Author: Iva Cheung

Stefan Dollinger—Forks in the road: Dictionaries and the radically changing English-language ecosystem (EAC-BC meeting)

Stefan Dollinger, faculty member in the English and linguistic departments at the University of British Columbia, is editor-in-chief of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP), and he spoke to the EAC-BC crowd about the role of dictionaries in the global English landscape.

His fascinating talk covered some of the same territory that I wrote about when I first saw him speak last year, so I’ll focus on his new content here.

English, said Dollinger, is unique in that it is the only language in the world with more second-language speakers than native speakers, the former outnumbering the latter by five to one. This ratio will only grow as more people in China, Russia, continental Europe, and South America use English for trade and diplomacy. Until recently, the study of English—particularly for dictionaries—had focused on native speakers, but scholars such as Barbara Seidlhofer, of the University of Vienna, have argued that English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the “real” English.

This shifting view influences how we approach dictionary making, which has generally used one of two methods:

  • In the literary tradition, lexicographers collect works from the best authors and compiled excerpts showing usage.
  • In the linguistic method, lexicographers empirically study language users.

One of the best examples of dictionaries compiled using the linguist method is the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), which Dollinger said is based on superb empirical data, including historical sources as well as a national survey of about three thousand users. The dictionary includes only “non-standard” regional words that are not used nationally in the United States and hence isn’t a comprehensive compilation of English words, but for researchers like Dollinger, the detail on regional, social, and historical uses is more important than the number of entries.

In contrast, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) used the literary tradition, and, as the preface to the third edition admits,

The Dictionary has in the past been criticized for its apparent reliance on literary texts to illustrate the development of the vocabulary of English over the centuries. A closer examination of earlier editions shows that this view has been overstated, though it is not entirely without foundation.

Although the OED has become more linguistic in its methodology, residues of the literary tradition persist: Dolliger said that about 50 percent of the entries the current edition, OED-3, are unchanged from the original edition, and although the OED employs a New Word Unit, a group of lexicographers who read content on the web and compile new words and senses, such a reading program is still not empirical and will fail to capture the usage of everyday speakers.

Going completely online, however, has allowed the OED to respond more nimbly to changes in the language: corrections to existing entries can now be made immediately, and the dictionary issues quarterly updates, adding a few hundred new words, phrases, and senses each time.

Dollinger feels that if the OED wants to keep claiming to be the “definitive record of the English language,” though, it will have to reorient its approach to include more fieldwork to study linguistic variation across the globe, focusing not only on what linguist Braj Kachru defined as the “inner circle,” where the majority of people are native English speakers (e.g., the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand) but also on the “outer circle” of former British colonies like India, Singapore, etc., and especially on the “expanding circle” of countries, like Russia and China, with no historical ties to England—not to mention English-based pidgins and creoles. Although some native speakers may consider this shift threatening, Dollinger quoted H.G. Widdowson, who in 1993 wrote:

How English develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers in England, the United States, or anywhere else. They have no say in the matter, no right to intervene or pass judgement. They are irrelevant. The very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have custody over it. To grant such custody of the language is necessarily to arrest its development and so undermine its international status.

How, then, do lexicographers distinguish innovations from errors? World Englshes are replete with words that are unfamiliar to the native speaker, like

  • stingko, meaning “smelly” in Singapore English;
  • teacheress, a female teacher, in Indian English;
  • peelhead, a bald-headed person, in Jamaican English; or
  • high hat, a snob in Philippine English

Whether these are right depends only on the variety of English in question. Linguist Ayo Bamgbose suggested using the following criteria to judge whether a word or phrase is an error or innovation:

  • The demographic factor: How many acrolectal speakers speak it?
  • The geographical factor: Where is it used?
  • The authoritative factor: Who sanctions its use?
  • Codification: Does it appear in dictionaries and reference books?
  • The acceptability factor: What are the attitudes of users an non-users toward the word?

Dollinger is applying some of these principles to his work on DCHP, the first edition of which (now known as DCHP-1) began as a bit of a pet project for American lexicographer Charles Lovell. As a researcher for A Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1951, Lovell began collecting Canadianisms. In 1958, Gage Educational Publishing asked Lovell to compile a dictionary for the Canadian Linguistic Association. After Lovell’s sudden death in 1960, Gage approached Walter S. Avis, known as “the pioneer of the study of Canadian English” and Matthew H. Scargill to continue his work. Together they finished and edited the dictionary and published it in 1967. That dictionary became the basis of Gage’s Canadian dictionary.

