Scam-Mail, Bad Grammar and Audience

Every now and then I check my spam filter and find the usual junk mail: ads for foreign pharmaceuticals, phishing scams, solicitations to buy products to make my hair (or other things) grow, and the many variations on the Nigerian inheritance scam.

Here is an example of one such email:

Good day my dear,
In confidence,i have to introduce myself, i am Miss. Christy Watars,24 years old,I am the only child of late Mr & Mrs.Richard Watars.

I prayed before contacting you, please for God sake do not see my mail as embrassment as we do not know each other before.  I wish to request for your assistance in my efforts to procure the transfer of my inherited fund from my late parents for investment ventures under your care and directive,while i continue my education in NewZealand.

I inherited Three Million,Four Hundred Thousand US-Dollars ($3,400,000.00)I wish to require your assistance in receiving the transfer of my inherited fund in your account for investment purposes only, it is my wish to come over to Newzealand to further my education while you take care of the investment on my behalf.

i need your urgent assistance to transfer my inherited fund to Newzealand and also your assistance to secure my future in NZ where I will continue my education

Please I am waiting to hear from you soonest,God Bless You.
Yours sincerely,
Christy Watars

If you are a teacher of English, you feel almost compelled to correct the grammar, punctuation, syntax and formating and return it to the user, don't you? C'mon - don't you? Yeah - me too. And even though we don't proofread and edit the document, we all must wonder, "Why do scammers send out email with such horrendous writing? Don't they know that no one is going to buy the message with such glaring mistakes?"

Well, there is a method to the madness, and a mistaken assumption on our part. ALMOST no one will buy the error-riddled pitch. But the ones who do not recognize the mutilation of the Queen's English are exactly the ones who the scammers want to reach.  If you can correct the grammar and spelling, you are probably too smart for the scammers. They aren't trying to reach you. You are not their audience. People with lower intelligence are their audience.

So - if you want ONLY people with lower intelligence to give your message a fair hearing, then, for goodness sake, do not pay attention to spelling or grammar or punctuation!

Most of our students - and we ourselves - do not hope for such a limited audience. Whether it is teachers teaching, preachers preaching, advertisers advertising, or students studying, we hope to reach more than just the dumbest people around. In those cases, good grammar and correct spelling and proper punctuation insure you include the widest possible audience - including potential employers, potential publishers, colleagues, and leaders of the community. Everyone is included when good writing takes place. (I've never heard anyone say, "I ain't going back to that restaurant - they spell everything 'right' on their menu. Smarty-pants know-it-alls!" or "I don't think we should consider this candidate; his writing is just too perfect.")

Elements of Speech & the Superbowl Pre-game Talk

This week, the Baltimore Ravens meet the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl. One of these teams boasts the player who has what may be the most emotional pre-game speech/dance combination in NFL history. I'm speaking of the Ravens' Ray Lewis. Ray's  pre-game activities could be a valid artifact for communications and speech classes - it seems to be perfect for talking about occasion and the place of emotion in speech-making.

But what about all those weeks when Ray was injured? Did you ever wonder who did the pre-game speeches during his absence? Well Sports Friends offers a humorous take on that situation. In this (fictional?) situation Ray Rice approaches Joe Flacco to give the speech, and the results are a sort of Communications/Speech Class workshop on what NOT to do. I played this clip for my class and asked them to respond with comments on what went wrong with Joe's attempts - and to suggest fixes.

Watch the clip and see what you think.

Some student responses were:

• " Joe shouldn't have shown that he was nervous and that he wasn't happy about giving the speech."
• "To make his speech more effective, Joe should have used more passionate words that male sports men can relate to and that trigger the right emotions. Sentences like, 'You only have this one moment to show that you are powerful, that you have worked, sweated and bled to achieve success.'"
• "He started quoting a movie that no one would know. He should consider his audience and what they would watch."
• "Joe was referencing things his audience couldn't relate with. To be more effective he should have related more to his audience by referencing things he knew they were familiar with..."
• "Joe was not enthusiastic enough to boost the morale of his teammates..."
• "He didn't need to introduce himself to people who already knew him."

 You might build on these and other comments to talk about ethos, pathos, logos, kairos, audience, culturally-sensitive speech (the last remarks crossed the anti-semitic line, ouch.)

And, depending on the outcome of the game, you might let the students guess whether Joe or Ray Lewis gave the pre-game talk.

Buddy the Elf, Internet Free Candy, and Plagiarism

If saw "Elf" over the holidays, then you will remember this scene - Buddy the Elf is preparing to go to New York City to find his father when Santa offers him some advice, including the following:

"Well, there are some things you should know.

First off, you see gum on The street,

Leave it there. It's not free candy."

Of course, when Buddy arrives in NYC, he can't resist the "free candy" on the streets, the handrails, etc...Funny!

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If you've taught a class that involves research, you will remember this scene - Students are preparing to complete a class to earn their degrees, and we offer them advice, including the following:

"To do good research, you should know some things.

First off, just because you can cut and paste something,

that doesn't mean it is good information.

