On Taking Notes, Part 8: Getting Feedback

Unlike the six middle steps of note-taking, the first and last steps are collaborative efforts. A good planner asks those in the know for ideas in setting the stage for note-taking; a good writer does the same by asking other good writers for their input on those notes.

This step can take some extra time at first but not in the long run.  Think of some of the benefits:

• Increased confidence – You'll go into the drafting and rewriting stages of the writing process with a greater sense of being on the right path for your reading audience.
• Deeper insights – You'll have a better understanding of which details to embellish and which to truncate. 
• Improved efficiency – You'll save time as you transpose notes to the formal report.

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Read previous installments in this series:

Part 1: Preparing to Take Notes

Part 2: Listening with a Purpose  

Part 3: Reading with a Purpose

Part 4: Hitting the High Points
Part 5: Organizing the Notes
Part 6: Reviewing the Notes
Part 7: Rewriting the Notes

On Taking Notes, Part 7: Rewriting the Notes

Rewriting notes is akin to reviewing them; as you review your content, depth, and structure, you make necessary changes. The point of making rewriting a seventh separate step of note-taking, however, is to guarantee you've followed through on your plan. 

Have you ever failed to pack one incidental for a trip, pick up one item from the supermarket, or recall one fact for a test? The same can happen when taking notes. So rewriting stands out for those moments when you move, add, and delete details as you review your notes. The more skilled you become at note-taking, the more reviewing and rewriting seem simultaneous.

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Read previous installments in this series:

Part 1: Preparing to Take Notes

Part 2: Listening with a Purpose  

Part 3: Reading with a Purpose

Part 4: Hitting the High Points
Part 5: Organizing the Notes
Part 6: Reviewing the Notes

On Taking Notes, Part 6: Reviewing the Notes

Now you've been through the first five steps of the note-taking process: preparing, listening, reading, summarizing, and organizing. Why add review as a sixth step? After all, summarizing and organizing notes are a form of review. The review can be redundant in a great many cases, especially where templates are involved, with their pre-defined categories and limited space. But if you have a broad audience with contrasting concerns and no pre-determined guidelines or standard template, a review is in order.

You should review your notes for consistency in content and depth:

• Content – Ensure each reported section gets equal treatment among each talking point (e.g., problem - impact - solution - benefit, or, criteria - condition - cause - effect, or, issue - method - options - analysis - recommendation) 
• Depth – Provide the coverage that each talking point deserves with sufficient detail.

Of course, you can take care of these matters during the drafting stage, but you would be better off with a strong plan because of the increased efficiency it will bring to the writing. Now you are ready for step 7: rewriting, the stuff of the next post.

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Read previous installments in this series:

Part 1: Preparing to Take Notes

Part 2: Listening with a Purpose  

Part 3: Reading with a Purpose

Part 4: Hitting the High Points
Part 5: Organizing the Notes

On Taking Notes, Part 5: Organizing the Notes

You've prepared diligently for your meeting, conference, interview, walk-through, or reading; taken copious notes for what you saw, heard, or read; and selected the most important ones for reporting. Now you need to make sure those key points are in order.

Let's say you were organizing a list of problem areas in a production facility. Here are four ways you can organize them:

• Category – by the three major issues: equipment, staff, and building 
• Chronology – within equipment, the time in which the problems appear: compressor, conveyor, and wrapper 
• Importance – within staff, their relative value in the production process: assemblers, packagers, and maintenance
• Space – within building, the areas in the facility: shipping, production, and storage 

What makes structuring tricky is the range of organizing options available to you. Use them based on what your readers need to know.

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Read previous installments in this series:

Part 1: Preparing to Take Notes

Part 2: Listening with a Purpose  

Part 3: Reading with a Purpose

Part 4: Hitting the High Points

On Taking Notes, Part 4: Hitting the High Points

This eight-part series on note-taking is about the planning stage of the writing process, when you need to collect, organize, and assess content whether reporting on a meeting, documenting a project, or writing an essay for publication. 

