was National, just from the reactions to National Geographic, what I mean it's the cover (???), and that to me presents a problematic, when we talk about tell a story, I think in some ways stories are much harder to unpack than if you are presenting a logical argument in the constructions that we've developed for scholarly writing. And it's a little bit like the museum label exercise. Part of what I do when I (???) to students is to get them to challenge the voice of the label that it is a subjective voice. And I think, you know, as engaging as this there is a sort of trade off that it must be used to measure balance.
Lynne: Oh sure, and you don't want to do this whit everything that you write. But, my point here is that, you know, what we've got to do, is find a way to draw people in and you know you wonder, well what is all of this going to have to do with instructing me about how chiefdoms operate or you know what the political structure is, and if you can tie it...I guess what this tells me is that (???) tie into a real world example, you know, this isn't just somebody making up, you know, this is what chiefdoms must be like based on what I think in my head. This, you know, how the real world operates. This is an event that happened in the real world (???). And I'd like that, as a reader I want to know this isn't just somebody making up categories of human societies, but this is taking real world examples and helping me to understand how those real world cases...
Neal: But you don't read it just...you read the title first, and I don't know what the title of this one might be, but as an editor of a journal myself I'm always looking at how the title and that first sentence, the first paragraph relate. So, that if you can give the contents with the title...chiefdoms in (???) whatever (???) and then you open up with this, well I OK, know what the academic topic is. What an interesting way to approach it!
Glenn: Well, a quicker problem is, that we can all recognize, I mean there is not a great deal of (???)
Lynne: But there are (???). I mean, people are really weary of this one and also of number six, because I think this is also why also people like number six. You know...again I thought 3 a 6 were going to be the things that people would say, oh this is drawing in the reader and I actually had one class where they said, oh these are bad, this guy uses personal pronouns. Oh, Lord!
Vin: I think maybe you may have already mentioned this, but obviously some of the difference in how people, how different rooms of people react to this exercise, has to be with who is sitting in the room. And, you know, when I graded these things, and graded number three first, what (???) am I grading these as myself, who happens to have a paper in this book or am I the intelligent lay reader. And I sort of picked the latter and number one just, you know, just (???) at the top of the list. Now, if I were to put myself back into the role of an expert on chiefdoms, it would be harder to pick honestly, and what that makes me realize (???) think about it in these terms until I went to this exercise is that all of us are in a way co-dependents, when it comes to addition to that writing. Because all of us have developed strategies for coping with it when it occurs, I mean, I take one look at an introduction like, well, name one in particular, but just (???) to skip over...it sort of just go (???) it's in the article, you see what they are really talking about, and the introduction is kind of just stuff that you really don't focus on. And so, in a way I guess you can...it gets back to that thing the you...that your very first point about writing, which we didn't let you get to any other points, because we had so much to say about it, focus on the audience, on one hand, it's a matter of we do write differently for different audiences and think as Bill was saying that's Ok. But on the other hand, what a lot of our students don't realize, is that when they write for technical audiences that writing doesn't have to be all that, as different from writing for lay audiences as they think it does.
Lynne: Yes, and I think this is the example of that. Now, numbers 3 and 6 are not by any means my favorite things in the book. Vin's paper of course is my favorite! There is the content issue and then there is (???) but if you can't get them in, you know, no matter how great your content is, it's not going to happen.
(1738) Bill Lipe: This is to illustrate why in the abstract (???) because people, you know, look at 100 titles before they decide to read one or two. (???)
Jeanne Sept: I'm just going to defend my vote because I've voted...number 6 is great, and I didn't like number 3 at all. And (???) everybody else (???) I started reading it, I started thinking Oh my God what labored sentences. They are all full of clauses (???) and the whole perspective I got was sort of this colonial sort of (???) it's and opening and it switches to talk with (???) something other than terrorizing (???) whatever, I may be more inclined to read it. But I didn't get any hints of what the stands or the (???) was going to be like and if it's anything like this opening paragraph I really don't want to read anymore. So, in some ways, I guess, what I'm saying is, if try and almost (???) be careful about what in fact, what messages you are sending when you are creating this (???)
