During the Great Recession, I helped a number of people rework their résumés, mostly successfully.
Résumés often seem like a simple list: when did what happen, using what technology / skills, and in what context. All well and good, and easy enough (once all the details have been collected). These various "whats" should include all the various keywords that hiring managers may use in their database search for someone doing a particular type of job. So these keywords are included to force a résumé to be included in the results of such a database search. The audience for a résumé's keyword section isn't a human being at all: it's the computer (specifically, the database search algorithm and the limitations a hiring manager might place on that search).
"Keyword" sections in a résumé, and sometimes "skills" sections, are often used as a place to dump all the acronyms, synonyms, odds and sods that could be used in the database search. These lists aren't for human consumption.
But good résumés also present one's professional life, and as such should imply a consistent story. The résumé shouldn't include everything, if including it all doesn't help that story be clear, consistent, and coherent.
Do I mention on my résumé that I did paint crew on my college campuses to work my way through a couple of summers? How about the many part-time retail jobs? Volunteering at an Irish festival, organizing the guest suites? Or volunteering with some senior citizens to help them learn the Internet / email / AOL back in the 90's? Oh, and what about the occasional community college English class that I pick up, when I think I'm ready to face a few more stacks of undergraduate papers to grade?
No, of course I don't mention those part-time jobs or that volunteer work: those experiences don't fit the story of the kind of work I would like to be doing (even if painting a fish mural in the basement of one college dorm was a silly way for the paint crew to spend a hot Friday afternoon when we got ahead of schedule).
Of course, this makes some people, including some hiring managers, squirm. I guess there really was a time back in the 1950's or 60's when a résumé really could also be an accurate tally of a professional's life story, because people's life stories included only a few jobs in one industry, usually working up through one company. Such a professional's life story is easy to read from the listing of all that person's work experiences and education. Such stories are just not as complicated, or messy, as our modern, life stories.
So now there's a tradition that one should somehow include everything, even if the resulting document is long and disjointed. Even if a completely inclusive résumé can't now clearly imply a story--easily read between the lines of the listed jobs and education--because our lives have so many stories in them.
To write for the human who hopefully will see a résumé, that résumé still needs to create a cohesive, clear, implied story. People can get their heads around stories. From these implied stories, we can get the gist of what the person is like. We can see whether a person would fit with the rest of the company and whether that person will succeed with the work that needs doing.
But those stories have absolutely nothing to do with what that database is going to need during a keyword search.
These two conflicting audiences--the one that needs terms, lots and lots of terms; the other that needs a clearly implied story--force résumés to be in conflict with themselves. Including both the list and the story to fit the needs of both audiences is unwieldly. Not writing for the database will mean a human may never see the résumé. Yet not having a story means the hiring manager will likely drop the résumé in the round file in a second or two. (Most hiring managers will look at a résumé for around 9 seconds, I read recently, before they decide to toss or to make a phone call. That implied story had better be clear, and quickly clear, to inspire someone to call.)
Databases may make finding résumés easier, but they're not giving hiring managers the information they really need about the possible candidates. Writing for that database--while often necessary--creates documents that inherently fail to answer questions the hiring managers are actually asking: Who is this person? Would this person succeed at the work that needs doing? Would this person fit with us?
The solution often is to find a way to get a story-based résumé to the hiring manager after they make a phone call but before the interview. Better yet would be to skip the database altogether, getting the story-based résumé into a human's hands from the start.
Consistently the people who I helped get a job during the Great Recession found some way to get a story-based résumé into a human's hands as quickly as possible Sometimes my clients skipped the database stage completely, networking to find people who might have work that suited them. Sometimes, when being phone screened, my clients asked if they could send an "updated" résumé. Those "updates" were the same content, but written so a human could see a human's story, without all those keywords.
Résumés are professional life stories: mini-biographies, vibrant with a person's life and living. Yet now résumés have become lists, and lists are things, not lives. The conflicting audiences for résumés force one document to merge two conflicting genres, making it work at cross-purposes.
And we wonder why writing them is so very frustrating, and reading them is so very, very dull. Using résumés, in their traditional form, is not efficient, not appropriate to our current lives, and not engaging, yet impossible to avoid. Résumés are a construct: ones that are necessary only because we've not
moved to more efficient and effective ways to make the human-to-human
connections needed to place people in the right work.
If you are working on a résumé, or reading them, I wish you well. The documents in front of you are far more dull than any person could possibly be.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Friday, June 29, 2012
Anti-intellectualism and speaking plainly
I was in a training session for professionals at a Fortune 100
company, during my post-Professor career. The trainer told a story about training another Fortune 100 company's VP. The VP was asked
what he does for a living, and he said "I sell ideas."
