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How Character Drives Story — Book Review of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder

Tom Johnson — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:08 +0000

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, published in 2011, is a story about a pharmaceutical researcher’s attempt to make sense of her lost colleague, presumably dead in the Amazon, while wrestling with a domineering academic professor who refuses to communicate updates about her research.

The book begins at a slow pace but, as Janet Maslin notes in her New York Times review, the story catches fire when the narrator, Marina Singh, meets up with Annicka Swenson, the mythic professor of Marina’s past.

Dr. Swenson, a medical professor specializing in reproductive endocrinology, has gone to the Amazon to live with the Lakashi — a tribe of indigenous people where the women can continue bearing children throughout their lives (this is not necessarily an advantage). Dr. Swenson’s goal is to find out the secret of their fertility and develop a drug for Vogel, the pharmaceutical company sponsoring her research.

The Vogel CEO, Dr. Fox, is eager to receive an update about Swenson’s research, but she is out of touch in the Amazon, and it has been 26 months since she last communicated with Vogel. Meanwhile, Vogel continues to spend a ton of money supporting the effort.

Dr. Fox sent one employee, Anders Eckman, to seek out Dr. Swenson, but Anders, a jungle novice, contracted a fever in the Amazon and presumably died. Dr. Fox decides to send another employee, Marina, a former student of the mythic Dr. Swenson, and also his mistress, to locate Dr. Swenson and get an update about the research.

That’s the basic plot, which I could unravel in more detail, but it’s not the purpose of this post. The true purpose of this post isn’t even a book review, but rather to take an element of the book and incorporate it into my own writing, to review Patchett’s most salient fiction technique and reflect on it.

What’s my takeaway from State of Wonder? Character. Barbara Bovender, a Bohemian hired to look after Swenson’s apartment in Manaus, describes the character of Dr. Swenson to Marina as follows:

“Once you understand Annick [Swenson] you know there’s nobody like her. I was thinking that maybe you hadn’t been around her in a while, or you’d forgotten. . . . She’s such a force of nature. Her work is thrilling, but really, it’s almost beside the point. She’s what’s so amazing, the person herself, don’t you think? I try to imagine what it would have been like to have a mother like that, a grandmother, a woman who was completely fearless, someone who saw the world without limitations” (p.96).

In Janet Maslin’s New York Times review of State of Wonder, Maslin notes that it’s the introduction of Swenson in context with Marina that brings the book to life:

Not until Marina comes face to face with Swenson does this unexpectedly meandering novel find its focus. In books like “Bel Canto” and “Run” Ms. Patchett found amazing ways to coax unrelated elements into magically coherent narratives and make them all matter. But in this case, it is Swenson who is far and away the book’s best-realized character. And the reader drifts past many so-so secondary figures and generic tropical scenery before her presence is really felt.

When she does appear, so does this book’s central issue, its unresolved rivalry, its beating heart. And she is worth the wait. Here is the dragon of a teacher who lurks somewhere in every student’s academic history, and whose cruelty and exactitude are inseparable personality traits. (Will Perilous Trek to Amazon Reveal Heart of Darkness?)

Dr. Swenson is domineering in intelligence and risk. She’s a researcher that sees past ethics to embrace the scientific method to the extreme. Her work consumes her life and environment. Her demeanor, in relation to everyone around her, comes off as straightforward, insensitive, directorial – but colleagues respect her because of her knowledge and intensity. In fact, they fear her. She has even trained the natives to passively submit to the needle pricks and cotton swabs to required for testing and drug development. Engaged in her life’s work, Dr. Swenson sees no bounds – she will forego any reports that impose on her time, ignore inquires from the CEO, cross ethical boundaries to carry out her own human experiment, and continue forward with her work without regard for the emotions of those around her.

Dr. Swenson’s students both worship and fear her, and somewhere in that emotional slip-knot, the story grows. That’s the real story – the encounter of an unconfident student with her mythic professor. The interaction provides a depth of emotion and conflict. At times one feels awe, other times repulsion, for the legendary Dr. Swenson. She gives the book life.

Now, overall Patchett tells a good story. It starts slow, but once Marina gets to the Amazon with Swenson, the story pulls you in. The book doesn’t reach an intensity of plot or intricacy ideas that would make it a classic. The plot remains a bit too safe. The story never climbs up to a level with enough energy to keep me up past midnight. Even so, the book is satisfying. The development of the Dr. Swenson character allows it to achieve the impact it does.

It seems that fiction needs not only well-developed characters to provide interest, but characters that are larger than life. And yet, in developing larger-than-life characters, writers can’t exaggerate the characteristics and actions too much or the characters will lose a sense of realism. Perhaps this is the art – to achieve a perfect balance, developing a larger-than-life character without resorting to exaggerated, overdone strokes that fail to meet the reader’s the suspension of disbelief.

With Dr. Swenson, I never felt her actions or thoughts were unrealistic. Yet they were extreme enough and purposeful enough to draw me in. And it is precisely this character that makes the book worth reading and reviewing.

If you would like to listen to Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, you can download it from Audible here or buy it on Amazon.

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Book Review: Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson

Tom Johnson — Wed, 09 May 2012 01:31:59 +0000

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson, is a fantasy trilogy that takes you into a world where the characters can “burn” metals inside their bodies to give rise to certain powers, such as increased strength, the ability to push and pull other metals, an enhancement of the senses, or the most potent of all, the ability to see several seconds into the future (critical for fighting).

Mistings possess one of the nine powers; a mistborn possess all nine. (For more information, see this Allomantic Table of Metals.)

