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''' '' SAYING STUDENTS
SPARKS '' '''
REMEMBER : ON THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY, students's, social and institutional trust are very critical when the future is anything but damn, damn uncertain.
GLOBAL FOUNDER FRAMERS : Do we have a FALLBACK position strategy? Missteps can serve as lessons in why transparency is critical for navigating through uncertainty. Don't try living by imagining an utopian world. Trust, if maintained, could make a huge difference.
IF WE IMAGINE THAT SPEECH has existed for 24 hours, - then according to all modern estimates, writing came along only sometime around 11: 30 p.m.
YOU MAY NOT AGREE, AND THAT'S THE POINT. IF YOU have something to say, then say it. Why do we prize writing skills over the ability to make an oral presentation?
When I have given oral presentations, I reach people more directly than if I'd written everything down for them to read. When people can see your face and hear the melody of your voice, your point gets across more vividly. Language evolved, after all, for face-to-face contact, not rendered as glyphs on paper.
AS TIME GOES BY - I AM EVER MORE perplexed by way we make students learn to write the classic five-paragraph essay but have so much less interest in developing their spoken argument skills.
As much as I love writing, I wonder if there is something arbitrary in the idea that education must focus more on the written than on the spoken word.
I'm not referring to the mano a mano of debating or the thrilling but colloquial speechmaking of preaching. I'm talking about formal oratory.
Back in the day, people would clear their throat and deliver. They weren't winging it. They would plan their remarks, without writing them out word for word. They knew their topic and, from that, they spoke.
Today, people may give a talk but with no expectation that they have their material down and not usually with the idea that they will attempt to convince us of a proposition by making a case. Our sense of spoken presentation is less formal, more personal, looser. But more formal oratory has its uses.
Sheer aesthetics is one of them. For example, to Americans in Gettysburg on Nov-19, 1863, the address they gathered to hear was not delivered by Abraham Lincoln. His speech lasted but two minutes. Former Secretary of State Edward Everett gave a two-hour speech from memory.
This was no talk of the kind we most often encounter these days, but an oration, opening with :
''Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and nature.''
He spoke of the hypocrisy of slavery in a country that was supposed to be free, the crime of the Confederacy's rebellion and the horrors of war.
The question is why oratory of this kind is so much less central to the culture than it once was. The fact that there exists an organization like Toastmasters, which fosters ability in public speaking, only underscores that this skill is no longer a given from schooling and general acculturation.
Imagine a square divided into four smaller ones. The top left square is casual speech; the top right square is formal speech. The bottom left square is casual writing; the formal right square is formal writing. We have, as it were, an empty square in our grid.
Casual speech is how we communicate most of the time. Down from that square, casual writing once upon a time meant the way you may have written letters to friends or the written language of passed notes or dorm message boards.
More recently it is texting and email, in which we use the mechanics of writing to express ourselves in a way that sounds like talking. Formal writing is the five-paragraph essay, and, of course, books and articles.
I wish students had the choice of either writing essays or speaking them. We would train them in the ability to speak carefully and coherently with the same goal of making a point that we require in writing.
A LOT OF PEOPLE really hate writing. It's an unnatural activity, as humanity goes.
If we imagine that speech has existed for 24 hours, then according to all modern estimates, writing came along sometime around 11:30 p.m. Writing is an artifice, and given a choice, most people would rather talk [ or text ].
I have done this in one of my classes, and often the students who choose speaking make a better case than many of those who opt for writing. They seem to connect more readily to the task of talking than to writing an argument and execute it with more passion.
It is unclear to me that there is a reason to classify the oral suasion as something lesser than the written version, as long as students are instructed that they are to maintain a basic, tempered poise, without relying on volume or colourful rhetoric to stand in for logic.
Some will object that students will need to be able to craft arguments in writing in their future endeavours. But to channel the modern kind of response : Will they though?
To be sure, only formal writing can harbor '' Beloved '' or '' Ulysses,'' extended scientific proofs or detailed historic documentation. However, when it comes to individuals expressing their intelligence for assignments or teaching, I cannot see that writing is the only legitimate and effective vehicle.
We are a society that values speaking engagingly but places less of a value on speaking precisely. This is a matter of cultural preference; I wish it would change.
The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Concepts, Logics and Debates, continues. The World Students Society thanks author John Mcwhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University.
With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011.
Good Night and God Bless
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