The trainer celebrated this answer as the mark of a very smart man, for the VP could see the true nature of what he does and explain it clearly.
I don't doubt that the VP was probably very competent: that trainer, though, struck me as more than a little slow. That, or he had drunk far too much of the anti-intellectual kool-aid, and it had killed off some of his brain.
American anti-intellectualism has its typical rhetoric. One such type is Plato falling off the turnip truck, but shifted to our place and time. Too often, I've seen the rhetoric depicting really bright people as those who can distill the essence of something and speak it plainly (instead of being the people who can also see nuances and clarify those as well).
But plain speech in the professions is a landmine. Really, it is: that's why we have jargon. Jargon can be very useful: with one jargon term, we can eliminate sometimes whole paragraphs of explanation. Jargon can increase the efficiency and specificity of communication, so long as the audience also already knows that jargon (and so long as the term hasn't drifted recently).
And that audience needing to already be in the know leads to the other reason we have jargon (even if we don't want to accept or admit it). Jargon keeps the know-nothings out of our playgrounds, because the work needed to learn the jargon will nearly always lead to the person becoming a know-somethings who we would welcome into the playground. Jargon functions to communicate, and to gatekeep.
(And I'm not the first to point this out, but I can't recall where I read it. Peter Elbow maybe? I.A.Richards? Stanley Fish? Probably Fish. All I can recall at the moment was being surprised to read that tidbit in that place in someone's argument: it was under utilized at the time.)
Using plain speech in the professions is tricky: doing so announces that the content is easily enough understood that the efficiency and specificity of jargon isn't necessary. But it also invites the know-nothings: it says to everyone that the ideas are ones we can all understand. It breaks the gate around the playground, which opens that playground to all.
Including someone who just fell off the turnip truck. Including people who hate nuance.
Plain speech is more democratic; it's also a tool too often used by anti-intellectuals. It gets us all into the playground, making all the brain numbing noise of any playground packed with too many kids.
It encourages simplicity, to the point of stupidity.
Yet I am writing my blog pretty plainly, for I believe that the way to fight the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism is to encourage thought, despite the hullabaloo around us. We will never teach everyone to be able to pass the gatekeepers of jargon: there's too much to learn, too much nuance to juggle. But to not even try denies the democratic spirit buried in using the plain style
PS. My personal favorite example of jargon drift is in the term "ideology". I believe it once meant those beliefs that are so completely shared by a community that the members of the community can't recognize them: we're effectively blind to those shared beliefs. These days, "ideology" is regularly discussed as those beliefs that are commonly shared, not the ones that are so deeply set that we are blind to them. I find that shift frustrating, because the original idea--of beliefs that we can't know we have--is useful. Instead, "ideology" has shifted to mean little more than "conventional wisdom".
The trainer celebrated this answer as the mark of a very smart man, for the VP could see the true nature of what he does and explain it clearly.
I don't doubt that the VP was probably very competent: that trainer, though, struck me as more than a little slow. That, or he had drunk far too much of the anti-intellectual kool-aid, and it had killed off some of his brain.
American anti-intellectualism has its typical rhetoric. One such type is Plato falling off the turnip truck, but shifted to our place and time. Too often, I've seen the rhetoric depicting really bright people as those who can distill the essence of something and speak it plainly (instead of being the people who can also see nuances and clarify those as well).
But plain speech in the professions is a landmine. Really, it is: that's why we have jargon. Jargon can be very useful: with one jargon term, we can eliminate sometimes whole paragraphs of explanation. Jargon can increase the efficiency and specificity of communication, so long as the audience also already knows that jargon (and so long as the term hasn't drifted recently).
And that audience needing to already be in the know leads to the other reason we have jargon (even if we don't want to accept or admit it). Jargon keeps the know-nothings out of our playgrounds, because the work needed to learn the jargon will nearly always lead to the person becoming a know-somethings who we would welcome into the playground. Jargon functions to communicate, and to gatekeep.
(And I'm not the first to point this out, but I can't recall where I read it. Peter Elbow maybe? I.A.Richards? Stanley Fish? Probably Fish. All I can recall at the moment was being surprised to read that tidbit in that place in someone's argument: it was under utilized at the time.)
Using plain speech in the professions is tricky: doing so announces that the content is easily enough understood that the efficiency and specificity of jargon isn't necessary. But it also invites the know-nothings: it says to everyone that the ideas are ones we can all understand. It breaks the gate around the playground, which opens that playground to all.
