Social Media and Communication: Creating a Policy, Part 1

When something new happens to you two times in the same week, you take notice; when it happens three times, as it had to me last week, you think you're experiencing a trend. Within days of each other, three of my clients talked to me about their new social media policy to regulate staff usage of social media platforms not only at work but after hours as well if staff choose to identify themselves as employees of the company. 


Two points make this phenomenon important:

• The three clients are in entirely different industries (education, investment banking, and transportation). Anecdotal as this data may seem, I take it to mean that the concern is pervasive.
• All three have an email policy, as do most organizations, but felt compelled to create a social media policy because message boards, blogs, and other community e-communication tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are far different from email.

Companies will have a hard time completely forbidding the use social media because they themselves are deeply invested in a social media presence of their own, and they will likely encourage their staff to contribute to these platforms. 


Over the next several posts of Words on the Line, I will share best practices for those who are creating a social media policy of their own or modifying the one they already have.

My Top 100 Movies

I noticed that two of the top ten films on the American Film Institute's Top 100 Movies List would not make my own top 100. I also find myself recommending movies to others during informal conversations about sources of entertainment. So I decided to list my own Top 100 movies in chronological, not preferential, order. I probably left out some great pics, which would push out some of the films listed, but here's a first draft.

You may be thinking, “What does this list have to do with writing?” Let me mention just two strong reasons to share my favorite flicks. First, as storytellers or proposal writers, poets or technical communicators, we use metaphors to crystallize our points—and we often borrow from the movies. In fact, I notice that my own teaching points are best understood my learners when I refer to popular culture, the most popular being music and movies. The movies that made this list are all rich in metaphor and allusions. Second, the movies listed here share a common bond: outstanding writing, even the few documentaries that appear here, so just listening to these films offers great insights into quality writing.

Don’t take my word: See these movies, or see them again, with these thoughts in mind.

MY TOP 100 MOVIES

      1.      The Wizard of Oz (American, 1939)

      2.      The Grapes of Wrath (American, 1940)

      3.      Casablanca (American, 1942)

      4.      The Ox-Bow Incident (American, 1943)

      5.      The Best Years of Our Lives (American, 1946)

      6.      Hamlet (British, 1948)

      7.      All the King’s Men (American, 1949)

      8.      All About Eve (American, 1950)

      9.      An American in Paris (American, 1951)

  10.      A Streetcar Named Desire (American, 1951)

  11.      Singin’ in the Rain (American, 1952)

  12.      High Noon (American, 1952)

  13.      Ikiru (Japanese, 1952)

  14.      On the Waterfront (American, 1954)

  15.      A Star is Born (American1954)

  16.      East of Eden (American, 1955)

  17.      Twelve Angry Men (American, 1957)

  18.      Inherit the Wind (American, 1960)

  19.      The Magnificent Seven (American, 1960)

  20.      Judgment at Nuremberg (American, 1961)

  21.      A Raisin in the Sun (American, 1961)

  22.      The Guns of Navarone (British, 1961)

  23.      Requiem for a Heavyweight (American, 1962)

  24.      The Miracle Worker (American, 1962)

  25.      Lawrence of Arabia (British, 1962)

  26.      America, America (American, 1963)

  27.      The Great Escape (American, 1963)

  28.      The Sound of Music (American, 1965)

  29.      Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (American, 1966)

