Editorial
For more in the subject see Churchill, J.: What is Intelligence – EQ or IQ?, Humanising Language Teaching, issue 1, 2007
Communication Styles
Monica Hoogstad, UK
Monica Hoogstad is a freelance Business English and Legal English teacher, and a teacher trainer with eighteen years experience in ELT. She has worked in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Romania. Her current interests are NLP and Multiple Intelligences, the cognitive function of metaphor, teaching while having fun (and the other way around). E-mail: MonicaHoogstad@yahoo.co.uk
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Introduction
Background
Reading
Speaking
Writing
References
How many times have you thought to be in agreement with somebody only to realise later that you’ve been talking at cross purposes? How many times have you asked for directions and still couldn’t manage to find the place, despite the detailed description? What happened? Obviously, a glitch in communication. But what caused it? The difference between individual mental maps, neuroscience tells us. Each person perceives, filters and stores information in their own, singular manner. There are no two perfectly identical perceptions of the same reality. Each of us draw and carry with us a mental world map that reflects reality the way we see and understand it. Every time several individual maps clash, we experience a ‘Huston, we have a problem’ moment. We sense something is wrong, but we can’t really put our finger on it. What’s the solution?
Emotional Intelligence comes to the rescue yet again. Emotionally endowed people need only wiggle their wand, and the carriage of communication won’t turn into the pumpkin of chaos any more. As they thrive on managing emotions, they’ll understand, accept and respect various points of view. And we’ll all live happily ever after, right? By the way, have I mentioned the media so far? It might come as a shock, but fine-tuning various individual mental maps isn’t journalists’ main purpose in life. Allegedly, their reason for getting up every morning is the kick they get from cunningly imposing their own ‘map’ (interpretation of reality) on the public. Being aware of the massive diversity in readers’ educational backgrounds, orientations and expectations, journalists employ various persuasive strategies to make their ‘map’ more attractive, more plausible, more convincing and more saleable.
As evil as they might seem prima facie, they actually reinforce the paremiologic truth that a rhetoric arsenal is mightier than the sword. So, journalism-bashers of the world, unite, regroup and borrow your archenemy’s techniques. Forget flowers, say it with questions and exclamations, clever puns and memorable alliterations, emotive language and statistics, humour and irony to get the public on your side. Insight into your readers’ mental world maps is mandatory in order to manage relationship building. Moderating your style to better accommodate the readers’ projections is a viable strategy. Think like them. Mesmerise them, so that they agree with you. Surprise them, so that they are enticed by the latest updates about your subject. Tantalise them, so that they get new perspectives to sink their teeth into. Razzle-dazzle them.
The following activities cater for businesspeople whose jobs require them to write compelling and creative articles, press releases, ads, announcements, reports, advice, proposals, letters, memos, etc. The reading activity is an eye-opener, as it reveals and illustrates a wide range of rhetoric techniques. The speaking activity invites students to connect, organise and refine a number of facts, and to develop them into a story meant to serve a certain purpose and to appeal to a certain target audience. They also get to apply the rhetoric devices discovered in the previous task. The writing activity sets a new challenge: composing a credible and targeted text while paying special attention to word count.
Select a story likely to stir your students’ interest. Bring with you two different newspapers – a ‘serious’ one and a tabloid – that cover the chosen story.
Get the students to split up into two teams, and give each team a newspaper. Invite them to read the article and jot down a few characteristics: ways of conveying information (facts v opinions, objectivism v sensationalism), persuasive techniques, to which target groups the style appeals and why.
After the completion of this stage, ask them to report their findings to the whole group and draw a comparison between the two publications and their styles. The description should include captions, tone, the way people are introduced and referred to, choice of words (clichés, idioms, jargon, connectives), preferred tenses and punctuation, sentence complexity and structure.
Team A’s text: Hash Cake Gran Faces Jail
Adapted from the Sun, March 2007
A granny faces jail after feeding her neighbours casseroles and cakes laced with cannabis.
Grey-haired Patricia Tabram, 68, started taking the drug to relieve pain following a car crash. The retired restaurant boss then discovered the effects lasted longer if she used it in cooking. She used to make soups, cheesecakes, hot pots and pies which were a hit with neighbours.
Tabram first bought the drug from a pub, then started growing her own. But police raided her country cottage after a tip-off. She was let off with a caution. But when cops called again, they seized cannabis worth £850.