The protagonist, Vin, is a young girl, an orphan thief, who doesn’t realize she possesses these mistborn powers until she meets her mentor, Kelsier. Kelsier recruits Vin along with other crew members to overthrow the Lord Ruler, a despot who maintains his power, in part, through a sharply defined class system between noblemen and skaa.

Mistborn has been one of my favorite books to listen to this year. The system of magic — burning metals (called “Allomancy”) — gives rise to a fascinating world, one that mixes innate capabilities with class and mystery.

The Mistborn trilogy is a classic and highly regarded in the fantasy genre. It’s full of action scenes, intricate plots, and compelling characters. The book is appropriate for any age. (My 10-year-old daughter listened to two of the three books.)

I hadn’t really listened to fantasy novels before Mistborn. The closest book was J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit. With Mistborn, I realized that I like fantasy literature. For example, after finishing the book, I decided to listen to Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World — a series that Sanderson finished on behalf of Jordan (because Jordan died around book nine, before finishing the series).

To learn more about Mistborn, see the Mistborn page on Brandon Sanderson’s site.

To listen to an audio version of Mistborn, download Mistborn from Audible.

Using Tags to Increase Findability

Tom Johnson — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:32:21 +0000

Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web

I recently read Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (2008), by Gene Smith. Smith dives into tagging as a method for adding metadata to resources, which in turn increases the organization and findability of the resources.

Traditional help authoring tools categorize resources through folders (a carryover from Windows folders), whereas web platforms typically use tags. Tags are actually a quick and easy way to attach metadata to any information object.

For example, you might tag a photo with a geolocation. This would allow the photo to appear in the correct location on a map. Or you might tag a help topic with information about the audience and other relevant facets, such as role, location, goal, task/concept/reference, and so on. The key point is the tags are metadata.

Twitter wouldn’t be nearly as powerful without tags. Adding #techcomm to a tweet makes it findable for the technical communication community, just as tagging tweets with #contentstrategy makes it findable for the content strategy folks.

What’s cool about tags is that you can easily tag the same information with multiple tags. Does the information fall in #techcomm, #contentstrategy, and #findability disciplines? You don’t have to choose one folder to assign the content to. With tags, resources can live in multiple places at once.

Tags can be generated in at least two different ways. If users assign tags to topics, the result is a more free-form, loose set of terms that some call a folksonomy. Del.icio.us is the flagship example of a folksonomy. If only designated authors can assign tags, the result is more of a centralized taxonomy.

Tag clouds, which are visual displays of your top tags, can give you a general idea of topic trends. For example, if you look at the bottom of my sidebar, I frequently tag posts with the terms blogging, creativity, podcasting, screencasts, STC, technical writing, Web 2.0, and WordPress.

The tag cloud highlights only the most common terms. To see 500 tags in a cloud, see this page. When you look at this massive tag cloud, you might immediately realize one of the limitations of tags: lack of hierarchy. Most tag systems lack any kind of hierarchical arrangements (that is, parent and child tags), so as tag systems grow, they become unwieldy. The flat structure of links becomes hard to navigate.

Managing tags in digital photo collections can highlight the limitations of tags. Scott Dart, program manager of the Microsoft Photo Gallery, says,

“Anyone who has tagged their photos for any length of time will tell you that a flat list eventually becomes unwieldy. This is one of the reasons why we have hierarchical folder structures– because a flat list of folders would be too long to manage” (quoted in Tagging, 200).

In other words, the ease of adding tags to resources leads to an abundance of tags that gets to be hard to manage, unless you have some type of hierarchy imposed on your tagging systems.

Some tag clouds do allow you to drill down and explore a list of subordinate tags. Other platforms allow you to leverage tags in combinations of each other. Both strategies can make tags more useful and powerful.

Beyond tag hierarchies, Smith talks about some concepts I hadn’t heard before:

Pivot Browsing: ”Moving through an information space by choosing a new reference point — a pivot — for exploring the system” (105). The ability to look at information based on users, resources, and tags provides various pivot points in the data. Pivot points seem similar to facets but more radical in the way they change the reference point.
Pace Layering: ”Aspects of society change at different rates” (91). For example, tags suit user needs as they’re moving quickly to make sense of new information; taxonomies and ontologies are more appropriate later, when the dust settles and users have more time.
Synonym Rings: “A synonym ring gives two or more words an equivalent meaning” (69). These rings establish synonym equivalents for tags, so that “Web20″ and “Web_2.0,” for example, would be equated with one another.

Some tagging systems present users with the most popular tags, often segmented by time. But knowing that a tag is popular is just one type of information. Popular by whomis another type of information that tagging can surface. Smith writes, ”One of the benefits of tags to object-oriented sociality is to bring people together through their tags” (187). In other words, you can also connect with other users who have tagging patterns similar to you.

Tagging interfaces are characterized by speed and simplicity. As a result, tagging can be messy, with numerous tags having similar spellings, formatting, and synonyms. This is why it’s necessary to regularly clean up tags with tag management tools, which allow you to merge, delete, or change tags in bulk.

Tags have been implemented in a variety of ways with different platforms. For some examples, check out Del.icio.us, Mefeedia, Buzzillions, LibraryThing, Milenix MyInfo, Flickr, and Youtube.

Tagging is emerging as one of the most common ways to organize resources on the web. Smith notes that Delicious, a social bookmarking site that first appeared in 2003, was one of the first instances of tagging to emerge online. However, he also notes that classification and metadata strategies have been ongoing for centuries, with the Dewey Decimal system as one of the prime examples.

My Thoughts

In the larger discussion about findability, tagging brings us right back to the metadata discussion. Tagging is metadata that people apply to resources so they can find the resources later.