  30.      Persona (Swedish, 1966)

  31.      The Graduate (American, 1967)

  32.      Bonnie and Clyde (American, 1967)

  33.      Shame (Swedish, 1968)

  34.      Midnight Cowboy (American, 1969)

  35.      Husbands (American, 1970)

  36.      Patton (American, 1970)

  37.      Death in Venice (British, 1971)

  38.      A Clockwork Orange (British, 1971)

  39.      Cries and Whispers (Swedish, 1972)

  40.      The Godfather (American, 1972)

  41.      Last Tango in Paris (Italian, 1972)

  42.      Scenes from a Marriage (Swedish, 1973)

  43.      Love and Anarchy (Italian, 1973)

  44.      The Conversation (American, 1974)

  45.      Lacombe, Lucien (French, 1974)

  46.      The Godfather, Part II (American, 1974)

  47.      Chinatown (American, 1974)

  48.      Seven Beauties (Italian, 1975)

  49.      One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (American, 1975)

  50.      Taxi Driver (American, 1976)

  51.      Providence (French, 1977)

  52.      Julia (American, 1977)

  53.      A Special Day (Italian, 1977)

  54.      The Deer Hunter (American, 1978)

  55.      Autumn Sonata (Swedish, 1978)

  56.      Apocalypse Now (American, 1979)

  57.      Being There (American, 1979)

  58.      Raging Bull (American, 1980)

  59.      Breaker Morant (Australian, 1980)

  60.      The Elephant Man (British, 1980)

  61.      Pixote (Brazilian, 1981)

  62.      Gallipoli (Australian, 1981)

  63.      Gandhi (British, 1982)

  64.      Tender Mercies (American, 1983)

  65.      El Norte (British, 1983)

  66.      Paris, Texas (German, 1984)

  67.      Amadeus (American, 1984)

  68.      The Trip to Bountiful (American, 1985)

  69.      Shoah (French, 1985)

  70.      Hannah and Her Sisters (American, 1986)

  71.      Cinema Paradiso (Italian, 1988)

  72.      The Civil War (American, 1990)

  73.      Barton Fink (American, 1991)

  74.      32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (French, 1993)

  75.      Schindler’s List (American, 1993)

  76.      Household Saints (American, 1993)

  77.      The Shawshank Redemption (American, 1994)

  78.      Shine (Australian, 1996)

  79.      Ponette (French, 1996)

  80.      Affliction (1997)

  81.      Shakespeare in Love (British, 1998)

  82.      Central Station (Brazilian, 1998)

  83.      Run Lola Run (German, 1998)

  84.      Saving Private Ryan (American, 1998)

  85.      Memento (American 2000)

  86.      Calle 54 (Spanish, 2000)

  87.      The Hours (British, 2002)

  88.      American Splendor (American, 2003)

  89.      The Sea Inside (Spanish, 2004)

  90.      The Motorcycle Diaries (Argentinean, 2004)

  91.      Tsotsi (South African, 2005)

  92.      Paradise Now (Palestinian, 2005)

  93.      The Lives of Others (German, 2006)

  94.      The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (French, 2007)

  95.      Synecdoche, New York (American, 2008)

  96.      The Hurt Locker (American, 2008)

  97.      Doubt (American, 2008)

  98.      Poetry (South Korea, 2010)

  99.      Midnight in Paris (American, 2011)

100.      Carnage (French, 2011)

Industrial Revolution = Writing Revolution

3D Printer

The machine in the picture does not look like much, but it will transform our lives. It is a 3D printer, which can manufacture three-dimensional objects based on specifications a designer provides by a digital file. On the agenda for production are clothing, furniture, cars, and even planes. The advent of 3D printing has led us to "The Third Industrial Revolution," a time when we will have greater access to the manufacturing process, bypassing costly tooling charges and long waits for products. As a result, we will reap the benefits of greater choice and become manufacturers ourselves, just like we have become high-quality personal print shops. 


This revolution will affect writing as profoundly as the smartphone. We will learn more digital code to communicate in formulas that will process what we want; in short, more than ever we will think like the machine. What we now consider to be cryptic, acronym-laden style will become the parlance of every industry. How much writing will change nobody can predict. But it's coming. Skeptics can review standard documents from the business world a quarter-century ago, around the time most of us started emailing,  to how it has evolved today. Yes, the third industrial revolution means the writing revolution.

That's a Human with an Issue on the Other End

In one of my recent writing classes, by a nine to one margin—a landslide in any election—participants  agreed that the e-world has made communication more challenging than ever. The majority cited these reasons for their beliefs:

• They are deluged by more than a hundred emails a day with hardly the time to respond to them properly.
• They are required to be available 24/7 to clients and managers through their smartphones.
• They now struggle over the best means of communication to reach their reader.
• They become less rigorous in assessing the validity and reliability of information they instantaneously access online.

To deepen the problem, representing the 10 percent of dissenters, a young financial analyst in the class said, "Are you all kidding? Communication is easier than ever! I would never read a newspaper or magazine if it weren't for the Internet, and I could instant message my boss or my wife in New York from forty thousand feet over Beijing."


Both sides have great points. Some of the people in that class were not even born in the interoffice envelope days, when a writer had to photocopy, fold, and stuff a copy of a memo for each person on the distribution list. In those days, I sometimes had to perform this tedious task for up to a hundred staff. Writing would take 10 minutes and distribution would take 60 minutes. I'm also reminded of a young person who recently asked me, "What's carbon paper?" For sure, the minority has a good argument about the convenience of instant and paperless communication. No doubt, we will not be giving up our handheld devices anytime soon.


But what about our humanity? Have we sacrificed our own social needs and our empathy for others as we text, chat, and flame away? And what of our ability to focus on the task at hand? Does the endless tide of messages flooding our many inboxes diminish our capacity to understand the impact of a given problem, its underlying causes, and the options for remedying it?