Assuming you have captured the key words and phrases described in part 2 of this series, you should now be ready to transcribe them into a bullet list of high points. You're still in the note-taking stage, so quantity is more important than quality. Don't even concern yourself with organizing your list of ideas; that step will come after you have content to assess. You should get started as soon as possible to maximize your chances of recalling what you heard and saw at the meeting. 

As an example, Gino's assignment is to determine the feasibility of renting a satellite office for his company in a neighboring town. Your assignment is to capture the key points of the discussion at a weekly meeting. Your notes look something like this:

Not feasible to rent 135 Main Street, 3rd floor, only available space in Oakville. Toured area. No problems there except no public transportation. No big deal, all of our staff  drive to work. Good restaurants a block away (Big Garden Chinese, Americana Diner, Supreme Soul Food, Suave Soups). Walked entire floor: 2,000 square feet, sufficient for proposed 15 staff. Rent $12.75 square foot. Area average $8.40 square foot. Report at meeting next week on Parkton rental space.

Now create a bullet list of the items under an agenda-item heading:

Satellite Office Feasibility Study

• Gino says: not feasible to rent 135 Main Street, 3rd floor, 2,000 square feet, only available space in Oakville 
• Rent: $12.75/square foot, 52% higher than area average
• Gino will check in Parkton, report in meeting next week 

Notice all the information that has disappeared: the public transportation factor, nearby restaurants, even the sufficiency of the space. What matters for the record is the agenda item (renting satellite office), issue discussed (too expensive), action item (check Parkton), owner (Gino), and deadline (meeting next week).

But what if questions pop up about how great the space itself is?  They likely won't, but you'll always have your notes if they do.

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Read previous installments in this series:
Part 1: Preparing to Take Notes
Part 2: Listening with a Purpose
Part 3: Reading with a Purpose

On Taking Notes, Part 3: Reading with a Purpose

The main difference between note-taking for a live event and for reading is the control you have over the situation. Part 2 of this series on taking notes offers two useful tips for reviewing meetings. Those pointers, looking and listening for key words and phrases and asking for clarification, apply to an extent when it comes to reading, but you can do more as you have greater control over the content delivery as a reader.

I would suggest as a first step reading Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren's How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, which I review in this blog. In this highly educational book, the authors detail four levels of reading: 

• The elementary level focuses on word, sentence, and paragraph recognition and vocabulary development.
• The inspectional level looks at learning the content and basis of the book. 
• The analytical level covers interpreting and critiquing the reader's viewpoint.
• The synoptical level involves capturing the relevance of the book.  

Next, you should check reviews of the book to classify its type (e.g., biography, business, philosophy, politics) and summarize it in fewer than 50 words, including the issues it addresses. Then search the book for key words as you would when taking notes at a meeting or conference. Of course, a lot goes into these steps, but with practice you'll be able to cover them quickly.

Let's assume you have been assigned to review a book for your manager or team. (Yes, there are visionary, proactive managers who still engage in this practice.) I doubt you would do so to contribute to your manager's leisure reading list. A business purpose must accompany the assignment. Are you reading Stephen A. Schwarzman's What It Takes (also reviewed in this blog) to extract business principles that may be useful back at the office? Then you would do well to look at Schwarzman's 25 Rules for Work and Life at the conclusion of the book and search the index for where the author discusses the specific rule that captures your interest. On the other hand, if you were searching Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress to determine whether his historical perspective synchronizes with your company's mindset, you might be looking for supporting content that may bolster your organizational public relations strategy.  Finally, are you reading Rebecca D. Costa's The Watchman's Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction to view how worldwide trends may affect your firm's global ambitions? If yes, then search for the big questions Costa answers throughout the book.

And still there's more. How to Read a Book will fill in the blanks. 

***

Read previous installments in this series:
Part 1: Preparing to Take Notes
Part 2: Listening with a Purpose

On Taking Notes, Part 2: Listening with a Purpose

Part 1 of this series on note-taking covered the three key questions to answer in preparing to listen at a meeting or to read a book. This part covers tips for listening with a purpose, and part 3 will cover reading with a purpose because each demands different focuses, skills, and approaches.

