Malibu morning picture of the day - Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Dear Family, Friends, and Gentle Readers,

It's midweek and here is your picture.

Clear blue today, not 100% cloudless, but pretty close.

I'm reading a book called Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction, by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. It's a DIY version of a workshop that they run. If you are a writer or rhetorician of any kind (fiction, nonfiction, speeches, web copy), I highly recommend it. There are a series of exercises that if you do them in earnest you will expose your cultural biases which, once you are aware of them, you can start to correct in your writing.

They speak of the "unmarked state" which is taken from the field of linguistics and the concept of "markedness." In their context, the unmarked state "denotes the state of possessing only those characteristics that are literally not remarkable. A character in the unmarked state has a certain transparency; he allows readers to read the action of the story without coloring it with his particularity."

This is of particular importance in my day-to-day work of reviewing and editing expository text that is meant to motivate people to attend or give money to the school that my employer happens to be. The "character" in this kind of writing is the actual reader. The point of the text is to mirror the internal monologue that person may be having on this topic. If we are successful in our messaging, we will transfer the thought we want them to have into that person's consciousness, and hopefully they will internalize it enough to take the required action that we desire.

As I write this, it looks terribly like some kind of mind-control or propagandist technique. But I would say, that the place where I start, the unmarked person to whom my messages go, is one who is free to hear, evaluate, and then discard or accept whatever message I attempt to convey. If we happen to nab a few unthinking, weak-minded, uncritical, yes men along the way, that's OK. We'll make them better.

When I used to work for H&R Block several years ago, I had a Filipino couple that regularly came to me to prep their taxes. They were both health care workers at the same hospital (yeah, yeah, I hear your jokes about this in your internal monologues...). They were citizens, but immigrants who had come many years previous. Some years they brought their teenage daughter along (I don't know why), who was an all-black-clad Goth grrl, she looked totally bored, which I'm sure she was because I had nothing to ask her, but she was obedient enough that she actually came along and sat quietly texting. They were the classic immigrant-2nd Generation Asian American family. The couple both also spoke with very heavy Filipino accents. The husband referred one of his fellow Filipino coworkers to me to have his taxes done. The coworker, said the husband described me as "the guy who speaks with a very heavy American accent."

This was an epiphany moment for me. I realized "Filipino English" is a language unto itself with it's own syntactic regularities and standard pronunciations. And I, who thought I was an expert in English language usage, turned out to be a fairly poor practitioner in one of it's many versions (probably most). I moved from the unmarked state (to me) to the marked state with just that one sentence. Now, I took heart in the fact the distinction that I feel into was rather precise. I was not "the American guy" (although I could have been described as "a banana" and just not told so), but I made it into his default "guy" state (brown-skinned, short, Asiatic male), but was "marked" by the way I spoke.

So, the thought I would leave with you is, when you are trying to communicate with someone else, is your unmarked state measured by who you are, or by the person to whom you're trying to convince of something. If you're the same default, great. If you're not, then you might want to rethink what words you use.

May all your verbal exchanges today be good ones.

Love,
Pops