Shirley Brice Heath

In recent months, I published a book about adolescents who let me hang out with them in the waning years of the first decade of this century.  For most of these teens, I had done the same thing with their parents two decades earlier and their grandparents more than three decades ago.  The teens of the 21^st century were a special case. They laughed at the idea that I was actually writing a book!  They argued that I should “just blog” or maybe “tweet,” since “nobody reads books.”

In spite of today’s teens’ discouraging words about books, I did publish Words at Work and Play:  Three Decades in Family and Community Life (2012).  As I explained to the young 21^st century pioneers, they would very soon be history, and history would, for at least the next few decades, need to be recorded in writing – particularly in books. Within the next decade, what they as today’s teens were doing as they read, wrote, watched, and performed with IT (internet technology) would be outdated. Facebook would evolve or even dwindle as MySpace had done, and new social networking means would emerge with more efficient and effective ways of connecting people, places, actions, and ideas on the internet.  Teens today read, watch, talk, and experiment or perform when they want to know or do something.  Their parents, in contrast, watched, talked, and relished trial and error.

Indeed across just the two generations represented by them and their parents, work and play, along with ways of talking, regarding written sources of information, and expressing ideas to others had changed right in front of their eyes.  Uneasy with being confronted with the speed of change that now makes history, the teens gradually came to relish taking part in the research that went into my book.  They digitally recorded their conversations with friends and sessions when friends worked together to create a film or research games on the internet.  They learned to count parts of speech, tense changes, and hypotheticals in transcripts of their own talk and to compare these numbers with those from similar recordings their parents had made when they were teenagers.  While their parents used past, present, and future tense in their everyday conversations, the teens of today tended to stick with the present tense, making it extend backwards and forwards through vocal emphasis, gesture, and facial expression.  Their parents had lacked the fondness for adverbs that today’s teens found in their talk; when they listened to their own recordings, they heard actually, really, totally over and over. While their parents had occasionally used like to introduce a segment of a narrative, today’s teens found this word in their conversations “like everywhere.”

Immersed in a world of now, they have no need for stating conjecture.  They just “do it, try it, go for it.” They spend relatively little time positing for themselves future selves and laying out steps along a pathway that they want to take in the coming years.

In short, Words at Work and Play eventually managed to work its way into the hearts and minds of the teens who populate the book.  When their parents and grandparents read the book, they find much to celebrate about their own youth and more to lament about today’s teenagers. Yet the elders realize that such has been the pattern of transgenerational assessments for centuries. Harder for them to take is the realization that in past decades responses to economic changes lay largely within the control and conscious choice-making of individuals and families.  Such is not the case today. The global economy exerts pressures that reach into nearly every aspect of life at the local level.  Consumerism, entertainment, and material accumulation have overtaken saving, doing, and knowing.

In the words of one teen, this collection of stories is “too big to be on the internet.”  Conjoined compliment and complaint, this description fits the book well.  The volume’s narrative takes in thirty years of economic changes and ripples in parenting, working, playing, and talking.  Families and communities now figure in the lives of children and young people in ways that only faintly resemble those of a decade ago. Where this kind of demand comes from and where the innovations that may result will take us constitute the essence of Words at Work and Play across three decades of family and community life.

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News Talk: Epilogue

By Colleen Cotter

It is a truism in the news bizz that you have succeeded in writing a “balanced” story if all your sources take issue with and are unhappy with it. I never bought that (nor do others follow the precept). I much preferred it when both (all?) sides of story I had written – about a complex, grey-area, politicized local issue – were satisfied. It meant that I had listened and heard what might have been contradictory, divergent, or didn’t add up and conveyed that both sides had something relevant to say. It also meant that I had succeeded in writing a “balanced” story in the expectations of my peers. I was an “insider” operating within the journalistic world, functioning as my community expected.

The way I have set up this book – focusing on practice more than problematizing the outputs, sometimes essentializing the journalist or over-simplifying the process – will undoubtedly mean I have pleased none of the people all of the time* (but, I would hope, all of the people some of the time). Which is as it should be. My goal is dialogue between journalists and linguists, among linguists, among journalists: to open up discussion, rather than shut it down. Linguists have the tools; journalists have the material; all have the interest. Let the dialogue begin.

* Based on responses from “both sides” over the years, I can predict that some journalists will say I have been too academic and jargonful. Some linguists and anthropologists will say I have not been sufficiently critical. This is a predictable consequence. Indeed, one journalist friend who read a version of chapter 4 said his eyes “glazed over” reading about emic and etic constructs. A short while later, a linguist colleague who read the same chapter emailed to say he loved the emic/etic concept application and wanted more. That “minimal-pair response” reinforced my understanding of what is differently relevant to both communities.

From the Epilogue of News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism

Today, Colleen Cotter, a former news reporter and editor and the author of the forthcoming News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism, dissects the inner workings of the media to define the processes and practices that go into crafting our understanding of the day’s events.