1. Look and listen for the key words and phrases. For each agenda item of business meetings, I search for four points: issue discussed, action item, owner, and timeline. For conference sessions, I search for six: issue discussed, critical challenge, strategy used, business result, lesson learned, and business applicability.

But there's more to it than that. Assume you are preparing to write meeting minutes. You have come to this session with a plan by answering the key questions I raised in part 1 of this series. Now that you are at the meeting, you should be prepared to capture the key words and phrases the presenters discuss. If they mention the problem (e.g., the system went down), capture its impact ($50,000 of lost revenue); without an impact, there is no problem. If they analyze the options, create a checklist of their advantages and disadvantages; options without advantages and disadvantages are not real options. It they offer a recommendation from among those options, look for its unique benefits; recommendations are hollow without those benefits. 

Make notes by simply bulleting the points and creating tables for which you must complete all columns and rows. Using this techniques ensures you capture all the key points and their supporting points. For instance, say you plug into your table for agenda item 1 the impact of the problem and just the recommendation 1, and agenda item 2 just the problem and the recommendation and benefits. You will see blank boxes for the benefits of the recommendation in the agenda item 1 and for impact of the problem in agenda item 2. Fill in those blank spaces. These key words or phrases, or numbers for that matter, might appear on the presenter's slides, so keep an eye on them as well.

As for using a tape recorder at meetings, I would advise against it unless you are reporting for a publication where precise direct quotes are necessary. Reviewing the tape recorder can defer focusing at the meeting and will take more time than the verbatim value it brings.

2. Ask for clarification. Of course, the practice of looking and listening for key words and phrases assumes that the speakers are on point. Too often they are not, so you'll have to be bold by asking for the business impact, suggested resolution, or action plan. Those who ask shall receive.

I will apply similar tips but with a different spin to reading with a purpose, the theme of part 3. 

On Taking Notes, Part 1: Preparing to Take Notes

This first installment of an eight-part series on note-taking results from the frequent requests I get to help people write effective reviews of meetings, conferences, programs, and books. The first step to writing focused reviews is note-taking, which is the planning stage of the writing process. Your first draft will go a lot smoother with a strong plan, so let's get started.

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I'm a big fan of reading for pure pleasure. Few activities are better than hanging out on a beach, in a park, or in your living room while cozying up to a fiction or nonfiction book just for the sake of relaxation. But reading with a purpose can happen at the same time. Pleasure and purpose can live in harmony.

What is reading, or listening, with a purpose? Actually, many things. For me it could mean making myself a more knowledgeable education consultant, or to better understanding a social issue in becoming a more informed citizen. For you it might mean getting through an academic course, learning a new skill, or passing a high-stakes test. For someone else it might lead to preparing for a terrific vacation experience, choosing the best academic path for a child, or achieving professional mastery in a craft.

Whatever the aim of our reading or listening with a purpose, we can take three useful steps to ensure we make the most of the reading experience.

First, answer: "Why and for whom am I taking notes?" If you're taking them just for yourself, then answer why you need them. To be updated on a project? To learn a new process? To determine the feasibility of an organizational move? To understand how the author created a cultural shift in her company? If you're taking notes for someone like your manager or your team, answer why they need the notes. If you're not sure, ask well before attending the event or reading the book. Without answering this question (I know, it's really two questions), your note-taking experience will be useless.
 
Second, answer: "What does the audience need to know?" List the necessary items, read them, and reread them to embed them in your consciousness. They will become your mission for attending the meeting or reading the material.

Third, answer: "What methods and sources would best get me the answers I want?" For attending an event, this might mean knowing which parts of the meeting and which speakers are most valuable. These assets shift from meeting to meeting and from book to book. For instance, I once attended a language conference to get a grasp of a speaker's communication theory; when I heard her the following year at the same conference, I was more interested in observing her communication style for my own development as a speaker. As for books, I remember reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Ultimate Experience to learn about his theory, while I read his Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discover and Invention to hear what his renowned subjects had to say about their creative experiences. For reading a book, decide whether you'll read the whole thing, key parts, appendices, and additional resources. Time is of the essence here. You have to be all business.

Now you're planning to listen or to read. You're ready for the next step, listening with a purpose, the topic of the next post.

