by JCM | 29 Feb, 2020 | Marginalia
This is a decent short piece in Inc. about Oprah Winfrey’s podcast strategy – basically mining her archive of TV shows for audio highlights – with some simple yet sensible advice for this age of ephemeral experiences:
“Good content is good content. No matter how old it is… Get creative and find ways to adapt that content to be relevant for… new audiences, and put it in front of them.”
That “get creative” part is key, though. Older content is likely to only have nuggets of still-relevant gold that will need careful mining and potentially refining for different formats, audiences, and purposes.
Remember: Not everything has to be explicitly about today’s perceived front-of-mind issues to be relevant and interesting. There’s a reason Dale Carnegie continues to be a bestselling author in the business books category 75 years after his death. Good insights are good insights.
Approached with the right mindset, old white papers, transcripts of conference speeches, case studies, surveys – even LinkedIn posts – could become a treasure trove of inspiration for creating something similar but different to engage new people on new platforms and in new formats.
Content marketing is, after all, about effective presentation of the content as well as the brand. And content ultimately succeeds based on *its* content – ideas and their presentation.
And there is *always* more than one way to present an idea.
by JCM | 22 Feb, 2020 | Marginalia
Complaining about nonsense business-speak may be futile, but this piece – a review of a memoir about life in startup land – does a good job of summing up why spewing out business bullshit is not just intellectually offensive, but actively harmful:
“I like Anna Wiener’s term for this kind of talk: garbage language. It’s more descriptive than corporate speak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly…
“But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.”
In short, if your ideas are good, don’t bury them in garbage. If they’re not, the presence of garbage is a good indicator.
by JCM | 19 Feb, 2020 | Structures & Models
3/5 stars
A strange book. Well written, entertaining, but largely pointless – and doesn’t deliver on its core promise of explaining *how to use* rhetoric more effectively.
Instead, its basic argument consists of the astonishing revelation that:
- language can be used to make a case that’s designed to persuade
- people have been doing this for a long time
- people used to study the techniques involved and gave them all fancy Greek names
- people no longer use the fancy Greek names but still use the techniques.
All of which is illustrated with examples, including deconstructions, showing what techniques were used.
So far, so good – but that’s a *what*, not a *how*. As such, so what?
This book starts out as a plea for the restitution of rhetoric as a field of study – but then fails to follow through with a convincing case to do so because it never manages to demonstrate the practical application of an understanding of rhetorical theory. About halfway through there’s even a line that tells us to ignore the detailed analysis and use of rhetorical terminology via the double dismissal:
“in the end, these distinctions… can safely be left to the theorists.” (p.131-2)
If those distinctions can be ignored, what is the benefit of learning *any* of the terminology of rhetoric that is scattered throughout the book? It seems to be just to make you look clever by spouting archaic Greekisms.
(That question was, of course, a rhetorical device.do I know the *name* of the rhetorical device? No. But I knew how to deploy it. I rest my case.)
Because the problem is that while Leith shows how an understanding of rhetoric can be used to analyse words and see how arguments were constructed, at no point does he coherently illustrate how to use this knowledge in a practical way to construct arguments of your own. Nor does he provide a single example of how anyone has done so – beyond references to great speakers of the past reading lots of past great speeches, which is not the same thing at all.
All of which means that, while this is a perfectly entertaining enough book, I’ve come out of it *less* convinced that there’s any point in trying to memorise what hendiadys or hypallage, pleonasmus or polysyndeton are. All I need to know is that I know how to use them. And this book, despite giving plentiful examples of how these techniques have been used by other people, is no practical use on that front at all.
In short, if you want to learn more about how to write or speak in a more convincing rhetorical style, this may be good to point you to some of the greats of the past so you can go and read their stuff (as long as you’re happy focusing primarily on British and American greats, that us), but that’s about it.
And, most importantly, that’s not what the dust jacket promises.
by JCM | 15 Feb, 2020 | Narratives & Meanings
3/5 stars
Parts of this were very good, and the writing mostly flows well. Parts were a bit confused – or confusing, or both.
Some characters are fully fleshed out, with clear story arcs that make sense. Most flit in and out with little clear purpose beyond serving as an excuse to explore some aspect of Zambian life.
All this is fine enough, as it goes, as the whole book is effectively a montage of snapshots of loosely intertwined lives designed to give a sense of the country’s own confused identity – but it’s a montage building to something that feels unfinished.
Unless that’s the point – which, in part, I think it is. But if so it’s a bit frustrating for the reader who’s just invested all that time reading the best part of 600 pages, even if it may well be thematically appropriate.
