 Bingo we're back 12 o'clock rock. This is Think Tech and it's our Community Matters show I'm your host Jay Fidel on community matters today. We'll talk to our old friend and journalist Brett open guard He's an assistant professor at the journalism program the school of communications at UH Manoa The name of our show today or episode is how to make American writing great again Of course, that might also be a way to make America itself great again You've heard that expression if we can really work it After all all writing in the language has a huge effect on our business endeavors and for that matter our legislation our court opinions our Government in general our legal infrastructure. It's all based on writing isn't case in point Did you look at the dozens of initiatives and amendments on the ballots on the ballot forms an election day? Do you think that kind of language will make American writing great again? I don't think so no comment So today we'll discuss what is good writing how it was and how it is today in various places and sectors of our economy and our Lives we'll talk about the changes in writing in America over the past several years decades the profound and perhaps the pernicious Effect of the internet email social media on writing in America what it looks like going forward and what we can do Individually collectively of what we should do if anything to make American writing great again if we have time we'll also talk about Donald Trump's writing on Twitter and What we can learn or not from what he does welcome to the show great over God's great to have you here again Well great to be back. Thank you Jay. I appreciate it So tell me what do you think has happened to American writing over? Oh, I don't know since the time I went to grade school in the 50s. What do you think has happened? Well, it's interesting that about a decade ago. I started teaching composition at the college level and I was literally Shocked and dismayed when I saw the papers come in and so I found this book Called errors and expectations. I think the author is Mina Shaughnessy. I have to check that. But anyway she documented basically writing proficiency for the last century and The big surprise from the book is it's always been bad It's always Yeah, it's not she basically had the same experience I had in the In the 90s that she had in the 70s and other people had in the 50s and the 30s so it's I think some of it's romanticized skills, but There's the writing is constantly changing just like languages. We're always inventing new words inventing new ways to use words so I think to some degree there is that kind of change in the formality and the techniques and styles and writing but Writing is a very very difficult thing to do. That's what it comes down to What's the connection between writing and literacy if I take a country where you have we can name something We have a high degree of literacy. I don't know why this comes to mind But Turkey Turkey has a very high degree of literacy does the degree of literacy Help in writing I guess it does you can't write you certainly can't write Yeah, I mean there's a base level of being able to read and then Also, people don't necessarily use that skill a lot of times people Read you know read Just the bare minimum or they watch a lot of TV news or whatever and they don't do the kind of Basic maintenance that they need to keep their writing skills sharp and that also hurts So I think the better reader you are the more you look at it Yeah, the better writer you are and the comparison I've started using lately is if you imagine a musician who plays instruments, but never listens to anybody else's music Can you imagine a sports star who never? Watches any games or or a artist who never looks at anybody else's art Same way with writing if you never read you're not going to be a good writer. I don't care how hard you try had it Yeah, it's a universe of symbols It's a universe of logical symbols and you have to be there and Engage with the symbols to see the relationships between the symbols and all that but you know I find also There's some music. Don't you think you know we speak. Oh, it actually writing comes after speaking And and if you if you listen to speaking, you know There's music and speaking and therefore it says my own personal theory and therefore if you find music and thinking you want to somehow Incorporate that into your writing. So when somebody reads it, they can feel the music They can feel the the pentameter if you will they can feel the poetry the voice the voice Yeah, the voice is a term we use a lot to describe how people select different symbols to Encode and that's basically when you're writing you encode a symbol and then the receiver of the symbol decodes it It's a little bit of a technical way to think of it But they might not decode it the way you want them to but they're they're actively Taking your symbols apart and trying to make sense of them. Yeah, so you have Multiple options for symbols, right? You can find symbols that are really descriptive that you vote Pardon me. I'm gonna throw this in a bag of water here now it has its own way of She was yeah, okay You know people have Choices in the in the words they pick and some words are emotionally charged Some words are not emotionally tell me you and you you have all these fabulous choices And as you say the spoken language changes new words come into the vocabulary and thus come into our writing options And so we have more choices now than we ever did don't you agree and and those choices Can can create symbols which can be encoded or decoded as you like With greater depth now. Yeah, no, we have way more opportunities to write When you know, I started out as a professional writer. You had you know magazines newspapers Television your scripts But you had to own millions of dollars of infrastructure to participate in those things and with the advent of the internet Suddenly people can make blogs. They can go on social media and on Facebook or whatever and write long