BOOK BRIEF: Deep Diving into Principles

Principles by Ray Dalio (Simon & Schuster, 2017) 593 pages

Why would anyone who is not an entrepreneur or business analyst want to read Ray Dalio's book, which is one-third an  autobiography of a billionaire and two-thirds a how-to of the mind? The answer is in its applicability to most issues confronting us, from dealing with one's own emotions to contending with difficult coworkers or clients, from responding to tough questions about business forecasts to addressing universal concerns that challenge our everyday life. 

Even Dalio himself suggests in the opener to jump right into parts two (life principles) and three (work principles), skipping part one if you'd prefer to bypass how he came to embody the principles. The principles themselves are refreshingly philosophical and organic, not what one would expect from a bottom-line driven businessman. The truth is Dalio is more than that. He realizes that life is a process of planning, failure, learning, recovery, and continuous change. Anyone wanting to get a unique, well-packaged thesis on how to approach daily challenges of any type would do well to read Principles.   

BOOK BRIEF: The Meaning of Big

What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence by Stephen A. Schwarzman (Simon and Schuster, 2019), 394 pages

If you dream, dream big, because dreaming big and dreaming small take just about the same amount of time. If you try hard, try hard for something big, because trying for something big or for something small take roughly the same amount of effort. And don't let failure stop you. These are the main messages of Stephen A. Schwarzman's compelling and useful autobiographical look at best business practices and, more significantly, how to live a focused, fulfilling life, Wall Street style.

Schwarzman has lived by those words of advice, as a teenager, when he tried to persuade his father to go national with the family's linen business in Philadelphia (he failed), and when he wouldn't accept Harvard's rejection of him and pumped a pocketful of coins in a pay phone to get the university to reverse its decision (he failed). As a Lehman Brothers associate, he blundered more than once on big presentations. When beginning Blackstone. the giant equity asset management firm, his days of hustling for a first investor went to weeks and months. Yet his tenacity enabled him to achieve enough successes in between all these setbacks as a high school track athlete, a student activity coordinator at his alma mater Yale, and as an investment banker. These successes reinforced his confidence in an evolving decision-making system and in his commitment to principles that have always guided him through big moves, even in tough economic times, when his competitors failed.

Schwarzman's attention to the details of elite image-making is as striking as his legendary largess: $100 million to the New York Public Library, whose main branch on Fifth Avenue bears his name, $150 million to Oxford University, $150 million to Yale for a renovated student center, $25 million to Abington High School, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated, $40 million for a scholarship fund for children to attend New York Catholic schools, and $100 million to establish Schwarzman scholars in Tsinghua University, Beijing, not to mention the countless millions he raised as Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He details how involved he was in executing these bequests, putting in no less effort than when opening new Blackstone offices globally, establishing new investment funds, and serving as an unofficial economic consultant to world leaders, including the present and past few presidents. 

Schwarzman writes with candor, humor, and insight, gifts in their own right for readers interested in biography, business, and self-development. His 25 Rules for Work and Life at the end of What It Takes have grounded him throughout his life and make sense for the burgeoning entrepreneur to adopt.

Do You Know How to Argue? Part 3: Remaining Purposeful

Part 1 of this series on arguing well notes that an argument needs to be clearly stated. If one American votes Democratic and her neighbor votes Republican, they are not engaging in an argument. They are voting. But if she claims that her candidate would make a better leader, she would need to qualify that statement for an argument. She might say the Democratic candidate follows through on pledges more regularly than the Republican, or has more expansive government experience, or speaks more eloquently, or  supports gun reform more ardently through his voting record. 

Part 2 looks at the rules of arguing, such as how long should the argument run, what will be the range of talking points, how will the argument be resolved, who will resolve it, and whether a judge is necessary.

After defining the terms of the argument and setting the rules, let the argument begin—but keep the lines of argumentation in check. For a purposeful argument, we'll need to be faithful to two principles: stick to the point of the argument and refrain from logical fallacies. We'll cover each of these separately.

