Friday, July 14

Writing Across Communication: Writing For Tomorrow

The writing you read today won't be the communication you need tomorrow. In a world where content can appear on any surface or no surface at all, providing consumers with real time intuitive assistance to find the right product, improve performance, or manufacture reality will require a different kind of thinking, planning, and promoting. The boundaries and barriers are gone.

Content will need to be versatile, portable, multimodal, and improve the consumer experience. Storytelling alone won't be good enough. Many stories will have to be told by the consumer, drawing upon a non-linear array of data capable of delivering visual, aural, written, kinesthetic content based on the platform they are using and their preference for learning, experiencing, and making purchases.

Logical or emotional, solitary or social, the words we write tomorrow will be blueprints that appreciate no one person is really the same — even if there are a few things that never change.

A sneak peek into the future with a predictive deck. 

When I needed a new deck to wrap up my final Writing Across Communication class last spring, I set an objective to help my writing students to appreciate the future as well as a few constants in that have always been part of human communication. It made for a worthwhile exercise in bringing consumer psychology and strategic communication together. They really do belong together.



While many writers spin their wheels trying to find the right way to spin their story, relatively few remember that most communication aims to motivate people. So if you don't know what motivates them, you are only operating with one-half of a two-part equation between the sender and receiver.

Three primary drivers for motivation. 

• Intensity of need or desire
• Perceived value of goal or reward
• Expectations of individual or peers

In order to start reconciling these drivers, it's generally a good idea to remember that humans are the only creatures on the planet that form perceptions based on objective and conceptual realities. We're also the only creatures who possess a capacity for cooperation that is both flexible and scalable.

As technology continues to blur the lines between these two realities, people will likely become increasingly responsive to conceptual influences, making the communication of tomorrow especially potent if the message is sent across multiple delivery methods, repeated across a multimodal spectrum, and delivered as non-linear content that allows the user to self-select the experience.

When done right, it will provide even more opportunities to change behavior, change perception, and change attitudes toward just about anything that doesn't oppose individual or cultural core values. Although even those are subject to change when communication is created from precise objectives.

Writing Across Communication will be available again at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas this fall. The class includes eight sessions from Sept. 21 through Nov. 9. I am currently developing an online version of the course for people outside Southern Nevada, independent of the university.

Thursday, June 1

Considering Education: More Choices Mean More Chances

The next couple weeks are a whirlwind. My daughter is graduating from elementary school this week. My son is graduating from high school next week.

Next year, he will be headed to the University of Nevada, Reno while she looks forward to starting her middle school years at Legacy Traditional School in Las Vegas. We’re grateful she was accepted by a charter school, as it seems like it will provide a suitable transition from the private school she has attended for the past six years. We never had to consider such a transition for my son. He attended public school from kindergarten through high school.

She might have attended private school from kindergarten through high school too, but school choice, a.k.a. Educational Saving Accounts (ESAs), continue to stall in Nevada. So while I helped campaign for ESAs, writing columns and comments, we also toured and applied to several charter schools where selection is determined by lotteries and waiting lists.

After she was accepted at Legacy, some people wondered why I continued to donate my time in support of ESAs even though my family would no longer benefit. My answer was simple enough. My support of ESAs isn’t about just about my family. It's about all families because I know school choice works. An early version of it changed my education experience and my life.

Affording more parents school choice will course correct more kids.

As one of those students who was mislabeled by the public system in first grade, I had already been ushered off to the school’s portable classrooms, dubbed the “barracks.” Out there, away from the other students, education was optional. Most kids so assigned would bide their time, failing forward.

My grandmother wanted more for me so she intervened. At the end of third grade, she pulled me from the public school system and enrolled in me a private secular school to repeat. While we were too poor to afford it, she somehow managed to secure a hardship grant. I’m grateful.

The new school reassessed the public school system’s perception that I wouldn’t amount to anything and discovered something different. I was only struggling with most subjects because I couldn’t read. They also determined I was gifted in math and art and provided advanced placement curriculum so I wouldn’t become bored with the standard lessons.