The 1990s saw a “Canadian Dictionary War,” with too many publishers—Gage Canadian, ITP Nelson, and the Canadian Oxford—competing in one market. Backed by a fierce marketing campaign, the Canadian Oxford won out.

In March 2006, Dollinger became editor-in-chief of the second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-2), with Nelson Education providing seed funding. In 2013, DCHP-1 was released online, and Dollinger expects DCHP-2 to be complete in early 2016. Owing to time constraints, some entries from DCHP-1, which dug deep into the history of the fur trade for much of its content, will persist in DCHP-2, but these will be clearly marked as being from the original edition and annotated if necessary.

In compiling DCHP-2, Dollinger has noticed that some terms have considerable regional variation and wonders whether we should be considering national isoglosses at all, considering the U.S. and Canada have the world’s longest undefended border. As an example, he showed that whereas Western Canadians prefer the term “running shoes” or “runners,” those in Eastern Canada prefer “sneakers,” which mirrors the regional variation across the northern United States. He also noted that these kinds of variations would be much harder to identify through the literary method of dictionary making.

Another interesting feature of the entries in DCHP-2 is that 70 percent of the entries are compound nouns. “Butter isn’t uniquely Canadian, tart isn’t Canadian, but butter tart is,” said Dollinger. “Cube isn’t Canadian, and van isn’t Canadian, but cube van is.”

Dollinger wondered too if it was time for lexicographers to get even more granular and consider the variation within regional Englishes. In what ways, for example, might English spoken by a Chinese Canadian be unique?

As part of his research, Dollinger is asking British Columbians to complete a twenty-minute survey to help him and his students understand how they use English.

Jumpcut: a clipboard-buffering tool editors will love

I installed Jumpcut after a tragic case of stupidity led to my losing a bunch of text I’d cut. Before I could paste it, I got distracted and copied something else, overwriting the text on my clipboard.

Jumpcut offers clipboard buffering: it stores up to ninety-nine clippings, so you can paste something you cut a while ago, even if you’ve since cut or copied something else. Although I installed it as insurance against my cut & paste brain farts, I discovered that the application is enormously useful for editing. It lets you cut or copy noncontiguous chunks of text and then paste them somewhere else, in any order and as many times as you need.

Last week the Chicago Manual of Style tweeted about Microsoft Word’s spike feature, which lets you cut several separate chunks of text and paste them all at once, but Jumpcut is better: Word’s spike allows only cutting, whereas Jumpcut allows both cutting and copying, meaning you don’t have to destroy your source document. What’s more, Jumpcut works across applications, so you can copy content from your web browser or a PDF and paste it into Word. I’ve been using it for only a week, but Jumpcut has already proven to be a huge timesaver by helping me replicate chapter headings in backmatter, add cross-references to an index I was editing, and copy quotes for a paper without having to bounce around between applications.

Best of all, Jumpcut is free.

Once you have Jumpcut installed, you can access your most recent clippings from the Jumpcut logo on the menu bar using your mouse, but you can also bring up your clippings with the shortcut key Ctrl + Option + V and then, holding down Ctrl + Option, use the arrow keys to scroll through them and select the ones you want.

Jumpcut is available for Mac only, but Windows users could try some of these alternatives. I haven’t used any of them, though, and can’t vouch for them. If you have any experience with them, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Communication Convergence 2014

Plain language advocates Cheryl Stephens and Katherine McManus teamed up with the Society for Technical Communication’s Autumn Jonssen and EAC-BC’s Amy Haagsma to organize the first Communication Convergence mini-conference as part of the Vancouver celebrations of International Plain Language Day, October 13. Because IPL Day coincides with Thanksgiving this year, we celebrated one weekend earlier, on October 5.

The afternoon included a networking buffet lunch, followed by three panel discussions. I was a panellist on the first, which explored the tendency for different communication fields to apply a common range of methods. Joining me were:

Frances Peck moderated.

The second panel looked at the real-world demand on communicators and featured

Katherine McManus moderated.

The third panel, hosted by

  • Lisa Mighton, director of communications and community liaison at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC
  • Paula LaBrie, marketing communications specialist;
  • and Cheryl Stephens, who moderated,

was more of an open discussion asking where we—as a community of communicators dedicated to plain language—go from here.

