Scene From Above

Although anyone can write, not everyone can write well. There’s a lot more to it than simply typing your thoughts onto the screen. While spelling and grammar are important and help to give your thoughts more authority, these alone don’t make for good writing. When I teach students how to write, I always emphasize what I call the SOAP—the Subject, Occasion, Audience, and Purpose.

• Subject: the WHAT you’re writing about. While you can write about anything, you generally should a have strong interest in your subject before trying to write about it.
• Occasion : the WHEN and/or WHERE—the context for your writing. For example, are you responding to some world event? Are you writing an email or a report to a government committee?
• Audience: the WHO you’re writing for and HOW you approach your subject. Although you’ll probably never meet your readers, who are the people you want to speak with and how do you get their attention?
• Purpose: the WHY you’re writing. The reason(s) your audience should care about what you’re saying. You’ll usually have many purposes (e.g., informing and persuading) to your writing.

While all four elements interact with each other, the audience is the most important. You could write the most brilliant piece on a subject that everyone cares about, but if you mess up who you’re writing for and how you approach the subject, your efforts will probably be wasted. I’ll have another post that looks at the audience in more detail soon.

Writing well is a skill that comes with years of practice. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful right away—I’ve seen students improve dramatically in a number of weeks simply by keeping these four elements in mind.

While proponents of localism (i.e., buying as much of our food from local farmers) suggest that this approach is more environmentally sustainable and supports community growth, one of the advantages of globalization and global trade is that it allows us to get things that we can’t produce locally ¹ But as George Stalk suggests in “The Threat of Global Gridlock,” we are facing an infrastructure crisis that could make producing (and ultimately consuming) global goods and services more costly.

Stalk notes that while transportation capacity has grown in certain areas, capacity hasn’t kept pace with the growth in demand. This, he suggests, combined with the possibility of rising fuel costs could not only add significantly to transportation costs, but also increase production delays and lead to inefficient production cycles as the arrival of inputs may become less predictable. All of this suggests that costs will only increase and that profits will decline.

One of the recommendations that Stalk makes is that companies should look at sourcing their products closer to home and moving to reduce the length of the value chain (i.e., they should begin to practice greater “localism”). He notes that while this may increase production costs, this will likely be offset by the lowered logistics costs.

While noting that we are facing a transportation capacity crisis is prescient and I welcome shortening the value chain from both economic and environmental standpoints, in the not too distant future, companies could face an even greater challenge in the form of 3D printers. Although the technology is still in its infancy, the number of materials that can be printed and the quality of the reproductions is increasing at a steady pace. When you can print your own furniture or other appliances, for example, all you really need is the material inputs and the design (which you can get from the Web)—there’s little need to have a product manufactured in across the country (or in different countries) and then shipped to you.

Although it’s very unlikely that we’ll see 3D printing displace traditional manufacturers in the next 10-20 years, with the transportation capacity crisis and 3D printing, we can see the emergence of a trend towards greater localism and having more of our goods produced at a local level rather than a global one—and this could make for a more sustainable future.

Although we live in a world where the things around us (i.e., our environment) are constantly changing or evolving, ¹ often we’re unclear as to what the concept really means. One of the most robust models of evolution is natural selection (sometimes [mis]interpreted as survival of the fittest) proposed by Charles Darwin.

When people hear the term “survival of the fittest,” they often assume that what’s meant is that only the strong survive. This isn’t the case, however, and isn’t what Darwin had in mind. What Darwin was getting at, and what this phrase really means is that those organisms that are best adapted to their environment have the greatest chance of surviving and having their genes passed on to a future generation.

The thing is, the environment is constantly changing, both due to the actions of organisms in the environment, and due to the changes that happen because of natural processes. And just like the natural environment is undergoing constant change, so too is the information technology environment. Different ideas are always being put out into the world (and at what seems to be an accelerating pace), and some of those ideas like the PC survive and have a significant impact in changing the environment, while others like HD-DVD die and may be quickly forgotten.

Now since the natural environment is fairly constant in the 21st century, there is little need to adapt to that environment ² But failing to adapt to the changing information environment can put you at serious risk of “death” in what’s been termed the knowledge economy. ³

One way to ensure your survival in the knowledge economy is by practicing to manipulate information (by critically reading [and writing about] the information you come across) and by doing what reading fiction encourages—imagining the possibilities that each technology brings and uncovering the hidden “meanings” and connections between those technologies.

We know that education makes people more productive but that obtaining education (particularly advanced education) can be quite costly, if not prohibitive. But what if that education were free? What if, as a society, we adopted a distance education format that was open and free to everyone with access to the Web? For instance, the Krebs Cycle is the same whether we learn about it in Bergen, Santiago, Vancouver, or Adelaide. Similarly, we can learn calculus, economics, and many other subjects in one part of the world and be fairly confident that people in other parts of the world will be able to understand us.

When you look at different subjects, you can see that in essence, the basic concepts of any discipline are universal and don’t change that quickly, ¹ and those concepts are in the public domain. While there’s bound to be some cultural differences in how the material is presented (e.g., using local examples to make the concepts more relevant), the principles are the same.

And if we look at how these concepts are currently transmitted, we see that there’s a lot of duplication and inefficiency. Professors (at various universities) and textbooks explain the concepts in slightly different ways, and students begin to incorporate and apply these concepts. But if the basic concepts remain the same, do we really need all of this duplication of effort? Wouldn’t society be better off if, rather than using resources to recreate and recycle information that changes very little, we put more effort into putting the information into a consistent form and making that information widely available? ² By doing this, society could spend more time working on discovering new knowledge, and if Hockbein’s assertion that increasing the store of information/knowledge creates wealth, then we could make all of humanity better off.

If we look at the Web as a means of storing and transmitting [a portion of] human knowledge, then we see that anyone who has access to the Web is able to (in principal at least) access all of human knowledge and to build upon that knowledge. And because it allows us to distribute information to anyone else able to connect to it, the Web has tremendous potential to transform the way that people learn and can provide a low-cost means of educating the masses. ³

Now while I think the case for free advanced education (i.e., open education) is sound—it raises labour productivity at a low marginal cost—the real problem is implementation and addressing all of the questions it raises. For example, how do we encourage people to create quality educational content? How do we accredit students (i.e., ensure they have the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities)? How do we settle on what content should be in course? Your thoughts? Questions (and possible answers) I haven’t thought of?

Most people would like to be rich. Maybe not like the richest people in the (think Bill Gates and Warren Buffet), and maybe not even a multi-millionaire, but wealthy enough to live comfortably and enjoy life—maybe retire early, own the house and car, and go on extended vacations. Now while most people want more money rather than less, getting (and saving) that money can be a challenge—and studying English (or any language for that matter) can help to overcome that challenge.

So how can studying a subject that most people hate taking in college or university help you to get rich? Well, as I suggest elsewhere, English is really an information technology and about manipulating information. In The Origin of Wealth¹, Eric Beinhocker gives a number of examples that show that as the quantity of information that a society produces, so too does its standard of living. What Beinhocker is really suggesting then is that all wealth ultimately comes from the manipulation of information. And if we accept Beinhocker’s conclusion, then we see that at the very least, being able to manage and (re)organize information is critical to our daily lives and our long-term wealth.

Since managing and organizing information is essentially what English is all about—finding ideas from different places (either from books or more commonly today, search engines such as Google), critically analyzing those ideas, and then organizing them into coherently written essays (or blog posts). While literature may be the subject of interest in an English class, studying English gives you the writing and associated skills that are critical for manipulating the information that wealth depends upon. And mastering those skills can help you to get rich.