Tags present a radical shift in the way we attempt to organize information. Many help authoring tools default to hierarchical folder structures, but tags allow for polyhierarchy and give many more “pivot points” and facets for browsing the information.

The key point about tags is that you can add any number of them to a single resource. You can then manipulate the resources based on the tags you want to leverage. This is something you can’t easily do with a traditional hierarchical organization of information, or in systems where resources are placed in one folder at a time.

For example, with help information, you might add tags related to any of the following metadata properties:

Author
Date published
Release version
Date last revised
Popularity
Task
Concept
Reference
Format
Difficulty
Location
Event

You could then manipulate the resources in different ways based on the metadata that was important to you. You could also manipulate the resources based on combinations of tags — for example, the most popular tasks that are specific to a particular location. Combining tags provides a powerful way to sort and manipulate data, as it allows for a lot of different arrangements and possibilities.

When we start thinking of tags as metadata, they becomes a much more useful tool for help systems.

Although I’ve explored different strategies for findability, it seems that faceted classification through the attachment of metadata (such as tags) to resources remains the most compelling strategy. It can suit a diversity of audiences, purposes, and needs.

Taking it one step further, I think we need to allow users to tag help content. One failure of tech comm is that it hasn’t kept step with the innovation of the web. Many help authoring tools discard the interactivity of the web and the wisdom of the crowd. The revolution that needs to occur to pull help into the current era is to leverage the wisdom of the crowd in an intelligent way to increase the findability of help. Allowing users to tag content, and then leveraging their tags, seems like a good way to start.

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Book Review: The Hunger Games, and a Possible Parallel for Technical Writers

Tom Johnson — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:38:39 +0000

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, is one of the most suspenseful page-turners I’ve read in a while. I actually listened to it via Audible, and I was so pulled into the story that I found myself doing dishes, cleaning up, driving slowly — anything so that I could prolong listening to the book. A couple of nights I stayed up past 1 am listening to it wide awake in bed, unable to sleep.

In brief, the book is a dystopia set in the future, with a teenage narrator (Katniss Everdeen) passing through enough violence and tension to noticeably increase your pace of breath. Set in the future, the Capitol requires that two children from every district (there are 12 districts) participate in a death-by-elimination game in a large arena. Each child must try to kill the others — the last one standing wins. As the game lasts a couple of weeks and is set in a wilderness spanning several square miles, there are plenty of deadly unknowns and surprises in each chapter.

Literary Techniques

Although the book kept my attention, the technique used in practically every chapter seems to be the near-death experience. It’s as if the narrator tells us, I almost died, but then I lived. Though simple, it seems to work. From giant “tracker jacker” attacks to extreme hunger to deep cuts from knives to “muttations,” the narrator keeps alive in the Hunger Games until, well, I don’t want to spoil the ending, but let’s just say the first-person point of view doesn’t suddenly stop.

Another technique in the book is the way Collins ends each chapter. She ends it on a cliff hanger that compels you to the next chapter, in much the same way that episodic television ends with a cliff hanger, drawing you back for more. With the chapters, this device pulls you further into the book, because just as you plan to finish one chapter and then rest, you realize that you can’t stop reading. It’s a great technique for novelists to adopt if they want to add more suspense in their writing.

Genres and Themes

Although The Hunger Games is young adult fiction, my wife won’t let my six-year-old or four-year-old listen to the recording. And my ten-year-old, who read the whole trilogy and then listened to the Audible recording, said she wouldn’t recommend it to anyone under 12. I actually didn’t think it was too violent to restrict it from these ages, but I may simply be desensitized.

The Hunger Games fits in with a trend of dystopian novels in the juvenile genre. With the Hunger Games, the dystopia provides an immediate evil (the Capitol) that the protagonist can work against. Because it’s simply a dystopia, set in the future, we don’t seem to require much explanation to justify the state of things, other than knowing a few wars and rebellions led to it. Without the dystopian framework, the writer would have to work harder to get the reader on board with the idea of a sinister government organizing barbarian games with children for entertainment.

Parallels with Technical Writing

Since nearly every post on my site needs to tie back to technical writing in some way (or readers complain), I offer almost as a footnote to my review a parallel between technical writing and the Hunger Games. The following idea is somewhat fragmentary, and a bit of a stretch, but nonetheless partly true.

In the Hunger Games, the Capitol does a stellar job at restricting communication between districts. As a district member, you never hear of uprisings or unrest going on outside of your district. The Capitol will filter out any negative rebellion, they will quash any act or disruption that doesn’t support the Capitol. As a result, the people in the districts live in a world where information is sanitized and restricted, and where their voice doesn’t matter. Every media outlet is a cleaned up funnel of pure propaganda for the district. And the restriction of information paralyzes the people with inaction.

Not to unlike the Hunger Games, documentation has often been the puppet voice of the company. In documentation, technical writers spin things positively, more often stating what you can do rather than what you can’t. Technical writers are quick to remove any hint of failure or shortcomings about an app. If a bug exists, or if a process is cumbersome and technical to the point of absurdity, the documentation will not reflect this with an honest voice. It will instead stick with an objective, official style, glossing over any kind of explanations that would undercut a praiseworthy display of the product or its creators. Rather than admitting poor design, or insufficient coding, or some other bungle, technical writers filter all this out and describe the application with a tone of achievement and possibility. We are part of the corporate propaganda machine.

As a technical writer, are you another “peacekeeper” of the Capitol?

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My Review of the New Testament

Tom Johnson — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 04:03:23 +0000

Last year I wrote a review of the Old Testament. It was an off-topic post that I almost regretted posting, except that I did get a few comments from readers who appreciated my side jog because it showed I think about more than technical writing. This year I’ve been reading the New Testament, which is much shorter but also more challenging in some ways.

