What Are You Reading over the Holidays?

Last post of the year!

One of my great expectations as any holiday approaches is the found time to read more, and this year has not disappointed. Since I would be spending Christmas and New Year's days on another coast, I knew that the vacation would begin the moment I passed security at Newark Airport's Terminal C and settled into a seat at the waiting area of my departure gate to read. The cross-country flight would grant me another six hours of uninterrupted reading. Then I anticipated more late-night or early-morning opportunities during a stay on the dunes near Monterey and hills of Oakland. 

I recently bought at a bargain price the Library of America's boxed set of all 14 Kurt Vonnegut novels, spanning 45 years, from 1952 to 1997, because I wanted to rediscover why I was so caught up in the Vonnegut mystique of the early 1970s, when I was a college student. I've gotten through Player Piano (1952), a disjointed but revelatory critique of the dystopia that would emerge when machines replace human labor and engineers and managers run everything, and The Sirens of Titan (1959), a slapstick space travel odyssey about wealth, greed, and vanity.

Then sometimes you get an unexpected gift, as I did on Christmas Eve when browsing East Bay Booksellers on College Avenue in the Rockridge section of Oakland, California. I picked up Again, the Dawn: Selected Poems, 1976 - 2022 by Grace Schulman. Schulman, a recent recipient of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Achievement in American Poetry and a Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, where she has taught for 50 years. As one of her early students, I was greatly influenced by her teaching style and writing, as I mentioned in a previous post. This latest Schulman book collects 127 poems from all nine of her volumes, standing as a testament to an extraordinary career, which I hope is far from over. 

So here I am, switching between Vonnegut and Schulman, returning to writers I discovered a half-century ago. But I am also reading newer writers, mostly nonfiction, as I've noted in previous posts here. What are you reading during your downtime?

Use Your Words!

When children cry without explanation, parents typically say, "Use your words." It's a good reminder to all of us when writing business email or instant messages. Below are three common examples of using our words to say what we really mean.

This first example written by an information technology analyst to an end user replaces two words too general in the context with more specific ones:

• Vague: You must do several things before starting the engine.
• Specific: You must take three security precautions before starting the engine.

This second example written by a project manager to a department chief shows how two specific project-related terms replace a crude, virtually meaningless word:

• Vague: We will talk about project stuff during the meeting.
• Specific: We will talk about project deliverables and contingencies during the meeting.

This third example written by an engineer to all levels of the organization interested only in operations minimizes the value of two other business aspects because they do not relate to engineering. The second draft clarifies that oversight. 

• Vague: This engineering report divides the business issues into operations and miscellaneous.
• Specific: This engineering report divides the business issues into operations, administration, and management.

The problem with being specific is that we sometimes do not come up with the best words in first draft, so we should allow editing time if we want to use our words.

 

Pandemic Practices

I know the last thing you want to hear about is the pandemic. But I've learned a lot more than the value of getting vaccinated, washing my hands, masking up, and meeting others sparingly during those two-plus years that we were in pandemic mode, although I am grateful for those lessons. Sure, I lost a lot of business, but as the saying goes, money ain't everything, especially when considering those who lost their lives to covid. I mentioned in previous posts the pleasures of reading, writing, listening, and seeing more intently (and intensely) during those "lost years," but I believe I have gained so much by slowing down my commercial treadmill from March 2020 to June 2022. Here is how.  

I found unprecedented time to read many of the books on my bucket list, but I still have many more to read. Some recent worthwhile reads have been Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Geert Hofstede's Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations, Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci, and Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation.

I have subscribed to YouTube channels that never cease to put a smile on my face, including those of pianists Rossano Sportiello, Stephanie Trick & Paolo Alderighi. Or I could just listen a thousand times to pianist Michel Camilo play From Within, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane play The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond play Emily, pianist-singer Eliane Elias play Samba Triste, or pianist Ahmad Jamal play Poinciana. Those five videos alone could take and make an entire day for me.

All of these activities have inspired and continue to shape me, proof that we never stop learning.  

Advice for All Writers from Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) offers eight tips for fiction writers in his introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (2000), but three of them, tips 1, 5, and 8, apply to business and technical writers as well. 

Tip 1: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. We need to heed this advice when writing anything at work, from an audit or an investigation report to a procedure or a proposal. Readers do not need to know all the who, what, where, when, why, and how—only as needed. Consider the business purpose related to your audience. It's not what you know that matters; it's what your readers need to know.

Tip 5: Start as close as to the end as possible. Fiction writers can take this tip to mean that they should reveal or foreshadow the climax or even the resolution early in the story. On-the-job writers use another term: executive summary. Ask for what you want right up front. In an incident report, you will want to note the human and property damage of an accident immediately. For a proposal, you want to put the ask right away.

Tip 8: Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such a complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should the cockroaches eat the last few pages. Well, Vonnegut said it all with this piece of guidance, didn't he? Place the request before the reason, the solution before the problem, and the result before the process.

Thank you, Kurt Vonnegut.