Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’


Getting Over the Obsession with Word Repetition

Published March 8th, 2010 in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

I usually blog about bigger-picture communications strategy issues, but my alter ego the Grammar Queen has been fighting to get out over the weird obsession with word repetition.

We hear from clients all the time, when reviewing all kinds of writing—articles, marketing copy, taglines—”But isn’t it bad to repeat a word?” Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s good. And sometimes it just doesn’t matter.

I suspect that confusion on this points stems from a misunderstanding about why word repetition is sometimes bad. It’s not necessarily that repeated words make for monotonous writing (though they certainly can); it’s that repeated words often signal hazy ideas. Here’s a a simple example: The sentence, “We had a great meal at this great restaurant in a great neighborhood,” is obviously lame. Many people would think the way to fix it is to find synonyms for great. But is “We had a great meal at this excellent restaurant in a fabulous neighborhood” really any better? (Hint: no.) That’s because word repetition here is only a symptom of the real problem. “We had a great meal at this new restaurant in my favorite neighborhood” is a better expression of the thought because the new adjectives are not synonyms—they’re more precise information.

If you read something that repeats words and seems bland and uninformative, it’s usually not because the writer failed to use a thesaurus; more likely they failed to think through what they wanted to say and communicate that precisely.

When is word repetition good? When you want to convey the same information about different things: “Great for kids. Great for parents.” When you want to emphasize a subject: “It was the most fabulous shoe I’d ever seen. It was the shoe of my dreams.” (Substituting footwear for the second shoe would only drain the ardor.) Or when you want to create a transition: “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. That plain is where two-thirds of Spain’s … .”  (Substituting flatland for plain would not aid comprehension.)

As the Grammar Queen has frequently observed, the first prerequisite of good writing is good thinking.

Matching Mouth to Money

Published February 14th, 2010 in Miscellaneous, green marketing, sustainability | No Comments »

The phrase “put your money where your mouth is”  has been coming up a lot here lately—in part due to our work with New Resource Bank, which lets sustainability-minded businesses, nonprofits, and individuals do just that, and in part due to our decision to join 1% for the Planet.

If you’re not familiar with it, 1% for the Planet is an alliance of businesses of all sizes that commit to give one percent of their yearly revenues to environmental nonprofits. And the organization holds members to it–you have to submit tax documents and proof of donations to maintain membership.

We’d been thinking of doing this since learning of 1% via a Fast Company interview with Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who co-founded the organization with Craig Mathews, fisherman and owner of Blue Ribbon Flies. What finally kicked us into gear was hearing Hunter Lovins give her “The Business Case for Sustainability” speech at New Resource’s bimonthly speaker/networking event, re:think.

Lovins includes an apt quote from Interface chair Ray Anderson: “What’s the business case for destroying the planet?” But what really got to us was her parting question, “What are you doing?” Somehow, “helping sustainable businesses and environmental nonprofits” didn’t sound like enough. So here’s another chip on the table.

Try it—it feels good.

Survey Says: More About the Questioners Than the Respondents

Published October 1st, 2009 in Miscellaneous, sustainability | No Comments »

Do a survey about attitudes on any sustainability topic and it will get reported. And commented upon. And tweeted and retweeted. Everyone’s looking for insights on the cultural moment—or something that looks like insights because it has a number attached to it.

But what do surveys (about sustainability or anything else) really tell us? More and more I think, not as much about the people answering the survey as about the people constructing it. Case in point: a recent Rasmussen Reports survey finding that 47 percent of Americans reject the idea that they are selfish for putting economic concerns ahead of the fight against global warming.

What struck me was not the result—hardly a shock, since people don’t like to think of themselves as selfish—but the assumption behind the question: it’s the climate vs. the economy. This is a trope of anti-environmentalism, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s particularly wrong-headed in this case, since multiple reputable examinations of the issue have found that not addressing climate change is far more costly than acting to curb it. When you know that, the question makes no sense.

Twenty-four percent said they weren’t sure—which reminded me that just about every time I’ve been surveyed, I’ve been asked at least one question I couldn’t answer. Not because I didn’t have an opinion on the issue, but because I rejected the premise of the question.

If you’re conducting a survey and want an honest read on what people are thinking, it’s essential to examine the assumptions behind your questions. Are you closing off the possibility of opinions that don’t conform to your perceptions? And when you’re evaluating survey data, it pays to think as carefully about the questions as you do about the answers. Whose opinion is being reflected here?

Bringing Things Down to Size

Published April 29th, 2009 in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

Big numbers without context are rife in discussions about climate change (not to mention the state of the nation’s economy). I find it annoying: if you say you will eliminate XX tons of CO2 but don’t provide context or state it as a percentage of what’s possible, it isn’t informative.

But providing context often isn’t easy, as Natalie Angier points out in a N.Y. Times article about Fermi problems. 

Fermi problems (named for the physicist, who used them as brain refreshers with his atom bomb team), take a big question and break it down to smaller components to get an estimated answer. One question the article posits is, if you take all the miles Americans drive in a year, how far into space would it go? What’s revealed in the process can be as revealing as the answer itself. Unraveling the question flexes the brain with news ways of thinking, and gives communicators new ways to get the point across, too. It can tell a story of sorts, and make the abstract real.

In answering the miles question, you find out how many miles the average person drives (per Angier’s mechanic, it’s about 12,000). Say there is one car for every two Americans, that’s 150 million times 12,000, or 2 trillion miles. Then note that Pluto, the unplanet, is only 3 billion miles from here, and you’ve got a nice way to make the staggering concept of all those miles driven more concrete.

Angier also looks at a topical problem: how much cropland is needed if we decide to fuel our cars solely with corn-based ethanol? Lawrence Weinstein, co-author of a book* on Fermi problems, uses calories consumed as the starting point. There are 30,000 calories in a gallon of gas, and the average car uses a gallon or two a day. Since a person needs only 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, Weinstein says, we’d need “20 times more farmland, so this could be a bad idea.”

You can also help people comprehend amorphous figures by translating them into everyday concepts. For instance, to show how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million, you could point out that 1 million seconds equals 10 days, and 1 billion seconds runs to about 32 years. Neat.

If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to know if anyone has ideas for relating carbon equivalents. I want to see an alternative to “the equivalent of taking XXX cars off the road.” Just how much CO2 does a car produce? Taking it off the road for how long? It muddies the issue, provides no simple, concrete image, and says nothing about the amount of pollution relative to the problem.

*Guesstimation: Solving the Worlds Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin, by John A. Adam and Lawrence Weinstein. We have to love this, given how Thinkshift got started.