Live From Miami, a Style Showdown

An exercise in oratory--in classical rhetoric. My students can learn a thing or two about confidence in delivery, whether in speaking or writing. It's not about arrogance; it's about decisiveness.

Just the other day I was admonishing them against the dangers of hedging in their language. This made me thing of that:

Syntax Soup Both candidates have syntactical minefields, now very familiar to voters, that they must avoid. Mr. Bush sometimes mangles the language, while Mr. Kerry has a tendency to ramble, when an audience wants punchiness. He also uses what George P. Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, calls "hedges," words and grammatical constructions that imply uncertainty or qualification.

"There are certain forms of grammar that don't commit you, phrases like `I believe' or `I think,' " Mr. Lakoff said. "Kerry has to learn not to do that."

"It is possible to be decisive and not sound decisive," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "People who speak in sentences that contain parenthetical phrases, people who begin a sentence and then deflect to add a series of illustrative examples before they end the sentences" do not seem authoritative, she said. "The language of decisiveness is subject, verb, object, end sentence."

The New Faces of Reality TV

Just when I thought we couldn't go any lower.

Performance Anxiety

My dean observed my class today as part of my tenure review process. It's funny how different a class can go when you feel the weight of being evaluated. It wasn't terrible. (I think I'll still have my job tomorrow.) But I wasn't right on, either. Sigh. I'm tired. I'm going home now. I've got to prepare for another class and another observation on Monday. Tenure seems so very far away.

Discussion anyone? Talk to Me!

Getting students engaged in a discussion of reading is always a tremendous challenge for me. Even if I succeed in getting them to actually do the reading, getting them to think about and have ideas about what they read is another challenge altogether. It's tough.

The other day, I wanted to just have an open discussion in class about what we had all read for that day in order to walk away with a fuller understanding of what the text might represent, to hear different perspectives on it, and so on. Of course, I go into these situations with too much idealism. I often think we can all sit around in a circle and muse philosophically over the text and everyone will be enraptured by the whole thing. Doesn't work that way. The funny thing is I walk into the class half knowing that it won't work, I just don't want to believe it. Needless to say, with only a plan for open discussion on the text in class that day, it bombed big time (well it wasn't horrible, but not good.) I learn quickly though.

The next day, I had the same objective to accomplish in a different section of the course. I wanted students to get engaged with the material, to talk about it in specific ways, and to hear others talk about it. I tried something different. I had them get into small groups. Each group had one "Question for a Second Reading." They were to compare their notes on the question, discuss it, and then prepare a 3-minute presentation to give to the course offering their perspective on the reading based on the question they pursued. It's a simple plan really, but the results were so much better than the previous day.

The lesson learned? Perhaps, I should curb the idealism a little in the interests of better serving the students. Because I enjoy sitting around in a circle sipping coffee and talking about text, doesn't mean my 19-year old students will necessarily. A little nudge never hurt.