We had eleven speakers and three moderators, as well as plenty of comments and questions from the floor, so although the format made for invigorating discussion, I couldn’t capture everything that everyone said in my notes. Not pretending to do all of the participants justice, I’ll just give an overview of my impressions and the points I found most interesting. Because there was a lot of overlap among the three sessions, I’ll focus on the day’s themes rather than the specifics from each panel. (Find photos of the Communication Convergence event on IPL Day’s Twitter.)

Writing and editing for the audience (sometimes easier said than done)

We all agreed that the audience is paramount when we craft our communications. Joe Goodwill pointed out the importance of considering the audience’s cultural context, which can be very different from our own.

What can get especially tricky is when your work has to go through several layers of approval, said Heidi Turner. Frances Peck agreed: often at each of those levels managers and directors reintroduce jargon and officialese and undo all of the work you’ve done to make that text accessible. Turner always tries to advocate for plain language, telling those clients for whom she writes grants that “A funder won’t want to give you money just because you use big words,” but from a business standpoint she ultimately has to give her clients what they want, and sometimes they don’t have a very good idea of who their readers are.

How do you write for disparate audiences? Sometimes you have to create more than one document, and Stephens reminded us that there will always be some people we can’t reach with our writing. But if your hands are tied, Elizabeth Rains said to “use the plainest language possible that will satisfy your readers’ needs.” She firmly believes that “no matter what type of information you have, it can be explained simply. And you may find that you can use that same language to explain concepts to very, very different audiences.”

Tools and resources

Pam Drucker’s work as a technical communicator has evolved over the years; today, she no longer works on large manuals but instead writes individual articles or topics. Her most consulted resources include the

She also uses structured writing techniques (e.g., Information Mapping).

Plain language as a right

Beyond the arguments that clear communication is more efficient and will get better results, what motivates many advocates of plain language is that we feel it’s a human rights issue. Information can be life altering, sometimes life saving. Citizens need to understand their government’s legislation to participate in a democracy. People with health issues deserve to understand their treatment options to achieve the best health outcomes. What can we do get people the information they need?

Christabelle Kux-Kardos works with immigrants and seniors, among others, to help them access community and government services. Her approach is to do what she calls a literacy audit: she tries to step back and try to see the world through the lens of a new client. This process has shown her that some services, even essential ones, have poor signage and are hard to find, particularly if you don’t know the language well or aren’t comfortable with technology. She sees it as her responsibility to point out to those services what they could be doing better. A lot of her work, she said, involves talking with her clients to tease out the right questions. What don’t they know that they need to know? Often they don’t know what they don’t know.

Nicholson reminds us that for some people, there is value in misrepresentation. “There are circumstances in which people are vested in obfuscating,” she said. “We have to be loud enough to cut through the clutter.”

Beyond comprehension to persuasion

Did the audience understand the message? Achieving understanding is always the communicator’s goal, but should it stop there? How do we persuade people to act on that information?

Hompoth, an image consultant, said that we are judged on

  • how we look,
  • what we do,
  • what we say, and
  • how we say it.

What we say accounts for 7 percent of the message, but how we say it counts for 13 percent (with other non-verbal communication making up the balance). In other words, our delivery is more important than our content.

That reality certainly jibes with health and science communications. How best to achieve persuasion is an unanswered question from a knowledge translation point of view: we can present people with evidence that smoking harms health, but evidence alone isn’t enough to convince some smokers to quit. Whether our message spurs change depends on the audience’s level of motivation.

As much as some of us may shy away from marketing, if we really want to effect change, we may have to study it. Will a course in psychology eventually be a required part of communications training?

Communication in and from academia

Those who know me know that one of my life’s missions is to try to eradicate turgid writing from academia. Academese is unnecessary, it hinders understanding and collaboration, and, because research is mostly taxpayer funded, it is undemocratic. Part of my research in knowledge translation involves finding alternative means of communicating research so that stakeholders beyond a researcher’s own colleagues can find and use it. Journal articles haven’t fundamentally changed in sixty years: if you print one out, it will still be in tiny type, packed onto a page with no space to breathe.

But we are making some gains. Many journals, North American ones, especially, are more accepting now than ever of first-person pronouns in journal articles. The style can be more conversational, and as research necessarily gets more interdisciplinary, researchers are beginning to recognize that they need a lingua franca to work together, and that lingua franca is plain language. We still have a long way to go, but we can celebrate these small victories.