Long pieces about whatever they want without an editor in the way or any kind of commercial bedding system Well, that's an interesting point because when you have an editor, I mean, let me go back and tell you my frame of reference You know lawyer, right? Mm-hmm And you read a lot of stuff in law school You read a lot of stuff in practicing of course no matter what area you practice in and all that reading and writing helps You with the symbols that helps you get facile with the the universe of communication But but I what I when I find interesting is that as time goes by I have noticed more and more that the lawyers who Come in for a job the lawyers who you meet across the street and across the Council table, you know have real trouble writing and you know, it's like in our firm. We trained them We spent a lot of time Building them into good writers who are legal writers, which may not be the same thing as a poet No, it should be So my own references, you know, it's that and I I guess the point I would make is that Is that this is all related to not only law not only legislation not only court opinions But it's everything we do and so if you want to be effective in this life You have to be able to speak and you have to be able to write and you have to feel that that music you have to You have to be able to choose those those words so that you get the right message So about messaging right and and if you think about it really communication is at the core of everything we do From every every single business. It's not just journalism or law or whatever every single business You have to communicate what you're doing and why your clients are Customers or you know partners or whatever want to work with you and then why you do it the best and Why what you do has value and if you can't communicate and often that's in written words You won't succeed. You won't succeed and it's a like again I get back to how difficult of a Training exercise it is and also how it takes work It's not just something like a bicycle you roll out of bed and you can write well ten years later if you haven't written So help me define what good writing is though This is a really important question and the answer from you is an important answer In a few words you can't have two hours to answer this Yeah, well what you what you raise is really good points discipline based in the sense that good legal writing is different than good journalism good poetry, so it depends on the genre but The the hallmark of good writing in my mind is a clear coherent message has communicated to your audience How do you achieve that? Getting all the clutter out of the way It was pairing the finding them the statue in the marble I think so the schmutz off so that you get to the point yeah, I mean I'm a big proponent of the Hemingway style of pairing everything out and we We have a lot of exercise as we use in terms of just taking words out of sentences Making less like if you have three words you make it two words that kind of thing and making it smaller and smaller until you can't make it any Any tighter and that in my mind is the best kind of writing. Yeah, and that's the best kind of journalism too, isn't it? I think so. I think it's the best kind of writing overall. I mean there are certain cases where and I Often do this where I start getting into abstract realms and and using, you know, 30 word sentences or something like that But I don't think that's when my writing is at its best. I think it's more when it's kind of at its laziest Yeah, yeah, and then you you know if if you have the time you go in and you pair it down All right, you know it was a fellow I knew in the practice of law and the judge called him up In the courtroom and said what's the matter with you? I mean what's the matter with you? How come you give me an 80-page? Memo when I told you I only wanted it to be no more than 50 pages and the lawyer said because they didn't have time Right and have time. Yeah, and have time to pair it down right and everybody has got to do that Mm-hmm. You know you can't find the real message without working to pair it down Yeah, one of the most interesting exercises I do in some of my writing classes is I have them take a long piece and break it down to sentence by sentence and put each sentence on A note card or a piece of paper all alone, and then they just work with a sentence. Yeah Yeah, the sentence level is like word level is too small Paragraph level is too big the sentence is where it all happens in my mind But sometimes a sentence isn't a sentence, you know even in good journalistic writing you find somebody throws in a few words as if it was you know Conversation and it's a perfectly vernacular Everybody knows what it means But if you if you put it against sentence structure, it doesn't doesn't measure up and in fact the grammar checker We'll show you on word Microsoft word that that's not a sentence You shouldn't do it do it that way and yet if you do it that way the guy in the other end will get the message for sure Yeah, so what's your advice? Well, you have to be smarter than the spellchecker This is something you know that a lot of people run into problems with they let the machines do the thinking for them and Sometimes they'll use words that the machine doesn't recognize or it Flags is that grammar or spelling error or whatever and you just have to know you're right and have that confidence Yeah, so you mentioned the internet and I would like to visit with you on that. Okay, the internet, you know, it's what 1995 so that makes it what 20 years old only 20 years old. Yeah, it's amazing. I have shoes that are older So that has dramatically changed the way we make sentences the way we communicate the way we Pair things down or maybe pair them up because I don't think people think in those large philosophical 30 word sentences anymore They think they think in three or four words and that's what they put on the internet Is it a good thing do you think is the internet giving us good influence on communicating