Stick to the point. Let's say we agree to argue about whether the Democratic candidate has more expansive government experience than the Republican candidate. The Democratic supporter might say her candidate has been a town mayor for eight years. Fair enough. Now the Republican supporter replies his candidate has six years experience, two in the town council, two in the state assembly, and two as US attorney general. The Democratic supporter must concede that while her candidate has more years of experience, her opponent's is more expansive, on the town, state, and federal levels. This fact alone may not be sufficient for the Republican supporter to win the argument, but he is winning 1-0. Perhaps the Democratic supporter can talk about her candidate's service on state and federal commissions, or her four-year stint as a naval officer. But she would not want to talk about her years as a corporate attorney unless she had government clients.  

Avoid logical fallacies. Using them will surely erode, if not completely destroy, your credibility. In 2006, I wrote a 20-part series on logical fallacies, such as:

• straw man, misrepresenting an opponent's position to destroy its credibility. Example: Since you like the Democratic candidate, you hate Republicans. 
• ad hominem, attacking the person, not the position. Example: You like the Democratic candidate, but you have been wrong on so many other issues, so you're wrong now.
• unequal comparison, equating unequal ideas. Example: Voting for the Democratic candidate is like voting for a monarchy.
• guilt by association, inappropriately associating an idea or a person with another discredited idea or person to refute an argument. Example: Ten years ago you voted for a candidate who ended up in prison, so why should your voting preference have any credibility?

There are scores of logical fallacies worth studying, so know them all before entering a well-reasoned argument. The point is to narrow your field of vision to remain purposeful.

Do You Know How to Argue? Part 2: Setting Rules

In part 1 of this series on arguing effectively, I explain that we have to define terms carefully before embarking on an argument. For instance, I would want to qualify the proposition Paris makes a better vacation than Venice by at the least stating the precise location (the city in France, not in Texas or New York, versus the city in Italy, not in California or Florida), the vacationers (college students? young families? middle-aged singles, senior couples?), and the purpose of vacation (architecture? art? dining? history? music? sports? theater? walking?).

Rules of conduct also apply to argument. Should we establish the points we want to argue (e.g., buildings, waterways,  walks)? Should we insist on refuting each point the opponent raises? Then how do we refute? If I raise a point about the beauty of the great squares of Paris, such as the Place de la Concorde or the Place Charles de Gaulle, should you be required to refute my point by devaluing those locations? by explaining why Piazza San Marco and Campo San Polo are superior? by jumping off point to claim the Ponte di Rialto and Ponte dell' Accademia are more beautiful bridges than the Parisian squares? Should we determine time allotments for each point we want to argue, as well as the total time for the entire argument? Should we assign a judge to keep us on track? If the argument should lead to a winner, how would we determine victory? What about an audience to determine the winner? 

In my years of sitting in corporate conference rooms, university lecture halls, and Thanksgiving dinners, I have noticed that many of these arguments turn into exchanges of indignation, invective, or insult because people don't establish rules. We might be arguing about entirely different things when we don't define terms, but we are certainly arguing pointlessly when we don't set the terms of engagement. 

Do You Know How to Argue? Part 1: Defining Terms

Most irresolvable arguments result not from intractable parties unwilling to compromise but from their inability or unwillingness  to clearly define their terms, or their unawareness of sound  argumentative principles. Arguments are useless without establishing definitions. I'm not talking about social arguments, such as whether a career in the public sector is better than one in the private sector. Talk that one up all night with your buddies over your hummus dips and G&Ts, for all I care. 

But a really useful argument requires us to set clearly established routes through which our rhetorical lines can go—if only all the TV pundits and politicians took heed! To illustrate, let's look at that weakly phrased proposition in the first paragraph.

As a first step in the public-private sector argument, let's see who's arguing. Assume one is a 32-year-old single woman without children happily employed for 3 years as a medical doctor in a group family practice and living in a Manhattan co-op apartment. The other is a 45-year-old male public high school gym teacher, also happy at his work for the past 13 years, and a homeowner in suburban Pennsylvania married to a 43-year-old public elementary school teacher with two children, a 9-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy. Of course, we can collect much more personal data if needed, but this is a starting point. Maybe one more item about the doctor and the gym teacher: Even though she prefers the private sector and he the public sector, they are open-minded about their position, a trait uncharacteristic of the times we live in, don't you think? Based on this information, the argument might be reworded to "A career in the private sector is better than one in the public sector for a doctor" or  "A career in the public sector is better than one in the private sector for a young family with a hefty mortgage and college bills on the horizon."