I have a lot of thoughts on what I read, and a post like this is going to be hard however I write it. I also want to make a disclaimer that my thoughts don’t have a central theme to them; they’re just a bunch of random observations. Also, the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know or understand.

As I read the New Testament this year, I started listening to Dale Martin’s New Testament course at Yale (thanks to iTunes University), as well as Bart Ehrman’s Jesus Interrupted and Peter, Paul, and Mary books via Audible. Both of these scholars argue similar historical critical perspectives. Here are my notes:

Critics believe the four gospels were not written prior to the Pauline epistles. This should be obvious, since Paul never references Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John (nor even describes much of Jesus’ life), yet the way the books are organized, they give the false impression of chronology. Paul’s letters are actually organized by length, not date.
Many scholars date Mark as the oldest gospel, with John being the most unique (and latest) of the four. Scholars dispute that the authors align with the names of the books — many times books are given a name so they will have more credibility.
The books of the New Testament are a small selection of the many writings about Jesus and the early Christians. With the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, many Gnostic gospel texts also came to light, one particular controversial book being the Gospel of Judas. In that text, the writer claims that Jesus instructed Judas to betray him, and explains that Jesus showed or explained hidden mysteries to Judas at the last supper. It also portrays Jesus as laughing during the last supper, or sometimes appearing to the apostles as a child.
Many other Gnostic texts were discovered at Nag Hammadi. Gnosticism is somewhat complicated, and I don’t fully understand it. But some Gnostics believe this world was created and is ruled by a being who is less than divine, a demiurge. There are various creative powers. Some people have a spark of the divine in them, but you don’t know for sure. Many Gnostics believe the spiritual body is trapped by the mortal body, and the ultimate goal is to escape this corrupt, confining existence and reunite with the original creative power, which is not the corrupt demiurge. To achieve this requires a certain knowledge, which is not readily apparent.
I sometimes am intrigued by these other gospels, but some are so obscure I can barely read them. For example, the Gospel of Thomas is really cryptic. I’m not sure what to make of that text, and many other scholars shrug their shoulders too. We often don’t like to think of Jesus as an obscure teacher; no doubt my lack of Gnostic context makes the texts more difficult. I guess the intrigue with the Gnostic texts is to see how writers who subscribe to a specific cultural belief will infuse the early Christian texts with those beliefs. As a result, one begins to wonder how much other culture is woven into what may have originally been a less creed-heavy text.
Contrary to what many think about Jesus’ teachings, his parables were often a way to mask his teachings from others. His says this straightforwardly when his disciples ask why he spoke in parables — he explains that it’s to keep others from learning the truth. As a technical communicator who strives for plain, easy to understand writing, I struggled with this for a while. After all, why not make your teachings as plain as can be so that everyone can understand them? There are various reasons I’ve come across, but the most compelling is that his teachings were too revolutionary to articulate in plain speech.
At times Jesus told his followers not to tell others he was the messiah. Some people refer to this theme as the messianic secret. Why might he have told others to keep this a secret? Apparently promulgating it would have certainly raised controversy and led to his early execution by the Romans. This is not merely because the Romans wanted to keep things under control, but because the assertion about his being the messiah would have been particularly controversial among his followers as well — the Jews assumed the Messiah would be a powerful, Davidic king who sweeps away the Jews’ enemies and restores Israel to an independent state of power.
The assumption about the king-like role of the Messiah contrasts with Jesus’s messiahship in radical ways. It’s why his disciples and followers can’t understand Jesus when he hints that he’ll soon be killed. A messiah who is treated like a criminal and then executed seems contrary to the very definition of the messiah as understood by Jews at the time.
This reversal of the idea of the Messiah is just one of many reversals Jesus taught. I think nearly everything Jesus taught turned conventional beliefs on end. Jesus was clearly a radical thinker in his time, almost a deconstructionist. None of his teachings are mainstream; everything he asserts comes as a surprise for his followers. Jesus is the ultimate example of an alternative thinker, one who challenges assumptions and presents unconventional points of view.
I find it odd that Christianity, once so predominant in these radical views, now seems to take the opposite track. Rather than praising critical thinking and analysis, the majority follow quietly and obediently (like the sheep in the metaphor). To be christian does not mean turning over every idea to show how the opposite is true. Of course when radical ideas are adopted by the majority, they eventually become mainstream. But Jesus was anything but mainstream in his day.
Another peculiar fact is the gap of historical writing about Jesus. Apparently just a few non-Christian sources mentioned Jesus during the first century AD. For a figure that has become the most influential for the next 2,000 years, strangely he didn’t seem to make much of an impression on non-Christian historians and writers of his time. However, many writings may have simply been lost, perhaps during the Jewish revolt in 70 AD, or some other events.
Scholars say even the gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death. Bart Ehrman explains that no one wrote anything down because they all expected Jesus to return quickly. He notes that Paul seemed to believe that the Second Coming wasn’t too far off, and that many should wait and be ready for it. Because this whole event — when Jesus would return and usher in his kingdom — was not too far off, Ehrman says recording the many events and stories in his life was not a high priority. (This is hard to understand in today’s culture of live blogging and tweeting, where nearly everything is documented almost in real time.)
Many of Jesus’ stories and teachings were communicated verbally. It wasn’t until many Christians started to be persecuted and killed that the community began to feel some teachings needed to be written down. Without a written canonical text, there might be so many variations, embellishments, different retellings, etc., it would be hard to identify exactly what Christians believed. Why were they being martyred, for exactly which beliefs? Paul’s letters to the various Christian churches in the area certainly point to a variety of conflicting doctrines and practices, as Paul is constantly correcting and instructing the new churches.
Many scholars point out that some of the gospels seem to be a passion play, meaning three quarters of the narrative deals with Jesus’s crucifixion and death, or at least the circumstances leading up to it. Perhaps this lends itself to the Christian adoption of persecution. It almost seemed to be a practice that people gravitated to in order to better understand Jesus.
After the four gospels, all we mostly have in the New Testament are a collection of letters from Paul. But as Ehrman says, reading them is like listening to someone talk on the phone. You only hear one side of the conversation, and there’s not much context to understand other meaning.
Paul is an incredibly controversial figure. Many critics, from Bernard Shaw to Nietzsche, accuse Paul of twisting Christ’s message from a focus on the upcoming kingdom that the Son of Man would soon usher in, to an insistence on a belief in himself. I never realized how controversial Paul was (apart from the verses about women remaining silent, etc.).
Some scholars say we only know a few things for certain — that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, that he was crucified by Romans, and a few other details. Nevertheless, most historical critics agree on those points (at least). One criteria for historical credibility is whether a detail goes against what believers would prefer to see. For example, Jesus being baptized by John shows a kind of subordinate relationship to John, which goes against what Christian scribes might have wanted to portray. Hence it has historical authenticity according to their criteria.

