It's not easy to write a white paper. And reading them can also be quite a challenge!
Unfortunately, many white papers are difficult to digest and come across as though slightly 'nerdy-types', locked in research labs, prepared them with very little consideration for their readers.
So, if you're about to write your first white paper, here are a few golden rules to follow...
1. Get the Best Writer on board
Individuals with little writing experience are often delegated to write the white paper. In the IT industry, there is an assumption that the developer is best suited to write about the solution. Let's be honest: writers write and programmers program. There are some individuals who have both skills, but these are hard to find.
In general, developers are not ideal for writing white papers - and neither is the Sales Manager. Developers will focus on the technical innards, while sales types will gust about its 'unique' qualities. In doing so, both miss the mark. You can save yourself a lot of stress by hiring an experienced writer who can look at your product or service - and present it in an easy-to-understand manner. These writers know how to 'sell' a concept to both a technical and business audience-not everyone has this skill.
2. Sharp Presentation Attractive graphics reinforce your message. Use diagrams and charts to stop 'glazed eyes syndrome' setting in. Text-heavy documents drain the reader very quickly! By combining charts, diagrams and tables you weave together the main selling points and sustain the reader's interest.
3. Avoid Terminology Geekspeak and Three Letter Acronyms-e.g. B2B, B2G-are endemic in the IT industry. Experienced writers avoid TLAs as they know that readers won't understand the terminology, become frustrated and move on. If you have to use these terms, put a reference section at the start.
No-one likes to be patronized.
Technical terms without a clear definition will lose the reader's confidence in both you and your products. They will stop reading and go somewhere else. Why not? After all, your beloved White Paper is not the only show in town!
4. Subject Matter Organization
Before you get to the heart of the paper, outline the relevant background materials, such as industry research figures, that support your arguments. In the opening section, highlight why your solution exists; in other words, what specific problem does it solve?
Don't meander from topic to topic or you will lose the reader. Each paragraph should only discuss one idea. Don't mix ideas in the same sentence or paragraph.
For example, before you begin, assume that the reader is completely new to the subject matter. Then outline the most significant issues and progressively walk through the solution; begin with the larger issues first and sequentially move though the other points.
5. Abstract v. Reality
Many white papers discuss the theoretical application on the solution, e.g. Product X will do Y in situation Z. That's fine up to a point as it helps paint a picture for the reader. However, you need to underline your 'theory' with real world examples.
Case studies and customers quotes are a very effective way of demonstrating how your solution performs in a working environment. Case studies reinforce the theoretical concepts. They help the reader see how the solution could work for them.
If the reader can't relate to your solution in a practical sense, they will search elsewhere for another product.
Summary Oddly enough, many of us read the summary first. Because of this, it should capture the essence of the white paper and identify the most interesting points.
If this section lacks interest, you may lose the reader - before they've even read the first page!
Make your points. Make them clear. Make them stick.
White Papers are a low-cost way to promote your products and potentially gain an advantage over your competitors. They also have a long shelf-life.
They live on the web, intranets, and hard-drives long after your product has been rebranded, you've changed business strategy, or moved onto the golf course.
For this reason, ensure that your publication reflects positively on your company's high standards. Poor quality material will have the opposite effect of what you intended. Persistence is the key. Once you get it right, a well-written white paper pays for itself many times over in the long-term.
Assess Your Novel-Writing Progress With These Four Questions
You have to check the status of your novel now and again during the writing process---things do go wrong, after all. Consider the halfway mark a good point to take a breather, get out a notebook, and do a quick assessment of what you've done so far.
Mid-point assessment is NOT the time to start rewriting, though. Not even if you've gone tearing off in the wrong direction somewhere down the line. Assessment is a thinking step (and a taking-notes step), not revision. Four questions will help you determine the course of your story, and whether you're getting what you want from it so far or not. So, notebook in hand, ask yourself these questions:
First...are you having any fun?
I'm absolutely serious about this question. Writers in the middle of their novels frequently slide into this 'grit-teeth-and-grind-forward' mode that kills their spontaneity, makes writing miserable, and allows them to do huge amounts of really bad work before stopping to realize they've gone off in the wrong direction. Writing is NOT the job that's supposed to suck. Jamming ahead while hating life is as sign that your book went over a cliff somewhere and you missed the crash.