Lynne: That really is a good point, and you know, this is really just to illustrate the issue that you don't have to write dry as dust stuff in order to be published by Cambridge University Press. You can engage the reader through your language, through using real world examples to that kind of stuff, not holding us up as an example of the greatest writing in the world...I actually have good and bad writing examples that (???) bring those with me because.
Anne: We are all in this room!
Lynne: Anyway so this is just a way of helping...you know...pick a book out of your shelf and preferably an edited volume like this, and use it to let the students think about all the different language stiles and degrees of formality and degrees of jargon and say this is a published book by professional folks, and there is a lot of variety of ways to start sentences but some of them are more engaging than others. And you can be engaging even with your colleagues and you absolutely have to be engaging when you write (???).
Another example that I wanted to use...you start out with (???) the coming of the railroad in 1874 had an enormous impact on the cattle industry of south-central Texas, what are we going to talk about, in the rest of this paper?
(???): Cows (???)
Lynne: There is a hint in the first sentence...If we take that topic sentence and we think about other things (???) cattle industry in southern Texas, cows...and these are all possible topics that are going to come in our discussion that we are going to write here. And the question is which ones really belong in this discussion, which ones probably are somewhere else in this paper, and which ones don't belong here at all. So, cows were pretty (???). Does this belong in this section? Yes, that's a big impact on the cattle raising industry. Most of the major investors in the livestock were English. (May not even be part of this and certainly doesn't go with this topic sentence) The availability of supplemental (???) increased. Yeah, this is an impact of the railroad. Town sites changed to rail side locations. Well, sort of (???) of the industry but it's not about the enormous impact on the cattle industry as far as we can see, unless there is something about that town location change we don't know. Maybe it does, you know, the fact that the ranchers could not have to send their children out to some foreign place for (???), you know, that's not part of the cattle industry, so, you know, (???). Ranching for (???) after the Civil War? Probably not, somewhere else in this discussion maybe, but certainly not in this area. (2207) The price of canned goods and manufactured items declines substantially...yeah, it's the impact of the railroad but (???) so, this is what I use to think about where you started and what you are doing. I mean, all of these are perfectly useful things to know. There is nothing wrong with any of them but they may not all belong in this discussion. I say, this is the cut and pasted at the end of the file. They don't belong here...
(???): That's another paper.
Lynne: That's another paper. So, anyway, this is one of the exercises that I use for the...you know "remember where you started out to accomplish" tool, and your number two exercise is the exercise that goes with the card. It's a (???) puzzle, there is a (???) and you have to figure out...turn it into a comprehensive...this is the editing test...can you turn this into a comprehensible discussion?
This one takes a little while, but people, you know, a combination of a couple of these things, of showing them, you know, the topic sentences and what doesn't fit and then reminding them how to make this do what you accomplish. It actually works pretty well.
Rosemary: Lynne, can I actually...what you are describing doing here also works if you use this approach to something that you decide people should read, have them actually as group this is a (???) teaching the students to read an article...we discuss it in class...we start (???) identifying what the goals are, and then they get to trace and see if those goals are actually somewhere completed...again accumulate all those extra senses that it's startling how few articles that are in our professional literature stand the test of this rule.
Lynne: Yes. So, what I do is give them the one possible solution and then we talk about other ways you know, the problem here of course you don't have all the connective tissue, and it's kind of fun to see other possible combinations that people come up with and how their view of the organization of this little article becomes (???). I like using an article...
Glenn (???): It also, and I've told many students, is actually...start at the end and read backwards, so that you don't get caught up on the flow...not the words backward, but the last sentence first...(???) secondly, and it really breaks the continuity so it says, ok, does that sound (???).
Lynne: That's a great idea.
Glenn (???): ...reading so fast you don't see that there is an obviously poorly constructed sentence and doesn't belong there.