Including someone who just fell off the turnip truck. Including people who hate nuance.
Plain speech is more democratic; it's also a tool too often used by anti-intellectuals. It gets us all into the playground, making all the brain numbing noise of any playground packed with too many kids.
It encourages simplicity, to the point of stupidity.
Yet I am writing my blog pretty plainly, for I believe that the way to fight the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism is to encourage thought, despite the hullabaloo around us. We will never teach everyone to be able to pass the gatekeepers of jargon: there's too much to learn, too much nuance to juggle. But to not even try denies the democratic spirit buried in using the plain style
PS. My personal favorite example of jargon drift is in the term "ideology". I believe it once meant those beliefs that are so completely shared by a community that the members of the community can't recognize them: we're effectively blind to those shared beliefs. These days, "ideology" is regularly discussed as those beliefs that are commonly shared, not the ones that are so deeply set that we are blind to them. I find that shift frustrating, because the original idea--of beliefs that we can't know we have--is useful. Instead, "ideology" has shifted to mean little more than "conventional wisdom".
Mute to Rhetorician
According to my Mom, I was born mute. I just didn't talk until I was
three or so, and even then, I barely used more than a word. My parents
took me to get tested, and I gather my doctors went through a series of
diagnoses. Autism was the "real" one, but the doctors went with aphasia because my father's health insurance would pay for speech therapy if I had that as a diagnoses.
But the treatment wasn't all that successful, so they decided I needed to be institutionalized: this was in the late 1960's, when being put away for life was still a way of treating mental patients. I have the documentation still, showing my intake date and all. By then, they were back to autistic, I believe.
My mother just didn't like the idea of having to spend the money to put me away, so she enrolled me in pre-school.
I was making sentences within a week. Mom found it so "cute" that all it was was that "no one was talking to me, so I didn't understand the need to talk back". (My mother probably had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or so a counselor speculated after much work with me in my 30's. The drain on the family budget pushed her to find a new way of dealing with me, and I was spared being raised by a mental institution.)
But I hadn't been talking much, if at all, for years. Words, and the actions needed to make words, would now be always a struggle for me.
I have a clear recollection of my first grade teacher saying to me that "in my 26 years of teaching, I've never had a student as dumb as you." She said it across the whole room, so everyone heard.
I would have been about six years old at the time, I was failing first grade, and I had been using sentences for less than a year and a half. Repeatedly during my K-12 years, I was forced to accept that I'm just not that smart. I had to go to summer school. I had years of speech therapy. I was nearly placed in the classes for the mentally disabled kids (oddly, that was most seriously considered because it would get me away from other students who were bullying me). My teachers, especially the Reading / Writing ones, despaired of my spelling and grammar. I was made to take Home Economics and Shop because I clearly wasn't going to college. I even was made to trade those classes for the sciences classes I wanted to take. (My math scores were seen as a fluke, and a girl child can't do math based careers: ah, the sexism in 1970's little city America.)
Twenty four years, and a few months, after my first grade teacher bewailed my performance, I graduated with my PhD in Rhetoric from an English department.
Sometimes, rhetoric backfires. All those messages should have kept me in my place. All the craziness at home should have broken me. The goal was to keep me in the category my teachers and family had already put me in. I was the poor idiot, the unwanted child. Nobody likes to have their expectations disrupted, and me being mentally imcapable had become an expectation.
My story isn't unique: the story of the person overcoming other people's negative expectations has become a trope. We see the failure of bullying put-downs--of negative rhetoric--as a success of the human spirit. And certainly, it is such a success. We are reminded that we can be more than the words that shape our culture and our lives.
But wait a minute, what does this mean for rhetoric itself? The rhetoric techniques seem to have backfired. When we hear negative rhetoric--from political campaigns to cable news to interpersonal communications--we think about how it does, or does not, effect us. Well and good.
But we also need to recognize that the rhetoric itself just failed, not just that we succeeded.
What if all those negative messages weren't ones that lead to failure, but we just assume they will because they seem to us that they should? What if some sorts of repeated negative rhetoric actually encourage people instead?
Did my first grade teacher actually plant the idea that I needed to be smarter, so I worked to become smarter? Did she do me a favor, as well as abuse me, without even knowing it?
We need to be less self-centered when we study rhetoric. By only seeing its failure in the context of our successful self-affirmation, we miss a chance to understand all of what happened.
To understand why bullies fail to break our spirits, we need to assess the rhetoric used. We need to look for patterns of similar rhetorical use, and we need to see if that specific sort of negative rhetoric results in a statistically significant pattern of long-term positive outcomes.
