Opinion, fact and fiction

My career as an author is quite wide ranging. I get to write opinion, fact and fiction in different situations.

Writing opinion is something that happens through this blog, I also had an article published in the recent Communicator. This takes my traditionally-published life to three pieces. I’ve written for a local newspaper (although they have heavily edited and not attributed authorship in the online rendition), conference proceedings on the subject of textbooks (the proceedings themselves will be published in the new year) and now an article for the professional journal. I identify strongly with this genre of writing, and find myself leaning towards it in my other written work (hence the vocabulary and reference choices in my personal blog).

Article, blog and journal writing is actually quite an unusual way for me to write. As a technical author I tend to document procedures grounded in fact. This means that I tend to write with the voice of the company, or the machine. I often imagine that software would explain itself in the voice Commander Data would use if he were coaching an inexperienced pilot over the phone. The linguistic precision necessary in technical authoring and factual writing is in many ways more demanding than that required by any other type of writing (Issac Asimov’s short story Risk sums up why).

Finally, there’s fiction writing. I’ve taken the instincts for detail and control of my writer’s voice from technical authoring and am well on my way to my first novel which should be with us late in 2013. It features confidence trickery and well researched real world locations that will hopefully have some people scratching their heads.

I’d very much like to hear from anyone of my readers who write via the comments section.

Andrew

Hear no evil, see no evil...?

I’ve been watching my language lately. No, I don’t mean that I’m worried about the odd 4-letter word slipping out... I mean that I’ve been considering my use of language in relation to my ‘input preferences’. Depending on your background, you may have come across some of these before – whether you are a ‘visual’, ‘auditory’ or ‘kinaesthetic’ person. And so the rest of your 5 senses don’t feel left out, whether you are a ‘gustatory’ (taste) or ‘olfactory’ (smell) person! It follows from my recent training – see Wearing a Different Hat...

The theory is that we all have a preference, sometimes quite a strong one. According to the various tests you can take, my preference is fairly balanced, with ‘visual’ taking a (very slight) lead – but in terms of ‘how I learn’ I’ve known that for a long time.

I used to think I learnt from listening. Why did I think that? Well, I always wanted to sit at the front in class – I thought so I could listen more carefully to the teacher. What changed my mind? I learnt a little BSL (British Sign Language) – and of course, very little was audible. It slowly dawned on me that what I was doing was not listening to the teacher, it was watching. Auditory (listening and speaking) is probably my least favourite: my attention wanders if I can’t see the person talking to me... I start to look at the floor, my neighbour, read the emergency telephone number on the poster by the door, fiddle with something on my desk. You get the picture – and I really have to make an effort to concentrate on a phone call, or I find someone is asking me a question and I’ve been reading at a leaflet on my desk!

Apparently, you tend to use language associated with your preference, so theoretically I would say, “I see what you mean”, whereas someone with an auditory preference would say, “I hear what you’re saying” and a person with a kinaesthetic preference would say, “I’ve got a feel for that”. I’m a little sceptical myself – and feel my language varies more depending on what I’m talking about.

I was trying very hard to listen to myself during a recent training course I was delivering – and also trying very hard not to let the fact that I was listening change what I was saying! So, what did I find?

Well, when discussing punctuation (for example), I said that you can “hear the difference”, even though we were looking at words on a flipchart (so definitely auditory). A bit later on I said I would “guide them through the minefield” (kinaesthetic), and at the end of the day I suggested they “take a look at all of them and see which best fits” (visual).

I really need to record myself as I am sure I missed a lot of instances (I was aware of far more than the three examples above), and although I am fairly confident that my language varies, I didn’t identify a strong preference for one form over the other.

Alison

Wearing a different hat...

I wear a lot of metaphorical hats – more of hats in a minute – but two of my most frequent are ‘technical author’ and ‘trainer’. I am fascinated by the parallels (and overlaps) between the two disciplines – and (depending on your definition of ‘technical’), you could say both fall into the over-arching field of technical communication.