Next we need to consider whether by a career in the public sector we're talking about a career in government jobs or also those non-government organizations whose main source of income is government funding. Also, are we talking about federal, state, or municipal government careers? (There are differences.) What about the departments in those organizations? For private sector, we should also decide whether we mean only salaried jobs or self-employed careers too. Having reflected on those matters, we now change our proposition to Having a career as a purchasing manager in a federal government agency is better than one as a purchasing manager in a Fortune Global 500 corporation.

Now step 3. Should we continue to narrow our terms by mentioning the precise federal government agency and Fortune 500 company? What about the locations in the United States? Let's say the doctor and gym teacher settle on Having a career as a purchasing manager in the FBI in Washington, DC is better than one as a purchasing manager in Exxon Mobil in Irving, Texas.

With step 4 comes the choice of the comparison word better. What in the name of sanity does better mean? Better in what way? Support systems? Salary? Job security? Camaraderie? Paid time off? Growth opportunities? Professional development opportunities? Relocation options? Health benefits? Retirement benefits? Self-fulfillment? After-work area activities? We can go endlessly with this better word, so you can see the argument is bound to go in circles purposelessly without either person arguing persuasively or swaying the other.

Once we learn to define the terms of an argument, we'll often see that we have little to argue about because we agree with our presumed adversaries in most cases.

What's So Bad about Being Prepared?

My daughters and their husbands, who more than once have had to deal with my travel habits, just had to send me this article about a father planning to bring his family to the airport 14 hours before their scheduled flight. The just-in-case mentality of that dad reminded my family of me, and I must admit, they've got a point. I'm one of those what-if guys: What if we get a flat tire on the way to the airport? What if the road is closed because the President is in town? What if an accident backs up the traffic for miles and hours?

But I'll tell you why I have no apologies for such seemingly idiosyncratic behavior. It has served me well as a reader, writer, and student of life. For decades, that mindset has made me bring a favorite book to the bank, doctor's office, post office, and supermarket for something to read in peace while waiting my turn as everyone else fumes over how long the line is. That sentiment has gotten me up an hour early for years so that I can better concentrate on my writing assignment as the world sleeps. That attitude has made me show up at the airport early to squeeze in an extra hour of research time in the comfort of my seat while others aimlessly drift through the terminal shops. I have not struggled through flights from New York to Beijing, Mumbai, and Sydney because I am always prepared to learn something new from whatever I am reading at the moment. The habit of being prepared has moved this man of ordinary intelligence but boundless curiosity (which is what most of us are, but we may not realize it) from one successful 19-year career as an organizational director to another successful 23-year one as an independent communication consultant and, if I'm lucky to have the health, yet another as a full-time writer in the near future.

Of course, if you're a mom, dad, grandparent, aunt, uncle, big sister, or brother responsible for young children, you wouldn't want to get to the airport early just to watch your restless kids wreck terminal kiosks and trounce on people waiting for their flight. But just thinking of waiting as a privilege and not an inconvenience has transformed my life—and it could yours if it hasn't already. 

The Ridiculousness of Some Words

Many English words have multiple meanings, sometimes opposite ones, as I noted in my post on contronyms. These differences can pose huge problems for readers trying to understand ideas, intentions, or instructions. Take a look at this seemingly clear email from a work supervisor to his manager:

I lack staff so production will presently slow down. I should leave momentarily to ask Ava if her staff could give me a hand.

In those two brief sentences, the writer uses the four words below. What do they mean?

1. lack

A) not enough

B) not at all

2. presently 

A) now

B) soon

3. should

A) obligation

B) possibility

4. momentarily

A) in a moment

B) for a moment

If you answered both A and B for all four words, you would be correct. These contrasting meanings can pose heaps of clarity issues for the reader. Does the supervisor have fewer staff than usual or no staff where he writes lack? Where he writes presently, does he mean the production will slow down by the time his manager reads the email for an undetermined time or for just a short while, which could end by the time she reads his email? Is he demanding or requesting a leave from his workstation where he writes should? Does he want to leave in a moment or for a moment to ask Ava for support where he uses momentarily?