We need to not only celebrate the human spirit that rejects the bully's words, but to learn if some sorts of a bully's put downs are, in actually, a malicious way of lifting someone up.
Edit on June 30. Oh, hey, thanks to a Forbes article, I found a study that's sort of relevant. Not surprising, someone did do a study of how positive rhetoric improved children's performance while simultaneously undermining the opposing group. Here's the link http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22496180 Now, I'm still looking for a study that explores when negative messaging creates positive outcomes, especially over the long haul.
But the treatment wasn't all that successful, so they decided I needed to be institutionalized: this was in the late 1960's, when being put away for life was still a way of treating mental patients. I have the documentation still, showing my intake date and all. By then, they were back to autistic, I believe.
My mother just didn't like the idea of having to spend the money to put me away, so she enrolled me in pre-school.
I was making sentences within a week. Mom found it so "cute" that all it was was that "no one was talking to me, so I didn't understand the need to talk back". (My mother probably had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or so a counselor speculated after much work with me in my 30's. The drain on the family budget pushed her to find a new way of dealing with me, and I was spared being raised by a mental institution.)
But I hadn't been talking much, if at all, for years. Words, and the actions needed to make words, would now be always a struggle for me.
I have a clear recollection of my first grade teacher saying to me that "in my 26 years of teaching, I've never had a student as dumb as you." She said it across the whole room, so everyone heard.
I would have been about six years old at the time, I was failing first grade, and I had been using sentences for less than a year and a half. Repeatedly during my K-12 years, I was forced to accept that I'm just not that smart. I had to go to summer school. I had years of speech therapy. I was nearly placed in the classes for the mentally disabled kids (oddly, that was most seriously considered because it would get me away from other students who were bullying me). My teachers, especially the Reading / Writing ones, despaired of my spelling and grammar. I was made to take Home Economics and Shop because I clearly wasn't going to college. I even was made to trade those classes for the sciences classes I wanted to take. (My math scores were seen as a fluke, and a girl child can't do math based careers: ah, the sexism in 1970's little city America.)
Twenty four years, and a few months, after my first grade teacher bewailed my performance, I graduated with my PhD in Rhetoric from an English department.
Sometimes, rhetoric backfires. All those messages should have kept me in my place. All the craziness at home should have broken me. The goal was to keep me in the category my teachers and family had already put me in. I was the poor idiot, the unwanted child. Nobody likes to have their expectations disrupted, and me being mentally imcapable had become an expectation.
My story isn't unique: the story of the person overcoming other people's negative expectations has become a trope. We see the failure of bullying put-downs--of negative rhetoric--as a success of the human spirit. And certainly, it is such a success. We are reminded that we can be more than the words that shape our culture and our lives.
But wait a minute, what does this mean for rhetoric itself? The rhetoric techniques seem to have backfired. When we hear negative rhetoric--from political campaigns to cable news to interpersonal communications--we think about how it does, or does not, effect us. Well and good.
But we also need to recognize that the rhetoric itself just failed, not just that we succeeded.
What if all those negative messages weren't ones that lead to failure, but we just assume they will because they seem to us that they should? What if some sorts of repeated negative rhetoric actually encourage people instead?
Did my first grade teacher actually plant the idea that I needed to be smarter, so I worked to become smarter? Did she do me a favor, as well as abuse me, without even knowing it?
We need to be less self-centered when we study rhetoric. By only seeing its failure in the context of our successful self-affirmation, we miss a chance to understand all of what happened.
To understand why bullies fail to break our spirits, we need to assess the rhetoric used. We need to look for patterns of similar rhetorical use, and we need to see if that specific sort of negative rhetoric results in a statistically significant pattern of long-term positive outcomes.
We need to not only celebrate the human spirit that rejects the bully's words, but to learn if some sorts of a bully's put downs are, in actually, a malicious way of lifting someone up.
Edit on June 30. Oh, hey, thanks to a Forbes article, I found a study that's sort of relevant. Not surprising, someone did do a study of how positive rhetoric improved children's performance while simultaneously undermining the opposing group. Here's the link http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22496180 Now, I'm still looking for a study that explores when negative messaging creates positive outcomes, especially over the long haul.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Structures of ideas: Lists as things
I listened to a spiel the other day: the speaker was clearly intelligent, pleasant, trustworthy. But her speech had no idea, despite being 20 minutes of quotes, grouped into three sets and explained one by one.
The speech had a theme: all those quotes were about peace. But the structure of the speech was a list: three big sections, with lists of items inside each section. But giving and explaining quotes in a list, even one with subtopics, doesn't an idea make.
