The PostPandemic Curriculum Project is about increasing the ability of expert specialists and non-specialist citizens to communicate effectively with each other.  Only by having a shared language will they be able to work together to address serious public policy challenges: the experts by providing facts and insight, the citizens by providing political will.

 

Unlike other disciplines highlighted in the PostPandemic Curriculum Project, communications is more like a set of tools rather than an established body of knowledge.  But underlying this set of tools are some core concepts that are too often omitted from our classrooms.

Suggested core concepts related to Communications:

• Fact-based writing is an intensely creative act: Forms of writing based on imagination and emotion is called “creative” (eg. journals, poetry, and music, but also sometimes memoirs, plays, and fiction).  This inevitably results in fact-based writing (eg. journalism, technical, non-fiction) being seen as non-creative and mundane.  more
• Graphic representation of data: A picture is worth a thousand words; and like words pictures can be misleading, either due to sloppiness or an intent to deceive. more
• Write for the reader / Edit for the reader / Shun jargon: “Strong verbs. Simple sentences.” was the mantra of cardiologist Bernadine Healey, the first female Director of the US National Institutes of Health.  It is a distillation of Ernest Hemingway’s 4 rules of writing: Short sentences, short paragraphs, vigorous English, and be positive. more
• The Curse of Knowledge: The more expertise you have in something, the harder it is to explain it to a newcomer to the field.  As a skill becomes more ingrained most of us forget the steps we took to gain the skill in the first place.  more
• Listen / Improvise / Empathize: More often than not, you are likely to misunderstand the person you are speaking to, or who is reading something that you wrote.  The best way to reduce the confusion and the resulting damage?  Pay attention to what the other person is saying, how the other person reacts, and adjusting your message accordingly.  more

 

Suggested core concepts related to Communications:

• Fact-based writing is an intensely creative act:
  Meaningful public policy discussions require accurate fact-based writing that is easy to read and easy to understand. But its importance goes far beyond public policy.  Corporations, governments, and NGO’s rely on fact-based analyses to set strategy.  Researchers need others to read, understand, and be informed by their fact-based work.  A hard-to-understand analysis, proposal, or report greatly increases the odds of a costly failure.
  “They don’t know how to write” is many manger’s mantra (and they’re not talking about poetry and short stories).  Yet we place little focus on training students to effectively communicate facts, leading to misunderstandings, wasted opportunities, and staggering amounts of unproductive time.  One estimate of the annual cost to the US economy is $396 Billion.
  Forms of writing based on imagination and emotion are called “creative” (eg. journals, poetry, and music, but also sometimes memoirs, plays, and fiction).  This inevitably results in fact-based writing (eg. journalism, technical, non-fiction) being seen as non-creative and mundane.
  In emotion-based writing, the needs of the author come first, especially if the writing is never meant to be read by anyone else.  If shared with readers, it is often the reader who is asked to put in the effort to extract meaning from the writing.  It doesn’t matter if different readers derive different understandings from the writing.  In fact, the power of some of the best emotion-based writing stems from its ambiguity.
  With fact-based writing the primary goal is to share information.  Ambiguity and the primacy of the author undermine this purpose.  Fact-based writing can and should be elegant and concise as well as precise and clear.  Achieving this requires considerable skill and creativity. 
  Elevating emotion-based writing to the status of “creative” and leaving fact-based writing without a comparable adjective plays out in a number of subtle ways:
   • Children, being driven mainly by their emotions, are primed to value emotion-based writing.  It makes sense to encourage them to be imaginative; to write expressively, as well as to draw, paint, dance, and sing.  Labeling emotion-based writing as creative increases its appeal and diminishes that of fact-based writing.
   • Once it is viewed as “non-creative”, teachers and other adults easily over-look the possibility of helping students to create clear concise compelling fact-based writing that is a pleasure to read.  When “just the facts” is what matters, fact-based writing turns into a dry chore like practicing piano or learning to spell.
   • The habit of “tossing-off” fact-based writing, of spending little time or attention to editing it, becomes ingrained.
  Meaningful public policy discussions require accurate fact-based writing that is easy to read and easy to understand. But its importance goes far beyond public policy.  Corporations, governments, and NGO’s rely on fact-based analyses to set strategy.  Researchers need others to read, understand, and be informed by their fact-based work.  A hard-to-understand analysis, proposal, or report greatly increases the odds of a costly failure.  “They don’t know how to write” is many manger’s mantra (and they’re not talking about poetry and short stories).  Yet we place little focus on training students to effectively communicate facts, leading to misunderstandings, wasted opportunities, and staggering amounts of unproductive time. top
• Graphic representation of data:
  A picture is worth a thousand words; and like words pictures can be misleading, either due to sloppiness or an intent to deceive. And like all graphic arts, a graph of data is the result of a creative act, one that is designed to communicate a point of view and embodies a great many esthetic choices.  Every graph (and every map) is an interpretative exercise that emphasizes some facts and obscures others.  It is vitally important that viewers of data graphs be able to look critically at the visual image in order to retrieve meaningful information, and perhaps more importantly, to identify ways in which the graph selectively presents reality (and in doing so distorts it).
  Some of the most common distortions are caused by:
  • Selection of the range of the data being presented: A graph can dramatically change the visual impression of a data-set or trend simply by altering its vertical axis, in particular to make a small difference look very large.  This distortion can be seen every day in business and investment publication and web-sites.  By limiting the range of the vertical (price/share) axis to a minimum of slightly less than the lowest price and the maximum to slightly greater than the highest price, the fluctuation always seems large.  By manipulating the vertical axis range, Tesla stock’s 50% drop (top graph, $0 – $1200) is made to look much less than Apple’s 20% drop (middle graph, $210 – $330) from Feb 4 and Mar 30, 2020. Even to an attentive observer the cognitive distortion of framing bias will cause the two losses to seem more similar than they actually were.  If both graphs had comparable vertical ranges starting at $0 and extending to +50% of the highest price, Apple’s loss appears to be a slightly squiggly line with a modest downward slope (bottom graph, $0 – $400).  Other axis distortions are less innocent; lobby groups, businesses, and governments often use a very narrow axis range to make even the smallest of effects (eg. measures of educational attainment, crime, employment) to look very significant.
    Graph creators can also distort the impression of the data by picking just the right time period (usually the horizontal axis).  For example, to make the return on investment of a mutual fund look large, it is common for mutual funds to pick a favorable starting point to highlight their performance.  The graphs to the right show real data for a mutual fund ending in mid-2014.  The top one starts in mid-2007, before the 2008 financial crisis.  The bottom one starts two years later in early-2009, near the stock-market’s low point. following the financial crisis shows a very different, and much more positive story (a healthy 65% increase over 5 years vs a less-than-inflation 10% over 7 years).
  • Using axes that have very little explanatory value: Sometimes two factors show similar patterns but have little direct connection to each other.  But if we see them together on a graph, we often make the natural assumption that one causes the other.  Consider a graph comparing the sale of allergy remedies and children’s shoes, or one showing the price of gasoline and drownings.  Allergies don’t generate shoe sales (or vise versa), and driving doesn’t cause people to drown.  Shoes sales and allergies both spike at the beginning of fall, a time when many plants produce pollen and children start a new school year.  And summer brings both warm weather (increased swimming) and vacations (increased driving).  An improperly constructed graph can make it seem that loosely connected, or even random, correlations are really cases of cause-and-effect.
  • Fitting the data to a curve: Humans seem compelled to try to impose a simple pattern on complex partially random “noisy” behaviour.  This process of “fitting” “messy” data into a meaningful curve is often presented as a simple mechanical process; that the data creates the curve.  But it isn’t simple.  Before the mechanical process can start, the graph designer must first use intuition to pick a type of curve suggested by the circumstances (exponential, logarithmic, polynomial, linear, hyperbolic, multi-variate, … – see the attached brilliant cartoon by Randell Munroe).  Picking the right type of curve can provide great insight (eg. using S-curves to describe the course of a pandemic).  But choosing the wrong type of curve distorts everything (eg. forcing pandemic data into the shape of a “bell” curve as in the attached example) and leads to ineffective or harmful action. top
  • Write for the reader / Edit for the reader / Shun jargon:
    