Jandciu’s programs at UBC try to tackle the problem earlier, with communications courses designed specifically for science students. Although the Faculty of Science had always acknowledged that its students needed to develop communication skills, it usually left that training to first-year English courses. Feedback from graduating students, though, showed that those courses weren’t adequately preparing them to write reports and scientific articles or prepare and give presentations. Now the Faculty of Science offers a first-year course that integrates communication into science training and helps students develop scientific arguments. A third-year course has students interview researchers and develop videos and podcasts. Even funders, said Jandciu, are wanting researchers to do more outreach using social media, videos, and multimedia. Research communication can no longer be just text based.

He occasionally still hears students say, “But I’m in science because I don’t like to write,” or “I can’t do presentations,” but after the courses they realize the value of being able to communicate their scientific expertise. They begin to grasp that a lot of legislation hinges on policy makers getting sound information, and right now scientists aren’t doing a good enough job getting it out to them or to the public. “We need science students to stop thinking of communication as separate from their science,” said Jandciu.

Jeff Richmond, a journalist, responded that a lot of blame is put on “the media” for distorting research. And although it’s true that some stories can get sensationalized, if you talk to individual journalists, they typically have the sincerest of intentions. How does the distortion happen, and how we can express ideas in plain language without altering the facts?

Increasing awareness and uptake of plain language

We were all preaching to the converted at Communication Convergence—we all understand the value of plain language. But not everyone thinks the way we do. Nicholson said that we know that clear communication is the ethical choice, but when it comes to convincing others, some people and organizations simply won’t respond unless you show them the economic benefits.

And Stephens said that although professional legal associations support plain language, there’s still a culture of resistance among practising lawyers. I believe the key is in subtle shifts—a kind of quiet rebellion. There are several tacks to plain language; do what you can within the bounds of the culture, but start gathering evidence that what you are doing is producing results.

Does the public at large realize what they’re missing when communication isn’t clear? How can we raise awareness of plain language?

Paula LaBrie suggested that we all find a way to celebrate International Plain Language Day at our workplaces and spread the word about it. Lisa Mighton said we should always look for opportunities to turn our work into a media story.

The ideas from the crowd reinforced the community’s need for a central repository of plain language information: research, case studies, history. I urged everyone to join the Clear Communication Wiki and start contributing to it. It has the potential to become a valuable resource, but it needs a critical mass of participation.

***

My key takeaway from Communication Convergence is that being able to say “I don’t understand” is a privilege. The most disenfranchised among us may not realize that there’s an alternative to confusing communication or may feel that revealing their lack of comprehension might make them look ignorant, compromising their position.

We communicators need to acknowledge our privilege and use it to push for change. “By not calling people on their poor communication practices,” said McManus, “we’re making people—maybe generations of people—put up with a lack of information. It becomes the responsibility of communicators not to just throw up our hands and give up.”

Stephens and McManus hope to make Communication Convergence an annual event. If you have ideas for session topics or speakers, get in touch via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Book review: The Sense of Style

We humans have been speaking for a lot longer than we’ve been writing, which is why the former comes to us so much more naturally. When we write, explains Steven Pinker in The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, the physical and temporal distance between us and our audience means it’s impossible to monitor their body language and adjust how we’re communicating to keep them engaged. That distance also makes it easy for us to lose sight of our audience entirely.

But if we aspire to what literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner called classic style, we can make our writing as effortless to read as holding a conversation. “The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world,” says Pinker. “The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself.” (pp. 28–29)

Keeping this metaphor in mind can help you steer clear of the hallmarks of stuffy prose: the self-conscious hedging, the tedious signposting, the metadiscourse, as well as nominalizations (Pinker borrows Helen Sword’s term, “zombie nouns”) and excessive use of passive voice. Yet, it also highlights why some of those devices can be useful. The passive, for example, can help steer your reader’s attention toward the receiver of an action, if that’s where you’d like her to look, and a nominalization can be an economical way to refer to a topic you’ve just introduced. As Pinker says:

The advice to bring zombie nouns back to life as verbs and to convert passives into actives is ubiquitous in style guides and plain language laws… But it’s good advice only when a writer or editor understands why it’s being offered. No English construction could have survived in the language for a millennium and a half unless it had continued to serve some purpose, and that includes passives and nominalizations. They may be overused, and often they are badly used, but that does not mean they should not be used at all. (p. 55)

