Very briefly (around 3 sentences) follow the prompt above in a manner that demonstrates understanding of the assigned content by organizing it, reflecting on it, and presenting it.
The Point of Communication
The most important thing to remember about communication is that you communicate because you have something to say. This has become almost entirely lost. These days people communicate to avoid silence, they communicate because they are told to, they communicate so that people will read the ads around their communication. This is not new. However you need to understand it so that you can understand the harm that it is doing. Think about when you are doing something for yourself: cleaning, sending an email, cooking, whatever. Compare that to when you are doing something because you have been told to do it. The act is different and the results are different. Doing something for yourself is a better thing and it should be developed. Unfortunately our approach to communication has been to make people practice so they get better at it, what this means is they get better at communicating because they have been told to and not better at communicating because they choose to. This is the first rule of writing papers for me, there needs to be something that you want to say. I cannot tell you how many students this has worked for. It has failed a lot to, but I take my victories where I can find them. Try to find something that you think is worth saying and say it. This is the most important part.
The Usual Approach
There are several things worth noting about how people communicate. If I am communicating because I have been told to, then I don’t really care if I make my point. Why? That’s not my goal. My goal is to do what I’ve been told to do, not to make my point. Maybe I’ve been told to make a point, but I just care if the person who told me to do it will have a problem with it. If I’ve been told to clean my room my only goal is to satisfy the person who told me to clean my room. If I shove everything under the bed and they don’t look under the bed, then they will be satisfied. We have practiced communicating because we’ve been told to so much that our value is not to say the thing worth saying, it is to be safe. Most communicators are trying to be safe because not being criticized is the best they can hope for. Think about the impact that this has on communication. The safest thing to say is nothing. If I’m forced to communicate, then I’ll say as little as possible. I’ll repeat myself, I’ll double talk, I might consider hedging my claims possibly, I’ll BS, and I’ll repeat myself. The less I say the less risk there is. This is awful.
It has even gone beyond this. Note that ‘safe’ is not a matter of being right, it’s not even a matter of being not wrong, it is a matter of being safe from attack or criticism. In terms of writing papers, it is a matter of avoiding red marks on your paper. In terms of conversation it is a matter of avoid someone saying, ‘you’re wrong.’ I once started a conversation and the other person said, ‘tell me your position and I’ll tell you all of the ways that you are wrong.’ To which I said ‘I’ll pass’ and walked away. It’s worth noting that we spend a lot of time on the attacking side too. We should stop that, but we can’t fix everything all at once.
Templates
Since communication is a matter of being safe from attack we need rules about what is safe from attack. This is why people put such an emphasis on spelling and grammar. Grammar is not intended to be a set of rules about what is ‘right’ it is intended to be a tool that allows you to communicate. Grammar is in service of communication, not a series of restrictions on it. In other words: Use grammar, no grammar use you! The same is true of sp3llling, it’s a toool knot a punish-mint. I probably overdid it there.
However the rules that we put on spelling and grammar don’t provide sufficient standards of right and wrong. So we add more restrictions that allow judgement. These include things like word count, required number of references, certain structures of writing and so on. These are templates; Explicit or implied sets of rules that determine how you communicate. The 5 paragraph model is a template. Here’s the thing templates are introduced to make things easier. The better you get at something the less you should rely on templates. The 5 paragraph model was designed to be used by kids in middle school/junior high. Most of the things that you have learned about writing up to this point were templates and you are supposed to be at a point where you understand the reason for these templates and can choose to follow them, or not, depending on your needs.
Wikipedia is one of my favorite examples. The rule tends to be that you can’t use Wikipedia as a source. This is a template, it is a shortcut. Wikipedia is not a scholarly article so you probably should treat it as one, but it seems quite drastic to just reject it all together. Why not treat Wikipedia as what it is, a crowd sourced encyclopedia. If something is there, does that mean it’s true? No. If something is in a scholarly source does that mean it’s true? No, but it means it is being discussed in the scholarly community. I’ve used Wikipedia as a source a number of times to demonstrate what widely held views on a subject are. Doing this requires overcoming the strict rule against using Wikipedia and instead treating Wikipedia as the sort of source that it is, which was the point of the rule in the first place.
The New Approach
Here’s my approach to communication. Figure out what you wish to say. Figure out which tools are at your disposal. Use those tools. How well you use the tools determines how well you communicate. I really want you to start thinking about communication in terms of tools, how can I do that? Here are some of the tools at my disposal: tools, TOOLS, tools, tools, *tools*
*TOOLS*
Did it work? So what are the tools you have for communication?
Thesis
People talk a lot about a thesis, unfortunately most of the people talking about theses do not have a tool based approach so they don’t know what to say. You easiest thesis is your ‘stated thesis’. This is what you claim your thesis is. This is not a tool except to tell people what your thesis is. This is also the thesis most people think they are talking about. It is only relevant in how it relates to your other theses.