Now Tabram faces up to five years in jail after admitting one offence of possession to supply at Newcastle Crown Court. The pensioner, of Humshaugh, Northumberland, suffered depression after finding her son Duncan, 14, dead in bed in 1975. She also had back and neck pain after the crash. Tabram, who was freed on bail, said: “If they send me to jail I can finish my book — Grandma Eats Cannabis. If Jeffrey Archer can write a book in prison, so can I.”
Team B’s text: Woman, 68, Avoids Jail for Growing Cannabis
Adapted from the Guardian, March 2007
A 68-year-old woman who advocates cooking with cannabis for health reasons was today found guilty of growing and possessing the drug and sentenced to 250 hours of community work.
Patricia Tabram - a cause celebre for pro-cannabis campaigners - had been warned earlier today that she might face jail for her second drugs conviction and had defiantly spoken of how she was not scared of prison. This morning at Carlisle Crown, court Judge Barbara Forrester had warned Tabram that she could face a custodial sentence.
The warning came after a jury decided she had breached a six-month suspended jail sentence she was given in April 2005 at Newcastle crown court. The judge in Newcastle, David Hodson, had declined to make Tabram "a martyr" by jailing her.
In the event, after an adjournment for pre-sentence reports, Judge Forrester also decided this afternoon not to imprison Tabram, who lives in a bungalow in Humshaugh, Northumberland. The community work will be unpaid. The sentence was made up of 175 hours unpaid work for cultivating four cannabis plants and a further 75 hours for possessing powdered cannabis which she used for cooking. Judge Forrester told her she must also pay £1,000 costs.
Tabram had said this morning before the jury delivered its verdict that she would be "everyone's granny" in prison and would be treated well, though she was anxious about not having her outlawed "medicine".
Prepare two A4-size manila envelopes, each containing seven identical items. On one write ‘The Times’, on the other one ‘The Telegraph’. To make this activity more interesting, the items should be unrelated to each other. For instance, you could fill the envelopes with the following: a card containing the words obviously, surely, besides, therefore, alternatively, consequently; a low-energy bulb; a single journey tube ticket; an encrusted hairpin; a packet of salt-and-vinegar flavoured crisps; a rubber duck; and a pair of chopsticks.
The teams are supposed to use the objects as cues for an oral story of minimum 400 words, that has to get the interest of and to be accessible to the target group mentioned on the envelope. As each student contributes to the creation of the story, the plot will grow in complexity. Unleashed creativity, imagination running wild, and rhetoric devices encountered in the previous activity will be required by the truckload.
When the teams have finished, they give their story a suitable title and share it with the whole group. Each member of the team tells one part of the story and points to the related item when it comes up in the plot.
Criteria for successful completion of the assignment are: co-operation within the team, creativity and presentation. The teams will be awarded points ranging between 1 and 5 for each of these criteria. The team with the highest number of points are the winners.
Write a captivating 257-word article taking one of the following captions as a starting point. Adapt your style to fit your target readers’ profile, to beguile them and to convince them of the truth of your story.
Voters do care, but they prefer the carrot to the stick
There’s no choice: wrap up and grit your teeth
Fiddling while Rome runs out of combustibles
Cockerel defies a ban on crowing
A tyranny in tatters
Dutch courage
Legal eagles
The wizard of odds
Been to court, bought the T-shirt
You can organise a writing contest, where several students read their stories in front of the group. Their colleagues award them points on creativity, humour and innovative use of rhetoric techniques. The student who collects the highest number of points is the winner.
The moral of this story? Next time you’re late for a meeting because you couldn’t find your way, blame it on other people’s mental world maps. As the saying goes, if you can’t convince them, confuse them.
Andrews, T., 2006, The Secret of Writing Persuasive Web Content, at
www.articlestreet.com/Article/The-Secret-Of-Writing-Persuasive-Web-Content/12463
Churchill, J., 2007, What is Intelligence – EQ or IQ?, Humanising Language Teaching,
issue 1, at old.hltmag.co.uk
Cromwell, D., 2000, An Unholy Trinity: Truth, Market Forces and the Media, at
www.zmag.org
McNay, M., Neither Pedantic nor Wild?, at
www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/article/0,,181311,00.html
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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