Pinker encourages writers (and editors, by extension) to be discerning and to think critically about communicative effect, which is what sets The Sense of Style apart from other writing guides. It is not just a list of dos and don’ts, although the final chapter, “Telling right from wrong,” does cover which so-called rules you can safely ignore (perhaps grammatical rules that careful writers and speakers regularly break are not rules at all) and which you should probably heed. The motivation for following these rules, though, should not be the self-righteousness of being correct but the desire to be as clear as possible without irritating your readers—some of whom may have been taught to live by the sticklers’ and pedants’ old-school rules. Another of this book’s distinguishing features is that it grounds its advice on evidence, not just an intuitive sense of what reads well—as useful as that intuition may be for strong writers and editors. Pinker offers us psycholinguistic insight into why separating a subject from its predicate makes a sentence harder to read and why negative statements take longer to process than positive ones. It seems the common trait of stylistic infelicities is that they all slow a reader down.

The source of a lot of bad writing, says Pinker, is what he calls the curse of knowledge: forgetting that our readers don’t know exactly what we do. When we fail to give enough background or properly define a term, we risk confusing the reader. Similarly, if, when moving from one sentence to the next, we don’t show how the two are related semantically, we can leave the reader stranded. The strongest writers, says Pinker, are those that have mastered connectives: coordinators and subordinators (what we’ve traditionally called conjunctions), as well as phrases like “in contrast,” and “on the other hand.”

Pinker’s terminology may differ a bit from what many of us learned in school, and for good reason. When we were taught that “Adam’s” in “Adam’s apple” is an adjective, we conflated grammatical category (genitive noun) with grammatical function (determiner). It’s not that “ice” in “ice cream” has magically turned from noun to adjective but that nouns may function as modifiers. To great effect, Pinker uses the “sentence as tree” metaphor, using tree diagrams, ubiquitous in linguistics, to show how a sentence can be parsed. English, he explains, is a right-branching language: we expect new information to be added on as we move from the beginning of a sentence to the end. Too many left branches, as in a noun string, where we have to store a bunch of modifiers before we get to the thing being modified, gobbles up our working memory. We don’t have to create tree diagrams to write effective sentences, but they are another tool in our toolkit that we can reach for to help us untangle unwieldy prose.

Pinker covers an enormous swath of territory in this eminently sensible guide, from diction to syntax to paragraph structure and beyond, and I can’t even begin to do it justice in this short review. Editors will find The Sense of Style illuminating, hilarious, and (for all but the most pedantic sticklers) affirming. Pinker’s guidance resonates with my own approach to editing (although, counter to his advice, I’ll stay away from using “which” in a restrictive sense—for now), and it’s a refreshing change from the prescriptivist writing guides that don’t account for language change or register. I delighted in reading about such topics as how punctuation restores some of the prosody of spoken language—intonation, emphasis, pauses—and how the demise of “whom” and the subjunctive mood has been exaggerated. (The book, incidentally, also has a great index, which extends its life from an effervescent read to what will undoubtedly be a much-consulted reference.)

“Credible guidance on writing must itself be well written,” says Pinker in the prologue, “and the best of the manuals are paragons of their own advice.” (p. 1) This book is no exception. The prose in The Sense of Style is ambrosia, and I guzzled it greedily.

Hitting the books: Professional development tips (EAC-BC meeting)

EAC-BC held its first meeting of the 2014–2015 season yesterday evening, and, along with wine and cheese, we got a dose of professional development. Programs chair Roma Ilnyckyj and committee member Frances Peck asked us to share our favourite resources. Here’s a rundown of what people mentioned:

Books

Websites or blogs

Twitter accounts

On top of the ones already mentioned, members of our group suggested following:

Workshops or classes

Beyond EAC-BC’s excellent professional development seminars and EAC’s annual conference, here are some workshops or classes that attendees have found useful:

Upcoming professional development events include:

  • Word Vancouver, September 24 to 28, which will host a series of free workshops on everything from making chapbooks to creating a publishing roadmap to digital publishing.
  • Communication Convergence, October 5, which explores “the tendency for different communication fields over time to apply a common range of methods.” Frances Peck will moderate a panel (of which I will be a member). Tickets here. (STC and EAC-BC members get a discount, and students get a special rate.)

***

This list is by no means exhaustive, of course—it includes only what people mentioned at the meeting. Add your favourites in the comments.

If you found this list helpful, you may also be interested in the results of last year’s season-launching audience-participation meeting: Editors’ show and tell: time-saving tips and tricks.