with our fellow Americans? Well, it depends on what the words are If somebody like one of my favorite Activities to do is to write a Very very short story a 10 word story, which is You know kind of like the ultimate challenge, can you write an entire narrative in in 10? Can you you can? Yeah, exactly as a famous story about Hemingway in a in a bar and he wrote For sale baby shoes never worn actually six words. I take that back. It's a six word six word exercise and That tells the whole story for sale baby shoes never worn and I think that's one of the ways you can you can judge a good piece of short writing Yeah, does it tell the whole story so short writing on the internet? I mean right writing for example text for ordinary website It's a lot different than old-fashioned writing certainly different to legal writing different from what I want to call it Protective writing CYA writing where you never want anybody to say that you missed anything Right, so you have to write a whole enchilada in there, but real communication isn't that real communication is more like What's what's on the website? We just want to write you punchy statements We want you to understand and we want you to get through it. We don't want you to drop the book in the middle Yeah, so that affects everything doesn't it doesn't that effect when you see that happening that phenomenon in social media and the internet It influences you as a journalist as a writer doesn't it to write everything shorter than you did before no? well, there is a movement Called my micro writing where you write in the smallest possible atomic unit Which basically means can you pair everything down to just the essentials and that's the whole story And then you combine those atomic units into little blocks of Texts and then story gets put together and kind of a postmodern way You know where somebody reads all the blocks and they make their own story out of it That's you know that's potential, but I still like the long narrative yarns too in the books and I don't think it has to be a Situation where certain things die and go away. I think it's that we have more more options now So more the better how about Adjectives you like adjectives Brett some people, you know remember that game How many adjectives and you would one you won depending on the number of vowels and How many how many adjectives can we tolerate before we you know get slightly uneasy queasy and you know for that matter How about metaphors both positive and negative metaphors are they still useful? Well, I'll start with parts of speech That's the thing I see at the at the intro introduction to composition level that always Surprises me is how few college students know what the parts of speech are and I always think of it Like if you don't understand what the basic, you know building blocks of Language it can be then you won't have any way to use them Yeah, and so they'll start stringing together words and won't know what word does what and I don't mind adjectives, you know adverbs have kind of a low level on my totem pole, but I Think the bigger the bigger picture and better writing is if people Kind of strip away what they've learned And all these different types of genres because because what I really think it comes down to is you know in English you'll have free writing and Journalism you have inverted pyramid and in law classes. You'll have this type of writing or you know all these different types of writings and students and Even you know not even necessarily students anybody doesn't necessarily Separate those into the genre and use them like code switching into the right genre They mash them all together and then you have free writing and inverted pyramid, you know or you have You know long narrative form illegal brief or something like that and it just it's just not right for the genre So I I always start with with the idea that we go back to the very fundamentals Like if you were coaching a football team first day of practice you practice tackling and throwing the ball to each other You know, so that's the same sort of principle in writing that I think gets lost Everybody's trying to make the half-court shot or they're they're trying to write the thousand word novel But really they don't they don't have good command of the basics Yeah, and when you start from the basics, you can always change it and fix it and if it doesn't feel right I have the right music you can you can do that later. All right I have so many questions for you will never finish But let me ask you one more question before we go to the break sure and that is you and I spoke About the authorities you can look at on the web or you know by I'm in a bookstore if they're already books to was left anymore And when I was in college we had a strunk and white you call it S and W and I mentioned So I guess I guess a lot of people in journalism still know about strunk and white, but what else is out there? Well, I'll give one plug for my favorite book. I for many many years I collected little pieces of writing tips and I had this I mean like a gigantic box full of stuff I was going to make a book out of it and then a colleague of mine at University of Oregon Jack Hart who used to be at the Oregonian wrote this book called Storycraft and I started reading it and I got about halfway through it I just took my box and threw it away because he had everything in there covered That's my that's my favorite book. That's what I've been using Recently, but there are so many good books about writing and there's not a there's not one Particular way that everybody should learn to write. It's kind of finding your own voice Within the genre you want to communicate in you know, we used to in my law firm We would we would conceptually turn it around in other words We would write it and then we would put the other hat on we put the hat of the reader on Mm-hmm And we'd read what we wrote and we try to look at it from that point of view It was very helpful right to see whether the thing made any sense or not by