Lynne: Yeah, I do like that. That's a good idea.
D. Snow: Lynne, I think we have to distinguish between formal speech and informal speech. You've been speaking to us in a very formal way. Relaxed, but very formal because all your sentences were complete. Most people don't speak in complete sentences, they go for whole days without complete sentences. So, when you are talking to students I find it necessary to point this out to them, otherwise they start writing the way they really talk, which is...
Ruth: Not pretty!
Lynne: Yeah, and I say, spoken language is very elliptical, and we leave out things all the time, and we, you know, back track...this is when I say this, I'm talking about the language that you use. If you wouldn't say this out loud, don't write this. (2530) Now, I have an exercise that (???). My second one is, and this would be a great one for Liz, because the second question is: would your mom understand this? And that is, get a civilian to read what you wrote. I used to always try to (???) my administrative assistant...she is an intelligent woman, smart, and did not know a thing about archaeology...and if she understood what I was saying then I knew I had it right. Find somebody, find, you know, your spouse, if they are not in your profession, your tennis partner, you know, do not try on your teenage children, because nothing that you do is right to your teenage children, so they will not give you a good reading of this, but if you can find a civilian, get him to read it, see if that actually works for them. It's a great way to make sure you are not using language that people don't understand, because pretty (???) how to writing yourselves.
And then we have the passive voice discussion. It's amazing to me how much argument I get about oh you know we can't use pronouns. That's too subjective. I want to be objective. And, you know, I really...I actually happen to have this argument with people, and I say, well ok, you know, where do we really get with this? But I, you know, talk about things like: hardly any (???) how about the guys who comes into a bar and says: it is believed that (???) will win on Sunday. You know...nobody says that! Or your twelve years old daughter comes in and says to you: the dishes have been washed, and permission is being sought to go to Jamie's house. Now, a wise mother thinks: did she really wash them, or she blackmailed her sister into washing them. Because she did not say I washed the dishes. You know, nobody talks in passive voice and there is a reason for that, because it inverts the logic of what's happening. It makes the object of the sentence be what's important and the actor is gone. Five hundred potsherds were analyzed and it is believed that (???). Well, come on, you are not fooling us! We know A, you analyzed the potsherds, and B, that you think the values (???). You know, you are not fooling anybody by doing this and what you do is you get this incredible elaborate (???). And you also get to be free of any blame. Things like...
Maria: What about something like potsherd analyses suggest?
Lynne: That's exactly where I am going to go...Your proposal has been rejected. It's obviously not my fault, I didn't reject it...
Ruth: Your 10 points have been denied.
Lynne: It's your proposal's fault, you know, it's the subject of the sentence...obviously, you know, I mean, you get into these (???) things...now, there are places where, it's perfectly appropriate to use the passive voice. You know, active voice doesn't mean you have to sprinkle everything with pronouns, but if you have to go through elaborate circumlocutions to keep from using a pronoun, then use it for heavens sake! You know, it makes you prose so (???) otherwise, when you are talking about a process, like a stratified random sample was selected...well doesn't matter who decided we should do a stratified random sample, what matters is that it was a stratified random sample as opposed something else. So, if you are just talking about a process, you know, passive voice can be fine, but if you want to say: is believed that this creates, you know, an unbiased sample, well, you know, who believes this? The radical friend? You and two of your other friends? Or what? And you don't have to say: I believe. You can say: this creates an unbiased sample 'because;' you know, that's not passive voice. And it gives you information. But, it is believed that this creates, you know, it's just a silly circumlocution. I really struggle with people (???).
And the third example here is, I asked people to rewrite this into something that you would not be embarrassed to read out loud. What is says now is: it is thought that the selection of a rhetorical approach that more closely approximates a style of oral discourse will, under many circumstances, produce greater clarity and maximize reader comprehension. Such clarity may be achieved by adopting a style that utilizes a smaller number of constituent phrases and clauses in any given sentence, and by emphasizing a vocabulary focused less on the (???) obscure and more on the (???).