If your story is heading where it ought to be, you'll be having fun---even if the writing is a lot of work. You'll be excited about the twists and turns you're coming up with, you'll love your characters and what they're doing, you'll have to quell the urge to show off or read important passages to unsuspecting family members. This is the way you want the writing to feel. If you've taken a wrong turn, on the other hand, the writing is going to feel like drudgery---like punishment. If it ever feels like punishment, stop right away. Something has gone wrong with the story.
Second, does your Sentence still work?
(I talked about The Sentence, which is a tool you use to define your story, in a previous article.) If the book you're writing still fits the concepts, characters, and twist in your Sentence, go on to the next question.
If it doesn't, you're either going to have to figure out how to make the book fit The Sentence, or how to rewrite The Sentence to fit the book. If you're still passionate about your original concepts and characters, figure out where you've gone wrong in the story. If you love your new direction, figure out via The Sentence what these changes you've made will mean to your bigger picture.
Third, are your characters the people you want them to be?
They don't have to be carrying out your orders like little clockwork automatons, but they do need to be working, not sitting around the pool drinking tea and sneering at you whenever you try to put them into a scene. There are ways of dealing with problem characters---but first, you have to recognize that you have a problem, and that they're it.
Finally, how's your plot holding up?
My students generally use my plot card technique---plot cards allow you to be flexible, to move things around, to toss cards that no longer lie along the path your story is taking. But you shouldn't have to toss them all. And every plot card should make sense in relation to every other plot card, and the whole should add up to a complete story. If they don't---if your book has somehow become a series of unrelated incidents, it's time to go back to plot cards and figure out what you've missed, and how to fit it in.
At this point, you're probably wondering why you don't just go ahead and make the changes you see you're going to have to make. The answer is simple, though a bit strange.
You're not finished yet, and any revisions you do halfway through may have to be tossed when the second half of the story takes an unexpected turn.
For now, mark out problem areas, figure out workable fixes you can make when you're done, and then get back to writing, knowing that everything is fixable. Just not yet fixed.
You can do this.
About the Author
Holly Lisle, full-time novelist and author of more than 30 published novels, teaches you how to write a book
in How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers. You can download three free course modules today and receive her free writing tips right now at http://HowToThinkSideways.com
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Everyone has plans to write the great American novel. In fact, most researchers believe that everyone has at least one great story in them. However, you may wonder, then, if everyone has a great story, how will take the news?
The key to the history of the output is to organize his thoughts with an outline and get busy writing. Sounds easy, right? Can be. If you use the card index system handy-dandy schedule to write his novel. In fact, using this easy to follow the plan, you will be able to form quick and efficient organization of thoughts and throw me great American novel of the head and on paper!
But why the note cards and not paper, you may be wondering. Here's why:
- They are incredibly small and easy to transport. In fact, you can easily plop in your wallet or purse and write down their ideas as you think of them.
- They are easy to dismiss. If you change your mind about an idea that can go far without to pull all the paper.
- They are easy to organize and sort.
- They come in various sizes to suit your specific needs.
Now you know why they are so big. You may be wondering how to plan a novel use.
Here's how:
1. Calculate what like to achieve with your novel and write specific questions on each note card. For example:
- How many chapters will? - What be its plot and setting? - What kind of characters and scenes have? - You choose fiction or nonfiction? - What tone will be?
2. Then begin to evaluate their ideas further by taking another 10 note cards and write the answers to the idea occurred to him. He puts the ideas of a flat at the top of each card.
3. Third, go through each report card and put a star by having the greatest potential, while the cross will not work. When you come an idea will not work, throw it away.
4. Then go through the cards and choose the idea which has the greatest potential.
5. Once you've decided to have 10-20 more cards and create chapter titles of the winning idea. Write down how I want the novel to be organized. For each new thought, placed in a separate card.
Congratulations! You now have a roadmap that can be used to write his novel. See, that was not bad at all? All it took was a little imagination and organization. Now, take those cards and get their heads novel and on paper.
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Practical & creative writing Lessons : How to Write a Fairy Tale
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."
We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.
My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?
The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?
One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.
In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.
So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.
If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.
At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.
Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?
And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.
Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.
I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.
For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.
Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.
The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.
Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.
So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.
Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.
Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.
Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.
The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.
Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.
Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?
Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.
Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.
But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.
Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.
If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.
Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.