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How to be a language savvy news consumer

By Colleen Cotter

All professions have them: routines of interacting and communicating that become normalized. That become part of the everyday routine of doing business. A pilot’s FAA-mandated cockpit routine revolves around safety talk. A Disneyland employee uses the specified vocabulary of the Magic Kingdom to enhance the visitor experience. A police officer’s question-asking style leads to “just the facts, ma’am” while the therapist’s are more personal.

So it goes with news language. News language isn’t about “correctness” as such, although that’s part of the picture. It can also tell you a lot about what goes on behind the scenes in a newsroom, how reporters and editors think about things, and what the news conventions are.

To become a language-savvy news consumer, you have to think both small (words and patterns) and big (culture and concept). Here are some suggestions:

• look for patterns
Anyone can complain about news coverage, or focus on a hot-button word here or a misplaced modifier there. Another approach is to notice language patterns: sentence length, word choice, transitions, quotation and attribution routines, writing style, the reporting verb (“said”), number of sources, courtesy titles, standard language vs. colloquial usage, capitalization… That’s just for starters.

• know your news values
Get inside the news reporter’s head and think ‘important’ and ‘prominent’ and ‘unusual’ – and how that that might influence the focus or angle of the story, the order of information, placement (first, top, linked), and why stuff gets left out or minimized. Time and space has an impact, too.

• notice bylines
Become familiar with the byline over time and you’ll get a sense of the person’s approach to a topic (whether it’s movies or politics).

• think local
People inside the news biz talk all the time about making news relevant (shoe-leather reporters on behalf of their craft; corner-office senior editors on behalf of the bottom line). Notice how a national story gets illustrated by something happening next door. Or read about your school’s science and art fair. Or find out that someone the town over who you run into at the library or gas station does lots of volunteering. Or learn how crime/industry/innovation/poverty/philanthropy exists on your doorstep. Or that your neighbor’s barn is now a movie set. Or a new museum. Or a fire department training structure.

• ask a reporter
They’ll tell you that “to be sure” in a news story signals the opposing viewpoint – one they don’t believe, or that “centers around” should be “revolves around,” or that not saying something is saying something. (Up to you to fill in the blank.) In short: their life revolves around language and how to use it to communicate with others, responsibly if possible. They might anguish more about a split infinitive than the impact of a label, but then, that’s what you’ll find out if you ask.

• don’t forget anniversaries
A lot of life revolves around our everyday celebrations and commemorations. Notice how “anniversary” stories come up, when they do, what they commemorate, and how they are constructed. In the same vein, look at obituaries. And notice the holiday features. Or the Black Friday shopping stories. Or the “Christmas came early” leads. The values of our culture get reported alongside the news.

• look at leads
If poet William Wordsworth had been a reporter, he would have appreciated the pleasures of writing a lead, of finding worlds within that opening paragraph instead of his “grain of sand.” The news lead has to convey so much in so little. The feature lead has to draw a reader in (shout, whisper, cajole, carol, encourage, order, humor, describe, paint, entice). Not all leads are Wordsworthian (or word-worthy?) but check ‘em out.

• who’s that?
Attributing information to a source seems so obvious, but it’s not done the same way the world over. Even on U.S. soil, some news outlets are more conscientious than others, but overall it’s a practice that makes American journalism unique. Notice “according to” and “said/says” patterns.

Although unnamed sources are frowned upon, you get them, in Associated Press stories, for instance, with qualifiers: “according to people familiar with the selection process,” “according to an official who is not authorized to speak publicly,” “according to a source familiar with X who was not authorized to comment publicly,” “according to a federal official briefed on the investigation.” Savvy news consumers with an understanding of how public institutions work can often figure out who the source is.

• question labels
I loved reading the syndicated Sidney J. Harris column in my hometown paper –The (Appleton, Wis.) Post-Crescent – when I was growing up in the ’70s. It got me thinking about language, its complexity and how perspectives vary. Harris’s examples ran like this: I’m careful, you’re meticulous and he’s fussy; I’m concerned, you’re angry and she’s going postal. It’s part of the evolving dynamic behind labels, which both news consumers and news practitioners construct: Muslim/Islamist, immigrant/ex-pat, feminist/feminazi, SoCool/NoCool (full disclosure: I’m a former Northern Californian and hella proud of that).

• block that metaphor
Or at least pay attention to it. Metaphors aren’t just about figurative language, but about how we conceptualize important issues. Something looking “up” is good. “Downward trends” generally aren’t. Life is a “journey.” A “war” on drugs leads to one set of outcomes and not another. Calling something “World War III” both turns up the volume and evokes something big. Depending on the context it’s sobering or a “tempest in teapot.”

• and last…
Sometimes a quote is just a quote, and a photo just a photo. And a cigar just a cigar.