Seth on cartooning, book design, and the Canadian aesthetic

Cartoonist, book designer, and illustrator (though he prefers the term “decorator”) Seth took the stage on Thursday after the Alcuin Awards presentations to talk about his influences; cartooning as an expressive, symbolic language; and the design features he’s identified as uniquely Canadian that he’s incorporated into his own design aesthetic. Guided by questions from another titan of Canadian book design, Peter Cocking, Seth led us on an eye-opening tour of his artistic process.

“Let’s talk about where you came from,” said Cocking. “You have a very pronounced style. What were your influences?”

“I’m a book designer now—I do a limited amount of book design—but primarily I’m a cartoonist,” said Seth. Growing up in small towns in Ontario, before the Internet, he absorbed culture from the pop culture. “As a child, you don’t judge it with an adult aesthetic,” he said, “but there was some stuff—you were connected to it for a reason.”

Peanuts, for example, had a profound effect Seth. “It was not really written for children, but children responded to it.” Charlie Brown was an outsider character, which elicited a lot of empathy. Charles Schulz “set the standard for how I wanted to work as a cartoonist,” said Seth. “The cartooning was really his handwriting.”

Marvel Comics also captured Seth’s imagination. “Like every kid,” he said, “I loved the superhero comics of that era.” Like Schulz, artists like Jack Kirby drew in clear lines. “The figures were quite strange. The anatomy wasn’t quite right. That’s when I realized that cartoonists were working with a symbolic language. Cartooning is not about drawing. It’s about creating symbols that people instantly recognize. Drawings in a cartoon are more similar to typography.”

Later on Seth discovered the work of Robert Crumb, whose work proved to Seth that “you can do anything you wanted as a cartoonist.” Crumb’s work, he said, had a dirty vibe to it—“literally filthy. Yet there was something really enticing beyond its pornographic qualities. It could actually impart a genuine feeling of lust.” In contrast with many cartoonists who were just drawing to make a buck, Crumb was one of a handful of great practitioners who redefined the idea that cartooning “could be a personal medium.”

Particularly intriguing to Seth was that Crumb’s work “looked like it had come from some earlier era.” The quality of the cartoon looked like it was drawn in the 1920s, but the content came out of the hippie subculture. Seth realized that Crumb “was digging around in the past for inspiration.”

Seth’s other influences include the Hernandez Brothers, as well as Georges Remi’s The Adventures of Tintin, in which “the shapes were simple. He was not concerned with rendering. It was all iconically drawn,” reinforcing the idea that cartooning is symbolic.

“Cartooning is a graphic language,” said Seth. “People sometimes say it’s like a combination of film and literature, which to me has always been a poor idea of what a cartoon is. To me, it’s more a combination of graphic design and poetry. Comics are about condensing things—condensing time and space.”

“They can be as complex to read as poetry,” said Cocking.

“Sometimes people ask if they should be reading the words or the pictures first. To me that’s always been a peculiar question. I always read them at the same time.”

“Some people don’t understand the language of comics,” said Cocking. “They don’t know what a thought bubble means…”

“Yes,” said Seth. “In Japanese comics, characters will sometimes have a puff of smoke coming out of their nose, which means great sadness. That’s just as foreign to us as the sweat beads we have flying off our characters in North American comics. And we don’t really have words to describe these devices.”

The New Yorker’s cartoons made an impression on Seth as well, particularly Peter Arno’s bold, brushed lines. “As a cartoonist, you always have a temptation to tighten up,” he explained. A maximum of expression in a minimum of lines.

“We’ve talked about your influences,” said Cocking. “Now let’s move on to some of your own work.” Showing images from Seth’s book design on The Complete Peanuts, Cocking noted the “attention you bring to Schulz as an illustrator—really showing graphic quality.”

“People take for granted what he did,” said Seth, “but it was groundbreaking.” Schulz was one of the first post-war cartoonists to take a modern approach of using “very few lines. He kept things very simple.”

“Charlie Brown is not a drawing of a child,” said Seth. “It is Charlie Brown. This was Schulz’s hand—it was his handwriting.” Schulz was writing his own life into the strip,” Seth explained. “When he was having an affair, Snoopy was having an affair—and his wife didn’t pick up on it!”