For these reasons, a more careful writer would have sent this email:

I have two fewer team members, so production is decreasing by 25%. I will leave at 8:30 a.m. to ask Ava for support, and I'll return by 8:50 a.m.

Be precise, especially when words have clashing meanings, by finding substitute words that eliminate some of the ambiguity.

BOOK BRIEF: You Can't Win

Stanley Fish. Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom (Harper Collins, 2016) 212 pages 

Here's the only sure thing we can all agree on: 1 + 1 = 2. Although the 7-minute Babak Anvari film Two & Two suggests a brutal way to deny even that truth, most reasonable, educated (and free) people  concur that any data short of equations can be shredded, twisted, and rerouted to suit nearly any subjective viewpoint.

If this inconvenient truth disturbs your sensibilities, you will take more than you can tolerate when reading Stanley Fish's Winning Arguments, whose fundamental claims are that to argue is human and that truth and context are inseparable. Fish cleverly reviews a broad range of arguments from Hollywood to the White House with the discernment of a trial lawyer and the creativity of a poet to show how winning arguments work and how inevitable they are. He describes how the ebbs and flows of changing conditions, participants, and evidence can make virtually any argument winnable.

The winning in the book title is more adjective than verb. If you're searching for tips on how to present your case more persuasively, you might look for other books. But if you're interested in how fabled arguments held sway over huge audiences in the right place and at the right time, you'll get more than your money's worth.

BOOK BRIEF: To Debunk Strunk

Stanley Fish. How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One). Harper Collins, 2011. 165 pages

Stanley Fish says we should not rely on The Elements of Style to write better sentences. 

And what serious writer or reader can find fault in such a claim? That revered book by William Strunk and E. B. White derived from Strunk's lecture notes when he was a Cornell University professor more than a century ago. A lot has changed in writing since those times. We have added some 100,000 words to our dictionary and even more meanings to existing words. Leading writers have twisted standard punctuation rules to fit their stylistic preferences. Technology too has transformed writing style, as tweet-like language increasingly pops up in what we previously considered formal writing. Globalism has also enabled us to appreciate varied syntactic formations, from Pilar's metaphrasing in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to Yoda's anastrophic sentence structure in the Star Wars franchise.

In How to Write a Sentence, Fish searches for a deeper meaning, a more revealing nature of the sentence than we find in The Elements of Style, and he succeeds in explaining that this syntactic unit transcends a mere collection of varied parts of speech to provide what most language teachers simply call a complete thought. Great sentences, in fact, contain far more than one complete thought; they possess a veritable universe of images and ideas that each reader imagines based on unique experiences. Fish takes us through the rhetorical strategies of what he calls subordinating (hierarchical, causal, or temporal), additive (coordinating or cumulative), and satiric (ironic) style sentences from the likes of Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Elmore Leonard, Herman Melville, John Milton, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Gertrude Stein, Booth Tarkington, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. 

Some readers may see the net effect of Fish's approach as an intensive academic and philosophical examination of the writer's form and content. But his sensible explanations of the composer's intent and execution are entertaining and educational.

Crazy Contronyms

Our language gives us plenty of opportunities to misspell words (e.g., affect-effect, principal-principle), and just as many chances to scratch our heads over the meaning of words. There is no better reminder of this dilemma than the contronym, also known as the auto-antonym. A contronym is a word with multiple meanings, two of which contradict each other. 

We can use rent to mean to grant possession of a property in return for a payment, or to pay periodically for the use of an owned property. So we can say, "If she offers to rent her house to him at a reasonable price, he will rent it." Another contronym, rock, can mean rooted firmly or moving steadily, as in "They are as solid as a rock because they never rock the boat." We can also use left to mean remain with or to depart from. Thus, it makes sense to say, "She left her money with me, so I left with her money." 