Joe: This is what (???) do for a living.
Lynne: Yes. This is 72 words, and so what I do is turn them loose and say, tell me what this says in plain English in the smallest number of words that you can. And this kind of becomes, you know, a little puzzle, and people try to compete to figure it. And you know, basically what it says is: if you write more like you talk, then readers will understand you, and what that means, what you are going to achieve by writing more like you talk, by adopting a style that uses smaller sentences and simpler sentences and by emphasizing (claim) words as opposed to the (???)...and you know, we don't say it quite that informally, but it's a really good...I mean, it's so outrageous, you know, that everybody can see it and they can see why these problems with language may be (???).
(???): The problem is thought that what we are doing, we are fighting something that they have been taught...where they get points off every time they use the word you, or I, and so they learn real quickly after they don't get their As that they better not ever use those again, and then they go to college. And they are continued in English 101 and 102 that that's what you do and so then when they, when the time you may want to adjust this, this is ingrained in what they've been taught for years of very hard work. (2925)
Glen (???): ...certain circumstances where there are in fact too many (???)
Lynne: Oh, absolutely, I mean, no rule is a total fix.
Anne: I was just wondering, some of the people who are taking archaeology (???) will be English majors...
Lynne: Yes, there is that, I had a guy in one of my classes who was a masters candidate at a school in Texas that I will not name, and was forbidden by his committee to use any personal pronouns...was forced into using passive voice for his entire thesis.
White: But you know, you could quantify pronoun use especially for (???) person in bell shaped curves, you know, over the years, and now we are swinging toward the I, I, I syndrome and this, you know, I believe that, well of course you believe, you wrote it. You don't have to say that. Drives me crazy. And you are condensing...I wanted to mention also the old stand by (???book) style. Is so great for the because it's a little tinny condensed book, it's cheap and it has maxims like: use less verbiage. So I make my students buy that one.
Lynne: Yes, that's a very (???)
Dean Snow: Getting students to deal with this is like getting (3012) your faculty to talk about teaching techniques. It's problematic partly because it's so close to their personalities. In fact they don't like to trade teaching techniques, will talk all day about research techniques. They don't like to talk to each other about things that are close to their personalities. Students are the same, I think, about their writing, for reasons that Shereen was pointing out. And no better example of the one that I gave earlier, to Rosemary, that I had to fight with every single sentence in this person's dissertation. One of the techniques that I found undergraduates works...is that since it's too threatening for you to say to them, you don't know how to write, you say to them...you ask them, how many people in this room know how to edit, and almost none of them will say they know how to edit. So, then you say, all right, I am going to teach you how to edit, what you are really doing is teaching how to write. And I think that by saying what you are doing is technical writing, it sort of removes you from that danger zone, and you can always say, well you know, that's very good creative writing, but it's not technical writing. So, I thinks you have to kind of sugar coat it a little bit, in order to sell this.
Lynne: Yes. Two things that I do in my technical writing class is (???) I do not use...in their follow up exercises they are completely not related CRM. Because I teach CRM professionals. In one of their exercises they have to describe an object, and they can't use any function words or imply that they know what it's for. They have to just physically describe it and this is thinking about how not to use the easy words. And I have things like, a hammer, and you know, not archaeological things and it's the archaeology from (outer space) thing, you they come to Earth, they don't know anything about Earth material culture, they have to describe this object. I have...how things work, is one of the exercises, and other things like that, and purposely don't have any (???) content because then they can focus on their writing, and not being invested, I mean, the fact that somebody critiques that you could not explain how an eggbeater works, you know, you are not personally invested in the eggbeater. And so it's a lot easier for people to take the level of critique that we do in a technical writing class. If they are not invested in the subject, and the other thing I do is everybody works with a writing partner, and their partners work together to try to improve each other's writing. Because, like you said, everybody thinks they know how to write, but nobody thinks they know how to edit.