When Seth first approach Schulz’s widow, Jean Schulz, with the idea of The Complete Peanuts, he already had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do. “Peanuts had never been very well packaged,” he said. “People were selling the image of Peanuts as a popular item. I wanted to take down the tone of the books. The strips really had a melancholy mood.” Initially Seth envisioned fifty volumes, each with Charlie Brown’s face on the front. In the end he compromised, including two years per volume and featuring a few of the other characters.

The end papers in all of the volumes were a compilation of the settings, devoid of characters. “I wanted to establish a feeling for the place—this netherland of suburbia,” he said. “It was never clear where they lived. But it was somewhere with four seasons.” Seth wanted to highlight the strip’s underlying nature: it wasn’t really funny; it was meant more to be moving. On the occasional spread Seth allowed himself to assemble settings and build scenes with elements from Schulz’s strips. “I was drawing with his hands.”

Seth’s book design was heavily influenced by the work of Thoreau MacDonald, son of the Group of Seven’s J.E.H. MacDonald. Thoreau MacDonald was Canada’s premier book designer before the 1960s: he was a pen-and-ink artist who had a “cartoonist’s sensibility,” said Seth. He incorporated hand lettering seamlessly into his designs and illustrations. “There was a great earnestness to the work,” said Seth. “His work felt Canadian to me. Why does it feel Canadian to me?”

This question prompted Seth to gather Canadiana: old pamphlets, books, other ephemera that exemplified “Canadian vernacular design.” He was driven by the need to explore cartooning as a personal medium. “A lot of my peers were Americans,” he explained. “We were part of a little movement. I was one of the only Canadians in that group. Is there anything different in what I’m doing? What is an essence of Canadian imagery? Maybe I was insulted by Americans who thought, ‘Well, you’re just American.’ I started to inevitably feel some sense of national identity.”

From his collection, Seth distilled three features he identified in the Canadian postwar aesthetic: imagery from that period always had

  • an idea of landscape,
  • some official reference to the government, sometimes heraldic symbols of Britain or France, and
  • humility.

“There was something about them that was small,” he said. American images of the same era were always more impressive, almost always more proud. “I always thought there must have been some Ministry of Enforced Drabness,” said Seth.

These themes made it into Seth’s own work, such as in his graphic novel, George Sprott. “Every page could be read on its own, so it was easy to add pages in between. I could edit a work that already existed and really pay attention to pacing.” The front cover, with the title, George Sprott, 1894–1975, “is a tombstone,” Seth explained. “I like sadness, I must say. Life is sad. There’s an underlying tone of melancholy that goes through people’s lives.”

Cocking noted a musical quality to Seth’s work and asked him whether he thought in musical terms. “Yes,” he answered. “Pacing is so important. You’re always thinking about how you’re controlling time. Rhythm is super important.”

“Cartooning is a tiny little medium with a few symbols—a toy medium, a miniature world. There are endless possibilities for what you can do with that,” said Seth. “It’s remarkable the amount of variation that’s barely been touched. The medium is being completely redefined by the people working in it.”

Interspersed among the cartoons in the George Sprott collection are photos of cardboard buildings Seth crafted in his basement. “I made a world called Dominion—a Northern Ontario town that I invented where all my stories take place.”

Another of Seth’s projects was designing and decorating a new edition of Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, which, as Cocking said, “celebrates and mocks the drabness” of the quintessential Canadian town. “It’s a mean book,” acknowledged Seth.

“What was important to me, as is always, was to get a sense of place.” The dust jacket is Seth’s depiction of the town during the day, the book’s title central and bold. The cover, in contrast, is the town at night, and features no type at all. “It’s going to end up at a second-hand bookstore, and nobody will know what the book is,” he said. “There’s an old cartooning rule: show, don’t tell. So when people draw literally what’s written on the page, I always think that’s a wasted opportunity.”

Seth took his mastery of covert symbolism to another level with The Collected Doug Wright. Wright was “Canada’s master cartoonist,” said Seth. His work was “very, very Canadian.” He created a pantomime strip—with no dialogue—and he worked from the late 1940s to the 1980s, when he had a major stroke and died a couple of years later. As Seth was thinking of how to assemble the collection of Wright’s work, he recalled that Wright’s father, away fighting in World War I, had written the boy a heartfelt letter of fatherly advice and pride shortly before he was killed in battle. Seth landed on the idea of having the Wright collection subliminally take the reader on a walking tour of the Vimy Memorial in France. He studied photos and plans and storyboarded the tour before echoing each of his sketches in the designs of the spreads in The Collected Doug Wright.

