Matt Linderman has summarised some of the advice that Stephen King gives in the essay On Writing.

All excellent stuff. I have used the opening at page 56 and 57 of the Scribner hard back edition published in 2000 with English Speaking Board students. King is having an article about a football game editied by John Gould, a newspaper editor. Cross out the words that don’t do anything is the message.

Screen grabs taken on my Kodak and processed using scanr.com. Copyright is almost certainly Scribner’s, so if any rights holder objects I will remove the images of the text. I think King’s presentation makes things very clear.

“Part of it is tenacity. For example, I am writing this item as I wait for the internet to start working again in the Joburg airport departures area. But part of it is a simple strategy for writing you essays and articles quickly and expertly, a strategy that allows you to plan your entire essay as you write it, and thus to allow you to make your first draft your final draft. This article describes that strategy.”

The second paragraph above acts as a summary of the whole piece. Downes claims that discursive writing can be classified (it seems to be a week for classifications) into four categories;

• Argument: convinces someone of something
• Explanation: tells why something happened instead of something else
• Definition: states what a word or concept means
• Description: identifies properties or qualities of things

I shall leave you to spend the next half an hour reading his words…

Other pages on writing include

• Writing
• Writing Briefly

As part of the English Speaking Board qualification, students need to read a text aloud. This activity is designed to give students practice at reading aloud – how often do any of us read text aloud to see how it flows? – and to give each other feedback.

I will then increase the pressure a bit by asking the students to record their text using simple sound recorders. The resulting compilation will induce cringes no doubt, and will not be published here!

I have mixed journalistic writing with more academic or ‘reference’ sources. I’m guessing that students will find the news articles easier to read aloud than the more formal writing. This should prompt some discussion of the general idea of writing to read.

Tufte is arguing that the low resolution of the computer screen and the use of bullet points limit the number of words in a typical short presentation. This limited scope cripples the development of an argument or even the description of a process. Tufte also objects to the ‘sales pitch’ oriented nature of most of the built in slide templates. In a fuller essay, Tufte suggests that PowerPoint may be used to present graphic material which the speaker then explains. He also makes the important point that handouts should not be printed from PowerPoint but should be planned and written as separate documents with fuller text.

Godin’s essay Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it) is written from the perspective of marketing – exactly the context that Tufte claims has dictated the content of PowerPoint. Godin is also critical of the built-in clip art and slide layouts. Godin defines communication as ‘the transfer of emotion’ and goes on to suggest that the presenter is speaking to the left brain and the right brain is soaking up the images on the slides. The words and the music make the song. Godin is suggesting no more than 6 words per slide, and good quality images used large. He advises against fancy transition effects.

Lane and Wright point to the lack of any hard research on the use of PowerPoint (where is Jakob Nielsen when you need him?) and go on to present some findings of their own based on a literature survey. As there was little available for PowerPoint, they used general principles taken from work about Web sites, e-learning applications and games. To me, this shifts the context of their work from the process of presentation, where there is a speaker addressing an audience with support from slides, to the context of screen based kiosks or learning packages where the viewer is an individual sitting at a computer and is interacting with the various behaviours built into the package.

The summary article makes sensible recommendations about the use of clear navigation and providing users (viewers?) with opportunities to interact with the presentation. Just how a speaker in a room with an audience uses such a branched structure to respond to audience input is not fully discussed. I might try a simple schema diagram about learning theory with linked slides and see where the questionning goes. The Lane and Wright article arrived on my RSS reader from Jane Hart’s e-learning pick of the day.

The NTK™ students will be using PowerPoint and other IT packages to enhance their assessed presentations, and I would like to ‘allow’ or offer the opportunity for the students to adopt a more critical attitude to the package and to find a way of using PowerPoint that makes sense to them. Being critical in your use of PowerPoint might be a bit ambitious if you are a return to learn student who is trying to learn the various forms of academic writing for the first time, and who may not have especially well developed IT skills. This theme will be an ‘enrichment’ for the more confident students.

Garr Reynolds has a useful article with links on the reaction to Tufte’s PowerPoint views, and on Godin’s take on presenting.

Print your own A4 format newspaper from a PDF file on the Guardian Unlimited Web site. G24 is available in different sections (which I guess might overlap); Top Stories, World, Media, Business, Sport. Each seems to have around 10 or 11 pages of content, and the photos are small. There is some advertising (see the low resolution screen grab of the front page from the World section above). The articles are short.

Just what I need to get students reading more widely than the Metro. I’ll be leaving a few copies of the News and Top Stories sections in the base room a few times a week. Printing your own newspaper is one of those science fiction things I remember being suggested as a child… funny how they didn’t think of blogs or the Internet then? It was always the same thing distributed in a different way, not a different thing entirely as some think the future of newspapers will be.

“Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can’t do anything about that.”

I’d say: replace word ‘programming’ with a word describing any occupation short of leading edge algebraic topology.

From Advice for Computer Science College Students by Joel Spolsky, found on the interesting reddit.com. I think I’ll be using the new feeds.reddit.com service – very minimal and it works fast. In fact, I might steal the templates for use on this blog for the Summer Redesign, all very Web 2.0. By the way, being tall does help, I’m 183 cm and I have noticed this over the years. You get noticed, but then you also get picked on.

There will be some Maths posts here soon. And I’m teaching a study skills unit next year (Thanks to Rob for the idea for the course title, NTK or Need To Know) so there will be a new category.

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