As new learners of English challenge us to explain such contradictions, we can only say with a smile, "You've got to get a feel for a language to execute it"—execute being yet another contronym.

Notes on Beginning (and Developing) Readers

What is the best way to learn and teach reading? An article, "At a Loss for Words" by Emily Hanford in APM Reports, well summarizes three main reading instruction strategies and their evolution: phonics, whole word, and three-cueing. Briefly, phonics is based on associating individual letters with sounds; whole word consists of recognizing entire words without sounding them out phonetically; and three-cueing relies on some guessing based on semantics (sentence context), syntax (sentence structure), and graphics (visual appearance).     

From all my own research as both a student and a teacher of reading, I’ve concluded that  are all useful. Here's why.

Phonics

Phonics is good for matching the letters of certain base words with sounds, such a girl and in, and the more sophisticated boy and out, which have diphthongs. But more than 25% of English words cannot be learned phonetically (e.g., though, tough). The famous example of the absurdity of English is spelling fish as ghoti:

·       gh as in tough

·       o as in women

·       ti as in nation

Whole Word

So the whole word approach is necessary to simply memorize words like the homophones bail and bale, mail and male, pail and pale, and sail and sale. At least there’s a pattern in those examples, but what about air and heir vs. fair and fare, or one and won vs. none and nun? What about poor vs. pour? And how did the rhyming words bed, lead, and said get their spelling? We likely recognize these whole words as young readers before learning rules like “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking,” which, by the way, does not work for seven of the example words in the previous sentences.

Three-Cueing

The three-cueing approach makes perfect sense, as in these examples:

• Graphically: If I’ve learned cat and man, I’d have a good chance of learning mat and can based on the similarities of their appearance in print.
• Syntactically:  If I come across the sentence, I love Mother and don’t know Mother, even at age six I can guess that I love nouns, (i.e., people, places, or things), but it couldn’t possibly be that I love verbs (go), adjectives (pretty), adverbs (happily), prepositions (of), conjunctions (and) or interjections (wow). I don’t need to know the definitions of parts of speech to figure that one out. So if the story is about a girl and her mother, I could correctly guess the word is mother. Of course, by purely guessing, I might think the sentence says I love trains, an error similar to one that children have made when reading to me.
• Semantically: If I read I walk from school all the way to my house and knew every word but house, I could guess the word is not jail, sea, or zoo because of the limitations of what my six-year-old self can own.

But three-cueing was not so novel when Ken Goodman “created” it in 1967, as the article claims. In fact, he just repackaged the whole word approach, which required us to see things graphically, and syntactically, semantically.

One more thing we do: we read backwards as well as forward. Look at this passage from The Cat in the Hat:

“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.” 

If I’ve just learned wet and cold, I’ll look back to their first sighting when I get to their second sighting. As a Dr. Seuss book veteran, I would know how the author depends on rhyming. So by the time I get to day, I’m sure it rhymes with play. And, if I’m really clever, I’ll know I sit in my house when it was too wet to play. So guessing, yes, but comparing and building on previous information too.

I’ll always remember in my doctoral program, a student pronounced paradigm as paradeem, not paradime, even though she heard the professor use the latter pronunciation in class. I thought either she did not connect his correct pronunciation with the word she came across in the assigned reading, or she wasn’t paying attention to his lecture. Then my thoughts shifted to when I learned that word only a few years earlier. I had never heard the word before until I read it in a book. The author was discussing Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, so I read that book next. Here’s the weird thing. I never had heard the word in speech; I only saw it in print, but I somehow correctly pronounced it in my head as paradime, dropping the g and giving the i a long sound, even though I had no other word ending to compare it with. So when my professor said paradigm, I knew how to spell it. I’d bet that the woman who mispronounced it was not as experienced a reader as I was. I think you get my point: we guess contextually more often than we think as readers.

A regular dose of all these approaches works for most children. Some will learn faster than others, as in everything else in life. But the slower ones will still learn. Yet having the right attitude is essential. The most memorable sentence in the article is the Molly Woodworth quote:  “[Reading] influences every aspect of your life." Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. Learn as much as you can about all three theories, draw your own conclusions, and read.