Sean Maloney, a PhD student in Computer Science in my UCSB Great Presentations class has excellent advice. He writes:

“If I were googling ‘how to give a poster talk,’ once I have successfully assessed the audience situation I would also want to know how to behave.

There is some good advice applicable to all situations:

• Make eye contact with everyone.

• Acknowledge newcomers but don’t interrupt yourself.

• Don’t let newcomers interrupt you.

• Always include the ‘why are we doing this study?’ in the discussion.”

Thanks Sean!

Columbia University Computer Science PhD student Zeinab Abbassi presenting her poster at Grace Hopper 2011.

I am presenting the thoughts of Computer Science PhD student Yipeng Huang on the subject of discourse community. This text is part of Yipeng’s Final Writing Assignment in our Academic Writing Class at Columbia University. Thank you Yipeng!

“In the Academic Writing class, students wrote science stories that imitated articles published by the experts we admire, following their writing organization and style, even including their quirks in word choice. I would read my fellow students’ drafts and find the jargon hard to understand. I am weary of excusing unclear writing for the sake of imitating existing writing, because we must first ask two questions—Does everyone in the field indeed agree on the meaning of the text in question, when the words have evolving definitions? What good is it to enforce language barriers to distinguish insiders from outsiders of the field?

I admire academics that can explain advanced topics in plain language. They are the writers who inspire the public and educate newcomers to the field, and I suspect they are also adept at pitching their newest research to sponsors and reviewers, because not all of those readers are ever in the exact same field. The skills for writing for my discourse community and for a general audience should not be so different—even experts appreciate context and clear writing. Good science is accessible. Writing that captivates a broader audience than necessary is better than that which persuades too few.

Computer science as a field has the luxury of being relevant in the lives of most of the world population. But with that broad audience comes the hazards of folk science and distrust. We can defend against such dangers through plain, excellent writing, ensuring that the science is accessible to everyone interested. Elevating the quality of communication is crucial in science, and fields can either wither from neglecting this obligation or, by embracing the art, thrive.”

(The complete text can be found on Yipeng’s blog at http://yipenghuang.com/category/dedications/)

In our class we don’t simply discuss a checklist of important and useful pointers about how to put together and deliver a good presentation. We actually give presentations of varying lengths. We adjust content and organization; pacing; timing; volume; gestures; movement; visuals; transitions; ends of utterances; gaze; and eye contact. We do it all!

We have the chance to observe and evaluate many different and equally effective examples of how a presenter chooses to organize a story; develop effective slides; and deliver a great presentation.

My primary focus and goal as the Great Presentations instructor is to help students understand that there is no single template for how to be a great presenter, but rather a range of effectiveness. We see that a shy, quiet person is a great presenter just as an outgoing, energetic person is also a great presenter.

So in our class we work on developing the singular unique styles and tones of each student in the group. We want to help each person to be a more excellent presenter using her own individual gifts and personal characteristics.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful–? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your reader will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an ego maniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.”

From Kurt Vonnegurt “How to Write With Style” (1985) in Brainpickings http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/14/how-to-write-with-style-kurt-vonnegut/

“A few words about Process – I have actually enjoyed writing this essay, which I think is a testament to your class. It really changed how I approach writing in terms of my confidence and my writing and editing technique. I am working hard to let go of my painful sentence by sentence perfectionist writing style. The group editing we did in class gave me a window into how the sausage is made, so now I can believe the writing doesn’t have to be perfect from the start – it improves with editing over time. It’s a work in progress.” Samantha Arthur, Graduate Student at the Bren School, UCSB

Is there any shifting of gears in writing such children’s books as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little? Do you write to a particular age group?

WHITE

Anybody who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears. But I don’t want to evade your question. There is a difference between writing for children and for adults. I am lucky, though, as I seldom seem to have my audience in mind when I am at work. It is as though they didn’t exist.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.

Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.

From E. B. White, The Art of the Essay No. 1, The Paris Review 1969                                                      http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4155/the-art-of-the-essay-no-1-e-b-white                                                                                                                 

“Your statement that words are the DNA of a written piece of work is brilliant. DNA is made up of 4 different nucleotides that are paired together in different combinations billions of times. All together those billions of pairs make a code which is used to develop an organism and the different traits it possesses.

The beautiful thing is that even within the same species, each organism has a slightly different code that makes it unique. Changing the pattern of nucleotides creates mutations that can be wonderful and help the organism and its descendants evolve, but they can also have negative effects as drastic as cutting the life of the organism short.

This is the fascinating and simple foundation of understanding the basis of life as we know it.

Thinking about words this way is amazing.  With so many words in our language and other languages across the world, there are a seemingly infinite amount of permutations that could be put together as code for a story. The placement of each word plays a crucial role in the overall outcome and health of the piece of work. Errors or poor assembly of the words can result in a poor final document.

Good thing we get to edit .”

Thanks Taylor!

From Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (2006) by Francine Prose (http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/31/how-to-read-like-a-writer/):

“With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. . . . it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.”

“Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.”

(You will find more ideas about writing and reading at http://www.brainpickings.org.)

Here you can see Ben in the design phase of a paper on the business and environmental strategies of a major American company. The goal is to transform the key parts of the discussion and all related details into concrete and ordered segments. You can add things, delete things, move things around, make the connections that work for your explicit purposes.

Our design sketch can be used as a blueprint for the composing process. We can compose any one of the sections or a part of a section when we feel inspired, without having to start at the very beginning of the story and move through to the end. And it is a simple thing to make adjustments to our design if necessary as we learn more about our topic.

Thank you, Ben, for showing us this approach to organizing a text!