Seriously though, is it me?

To All Presenters:

It has been claimed the average vocabulary of 6 to 14 year olds is currently 10,000 words, a decline from 25,000 words in 1945. Allegedly the sources for these two stats were a book by Henry Rinsland and an unrelated report by Gary Ingersoll.

Reviewing 100,000 student compositions containing six million words total, Rinsland recorded 25,632 distinct words in the sample.

However, according to popular debunker website "The Straight Dope.com" - in 1984 Ingersoll conducted a similar study, but its sample was much smaller, just 5,000 students and half a million words total. With a sample size one twelth of the Rinsland study one would expect a far lower word count. And using rough estimates derived from the American Heritage Word Frequency Book, a 500,000 word sample should have around 60% fewer unique words than a six-million word sample regardless of vocabulary size. Coincidentally, the Ingersoll study reported the aforementioned 10,000 words, (10,265 to be exact) which is about 60% fewer compared to the results of Rinsland's study.

Ingersoll never paired his figures with Rinsland's results. A journalist somewhere along the line (I found references to this stat in Harpers Index, the New York Times and other publications) combined the two numbers and thus birthed an urban legend demonstrating society's linguistic decline. In fact, it is claimed Ingersoll has said he tried to set the record straight on past occasions to no avail. So as Mark Twain once said truly, "there are lies, damned lies and statistics."

Now, this stat may be garbage, but the jury is still out on our declining vocabularies.

To wit:

i can't blieve i had 2 explain 2 some1 that this is not the way 2 rite email 4 work . LOL!

THE POINT: Statistics aside? If this evidence of things to come, I think we might be screwed.

Symbology

To All Presenters:

"If it bleeds it reads," has been a common cliché in the media for generations. Another is, "a picture is worth a thousand words". Taken together, it would seem the ideal story is one with a picture of major damage or death to go along with it.

After you see enough of these images, read enough of these stories - they begin to break down. They are no longer tales of human tragedy but are instead symbols of themselves. Playing the role of the crushed car today will be a 2002 Honda Civic.

In recent days we've seen a number of media outlets get their wires crossed. As result images from one event are stated as being from another. A crowd from a protest years ago is presented as a crowd from a protest yesterday. Oddly enough, while the images were wrong the intent was correct. The media wasn't making an under attended event look like more than it was - they were simply careless when selecting their footage.

In the end it didn't really matter to the audiences - outside of a few competing pundits, no one seemed to care. All the audience expected to see was footage of a crowd, and that's what they saw. The symbol of a well attended event was all that was required, accuracy was not.

THE POINT: If it bleeds it reads, and a picture is worth a thousand words. If accuracy has become less important than symbology - I have to wonder if a body bag full of rocks because a photojournalist was too late to get the "real" shot is very far behind.

PowerPoint 2

To All Presenters:
Some fear guns.

I fear bullets.

PowerPoint sadly prevents us from making terrible mistakes, and thus users of this crutch can place an infinite number of bullets on a single slide. And if the user isn’t creating their own mini-library of congress they might instead choose to write 30-word bullet points designed to assure any viewer the presenter has done nothing to prepare.

Of even less value than long-winded bullets are the always popular emphasized bullets which guarantee the audience pays close attention to points generally of no interest to anyone other than the presenter.

Do us all a favor – remember the rules of 3 and 7. No more than three bullets to a slide and no more than seven words to a bullet. Keep things simple and concise – and in the name of all that’s holy, keep the emphasis in your voice and off your slides.

THE POINT: PowerPoint does not prevent you from being a bozo - you will have to do that yourself.

Reverse Psychology

To All Presenters:

Frederick the Great of Prussia had a thing for . . . potatoes.

He saw the subterranean veggies' potential to help feed his nation and diversify crops, thus mitigating the risk of famine and lowering the price of bread. A good plan, but one which faced many challenges in overcoming his people's prejudice against the plant. When he issued a 1774 order for his subjects to grow potatoes for all the aforementioned reasons, one town replied: "The things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what use are they to us?" Others lamented that if God had intended us to eat potatoes, he would not have buried them in the ground.

Presuming a less direct approach may have better results, Frederick used a bit of reverse psychology. He declared potatoes a "royal vegetable" and had them planted in his royal fields which were then surrounded by royal guards with orders to do their job as poorly as possible. Prussians weren't stupid and quickly determined anything worth guarding was clearly worth stealing and so they soon snuck into the field, snatched the plants, and within months there was a sizeable underground market for potatoes (pun!). Which was, of course, Frederick's plan from the beginning.

So why does this work, why are we motivated by doing that which we are told not to do? Why is the forbidden fruit (or veggie) so tempting?

In a cursory review of dating advice sites and book jackets, playing hard to get remains a well-endorsed and apparently very successful means of getting the guy or gal of your choice to notice you.

I also found a number of parenting books which cited reverse psychology an a key means of convincing kids to follow the rules . . . or rather not follow the rules, reverse psychology can be confusing.

So if reverse psychology works well for kings of Prussia, and people looking for a date, parents trying to control kids and very likely kids trying to control their parents I must wonder . . . when will we see advertisements which state in the clearest possible terms, "Do NOT buy this product!"
Would that work?

THE POINT: Same seller, same product, same target audience . . . different message, better result.