The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on nerds than there are nerds.
As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.
It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.
For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.
In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.
It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?
It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.
Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.
Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.
I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.
The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.
As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.
Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.
We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.
A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.
If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.
Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.
Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.
Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.
This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.
I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.
As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.
When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.
Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.
At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)
And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.
Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.
Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.
And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.
Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.
What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.
Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.
If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.
In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.
There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.
In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.
We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.
When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.
Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.
This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.
The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.
Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.
The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.
Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are unpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.
Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."
Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.
They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.
I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.
Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.
The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.
Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.
Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.
Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.
It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.
If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.
I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.
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Identity theft even applies to the dead. Write your obituaries with identity theft in mind because the identity the deceased is an irresistible target for thieves. There are tips you can follow to avoid identity theft.
Victims of identity theft
Identity theft of the dead is a regrettable issue to discuss, but should be talked about helping those who may be victims of identity theft in the future. The problem is compounded by the fact that the family is in mourning for the dead and cheating at a time. Is further aggravated when the deceased had joint accounts with a partner still living because he or she ends up having to pay a high price for the thief crimes. The sad thing is that the thief often gets away with the crime before he or she is trapped.
Identity Theft obituaries
With artists explore the obituaries in your town or village and aware of the valuable information they can use to access bank accounts and credit. long obituaries that give many details give these scammers information more valuable they can use to steal the identity of the deceased. The deceased do not have to worry about your credit score, but the family is inappropriate emotional stress. Sometimes the thieves want to steal your identity to prevent immigration, legal or financial problems themselves.
How can prevent identity theft
The best way to prevent identity theft of your loved ones obituary is to take care of financial matters and credit obituary before publication. Close the accounts and notify all creditors, banks and credit reporting agencies of the deceased is going. It is best limit on the obituary information so that there is a resume list of details that each occupation, award and detail of the life of the individual. You More information about how to write an obituary in the title = "Obituaries" Help> ObituariesHelp.org
A list of what to do to prevent identity theft from obituaries
If you do all these things, be sure your wished not to be a victim of identity theft after he or she has died. It's even better if you do all this before publishing the obituary:
Closure accounts and credit cards.
Notifications Equifax, Trans Union and Experian deceased's passing.
Contact Social Security and have been off social security number of the deceased.
What to do if you suspect identity theft
If you has published an obituary and notice unusual activity on the late accounts, you can assume there is some kind of identity theft and what they must do the following:
Notify the police immediately.
Contact your bank and freeze the accounts.
Contact the credit reporting agencies.
The police and credit reporting agencies will have more suggestions for you to stay safe.
Writing obituaries need not be a daunting task, especially if you have all your financial affairs in order. If you have taken all measures to prevent identity theft from obituary, you can be sure that his obituary can be as long or as short as you would like to be.
About the Author
Melanie Walters recommends ObituariesHelp.org for Newspaper Obituaries , free genealogy resources, guides to building a family tree, sample letters of sympathy and condolence, written examples of eulogies as well as help with all aspects of funeral planning.
As many people reach retirement age, they think about how they are going to fill all of the extra time that they have available to them. A large proportion of them have always thought that it'd be nice to live the life of a writer and perhaps write a book or some articles. The hardest part is figuring out how to start. Should they enroll in a writing course at their Jr. College? Should they go to the library and check out some books on writing? Or should they just start writing? In the age of the Internet, what many have decide to do is to take an online writing course.
There are many advantages to taking an online writing class. One of the largest advantages, naturally, is that you can take the class from the comfort of your own computer. You do not have to startup the car and travel five, ten, or twenty miles to a campus. Also, depending on the type of online class that you are taking, you can go at your own speed. In a live classroom environment, everyone progresses at the same pace. If you are quicker than another classmate, or slower, it doesn't matter. To a certain extent, your learning is restricted by the speed and progress of others.
Online classes hold a number of disadvantages as well. Firstly, because there's no physical person to push you, it is extremely simple to skip a class. It becomes too simple to just ignore class assignments. An additional disadvantage, for those who like interacting with their fellow students is that you don't have that resource. Some people work well and even thrive while alone. But others need that more personal contact. For these, a classroom setting is probably the best option. And lastly, sometimes the feedback is 90% or more written. Some people need that personal and verbal interaction with the instructor to get the most out of a class.