    • Writing: “Strong verbs. Simple sentences” was the mantra of cardiologist Bernadine Healey, the first female Director of the US National Institutes of Health.  It is a distillation of Ernest Hemingway’s 4 rules of writing: Short sentences, short paragraphs, vigorous English, and be positive.  Even the CIA agrees (at least for internal reports) advising:  “Be frugal in the use of adjectives and adverbs; let nouns and verbs show their own power”.  To these might be added: avoid adjectives and adverbs wherever possible.
      Despite this much of academic writing seems to be deliberately opaque and difficult, full of jargon.  As early as middle school, teachers set minimum essay lengths and reward an extensive vocabulary.  The inevitable result is that students get into the habit of:
       • cluttering a tight 300 word essay with 200 surplus words to meet a 500 word target, and
       • replacing straightforward words with show-off ones that scream “I’m smart! I know big words! Give me a good mark!” at the cost of losing the reader.
      These students mature into adults who compulsively use longer (and often inaccurate) words in place of shorter accurate words:
       • Center replaced by Epicenter (point on the surface directly above the source of an earthquake centered underground) to describe a Co-Vid-19 hot-spot, and
       • Full replaced by Fulsome/Fullsome (over-ripe, repulsive, excessive) when describing everything from investigations and schedules to praise and apologies.
      Perhaps this elevation of cluttered self-important language can be traced to the convoluted writing of super-star German philosophers like Kant and Heidegger.  Perhaps to the ornate prose of Victorian authors like Dickens and Austen or the stream-of-consciousness writing of Joyce and Kerouac.  Perhaps to the fact that a child’s earliest words are short and simple and we want to show that we aren’t child-like.  Or perhaps it is a legacy of short Anglo-Saxon words being seen as uncouth and the equivalent multi-syllabic French of the Norman conquerors a sign of aristocratic refinement (eg. talk vs converse, live vs reside, think vs conceive).
      Whatever the cause, we tend see elaborate language and long words as a sign of intelligence: “Difficult-to-understand = Profoundly-insightful“.  But it is more likely that “difficult-to-understand” is really a symptom of a self-indulgent writer too lazy to care about the reader or one who uses language to befuddle the reader into thinking that a trite thought is profound.
    • Editing: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”.  Clear concise writing takes time, much of which is taken up by editing.  It is rare for a first draft (or second or third) to be reader-friendly.  The questions that face the writer become:
       • Whose time is more valuable, mine or the combined time of all of my readers?
       • How many readers am I willing to lose to confusion, frustration, or boredom? and
       • How much harm do I do to my objective if someone who can help me doesn’t understand what I am trying to say?
      A one-line email setting up an appointment with a friend probably doesn’t need a lot of editing.  What about a 5-page proposal, a 40-page strategy, or a one hour PowerPoint presentation?  If there is nothing much at stake and a small forgiving audience, maybe a sloppy first or second draft will be good enough.  But when what is at stake matters (eg. reputation, money, social progress, promoting change) skilled editing can make the difference between success and failure.
      