Two articles in The Atlantic have clear opinions about these issues. In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (July/August 2008), Nicholas G. Carr argues that indeed our amazing online searching capabilities has eroded our attention span. In an interesting sequel to that article, "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" (May 2012), Stephen Marche writes that social networking is far from social and, in fact, a contributor to our isolation unto illness— and death. Judge for yourself. Both articles are reading for our communication times.

Those Darn Articles, Part 3: It Depends

Carefully read this dialogue for the uses of the definite article (the) and indefinite article (a, an). All uses are correct.


(MOE and ZOE are customers sitting in a diner. JOE, the waiter, stands beside them.)
JOE: Would you like coffee?
MOE: Is the coffee here good?
ZOE: It's great. I'll have coffee.
MOE: I'll have a coffee too. I haven't had coffee in a while.
ZOE: Come to think of it, the last time I had a coffee was right here.  
JOE: Two coffees. Great.


Moe's question with the coffee is easy enough to understand, because he is talking about the specific coffee of the restaurant. But notice how Zoe later says, "I'll have coffee," and Moe says, "I'll have a coffee." Then Moe says, "I haven't had coffee" and Zoe says, "the last time I had a coffee." Downright confusing, eh? 


In their last lines, Zoe and Moe could have added a where they deleted it and deleted a where they said it. This is where the parlance of English comes into play. You have to have a feel for the language.

Finding Inspiration, Part 4: The Show

We capped the magical evening of March 22 with a Broadway show, Porgy and Bess, perhaps my best theatrical experience ever but definitely the most surprising. The show was receiving negative publicity because the 1935 Gershwin-Heyward opera was cut by roughly an hour. Purists disapproved of any tinkering with America's best known opera, and as a lover of the music from Porgy and Bess, I had my own reservations about seeing a show that would cut any music from the original.

Audra McDonald, Bess in Porgy and Bess,
after her performance on March 22

Norm Lewis, Porgy in Porgy and Bess, at the Richard Rodgers Theater 

What I saw that night at the Richard Rodgers Theater was awe-inspiring. The acting and singing talent was incredible. After seeing the performance, we stayed to congratulate the performers, who were to the last one gracious, humble, and good-humored. The photos above show my wife with the amazing Audra McDonald (Bess) and Norm Lewis (Porgy). 

There's nothing like a great dramatic experience to inspire writing. When I got home, I visited the play's official website to learn more about the history of show and Catfish Row, South Carolina, where the musical takes place. There I found a place to write my own review of the show, which appears below:

America's opera has become America's musical. From the first note to the last, from the supporting cast to the leads, this show dazzles with an emotional intensity that I have not found in a half-century of going to the theater.

I want to mention all the performers' names, not only for their transcendent voices but for their electrifying dancing and magnetic acting as well.

Early in the two-and-a-half hour play, Nikki Renee Daniels as Clara sings "Summertime" and is joined by Joshua Henry as Jake. At that moment, I thought can this show get any more magical? But when Bryonha Marie Parham as Serena breaks my heart singing "My Man's Gone Now," I felt that if I had walked out then I would have gotten enough for the price of admission. But things were just warming up. Audra McDonald as Bess and Norm Lewis as Porgy are great together and on their own, Ms. McDonald creates magic in "I Wants You Porgy," seizing the raw essence of her character in her closing stanza like no other performance I've seen on stage. Mr. Lewis shines in "I Got Plenty of Nothing." David Alan Grier devilishly reinvents Sportin' Life, hitting the high notes--both literally and figuratively--in "It Ain't Necessarily So" and "There's a Boat Leaving Soon for New York." Philip Boykin commands the stage as Crown, overwhelming everyone around him, making his power over Bess apparent from the start, climaxing in his reappearance on stage in Act Two. I left this play emotionally drained but feeling better for it.

Without question, for its drama, singing, and orchestration, Porgy and Bess is the work of this century, and a stunning acknowledgment of the Porgy and Bess of the last century. Great work, director Diane Paulus, book adapter Suzan-Lori Parks, and music adapter Diedre Murray. May both works live harmoniously to the next century.

Finding Inspiration, Part 3: The Square

Mgarr Church and Square, Mgarr, Malta

When I think of a village square, I think of the many in the tiny nation of Malta. Those  squares usually appear in the village center and are built around enormous churches surrounded by boutiques, bakeries, grocers, cafes, bars, and restaurants. They tend to come alive in the evening after the ghost town atmosphere created by the brutal, blinding daytime sun gives way to the cooling sea breezes of evening, when dozens of people sit on stoops or lean over bar stools sipping a Cisk lager or munching on a pastizzi.