For those that do decide to sign up for an online course, however, there are a few things you should check out:
1) If you're taking the writing class as part of a high school or college curriculum, make sure that the course is accredited in your state. If you're just taking the course to learn to write, it doesn't really matter.
2) Determine if your class instructor is knowledgeable in the kinds and genres of writing that you want to learn. For instance, if you want to learn to write non fiction, you might want to choose an instructor who has actually written non-fiction.
3) Check the course requirements and ensure that you will have all that you need to successfully complete the course. For instance, the class may require that you view online video. Does your computer have the graphic abilities to view online video? Or perhaps certain elements of the course necessitate that you have broadband access. If you still have a dial-up connection, it's possible that you may have to upgrade. or, the course may require that you use a certain piece of writing software. Bottom line - check the requirements.
4) Certain online writing courses will give you incentives to sign up. For instance, they may give you a free website to promote your work once you've completed the class. Or perhaps they'll introduce you to services that will help you to sell your written materials. If any of the extras do appeal to you, take these into consideration when deciding whether to take the class.
About the Author
Chris Rosin is webmaster and writer of http://www.bookauthorservices.com . Visit his site and find articles on writing a book as well as other author related information and products.
"In Deep Waters" reading, Lesbian Genre Fiction Tour
How Bright Lights and Dancing Penguins Reminded Me It’s Christmas
It was 2 days before Christmas and I was relaxing on my comfy lounge when my sister rang to ask if I wanted to come for a drive to see some of the Christmas lights around the neighbourhood. As a shift worker, we can sometimes forget it’s actually Christmas because more often than not – we are working throughout the festive season.
But that being said, I jumped in the car with two other friends and noticed that my sister had constructed a well thought out plan. She had printed out all of the winning entries in the annual Christmas Lights Competition and with a map of the streets in one hand, we headed off in hot pursuit to find these prize winning lights.
As we approached the street which had won ‘The Best Street in the Neighbourhood Category’ there were cars, people and children everywhere. I imagine that this is how Halloween must feel if you live in the United States. (We don’t really celebrate it here in Australia).
As we could only get so close in the car, my sister cleverly found a car park and we began our walk towards this normally quiet suburban street to see what all the fuss was about. As we approached the corner and turned to walk up the path (whilst trying to avoid tripping over any children and pets in tow), we were gob smacked. Quite literally the entire street was lit up as if there was a shining light directly above us.
The attention to detail and creativity was truly eye opening.
From the bright lights to the dancing penguins it certainly stimulated all of our senses – sight, sound and even smell (the aroma of Aussie BBQ filled the air). There was even a couple of ‘stand in’ Santa Clauses wandering up the street – sure to confuse the child that just saw him 5 minutes earlier in front of another house.
But as were walked slowly up the street you could hear the giggles and laughter from the children and watching their faces light up as they watched all of the displays was truly priceless.
Now as shift workers we can sometimes forget its Christmas. As many of us work during this holiday season, Christmas day can sometimes feel like ‘just another day’.
But our journey across the neighbourhood last night to see the bright lights and dancing penguins certainly reminded me that it is indeed Christmas, and to be thankful and grateful for everything that I have in my life. From my friends and family, to the wonderful home that I now live in, and for our pet cat ‘Misty’ who is stretched out on the front deck watching me as I write this - I feel truly abundant and grateful to be alive.
So even though you might be working this Christmas, you can certainly still enjoy the holiday season. Eat, drink and be merry – and have a wonderful and safe holiday as we head towards an exciting and fun-filled year in 2010!
If you would like some more help with shift work, then I recommend you read a Free Report called - 'Why Shift Workers Are So Tired, Unhealthy and Unhappy - and What YOU Can Do To Fix It!'
It will open your eyes to a completely different way of coping with shift work. For Instant Access visit - http://www.healthyshiftworker.com
About the Author
Audra is a Shift Work and Airline Veteran based in Brisbane, Australia. She specializes in teaching people how to cope with the perils of working shift work and how to bring more fun back into the workplace.
Many people find themselves trapped in a job they dislike; however, they go on with their jobs for a number of reasons, of which probably the most important one is that they have to provide for their families and be able to pay their bills. Many people rule out the possibility of earning their living by doing something they would definitely enjoy because their commitments and responsibilities stop them from taking any chances, as far as their income is concerned. But loving your job is as important as earning money to support yourself and your family, which is why you should weigh your options more carefully and make the most of all the opportunities that exist.