After some immersion in the historical critical view for so long, I began to lose interest in the New Testament text. When I hit Revelation, that apocalyptic firecracker, I stopped reading and didn’t pick it back up for months. What reignited my interest was to see such an outpouring of attention on religion in the media. With religion affecting politics and plays, new candidates and polls, it’s hard to not feel caught up in the discussion, even if my post doesn’t relate directly.

Overall, my study of the New Testament leads me to conclude that Christianity is just as strange and mysterious and controversial as any religion. I think any believer would do well to immerse him or herself in scholarly texts (like the Dale Martin and Bart Ehrman sources I described). Too often people slip into a feeling of comfort with absolutes. To many readers, there are few unanswered questions, controversies, or paradoxes in this text.

Ultimately, there seems to be a difference in purpose. The effort of scholarly analysis is to open a text. The effort of clergy-driven analysis is usually to close a text. These two fundamentally opposing points of view don’t mix well. However, I don’t think the latter mindset is true to the central figure in the book. He’s clearly a revolutionary thinker and, as I noted earlier, a table turner on convention. How so many followers fail to catch the same mindset exemplified in the text seems an unfortunate paradox of religious culture.

While I praise open-mindedness, I have to remember that at the extreme, it can lead to relativism, and that might not be a valuable position to take either. Ultimately open-mindedness can challenge belief itself.

In deciding whether someone is open or closed in their thoughts on any text (scripture or not), it’s good to remember that people who may be close-minded, that is, favoring simple absolutes, may be quite open-minded about other topics they’re more passionate about. One cannot be rigorous and curious about everything, and we should respect that.

While I make these concessions, I clearly enjoy the attempt to open a text rather than close it off. The desire for simple closure leads to a kind of provincialism that gives ”Bible readers” such a bad reputation. One should always ask questions and explore a variety of answers to those questions. Such a text as the New Testament lends itself to exactly this kind of exploration.

Even sticking with a specific creed, the New Testament is engaging to read. If you’ve never read it, I recommend reading Matthew and John. The way the writers weave together stories and teachings to portray Jesus is masterful. If you want to move towards a more critical view, read the gospels against each other, comparing and contrasting the differences between them. These differences give rise to so much of what scholars write about.

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Book Review: The Lonely Polygamist, by Brady Udall

Tom Johnson — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:23:28 +0000

The Lonely Polygamist, by Brady Udall (published in 2010), is a masterpiece of a novel, pulling us not only inside a less than familiar family situation — one of polygamy — but also managing to connect the reader with universal family themes. Even if you’ve never met a polygamist (I haven’t), there’s plenty in here that any parent can relate to — feeling overwhelmed by children, being pushed and pulled about by your spouse, sensing that everything is falling apart.

The story of The Lonely Polygamist is set in the late 1970s in southern Utah (near the Nevada border). The father, Golden Richards, has four wives, 28 children, and 3 houses. It’s not a situation he pursued. He just sort of floated along in life and ended up in it. His first wife seems to make most of these decisions, arranging the additional marriages and determining the house order and protocols.

It appears that Udall attempts to explore several ideas in The Lonely Polygamist:

How can a man who is surrounded by family — 28 children and 4 wives — be lonely?
How can a polygamist family have the same challenges and struggles as a normal family?
How is loneliness experienced from different points of view in the same family — from children and wives, not just the father?
What conditions pull a man from relative passivity, being pushed and pulled by others around him, to a lead actor who directs and guides his life with his own choices?
How does one escape loneliness and connect with others?
How is polygamy not about sex?

Through the novel, we see Golden move from someone who is acted upon to someone who acts for himself. And that transformation gives the novel its main story arc. But what I most liked about the book is the basic family themes. These themes just seemed to resonate, even despite the differences in lifestyle. I think this is the brilliance of the book – to take a lifestyle and perspective that is unfamiliar (polygamy) and make it universal.

In the Amazon reviews, it’s clear that some readers weren’t able to get past the polygamy theme in this book. But it’s much less about polygamy and more about family and male mid-life crisis. The polygamy is in the background, almost as culture to give the book some intrigue. The same story could have taken place without the polygamous component, but then it wouldn’t have achieved so much.