Times Square, New York City

That's not the kind of square I was in on March 22, when my wife and I walked around Times Square after eating dinner at Carmine's and before seeing Porgy and Bess on Broadway. Times Square literally is brighter at night than it is on the most radiant noontime. Blazing  billboards and glittering neon-lit storefronts flash endlessly for teeming crowds larger that the entire Maltese population. The atmosphere is electric. If Atahualpa, king of the sixteenth century Inca Empire, were to see the evening become light on the streets of New York, he would have his subjects worship on the ground of this City of Fire. In fact, half a millennium after the Incas faded, I recall from my childhood the main Times Square feature being the Marlboro cigarette billboard with smoke circle billowing from a cowboy's mouth. Not much more. So I remain dazzled anytime I walk around Times Square.


True, nothing about New York City is routine, but even in Malta the locals know how to break the routine by going someplace out of the ordinary on the 122-square-mile island. I'm reminded of a village square regular who one evening was sitting on the church balustrade, a mere 50 feet across the street from his favorite chair in the local bar. I asked him why he wasn't in his usual spot. "To get a different point of view," he answered. I laughed, but took his answer as a lesson that you don't have to go far to break routine.  Find inspiration not only in breaking the routine but in rediscovering it.


[Next post in this series: The Show.]

Finding Inspiration, Part 2: The Supper

I'm a big fan of ethnic restaurants. With the exception of Soul and Cajun, which, I suppose, is also international food, I prefer off-the-US-border cuisine. The restaurants I've most enjoyed in New York and New Jersey, as well as in my travels as a communication consultant, have called themselves Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Jamaican, Mexican, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Chilean, Brazilian, Colombian, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Burmese, Malaysian, Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Maltese, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Greek, Turkish, Egyptian, Lebanese, Yemeni, Syrian, and Ethiopian. Of these, the non-European foods most capture my fancy, maybe because I was raised with so much Italian food and had had my fill of it by the time I moved from my parents' house at age 21.

On March 22, with theater tickets in hand and two hours to kill, my wife and I were debating where to eat. “Why not Pomaire (Chilean), Delta Grill (Cajun), or Havana Central (Cuban)?” I asked, hoping she'd approve of one of these restaurants we've eaten in several times. But my wife seemed set on Carmine's, a family-style Italian restaurant frequented by tourists. I grudgingly conceded, not expecting much. 

When I'm not in a place that I want to be, I have at least two choices: complain about being there and drag everyone else down with me, or focus on hanging out with one person whose conversation will distract me from my environment. My only choice that evening was my wife, and I am glad she was it. I had a speaking engagement planned in nine days at an attorneys' retreat for Strasburger & Price. One of the talking points for my presentation was going to be how to free oneself from the self-imposed bondage of smartphones. As practice for that event--after all, I should practice what I preach--I decided not to look at my Droid for the entire supper and listen to whatever my wife wanted to talk about. 

I listened for 90 minutes in Carmine's as she discussed a broad range of topics: her previous meals in this restaurant during theater trips into the city with teacher friends, the particular challenges she faces in teaching her sixth grade students, interesting books that she's read on her Kindle, her take on problems and successes that some of our family and friends are experiencing, and the great pleasure she has been taking in seeing how our daughters' lives are evolving. Looking at her across the table from me, I felt so glad that we have stuck it out together for 36 years. I thought about how awful it would be for anyone else to know me as well as she does. I thought about how lucky I am the she does know me as well as she does and still sticks around. When the bill arrived, I realized two accomplishments: I hadn't bored myself with my own talking and I hadn't looked at my smartphone once. Way to go, Phil!  

From a day in which little was planned, I felt a lot of cool things were already happening. And the day was only half over. Writers need to have planned activities for sure, one of them being planning to write every day, weekends included. But writers should also plan for unplanned times, times in which they get a second take on the familiar--their homes, their family, their daily walks, their situation, their condition. For "creative" writers, a richness of detail may emerge; for business writers, a fresh  perspective on a pressing issue may arise.

By the way, we ordered a dish of mixed seafood with penne, which turned out to be excellent, as was the Montepulciano and tartuffo.


[Next post in this series: The Square.]

Finding Inspiration, Part 1: The Walk

[This post is the first of a four-part series.]


Days like Thursday, March 22, 2012, on the surface are sheer fun, but in retrospect become far more. For this reason, I take my notebook with me wherever I go, and I recommend that other creative people do the same, whether they are writers, composers, painters, sculptors, actors, designers, whatever. This is a way to capture ideas that we can tap into later. 