Writing is something most of us have tried or at least considered at one time or another. But many people dismiss this possibility, as appealing as it may sound to them, because they think primarily of the hassle that can be involved in trying to get a book published. As you already know, if a book is good, it sells. But since a good book is a relative notion, meaning that it is a matter of personal opinion rather than a scientific fact, many people dismiss this possibility of doing something they really like, and make a lot of money at the same time.
You may be a very talented writer and not even know it, because you have never taken the time to write down your thoughts, or, if you have written them down, you never had the courage to ask some to look over them. Writing novels, short stories, poems, or articles is something you can do for fun, and once your work has proven a success, you can become a full-time writer and enjoy all the benefits of doing something you are really good at. But in order to start off on the right foot, you should try to find as many tips as you possibly can that make writing successful.
There are so many things to write about and so many people who would be interested in reading them, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t be successful. However, the problem that many future writers are often faced with is how to write, and how to make their work interesting, so that they can become successful and have their books published. Before you set off on such a journey, you should take some writing lessons, which can help you put your thoughts in order, make your story interesting and target certain audience.
The good news is that free writing lessons are available online. In other words, your only investment in this activity that you like so much is time and the desire to learn. These writing lessons provide you with everything you need to know in order to maximize your success, and, on top of everything else, they are free.
Writing requires talent, but being a successful writer takes a little more than just being talented. Above all, being a successful writer is all about selling your work; in other words, writing is similar to conducting a business in many ways. And the management and growth of your business can only be achieved by following certain rules. This is what the writing lessons are about. You may not want to write fiction or drama, but you could be a great writer for magazines, for instance. All it takes is that you be willing to learn how to do it. And if you still think that being a successful writer is something mysterious and impossible to unravel, these free writing lessons will take all the mystery out of becoming a good writer.
Learning to ask your child's Elephant: Who, What, Where, When and Why
Do you have trouble writing? I do not know why. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll writes up to five columns a week. After all, if you can write five columns, you should be able to write a poem of five aligned, but that does not seem to be the case.
How does he do? Carroll said to recite verses of "Rudyard Kipling's The Elephant Child":
"I have six humble men who served
They taught me everything he knew
Their names are those
And where and when
Why and how and who. "
I am more than sure that two incentives to Jon Carroll are: 1.) Creation of time and 2.) The salary! Yes, we writers are paid from time to time!
Based on these philosophies few lines of "Kipling's The Elephant Child" my advice is to "just ask questions." Rummaging through some old work (whether poetry, nonfiction, or fiction) that you have written and use the following techniques to improve their skills. And then ask yourself the following questions.
WHAT is the underlying theme?
Try to find a single word or phrase to describe its history. Perhaps one of the reasons for its history has not been effective in the past is that you have too many interwoven stories. This, in turn, can cause confusion for the reader. So ask yourself: "What is my story about?" And, give answers like: Desolation, Lost Hope, self-confidence, Racism, achieved dreams, etc. If you can KISS (keep it simple stupid), so readers do not MISS your point.
In practice, read some of the great contemporary writers and ask the same question: "What is the background theme?" Describe the book in a single word or phrase, instead of using a technical high school book report.
Where does your story or poem take place? Knowing environment may allow you to be a bit more descriptive of their work. Does your poem or prose take place in Alaska? Florida? China? Yugoslavia? Hawaii? Kentucky? Each of these places is, perhaps, equal opposites of the next. To find your fit with two options - 1.) Being a good researcher, collect photos and read all you can about the location, or 2.) Take a road trip! Nothing can be bigger than to spend your weekend visiting unknown territories.
When the events take place in which it is written? If you're doing reporting-indeed this is especially a must do. For example, if you read an article News reader wants to know when the house of Mrs. Johnson was stolen. Did it June 20, 2001? June 20, 1984? "The events take place when it was winter ten inches of snow? Or, better yet, do the events take place in Virginia Beach in mid-August?
Why did the events take place? Is there a conflict within his character? Often character (and real people too) have problems only because his conscience is eating away. " Is this the case? If so, why does your character feels so guilty that made these decisions? Maybe the events that take place only cause and effect. The Most people always the cause of his own mental downfall and breakdown. Always know why your characters complete every task and why the events take place.
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