So what are these overlaps? Well, you could look at the ‘collateral’ associated with training – the ‘stuff’ that we produce to help deliver training. There are hand-outs, workbooks, exercises, the ubiquitous presentation, videos and simulations. The decision on who does what really depends on how your organisation interprets the plethora of job titles that attempt to both describe and pigeon-hole what we do: trainer, facilitator, course designer, developer of course materials, e-learning developer, technical author, technical communicator… the list seems endless. The biggest overlap, though, is just that both are about communicating.

I’ve been a trainer/tutor/teacher for longer than I’ve considered myself to be a technical author, and as Andrew pointed out in ‘By popular demand’ (did I see a spot of ‘perk-envy’ there?) I’ve recently been on a 3-day residential course helping me to do a better job of it. I’ve always hated the type of training where you sit in a room and listen to someone drone on reading out one slide after another – I’ve always felt they could email me the slides and I’d do it myself – and this course was certainly nothing like that! (I also get annoyed when trainers proudly proclaim ‘no PowerPoint’, as if reading from a worksheet or a flipchart was any better…) And I’ve refused to deliver training like that – it’s just ‘wrong’.

For the most part, we focused on face-to-face, interactive training – but all the while, I was thinking how what I was learning about How To Be A Brain Friendly Trainer could also apply both to the sharing of knowledge as a technical author and as a teacher in an online environment. During this course, we were both students and trainers – and put our ‘trainer hats’ on (mine was a rather fetching lime-green baseball cap) to indicate we had switched into ‘trainer mode’ – and I learnt a lot from just watching and listening to the others.

My challenge now is to integrate the lively, colourful, interactive and sometimes noisy methods into more of my work, not just face-to-face training – not forgetting to squeeze in a bit of time for quiet reflection when appropriate.

Alison

Ouija Rooms

When I teach and lecture I have quite strong feelings about the rooms I’m working in, so much so that I have an ELT conference workshop ready to go on classroom layout. Some rooms, often with unconventional walls and slightly stretched overall geometry, lend themselves well to workshops where groups huddle round tables, posters and projects, whilst others are more geared towards a lecture format where the lecturer is situated with a panoramic view of the class at the front of the room. In the former I tend to perch on a desk and wander the room offering guidance and answering enquiries, whereas in the latter I tend to want to dance and prowl across the stage.

So what happens to the experienced trainer and communicator when we take away the physicality of the room? The answer, it seems, is that I have a lot of guessing to do. I’ve been in the habit of taking my cues from the room for so long that the virtual conferences I've been having with clients are quite disorientating. For about an hour a week, I’m getting dressed up as a helicopter pilot from the 1980s (headset with boom mike) and joining people in an online “room”. The host of the meeting takes control of one of my monitors (I’m glad I’ve got two, as I can keep my notes visible on the other one) and a disembodied cursor navigates a projection of his screen whilst a variety of ethereal voices speak over the headset. I tend to forget the other people are there if I’m not careful – Alison had to tap me this morning so that I stopped working on the sample files and watching the pointer and started making the little social noises we make when we are in the same room as others, as my silence was not helpful.

I originally thought that using the webcam would help, but the last two experiences have either seen me fielding questions about tropical fish (visible over my shoulder when sat back from the computer) or sitting so close that my on-screen head goes through a hall-of-mirrors-eqsue distortion... and it’s not seeing people I need, it’s having a concept of the room. Unfortunately the closest analogy I can find is Frodo peering into the Mirror of Galadriel, if the mirror was running on Windows 7 with a Ouija Board interface and sporting the disclaimer Many things I can command the screen to reveal - things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. But that which is seen, even the Wise cannot always tell. Do you wish to look?. As a result of this confusion my notes now include things like "it’s not a game, remember to respond when people speak" and "don’t sing to aid thinking".

Andrew