pretending to be the uninitiated reader just looking at it. Yeah, and even better Give it to just a random person on the street. Yeah, not even not a family member not somebody will say oh Jay That was such a good story. You know, you have to give somebody has no connection to you and No, it doesn't want to make you you know, doesn't want to make you emotionally feel safe or anything like that They wanted to tell you what they think of it You need to have the red pen you need to have the editor That's a great loss on the internet there are no editors out there to slash it up Because when the editor slashes it up you learn something every time. That's why we used to do that We'd slash and burn everything that was you know below standard and then we'd hand it back and explain it And it was all a teaching experience. So an editor is definitely a teaching experience Yeah, and I'd say 99% of the critiques I get in terms of reader comments on the Civil Bee column or whatever They're right. They're right, you know They have they have identified some kernel of weakness in my writing that they're correct about and I just have to accept that Let's take a short break Brad when we come back I want to talk about how all this feeds into politics and especially the politics of this past presidential election and Especially Donald Trump and his Twitter thing. We'll be right back. You'll see Thank you for watching think tech I'm Grace Chang the new host for global connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m Well, we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs So please tune in and aloha and thanks for watching Aloha, I'm Carl Campania host of think tech Hawaii's movers shakers and reformers. I Hope you join us over the next several weeks as we take a deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii and Explore the alternative fuels supply chain necessary for the local and global transition towards transportation fuel sustainability Join us as we have good conversations With our farmers our producers our conversion technologies our investors and our legislators as we try to achieve our transportation sustainability goals See you see things You know, these are these are things Brett that you don't necessarily talk to people about you just right and you have your own Personal inside conversation about it But that's why it's great to be able to talk to you about it I mentioned during the break up when I was writing for the paper. I would start out with a 7,000 words for a seven hundred paid a seven 700 word article and just cut it and cut it and cut it until I couldn't cut it any more then I knew I was Then it felt good. It actually felt great. I felt like you'd accomplish something. Yeah, that's what writing is I mean a lot of times I've seen there and then until the blood starts coming out of my forehead under the keyboard That's what I feel like that's a good writing. Thanks. Thanks for computers by the way I remember I had a write a report when I was on the service There was a you know overnight job had to be done right away national consequence And what I did is like I told them to give me a wall This is way before computers told me to give me a wall And so we dictated to secretaries and then we would cut each paragraph out like with the scissors like cut Like cut and then we would paste like paste the thing on the wall And then we would move it from this location to that location and it was all on the wall And then we would redictate what was on the wall and go through the same process again Wow, it was cut and paste in the physical sense. Wow. That's a good story Yeah, it gave us great great writing style virtually overnight But let's talk about Donald Trump and this campaign no president before although Barack Obama was into you know email I guess and maybe Twitter also no no presidential campaigns ever involved so much Twitter and in a certain way Although I don't think he says he sends too much email Trump but he does send a lot of Twitter and you know He does communicate in his own way with all kinds of secondary effect What do you get out of that from a writing point of view? This is the new normal. This is the new politics This isn't going to stop with Trump if we got it now Well, this is my opinion, but I think it's it's the illusion of communication without real communication And that happens on all sorts of social media where people Say for example post all the great things that happened to them during a year But none of the bad things, you know, and they're they're they're giving this appearance and that's the same with Facebook posts where people leave out details that you know somehow make their identity less and in this in this case, I don't really think I mean I don't Think it's a bad idea that he communicates as often as he does. I think most of what he says is pretty empty or or it's It's kind of cryptic cryptic. Yeah, and that's coming about hacking. I know more than anyone else about yeah well, right and that's another strategy he uses where he gives you Illusion that he knows more than he does or that he has some special information and And I think it's very troubling it's troubling because it's not a thoughtful way to communicate it's it's an efficient way, but Like like when I when I use Twitter and I think the best use of Twitter is Some kind of prompt with a link to more information not just The tweet yeah doesn't stand alone because it's 140 characters. Yeah Yeah, well, and I guess the it's very interesting that you can you can get away with that I mean Donald Trump largely gets away with that making cryptic comments telling one side of the story not the other Not giving you a full picture Not exposing himself to any vetting by anybody and dealing directly with the people and the press has to sort of chase them around about it And I thought that's a good point too that it's constantly triggering in the media to respond to his tweet instead of spending time like digging into the policy or or interviewing other people