Fountain Pen on Parchment » Digital Literacy

Zen and the Art of Managing Life in the Digital Age

Mary Anne — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:01:02 +0000

I am overwhelmed. I am overwhelmed with email, Facebook, Twitter, Google alerts, Twitter, my three blogs, LinkedIn, and on and on and on. And, with this feeling of being overwhelmed, I render myself completely ineffective. Add this time of year to the bubbling cauldron and: OUT OF CONTROL!!

I came upon this article: this morning and I have vowed to print it and paste it (permanently) to the wall next to my desk.

So, I share it with you in the hopes that you too can find some Zen-ful tips (and serenity) in this madcap, twirl-a-whirl world of ours.

Irritating email habits and how to fix them

Mary Anne — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 13:55:32 +0000

Irritating email habits and how to fix them.

You are what you write — this is my mantra and if you think about it, it IS the name of the image game these days. So much of how we interact with others is through text — especially email in business. When you write sloppily, you ARE sloppy. When you write illiterately, you ARE illiterate. When you write crudely, you ARE crude. So, write well, write with precision and care, write professionally, and if you don’t know how — LEARN!!!

Please Don’t Shout

Mary Anne — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:57:55 +0000

Why is it that some people insist on writing in all capital letters? I love to peruse the Saturday real estate section in the local paper, and enjoy reading the descriptions of my “dream homes,” except for the ones written in all caps! It’s not that I’m trying to make a point, it’s that I seriously can’t read the darn things. Reading in all caps is difficult. You have to really sit down and concentrate on the letters, and then on how they go together. Not to mention, writing in all caps is one of the no-no’s of professional writing specifically because it “feels” to the reader like someone is shouting!

I came across another example yesterday. I was going through a social networking site and came upon the page of a writer that was written in, you got it, all caps! It surprised me that a writer did not know better about presenting herself in her own medium.

On point: please don’t write in all caps, and here’s why:

Hard to read
Shouting at readers
Looks unprofessional

Bad Writing

Mary Anne — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:53:09 +0000

In just the past two days I have come across two articles, both of which “how-to’s” about good writing, both of which were rife with writing errors. What errors? Passive voice, pseudo-academic style (in other words, difficult to understand), agreement of pronouns and antecedent (That person caught their coat in the door), crazy sentence construction, and frankly — text that sounds like it was written by an ESOL (English as a second language) writer. Take a look for yourself (be sure to come back, I’ve got lots more to say.)

English maven that I am, I left a comment on the site basically saying what I am saying to you. But I want to say MORE to you, because the great highway in the virtual-sky is becoming clogged with crap that multiplies explosively moment by moment. Let me tell you why.

The marketplace is turning inside out, upside down as brick and mortar gives way to the virtual shingle (website, blog, SNS, etc.) I’ll spare you the technical mumbo-jumbo, but to make an Internet presence means to generate content, content content. Translated: articles, essays, blog entries, reviews, how-to’s,m features, interviews. When businesses take the approach of wanting to throw up a bunch of content to get ratings, traffic, etc., they don’t care about quality. They do care about keywords, key phrases, and Search Engine crawlers. What you get on these sites is often times, crap. And, you get crap written by offshore workers whose main language is NOT English, but they are cheap, cheap, cheap.

My purpose here is threefold:

As Internet readers, be discriminating about what you read. Look for quality in both writing and content.

As Internet writers, don’t ever compromise your standard of quality no matter how desperate for work you are. Trust me, it will come back to bite you

As website owners, don’t go the cheap route. Don’t hire people who can’t speak, let alone write, English to prepare written products for you. Think good quality writing and content.

From the Mouths of Youth

Mary Anne — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:52:17 +0000

I promised to publish more comments from my class of budding business writers and their preparation for same in higher ed. Here is another insightful commentary:

Question: Please discuss the changing nature of writing and how higher education should therefore prepare its students.

I think that the nature of writing has changed greatly in the past few years as the use of the internet has changed everything. Information can be found so easily, and people have attention issues because we are an age of immiediate satisfaction. This makes writing difficult because we, as students, do not want to sit and read through books for research, nor do we thoroughly search through all of the internet. We take what we need to support what we are saying. High education right now gives an assignment as followes. ” X thesis statement – 15-20 pages in length.” When in reality, our world is heading toward an age when length is not necessary because we will not be taking the time to read it. We will be taking the important facts from skimming, and moving on.

Therefore, higher education needs to prepare its students in brevity. The world is constantly changing, faster every year, we need to be able to keep up. But that also means to know basics of many more subjects. The fewer words you can get your point across strongly and successfully, the even stronger you will make your argument.

From the Horse’s Mouth

Mary Anne — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:09:42 +0000

I love horses. In fact, I have a wonderful little Standardbred I rescued from a dire fate. But this post is not about horses. It is about higher education, and the perception of students relative to writing and their experiences in the hallowed halls of academe.

A little prelude first. I am one of those professors within those hallowed halls. But I work hard to keep my feet balanced in two worlds: academe, and business — specifically related to its writing and communication needs. It is my conclusion that we in higher ed do a lousy job of preparing students with the knowledge and skills they will need to successfully negotiate in this new world of digital communication. Read on for one student’s commentary. There will be more interesting student-authored entries to follow:

Student Commentary

While I do agree with Ellen’s (fictional name) response, we must teach students to explore all avenues of research, I feel as though most things that can be found in a book can be found online these days. So many books have outdated material in them, but they are still sitting on the shelves. I think the best way in which higher education can prepare its students is to teach them how to use the tools properly.

For example, because the woman from the library came in and talked to us about how to analyze a website, we now have the skills to determine the credibility. I don’t think it is as important to teach where the materials can be found, but rather how to sort through those materials.

As mentioned above, many professors do require page lengths for papers, and I have even had several that only allowed one Internet source. For the times we are in now, these requirements are ridiculous. In the business world, no matter what type of office or business it may be, no one wants to read through a long paper, when the point could have been made in the first paragraph.

Instead of teaching students to write more, higher education should be teaching them to write less, but in a more complete way. There is more learning and challenge involved in writing a shorter paper than a longer one because anyone can add useless information and unnecessary words.

Higher education needs professors to spend more time teaching the students how to write for real life situations than to meet the 20 page requirement.

Digital Literacy

Mary Anne — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 18:09:46 +0000

It is more than knowing how to use the computer. It is more than knowing how to send an email. It is more than using the cadre of Microsoft products. It is about rhetoric, audience, message, purpose. It is about design, using image and word, and minimizing possible misinterpretation. It is a science. It is an art.

To learn about digital rhetoric, read Aristotle , Socrates (my personal favorite), Foucault, and Paul Gilster .

More About Writing

Mary Anne — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 23:34:39 +0000

I just finished reading an article by David Wallace on Search Engine Guide titled “Are Your Web Pages Haunted — That Is With Grammar Errors?”

Short though it is, it hits on all those common and all too frequent and inexcusable errors that make us all look like slugs.

Enjoy and happy writing!