Seth’s archival sensibilities came naturally to him: “Cartooning is a collector’s world,” he said. He developed an affinity toward collecting, and “the more you do it, the more it becomes archival, historical. You’re not just an artist; you’re also a historian.”

Plain language and the historical rain shadow

“I have a theory about the Internet,” said John Maxwell.

“Oh?” I took a sip of my coffee and sat back. “Go on…”

“See, everything before, say, 1970 is old enough to be interesting history, so people have posted that information online. And everything after 1995 is already on the Internet. But there’s this rain shadow of about two and half decades that there isn’t all that much information about. I think there’s a huge opportunity for people to fill in that history.”

John was referring to his research project about Coach House Books (see my summary of an Alcuin Society talk of his on the subject here), but his rain shadow applies just as well to the modern plain language movement, which got its legs in the 1970s, when First National City Bank (now Citibank) revamped its mortgage documents and governments began to recognize the need for plain language communications. The Wikipedia page about plain language offers some history, but most of it is U.S. focused, and it’s far from exhaustive.

Plain Language Association INternational (PLAIN) co-founder and tireless plain language advocate Cheryl Stephens asked me to put together a display table of the organization’s history to celebrate PLAIN’s twentieth anniversary at last October’s PLAIN 2013 conference. Drawing from three boxes of archives, including copies of PLAIN’s old newsletter, Rapport, I made a poster showing some of the major international plain language milestones of the past two decades.

Of course, there’s only so much I could fit on a poster. The archives are replete with important, fascinating historical tidbits that deserve to be documented somewhere. But where?

The need for a plain language repository

At PLAIN 2013, what became clear to me was that the plain language community could really use a repository for:

  • Clear communication research: Is active voice easier to understand than passive? Is it better to use serif or sans serif body type? I’d love to be able to visit one site to find the latest evidence supporting plain language and clear communication principles. Not only would this research inform my own work, but it would support my efforts to persuade prospective clients and decision makers about the merits of plain language. The Plain Language Advocates group on LinkedIn is fertile ground for sharing links and discussing new research, but the links to the original articles aren’t centrally archived in a useful way.
  • Case studies: Having a handy set of before-and-after examples, as well as documentation of a plain language campaign’s impacts (particularly on efficiency and the bottom line), would be enormously useful for explaining what we do and why.
  • Plain language history: Our past—seeing our gains, our losses—lights the way forward. Acknowledging the contributions of the pioneers who have dedicated countless hours to this cause is an important reminder of what we need to do to keep going.

A wiki for clear communication

I’ve sung the praises of wikis in the past: their ease of editing makes them democratic and participatory. So, I’ve set up the Clear Communication Wiki on Wikia, and I encourage everyone from the plain language community to contribute to it. Over the next several months (or, more likely, years) I plan to populate the history section with what I gleaned from my historical project for PLAIN 2013, including what I couldn’t fit onto the poster. Anyone else with relevant historical sources is welcome to fill in the details as well.

I didn’t mean to be unilateral about establishing this wiki—mostly I needed a neutral place to post the Plain Language: Clear and Simple guides I rebuilt, and I figured the wiki could serve many purposes. If there’s already an active international hub for plain language information, I’d be happy to migrate my data there.

I can see the archive of research links eventually creating the need for a full-fledged searchable database of the articles themselves, but for now, I think a wiki is a good first step.

***

Many of the modern plain language movement’s most vocal advocates are either gone or are retiring. The community lost Robert Eagleson in 2013, and Annetta Cheek retired from the Center for Plain Language earlier this year. I don’t know if others are feeling a sense of urgency, but I am. Let’s talk to these pioneers about their experiences, their triumphs and setbacks, and get this history down while we can.

PubPro 2014 recaps

The second annual PubPro unconference for managing editors and publication production professionals took place on Saturday, May 24. We had ten fantastic sessions in a day packed with peer-to-peer learning and networking. Volunteers Megan Brand, Lara Kordic, and Lana Okerlund took notes, and their summaries of the sessions have been appearing weekly throughout the summer on Editors Canada’s BC branch newsletter, West Coast Editor. The last of them was posted last week, so I thought I’d give a round-up of the links:

Many thanks to this year’s attendees, including our stellar volunteers!

Want to see PubPro 2015 happen? Get in touch with me or with Editors Canada’s BC branch professional development co-chairs. I’d be keen to organize this unconference again but want to make sure others share my enthusiasm.