The change in classwork changed my outlook. Within the course of one year, I rose from the bottom percentile to one of the top in my class. And as my performance improved, my sometimes unruly behavior — the by-product of being teased in public school for being raised by grandparents and having a visible handicap — dissipated. School choice gave me a chance.

After that school year, my grandparents were no longer able to raise me so I was returned to public school in a different state. The foundation that the private school provided me, despite not being ‘held accountable’ by the state, placed me well ahead of my peers. This never changed.

Sure, I had some ups and downs across the entirety of my educational experience, but my love for learning always persisted. Not only have I become I a lifelong learner, but I also share my passion for education as a part-time continuing education instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas — an outcome that would have been an impossibility had some version of school choice not existed for me.

At the end of the day, no matter what political arguments people raise, ESAs come down to one thing. Different students excel in different learning environments. Knowing this, we should be doing everything we can to make it easier for them to be enrolled in the right environment and without any of the pervasive socio-economic and faith-based labels on students or the bureaucratic requirements that frequently restrain public schools from better performance. More choices mean more chances.

Friday, March 3

Writing Across Communication: An Introduction To Writing

Anyone who has ever been introduced as a writer already knows the most common question that follows. In the thirty some years I've been introduced as one, it has never changed. It's timeless.

"So, you're a writer," they say, in admiration and sometimes skepticism. "What do you write?"

"Words," I would tell them. "And on good days, sentences."

I'd immediately follow up with a litany of audience-tailored examples that could be easily understood before settling on the umbrella concept as a commercial writer (copywriter isn't readily understood by people outside advertising and marketing) and occasional journalist. Later, I turned in the nouns for stylistic adjectives that ranged from strategic and interactive to gripping and zippy. I still do at times. 

Nowadays, I'm more likely to tell people that how we define writing really depends on whom we ask. Whereas Walter Lippman might define it as an opportunity to tell the truth and shame the devil, Stephen King is more likely to say that it's "the truth inside the lie." They're both right for their craft.

Bigger than that, writing is the process by which we translate our desired perception of objective and conceptual realities into a form that others may see, adopt, and act upon. It's one of the ways we exploit our extraordinary cooperative capacity as humans — agreeing or disagreeing that certain ideas, thoughts, and concepts have greater value than the objective, physical world in which we live — even if we don't personally know the person or group of people who put the words together. 

Regardless of what "kind of writer" someone is, the fundamental core of it remains unchanged, which is why I invested some time to design a class that could provide students with an understanding of how writing could be applied across communication — disciplines such a journalism, public relations, content marketing, advertising, and multimodal integration — with tremendous impact.

Writing Across Communication: An Introduction To Writing

This deck serves as an introduction to the class as well as some of the fundamental skills that can be learned by different writing disciplines. It also introduces writers to the changes taking place within the occupation as writers are being asked to specialize and generalize at the same time. So instead of learning how to write from within the silo of one discipline, they can learn from all disciplines: 

• Editors understand organization, structure, and universal ideas. 
• Journalists know how to find and define news and source information. 
• Public relations practitioners serve both organizational and public interest. 
• Crisis communicators possess empathy while managing a crisis and bad news. 
• Content marketers are experts in developing content that has customer value. 
• Copywriters are masters at developing creative stories that speak to people. 
• Writers of the future understand non-linear content, multimodal interaction, and UX design. 

The skill sets for modern writers don't end with journalism and commercial writing. Beyond the four primary approaches to effective communication (journalism, public relations, content marketing, and advertising), writing literature can help someone become more adept at storytelling, learning poetry more masterful at alliteration, and understanding psychology more attuned with the impact we impart on audiences. 

From script to screen and everything in between, getting it all right can be profoundly rewarding. The words and, on good days, sentences written for ourselves or our organizations have the potential to reshape how people see the world in small, almost unnoticeable ways and in grand life-altering ways that have shaped the course of world events. Nothing else is so important. 

What do you think? Where are the writers of tomorrow headed in terms of skill sets and craft? Are they really destined to be replaced in part by automation? And as an aspiring or working writer, would you want to take a class like the one being taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas?
 

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