    • Jargon: Every discipline has its own collection of special words that only those steeped into the discipline understand.  Sometimes these phrases shrink precisely defined complex concepts of little interest to outsiders into tidy packages (eg. “decoherence” in quantum physics, “moment of inertia” in architecture).  Much of the time this isn’t the case, with obscure language creating needless barriers.  The best examples of this are in tradition-bound technical professions such as law, medicine, and education – subjects of great importance to everyone, where an avoidable misunderstanding can cost someone their freedom, their life, or their future well-being.
      The allure of jargon has spread beyond technical disciplines and invaded areas where no little specialized jargon is needed.  Business management, politics, and journalism are prime examples with such pompous space-filling terms as: “going forward”, “giving 110%”, “take it to the next level”, “drill down”, and “laser-like focus” replacing golden oldies like “run it up the flag pole”, “silent majority”, “trial balloon”, “ball of wax”. top
  • The Curse of Knowledge:
    The more you know about something, the harder it is to explain it to a newcomer to the field.  As a skill becomes more ingrained most of us forget the steps we took to gain the skill in the first place.  This applies equally to dribbling a basketball and mastering organic chemistry – the best players and chemists often make lousy coaches and teachers. 
    Although The Curse of Knowledge is a fundamental cognitive distortion, I’ve included it as a Communications concept  because it infects almost our every attempt to communicate.  You don’t even have to be an expert to fall into this trap.  All you need to do is to wrongly assume that the other person knows something that you take for granted.  It is perfectly human to:
     • skip steps. 
     • use language that carries great meaning for you but is gibberish to the other person (see this New Yorker cartoon). 
     • focus on interesting nuances rather than on the fundamentals that have become boring.
     • lead your readers into dead ends or dizzying loops of logic that go nowhere.
    The result: frustration (and sometimes hostility) on both sides and failure on the shared goal of transmitting ideas and skills.
    “Those who can do, those who can’t teach.” gets it largely wrong.  Communicating effectively (the basis for all teaching) is a highly specialized skill grounded as much in understanding what the learner needs as it is in understanding the subject.
    Nobel Laureate Richard Feyman is widely famous for his demonstration of how a cold O-Ring that cost just a few dollars caused the space shuttle Challenger to explode. He was a superb communicator, author of delightful best-selling  memoirs and perhaps the most renowned set of lectures in the history of science.  He had a simple 4 step technique for learning that is also great advice for avoiding the trap of expertise (of which he had tons):
         1. Teach it to a child
             2. Review
                3. Organize and simply
                   4. Transmit (ideally to another child)      top.
  • Listen / Improvise / Empathize:
    Even with the best of intentions more often than not the person you are speaking to, or who is reading something that you wrote, will misunderstand you.  Maybe it is an off-putting phrase that offends them, or a step of logic that they can’t follow, or an image that distracts them from your objective.
    The best way to reduce the confusion, and the resulting damage?  Pay attention to what the other person’s reactions, including non-verbal ones, and then keep adjusting how you deliver your message until they embrace what you are saying.
    All communications generate an emotional reaction.  Too often the reaction is boredom or confusion, reactions that are most likely caused if you are more committed to the message that you want to deliver rather than how your audience will react.  Even with the best preparation, you won’t know ahead of time whether your lesson, proposal, or invitation will generate delight or offense, interest or (all too commonly) boredom.  Paying close attention to the other person’s reactions and improvising your delivery vastly increases your chances of success.  Athletes pay close attention, and react, to their team-mates.  Jazz musicians and improv artists feed off each other’s cues to create something unique, not as individuals but as a team.  Top performing sales reps know that being empathetic and attentive works better than sticking to a prepared script.
    Writing doesn’t allow this sort of improvisation – once you release your words into the world they are out of your control.  Unfortunately you are mostly blind to the assumptions that you build into your writing.  To gain insight seek out some surrogate readers, candid but sympathetic people who are as close to your intended audience as possible.  But don’t ask them to edit.  Instead ask them about their emotions – both positive and negative and indifferent – in as much detail as possible, highlighting paragraphs, sentences, even single words that shifted how they felt,  What confused them, convinced them, or distracted them?  What caused them to want to stop reading or to continue on?  Use these reactions to as your guide as you re-write.
    Your audience/reader is your partner.  The only measure of your success is what they come away with. Place the goal of their learning ahead of your desire to teach. top
    

 

“Effective science communication happens when we listen and connect. It happens when we use empathy. Communication is headed for success when we pay more attention to what the other person is understanding rather than focusing solely on what we want to say.”

Alan Alda

Why I haven’t included “Media Literacy” as a core concept:
Media illiteracy, which is really the problem of people being mislead by what they read, hear, and see, is a serious public policy issue, not a core concept.  Many of the concepts that underlie media illitracy are central to other important public policy challenges.  Among the factors contributing to media illiteracy are: ignorance of cognitive and linguistic distortions used to manipulate feelings and perceptions; improper use of population distribution statistics and graphic representations of data; and difficult to understand writing.