Udall always keeps the book light, and though at times the themes of alienation, loneliness, a sense of being overwhelmed, and adultery can become a bit dark, the book maintains a humor about it that is characteristic of Udall. You can see this same lighthearted tone in Udall’s other works – Letting Loose the Hounds, and The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint (also excellent works). In the Amazon interview with Udall, Udall notes that he tries to emphasize the comedic aspects of nearly every situation he writes about. In The Lonely Polygamist, even as Golden is about to commit adultery with Huila, the scene contains one misstep after another, and we laugh as quickly as we’re turning pages.

What I like about Udall’s writing is the way he paints and develops his characters. The characters are the stories, and even in The Lonely Polygamist, though at times I was frustrated by Golden’s passiveness and his lack of self-direction, he was a character I cared about. Having completely imaginary characters that both the reader and writer care about seems to be one of the main challenges of writing fiction. Udall says he spent time living with a polygamous family to research the book, so this research no doubt informed the character sketches and stories.

I don’t read a lot of fiction, but I can’t seem to get enough of Brady Udall’s writing. Maybe it’s the frequent but unobtrusive Mormon themes in his stories and novels that seems to make the content relevant. Mormons don’t practice polygamy, so the Lonely Polygamist doesn’t address Mormon culture (but rather Fundamentalist Mormon culture). Still, there’s some relevance through history. At any rate, he’s found a way to write about a culture without coming across as either offensive or preachy. He says he worked on The Lonely Polygamist for about 6 to 7 years. I hope it’s not that long until his next novel is released.

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Book Review: A Practical Guide to Designing with Data, by Brian Suda

Tom Johnson — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 13:10:21 +0000

A Practical Guide to Designing with Data, by Brian Suda

A Practical Guide to Designing with Data (Five Simple Steps, 2010), by Brian Suda, is a thorough exploration of best practices for graphs and charts. It’s somewhat similar to Edward Tufte’s Visualizing Information in focus, and both have a shared antipathy toward “chart junk” in the effort to tell the story of data. Suda explains,

The main purpose of this book is to encourage you to visualize and design for data in such a way that it engages the reader and tells a story rather than just being flashy, cluttered and confusing. (viii)

Everything that’s flashy, superfluous, and unnecessary is essentially chart junk. Chart junk gets in the way of the purpose in using a chart or graph, which is to tell the story of data. Any time you add visuals that distract from the data, or which don’t add to the data, this chart junk just gets in the way.

With this assumption, the graphs and charts Suda focuses on in Designing with Data are minimalistic. He encourages you to avoid bringing in too many dark lines or colors. To de-emphasize certain lines, make them light gray. To highlight an area, add a splash of color — but only a splash. Suda dislikes the gaudy multi-dimensional, multi-colored charts and graphs that you can too easily produce with PowerPoint, Excel, and other tools. He feels this excess of pixels all too often prevents the reader from understanding the data.

In a culture of visualization and infographics, Suda’s book is a wake-up call to graphic minimalism. Suda writes,

A visualization … seems to contain much more ‘chart junk’, with many sometimes complex graphs or several layers of charts and graphs. A visualization seems to be the super-set for all sorts of data-driven design. (11)

The focus on minimalism also has echoes in Jean-Luc Duomont’s Trees, maps, and theorems, which I reviewed last year.

Given the rising trend of infographics, Suda’s book provides an interesting counter. At Podcamp 2011, Tristan Higbee of Blogging Bookshelf said some of his most popular posts are ones with infographics; he now actually has a course on infographics. Higbee notes that people searching for infographics (see Google Trends for the term) has skyrocketed in the past few years. Most notable among the producers of infographics is New York Times. Check out the New York Times’ gallery of infographics. Fast Company also has a category dedicated to infographics.

Given this trend toward infographics and visualization, it’s easy to get caught up in the graphic design of the information, emphasizing the artistic aspect of the display. Yet Suda says,

To tell the story behind the data, we need to stop grasping for the perfect visualization and instead return to the basic language of charts and graphics. Only then can we begin to uncover the meaning and relationships the data has to offer. (v)

Returning to the basic language of charts and graphs is the core theme of the book. The debate between minimalism (with basic graphs and charts) and decoration (through infographics and other visualizations) is something Suda touches on with more depth outside his book, in a comment on a 10 minute BBC video clip about “making information beautiful.”

Two artists have contrasting views. David McCandless wants to bring his graphic design skills to the information landscape to portray information as a kind of art, to evoke more than mere information but also patterns and emotion and attention. Neville Brody says that over-visualization can too easily become pretty “wallpaper” — something that’s pleasing to look at, but which misses the underlying point of the story. The story gets lost in the decoration.

Suda comments:

While I personally find myself agreeing with Neville Brody, I also find myself defending David McCandless. Neville’s flippant comment about “It is very pretty, I would like that on my wall”, goes to the heart of the problem with visualizations and infographics, they are decoration more than they are tools to convey data. (The art of making information beautiful)

Although he sides with Brody, he applauds McCandless for pushing the limits and compares him to information pioneers such as Florence Nightengale, whose innovation in displaying information led to the formation of a new type of chart.

Designing with Data provides excellent information if you’re designing charts or graphs. If you’re looking for a book that explores infographics and visual storytelling, this book isn’t it. Yet Suda’s book still provides a good reminder to avoid unnecessary elements and decoration that distract from your story. In the last section of the book, Suda notes that he’s not opposed to more elaborate visualizations. He just encourages readers to first master the basics and tell the story, and then to experiment with something more artistic or creative after that.