Ideas aren't lists, and lists aren't ideas.
Ideas, now that's hard to define. I know what they aren't: they aren't a collection of things, though they can be about the why those items are collected together in a particular way. I know that ideas aren't merely similarities and differences, though they can be about why those similarities and differences exist. I know that ideas aren't descriptions, though they can be about what matters in picking what to describe.
Ideas are verbs, not nouns. Ideas are the why and the how of life, not the things of life.
Things don't persuade; they just are. To be able to persuade, have an idea.
What's an idea? I'm still not sure, not really. But it's not a thing, I can say that much.
The speech had a theme: all those quotes were about peace. But the structure of the speech was a list: three big sections, with lists of items inside each section. But giving and explaining quotes in a list, even one with subtopics, doesn't an idea make.
Ideas aren't lists, and lists aren't ideas.
Ideas, now that's hard to define. I know what they aren't: they aren't a collection of things, though they can be about the why those items are collected together in a particular way. I know that ideas aren't merely similarities and differences, though they can be about why those similarities and differences exist. I know that ideas aren't descriptions, though they can be about what matters in picking what to describe.
Ideas are verbs, not nouns. Ideas are the why and the how of life, not the things of life.
Things don't persuade; they just are. To be able to persuade, have an idea.
What's an idea? I'm still not sure, not really. But it's not a thing, I can say that much.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Rhetoric's Baggage
There's a trunk and two suitcases.
A black and maroon travel sticker, "Persuasion," is stuck on that trunk, and it isn't coming off. It can't, it belongs there. The problem is that that sticker means "bad" or "evil", when actually, it's morally neutral. I'll probably have to chat about that off and on for the rest of my life.
I'm stuck with that trunk. It's what rhetoric is.
It's those two suitcases. One was a gift from English Departments, trying to upgrade the teaching of writing, also known as Composition. Composition is a fine thing, but it only partially overlaps rhetoric. It's like going camping in late spring and being handed lots and lots of swimsuits. Ok, maybe I'll need one or two, but twenty? And to say that I really don't need the rest of my clothes because I'll be swimming all the time in the hot weather? In springtime? Not everyone lives in Hiawai'i (and anyhow, they do get snow in the mountains). I can hand that suitcase of extra swimsuits right back to its owner, with my thanks for the one or two I need.
The other suitcase is a far older gift, possibly old enough to break my metaphor. Rhetoric has been tied to politics at least since Plato's Gorgias, and certainly politicians use rhetoric. But not all rhetoric is political and not all political work requires rhetoric (despite the necessity of fundraising and vote-raising). So sometimes, I might want to dig something out of that suitcase, and it's a huge suitcase. But really, rhetoric isn't limited to politics. So why dig through a suitcase that's already had lots of other people digging through it? We can had it off to the political science people, and rhetoricians interested in politics, and not need it.
But rhetoric has to keep that trunk. Persuasion follows patterns; it shows up just about everywhere; it need not be serious. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Rhetoric is the art of herding cats.
A black and maroon travel sticker, "Persuasion," is stuck on that trunk, and it isn't coming off. It can't, it belongs there. The problem is that that sticker means "bad" or "evil", when actually, it's morally neutral. I'll probably have to chat about that off and on for the rest of my life.
I'm stuck with that trunk. It's what rhetoric is.
It's those two suitcases. One was a gift from English Departments, trying to upgrade the teaching of writing, also known as Composition. Composition is a fine thing, but it only partially overlaps rhetoric. It's like going camping in late spring and being handed lots and lots of swimsuits. Ok, maybe I'll need one or two, but twenty? And to say that I really don't need the rest of my clothes because I'll be swimming all the time in the hot weather? In springtime? Not everyone lives in Hiawai'i (and anyhow, they do get snow in the mountains). I can hand that suitcase of extra swimsuits right back to its owner, with my thanks for the one or two I need.
The other suitcase is a far older gift, possibly old enough to break my metaphor. Rhetoric has been tied to politics at least since Plato's Gorgias, and certainly politicians use rhetoric. But not all rhetoric is political and not all political work requires rhetoric (despite the necessity of fundraising and vote-raising). So sometimes, I might want to dig something out of that suitcase, and it's a huge suitcase. But really, rhetoric isn't limited to politics. So why dig through a suitcase that's already had lots of other people digging through it? We can had it off to the political science people, and rhetoricians interested in politics, and not need it.
But rhetoric has to keep that trunk. Persuasion follows patterns; it shows up just about everywhere; it need not be serious. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Rhetoric is the art of herding cats.
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