or whatever they seem to be constantly chasing the The whims of this this tweeter. Yeah, and somebody made a point the other day I thought was really important on this is that There are mistakes in what he does or willful deceptions Whatever it may be there are problems at what he does and if you You do investigate you find out okay, but one way that he deals with that is He has he has something new in a matter of hours So we should be investigating what he said in the first iteration Instead we're getting something new that sucks up the oxygen, you know now We're chasing on the second one. So if he keeps the ball rolling down the street that way We really don't have the time or opportunity or interest to check out what he said before He keeps us well balanced that way the magic of Twitter the magic of the Internet Well, it is a good distractive distraction machine. Yeah, and I think all social media is somewhat like that Yeah, there's again. There's that I'm not trying to judge those those the platforms But what I would say is a good media diet includes more than just social media includes the whole Array of media including books like books are the one place still you can get away from advertisements and have a deep Thoughtful moment With you in your mind. Yeah, and that's something a lot of people have lost track of and the good thing about books Is they can be published so quickly even vanity type publications virtually overnight So you find books now that deal with events that happened 60 days ago and you get a pretty good analysis of it But on the question of writing It seems to me that you have that hundred and forty characters So I think the limits more but now these days But hundred and forty character limits and you know the whole notion of short writing That changes the way and you referred to it a minute ago You can hide things that changes the way you can deceive people and not tell the whole story Because people are sort of lulled into this culture of He's just gonna give me a few words and he must be he must be telling the truth because he's parsed it down To only a few words and then they are deceived by that So well, he's in a position of authority now where we have to take everything he says seriously Until he got on the debate stage in the Republican primaries I don't think he had any authority But once they put him on the stage with all the other candidates He suddenly was elevated to that authority level and I think that helped Solidify him in the position he's in yeah, so I think a lot of Americans are reading that stuff when he sends out as The gospel I mean as as credible as from a credible authoritative person and they they you know In the absence of somebody from the press looking over at somebody betting it they believe it and this changes It changes journalism. It doesn't it changes the whole National conversation if somebody can do that can occupy such a predominant role in you know in communicating with 20 30 million people at the same stroke of a pen. I shouldn't say stroke of a pen It's the same push of a little button. Yeah, and that that has profound change I mean we haven't seen all the change right and it's also got us in this Realm of meta discourse about writing constantly. What is meta discourse? Discourse about discourse basically it's like a loop, you know, we're talking about his Twitter in tweets, you know, we're talking about His media production in media and that kind of loop I think again is a distraction If you look if you look at I mean, I know we're going back in time But if you look at the presidential candidates, I don't know how many there were a couple hundred or something like that Many of them wrote interesting thought-provoking things that nobody ever read because they weren't Normalized and then but for whatever reason Donald Trump got normalized and and his his tweeting became part of our national conversation. Yes, and I don't know I'm still trying to figure out why why he succeeded and other people didn't I think a lot has to do with how he chooses his words how he do puts those tricks in those short little tweets And how he finds the symbols to emotionally Carry an emotional message or charge people up I believe and I just make this may happen that he could he could set up a tweet that would change the world some ridiculous thing He could set up a tweet that would cause a mob in a downtown city, right? Yeah, I already has one of them I'm sort of getting into fake news now, but We started out with a pizza gate thing where the where the person read these stories on the internet about the children's Sex ring and the pizza parlor in DC, which was completely fictitious So he would he stormed in there with a gun and you know was ready to investigate me. Oh, well, I was wrong. Sorry So just maybe a week after that or so a fake news piece riled up a Pakistani administrator who has you know potential to start a nuclear war and He was really irked at Israel about Some piece of fake news he read and he's ready to go to you know Def Con one. I saw that. Yeah, this is the kind of thing that You know should make all of us very scared. It's scary. It's scary that you can take the language However, it's evolved and manipulated manipulate large groups of people using technology social media or even one person Or even one person right who's in critical position like the guy these people have low media literacy. They believe everything they read on the internet is true and Some of those people have nuclear weapons So I'll close with the same idea that you and I've had at the end of these shows before but I'll I'll put it in historical context I'll say Brett the price of liberty is eternal vigilance Yeah, and we all have to be vigilant against the things that manipulate our minds in our country in our way of thinking Yeah, and it's on us. It's on us. It's not anybody else's responsibility. We have to read We have to think we have to be civic-minded and we have to be responsible for things that we share and praise this gospel