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Book Review: Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps, by Joe Welinske

Tom Johnson — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:18:36 +0000

Joe Welinske’s latest book, Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps (published June 2011), fills a gap in tech comm literature that is sorely needed. Joe explores strategies and techniques for providing user assistance for mobile devices, and goes in depth with iOS, Android, Windows, and tablets.

Early in the book, he explains:

Hopefully the organizations that employ us will start buying smartphone devices for us to work with just as they provide us with desktop workstations (13).

It would be odd to be an IT employee in a company without being provisioned a computer. Now that mobile is becoming more common, shouldn’t we also be provisioned a mobile device too, if not several?

One of my colleagues just recently purchased his first smartphone. He decided to buy it himself rather than asking our organization to pay for it. Usually only employees with special needs to be reached outside of work times receive smartphones.

But the world has changed. We know that mobile is quickly becoming the most common way for people across the world to access the Internet. It’s much more common to consider and plan mobile development at the same time that you’re building a browser-based application. Mobile is no longer an afterthought. It should be part of our regular workflow, strategy, and deliverables — not just for developers, but for technical writers too.

Given the need to add user assistance deliverables to mobile, where do you start? Almost every mobile device has an emulator or simulator that allows you to explore the functionality from another computer. You also need the right software and setup. For most of us, this is a new world with unfamiliar terrain. How do you connect, how do you test, what software do you need, how do you publish, and how does it all vary by device? Joe covers all of this in depth for the major mobile platforms.

Additionally, he explores techniques for integrating help into mobile apps. Brevity and user testing are guiding principles. But as for a standard, “the look and feel of the UA is as varied as the apps themselves” (19). You can use everything from Dashcode (a mobile help authoring tool), to text built-in to the app, a standalone webpage, or many other solutions.

As for mobile help formats, I was also pleased to read the following advice for mobile documentation:

Many support situations can benefit from a richer level of presentation to the user. Videos and demos can provide a more engaging experience. The audio/visual capabilities of video make it a great choice for showing complex tasks and helping the viewer feel at ease. Demonstrations are useful for presenting an automated tutorial about tasks and procedures (28).

Yes, even on a mobile device, videos and other rich presentations have a place. When you consider the advanced interactions with mobile devices — the gestures, the pinches and squeezes, the flicks and two-finger scroll, the back swipe, etc., you need to see some of these gestures in action to understand.

Undoubtedly, the diversity of mobile devices makes documentation tricky. Joe says the “wildly different UIs that we find in our apps mean that users can’t necessarily carry conventions from one app to another. Unique icons, buttons, and menu structures can create angst for users” (41).

The operating systems and hardware buttons vary from the iPhone, Android, Windows, and tablets. Android itself has many different devices, with different buttons across the bottom. Not only do the operating systems vary, so do the built-in browsers. You need to test your output in all of these devices.

Add to this mix some difficulty in describing finger/touch movements (are these in your style guide?) and how those gesture words might translate, and you have a real challenge. What may have seemed simple suddenly becomes a full-blown documentation challenge.

Joe’s book is an excellent guide to get started in the world of mobile user assistance. The book is brief (142 pages) but thorough enough to get you comfortable in this space.

To learn more or buy the book, see Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps.

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Book Review: Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger

Tom Johnson — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:21:05 +0000

Everything is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger

In Everything is Miscellaneous, Dave Weinberger argues that classifications that we have imposed on most everything from the alphabet to the encyclopedia, planets, books, and knowledge ultimately represent our own beliefs and priorities. As time changes, we see how our own thinking at that time inclined us to organize the information that way.

In reality, things in the world don’t have such clear-cut categories and ordered absolutes. The world around us is ultimately miscellaneous, meaning, without clear division and order. Each thing has characteristics that overlap with other things, so that a classification that makes sense to one person doesn’t make sense to another.

Even if we meticulously craft a careful organization of the content, our organization might not ring true to another’s information needs. For example, organizing content on a map to include topography, water systems, roads, and trails might meet one person’s needs, but the omission of businesses, schools, boundaries, and emergency shelters might make the map useless to others.

Rather than classifying things in absolute ways, or deciding what to include and exclude in systems, we should strive to add as much metadata to things as we can imagine — and allow users to do the same. Applying metadata to everything allows us to manipulate the information in ways that make sense to each of us.

As another example, tagging photos in systems like Flickr allows you to retrieve virtually any set of information based on your queries. For example, you can search for all panorama beach photos in California containing sunrises and see a list of results. But if a group of librarians had forced the photos into rigid collections, their categorizations probably wouldn’t have accommodated this specific category.

Weinberger argues that metadata is really the key to solving the problem of order and classification. Adding metadata should be one of the top priorities of help authors, in my opinion. Who hasn’t wrung their hands in agony over where to put a help topic. We meticulously try to arrange topics into neat topical hierarchies, but these hierarchies often fail to communities of users. Trying to arrange content in the “right order,” usually based on tasks or topics, inevitably frustrates users. They end up playing guessing games about how things might be named and categorized. After browsing for a few seconds, they resort to hopeless searches, usually trying to guess the right terms.

Even if the order makes logical sense to many users, people don’t always think in topical ways. Maybe users are browsing to discover more advanced techniques, or are looking for troubleshooting issues, or are trying to locate specifications. If they could leverage metadata to arrange the information they need, they’re more likely to find the right topics.

Recently I was working on a project documenting a simple online calendar. In this calendar, administrators can reserve blocks of time for different groups, so I put this topic under a section called “Managing Locations and Resources.” Where would users — not administrators — look if they’re trying to figure out how to submit requests to reserve calendar times? And where would calendar schedulers look if they’re trying to view resource availability? Would they look in the same section where other administrator topics are grouped? Or in their own grouping of topics that relates to their own rights and roles?