You also have an ‘organizational thesis’. This is the thesis that you use to organize your communication. It is your organizational principle. You might not know that you have one, but you do. A poorly organized communication is the product of a bad organizational principle or a changing one through the course of the communication, not the absence of one. When I’m grading papers I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the writer’s organizational thesis is. An organizational thesis does two main things. It ‘filters’. It tells you which information to include in your communication. You have a ton of information. You need to decide what information to include and what information to leave out. Should I include the word ‘rattlesnake’ here? Yes. Rattlesnake. My organizational thesis told me to do that. Is it a good organizational thesis? Probably not. Rattlesnake. Your organizational thesis is the filter on the information that you include and the information that you do not include. Your organizational thesis also ‘relates’. It decides what information should be related to other information. Talking about something (Rattlesnakes) and then talking about something else (Kittens) for a little while and then introducing another idea (Eating) is very different then introducing those ideas together (Rattlesnakes Eating Kittens). Filtering information and relating information are two of the big ways that we increase our knowledge of the world.
The last type of thesis is your ‘total thesis’. This is your organizational thesis plus the complete tool list that you will use. It is the real thesis that determines what your communication looks like. It determines every choice you will make. I like to distinguish it from the organizational thesis because there is value in assuming the tools. However there is still value in discussing the complete tool set that you will use. Will you research your subject? How? How much time and energy will you spend on it? What sort of language will you use? These are all determined by your total thesis.
Some Values
With this in mind I have some values that I’d like you to consider. How you deal with these is determined by your total thesis.
You are not trying to avoid being corrected, you are not trying to be not-wrong, you are not trying to right. You are trying to offer something valuable. Something is valuable if it isn’t easy. Easy things are not valuable because anyone can offer them with little effort. Try to think about making a contribution. Think about adding something. You don’t need to be right, you don’t need to solve all of the problems, you just need to add something. If you write a paper and everything in it is something that anyone could have come up with if they put the least thought into the subject, then that isn’t valuable. Be interesting. Filter things in interesting ways. Relate things in interesting ways.
When you are working on an idea it is easy to break things down. Most claims can be divided into the facts and the standard that support the claim. If I say, ‘murder is wrong’, I can break that down into ‘murder takes a human life’ and ‘taking human lives is wrong’. If I say ‘The Game of Thrones tv series is better than the books’ you could break that down into ‘the tv series finished’ and things that finish are better than things that don’t’. You might disagree with these claims, but I need you to see how breaking them down gives you room to get into the details. This doesn’t stop there because each of your new pieces can be broken down into facts and standards. Spend some time trying this.
When you break things down it often becomes obvious that one part of the breakdown is easier to support than the other. If you are trying to be not-wrong you will spend your time with the easier one because it is safer. If you are trying to contribute something you will pick the harder one because it is more interesting.
When you break something down it is often wise to deal with all parts, but you don’t need to spend the same amount of time on them. You can deal with things ‘briefly’. When you deal with something briefly you don’t spend a lot of words on it. Often dealing with things briefly is harder than spending lots of time, especially if you want to do it well. It is usually a good idea to deal with the easy things briefly. You can also deal with things ‘deeply’. This is when you spend a lot of words on it. This is usually how you want to deal with the hard parts.
Writing Papers
The final assignment for this course is a paper. There are a couple of conventions about papers that I wish to make you aware of.
Papers are an assignment that, unlike tests, you are supposed to learn from as you do them.
Papers allow time to revise, so the expectations are different from a test or discussion where there is no chance to revise.
Papers can be organized on a variety of scales. You can look at the individual words, you can look at sentences, you can look at paragraphs, or you can look at the paper as a whole. Students often struggle with looking at papers on the paragraph level. To assist this I ask students to summarize their paragraph into a single sentence, in the same way that your introduction is a one paragraph summary of your paper, or your thesis is a one sentence summary of the whole paper. I find asking students to summarize the paragraph into one sentence allows them to tidy up the paragraph and to organize the paragraphs better as they relate to the paper as a whole.
An Example
Let’s say I’m writing a paper on organ donation. I would do this because I have something to say on the subject. Imagine my stated thesis is: ‘Organ donation is good.’ This is both boring and unhelpful. It’s boring because there is no effort here, anyone could do this easily, and because it does not help you to right the paper. This stated thesis is almost useless as an organizational thesis. How about this thesis instead: ‘Organ donation should be opt-out rather than opt-in.’ This is a little better. It adds work because it relies on the difference between opt-in (systems where you are not included unless you say so) and opt-out (systems where you are included unless you say otherwise) systems. It is also more useful as an organizational thesis. I explain organ donation, I explain opt-in systems, I explain opt-out systems, I say that more organs are better, opt-out systems result in more organs, therefore we should have an opt-out system. This is better but it still isn’t good. It isn’t good because it is boring and it is boring because it took the easy path whenever possible. Contrast that with this thesis: ‘We need an opt-out system of organ donations to increase availability rather than supply due to the issues of compatibility which are hindered by longevity.’ This is more of a contribution. The thesis is also more helpful as an organizational thesis. The most interesting thing is that writing this paper requires you to be able to write the two earlier papers. This is something that people often miss. Writing certain things implies that you could have written other things. In this case, you cannot write this paper well without the ability to write the other papers. In fact, you would take a lot of the details that the other papers would deal with deeply and you would deal with them briefly. It would probably look something like this: 1. Introduction. 2. Basics of organ donation including opt-in and opt-out. 3. Supply as the usual justification of opt-out systems. 4. The difference between availability and supply. 5. Availability is more important because of compatibility. 6. How longevity problems make compatibility problems worse.