If you want the tip for recognizing and capturing creative moments when they come, you just missed it. Reread and stop here if that's all you wanted. If you want to know where the possibilities for finding inspiration lie for me personally, then read on. I list them, of course, not only to recall at a future time where my own creative ideas arise, but to suggest how you might want to quickly record your own.


Under sunny skies, temperatures in the low seventies (22 Celsius), and a refreshing breeze, it was a perfect day for long uptown walk through New York City after a late morning appointment with a client, so I decided to walk five miles from the Front and John Streets near the South Street Seaport to 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue, with heaps of planned pit stops in between, including Au Bon Pain on Broadway, where I had the chance to take notes about my meeting while eating lunch; J&R Records on Park Row, where I discovered great bargains on compilation albums by my favorite jazz artists; Sarah & Serafina's Shop at 688 Broadway, where I found just the porkpie hat I was looking for and met Serafina, the kindly proprietress from Peru; Shakespeare and Company, a block up on Broadway, New York University Bookstore, a couple doors farther uptown, and Strand Books, a half-mile farther north, where I previewed valuable reading material and enjoyed searching for desired book titles; and then a mile west across town to Smalls Jazz Club in West Greenwich Village, where I caught a bit of the excellent afternoon jam session before running out of time and realizing that my wife would be waiting for me uptown long before I got there if I continued walking. (Wow, a 219-word sentence!) I aborted the five-mile walk, settled for three-and-a-half, and took the final two by the Number 1 train, followed by a quarter-mile stroll to the parking garage where my wife was waiting for me. It's a good thing she came into New York by car because I was carrying a lot more when the walk had ended, so I packed my stuff into the car and we had the evening ahead of us. 


[Next post: The Supper.]

Letting Serendipity Happen

Albert Einstein's residence in Princeton, NJ, 
from 1933 to 1955 (photo by Philip Vassallo).

In my first book on writing, The Art of On-the-Job Writing, I urge readers to let serendipity happen when drafting. In other words, just put one letter down after another until you make a word, then one word after another until you make a sentence, without concern for quality. In the book, I refer to a Ray Bradbury quote: "Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down." If struggling writers took such advice, they would be far more productive. 


The problem many workplace writers face when drafting is one of self-confidence. Such folks fall into three categories:

• Grim Grammarians - These people are so aware of inflexible grammatical rules and corporate communication standards that they dare not write anything they consider "wrong," resulting in limited output.
• Nervous Novices - These writers, as newcomers to the workplace or to a company, have no reliable standards to follow, so they feel lumps in their throat, knots in their stomach, and hives on their fingers when they need to write to a large internal or external audience, or even to their teammates or managers. 
• Linguistic Lowbrows - These writers are keenly aware of their weaknesses in sentence structure and word usage; consequently, they dread being exposed and embarrassed by their substandard use of language, regardless of their exceptional subject-matter expertise.

Here I want to use a recent experience as a metaphor for letting serendipity happen. Sunday, March 11, was an unseasonably warm day, so I decided to stop working and enjoy the sun. My wife and I drove 25 miles south to Princeton for an aimless, leisurely walk on Nassau Street. On the way to my usual stop at Labyrinth Books, one of the best bookstores in New Jersey, I noticed an interesting exhibit at the Historical Society of Princeton, Einstein at Home, which details Albert Einstein's two-decade residence in Princeton. Seeing that the house in which he lived (pictured) was only a short walk from Nassau Street, we decided to walk to it. On the way there, we noticed a lot of cars pulling into Princeton Theological Seminary,  so we decided to follow the crowd into Miller Chapel on the Seminary grounds. A concert featuring four local high school-aged choirs had just begun. One particular performance of an uplifting South African medley by the Princeton Girlchoir inspired a standing ovation from the 300 attendees. We then walked through the Princeton University campus, past the architecturally magnificent Alexander Hall, Nassau Hall,  Princeton Chapel, and Firestone Library. On the way to the car for the return drive home, we stopped at Labyrinth Books, where I discovered an interesting book related to my business, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play by Jennifer DeVere Brody, which I put on my reading list. 


What a perfect way to spend four hours. An otherwise regular Sunday workday became an unplanned drive to Princeton full of unexpected surprises, including a fine museum exhibit, a free choral concert, a discovery of a useful book, and an invigorating walk. Most important, I enjoyed quality time with my wife. All of this just by letting serendipity happen. Not bad for a guy who nearly always remains a slave to his busy schedule!


Writers can easily do the same thing by letting their brain connect to their fingers, typing one word after another until something of value comes out. Don't let the rules of writing stop you. My friend, there are no rules.