Surely every help author who has documented software that contains at least 75 topics or more has wrestled with this conundrum. This is the threshold in which figuring out the right categories or folders for information poses challenges. It’s where you realize the content could be organized in a number of different paths based on one’s needs, priorities, and perspectives. To users unfamiliar with an application’s rights and roles, unaware of its terms and workflows, figuring out where a topic is located within a large system of folders is a guessing game.

Amazingly, Weinberger doesn’t use help systems as examples of miscellaneous. His domain is instead the Internet itself. But I have never read a more relevant book for technical communicators than Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous. Weinberger provides a strategy that, if followed, would largely solve the problem of findability with help. In a world of ever-increasing information, adding metadata to push and pull and arrange the information in user-centric ways provides the best strategy for attempting to organize content. Ultimately, Weinberger says to give up on organizing the content in one specific way and instead allow users to group it in ways that make sense to them.

The challenge, as always, lies in implementation. Exactly how do you add metadata to your help topics? What kind of metadata do you include? And how do allow the user to arrange or call the topics based on the metadata they want to sort by?

Weinberger is a masterful writer with a strong knowledge of history, philosophy, Internet, politics, and more. He weaves together stories from different disciplines in a mesmerizing way while always tying in his overall thesis — that everything is ultimately miscellaneous (without absolute order and classification) — to each chapter.

In the second half of the book, Weinberger focuses on the implications of not having a centralized, top-down hierarchy of knowledge. Some of his philosophical interests surface more visibly here, but overall the book is extremely relevant to the field of technical communication. For anyone who has ever struggled to organize help content, this book provides solid answers and strategies.

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Book Review: Letting Go of the Words, by Ginny Redish

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 06:07:18 +0000

Letting Go of the Words, by Ginny Redish

Letting Go of the Words (2007), by Ginny Redish, puts forward an idea that many readers will eagerly embrace: think of writing as you would a conversation. Anticipate the reader’s questions as you craft your content. Redish explains,

If you think of the web as conversation, you’ll realize that much of your content is meant to answer the questions that people come with. you do not want an entire site to be in a section called frequently asked questions. You do want to think about what people come wanting to know and then about how to give them that information as concisely and clearly as possible. (5)

In other words, for Redish, to think of the web as conversation means to anticipate the main questions your users will have, and then to structure your content as answers to those questions. You might use subheadings phrased as questions, but it’s not necessary. She’s not urging every page to look like an FAQ page, but to simply keep the user’s questions in mind as you write.

This technique is brilliant for two reasons. First, it gets you thinking about your users. It’s hard to consider what questions your users would have if you haven’t already defined who your users are. So immediately you’ll begin to think carefully about who your users are, and what sorts of backgrounds, scenarios, and contexts they have.

Second, the web as conversation technique prompts you to consider your user’s pain points. Rather than wandering about in obvious information, by answering questions you’re tackling the user’s real problems. You’re addressing why your users came to your site in the first place — to get answers to issues and problems they’re experiencing.

Redish also suggests that you start by answering the most important questions first, and then in inverted pyramid style work your way down to questions of lesser importance.

This web as conversation technique is the most appealing and novel idea in the book. But while the “web as conversation” is a model that feels right, Redish’s take on writing as conversation doesn’t involve social media. Granted, Letting Go of the Words was published in 2007, and probably written during the several years prior to that, before social media saturated the web.

But today, when we refer to the web as conversation, we’re referring to the idea of the reader as an active participant in a content dialogue — not just metaphorically. As a reader, you can speak to me by writing comments on this post. You can write your own post discussing points you agree with or disagree with. You can publish responses on Twitter, Facebook, or other social tools. You’re not a silent reader whose questions and thoughts I have to merely anticipate. The web as conversation means the content flows both ways. I write, you respond, I write back, you respond, and so the conversation goes. As a result, an initial post might triple in word count when you consider all the conversation that takes place from that initial post. (See Post Publishing Word Count Can Be Three Times as Long.)

Unfortunately, Redish never gets into social media in Letting Go of the Words, so it feels a bit dated. But even dated, Redish’s technique to consider the user’s questions is still right on target. It’s advice that, if everyone followed, would make the web a much better content experience.

As for the title, “Letting Go of the Words,” Redish returns again and again to the idea that writing needs to be concise and goal-oriented. ”The key to successful writing on the web is to let go of the words without losing the essential messages,” she explains (98).

Omitting needless words is nothing new, of course. It’s solid writing advice that you find in classics such as Strunk and White. Because of this and many other basic writing principles that receive constant attention and emphasis, seasoned web writers familiar with web conventions may find this book too introductory. Additionally, the initial appeal of the web-as-conversation metaphor gets diluted by the ever increasing scope of the book. By the end, she covers so much territory (lists, tables, illustrations, links, headings, paragraphs, white space, etc.), that the book becomes more of a general guide on “writing for the web.”

Still, as a general guide on writing for the web, it’s useful to have next to your other books on style. For example, last week my colleagues and I were discussing list alignment (whether to indent lists or keep them aligned with the paragraph’s left edge). I opened to Redish’s chapter on lists to review what she had to say on the issue. Did she anticipate our questions? She does note that text should wrap under text, not under the bullet or list number. It wasn’t exactly our question, but by not addressing it, we decided either way was acceptable.

If you’re working with web content, Letting Go of the Words is a good book to ground you in the basics. You get a taste of a lot of disciplines mixed together here — usability, information architecture, typography, copywriting, and more. If you’re a digital native, however, who spends more time online than offline, you may be better off reflecting on the writing as conversation metaphor and then jumping into a book that discusses more social media strategies.