Find reputable sources and cite them."

Of course, when your students actually get to writing the paper, they sometimes find random "free candy" on the internet to be irresistible. Not so funny.

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I ran across an informative, if less-than-encouraging, article titled "The Top 10 Internet Sources College Students Us May Discourage You."  Oh, yeah, it does discourage us - especially after we've introduced them to the wealth of scholarly online resources that are available through our college or university libraries. I mean - millions of dollars worth of resources at their finger tips, peer-reviewed articles from the most erudite experts in every subject, ground-breaking studies in every field, and they "Google" for info on "steroids?"

(Thankfully, there are no sharp objects nearby as I write this. Anyway - take deep breaths and remain calm, Randy...)

So, I remind myself - and if it helps, you can remind yourself, too - our students are sort of like Buddy - this is their first trip to the big academic city. I will try to help them understand research and intellectual integrity from a broad view that deals with credibility, critical thinking, ethos, and what it means to be a "collegial" member of their new academic community. I will use a variety of approaches ranging from our official plagiarism statements to the story of Buddy the Elf. And I will keep telling myself that it's a process, and that it is my job to help my students (and colleagues) to develop an integrated approach to 21st-century digital literacy.

And I may or may not pass along this tidbit shared with me on Facebook recently:

ESPN, Culture and Speaking "English" Slang

At some point in the term, when teaching rhetorics, critical thinking, cultural literacies, speech, composition, or other topics - I find it important to discuss how language is a culturally/socially constructed semiotic system. (I usually work from a broader intro that looks at how ontology, epistemology and semiology treat a "thing," but that's another story.)

I am planning to incorporate these ESPN commercials to help students think about how language (in this case, English) is a living, growing set of signifiers and signifieds. Maybe some of my colleagues in related fields would be able to make creative instructional use of these artifacts as well...

Video one is the commercial I saw first - and though I had no idea what these guys were "saying" - I got the idea: the speakers seem to be exactly alike from a first-blush broad-brush categorizing of the individuals as being from the UK - but each views the other as a polar opposite.

A Second video (now disappeared from the web) slows the action down and adds definitions to the "slang" English from across the pond.

So, don't be a right divvy - spice up your sessions with these discussion starters/illustrations. And remember which video is which, or you'll look like a proper digital plonker.

...

Proposing Work as Exemplars for Emerging Areas - According to Gee

The following comments are a review-ish application of the concepts in James Paul Gee's 2010 New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and "Worked Examples" as One Way Forward.  I downloaded the e-book version for free for my Kindle here, and you can also find a free copy of the Google book here.  My reading, commentary, and application are admittedly influenced by my academic connections to rhetorics (as in the RCID community at Clemson University,) and by my duties as a teacher of communications and digital literacies at Limestone College, but it seems that Gee's work encourages such interdisciplinary engagement.  These comments will be part of the introduction for the presentation of the "Smartphone Museum as Exemplar" for teachers and scholars in venues such as the 2013 Popular Culture Association-American Culture Association Conference in Washington, D.C. 

“How can we proceed in building this new area into something more integrated and coherent, especially in building collaboration?” Gee suggests that using prototypical cases as exemplars is “one way forward” in the emerging area(s) of digital literacies and new media studies.

Gee references the “old sense” of exemplars, and remediates those “worked examples” toward a new application in digital literacies. As for the old sense of worked examples, Gee says “In a worked example, and ‘expert’ takes a well-formed problem and publically displays for learners how that problem is approached, thought about, worked over and solved.” Indeed, this is how most learners and scholars are “brought into” disciplines, ranging from maths to sciences to rhetorics.

(Though Gee references Kuhn, he is not explicit in pointing out that, in this description, we see how disciplines establish an accepted “right way” to think – as Kuhn might say, a “ruling paradigm” of “normal science” is established and reified through what Feyerabend might label a “consistency condition.” And while such an establishment might be seen as problematic with regards to limiting exploration to whatever approaches the establishment approves, it does provide the set of heuristics that allow new contributors to join a conversation within an emerging area of study.)

Using the idea of exemplars as worked examples (in the old sense,) Gee proposes that in emerging areas, such as digital literacies, those involved in the field should put forth exemplars, even if “play exemplars,” for the engagement of scholar-students in the field. In this new sense of worked examples, scholars in the emerging field would “display publically their thinking about how and why they did what they did, and why it may serve as a guide for future work.” This suggested approach (worked examples in the new sense) is more democratic, and markedly so, than worked examples as used in established disciplines.  In fact, Gee proposes that “we pretend to be experts in an area that, as of yet, has none.”

Gee’s remediation of the idea of worked examples does away with the idea of defending our exemplars and “winning” an academic argument. This remediated approach encourages the scholar to “lose” such academic arguments and “to see your proposed exemplar so worked over by the community that it would become fodder for collaboration.”

Though the composer-curators of the Smartphone Museum at Limestone are not part of Gee’s DML community centered at UC-Irvine, we do adopt with appreciation the democratizing approach of worked examples as a new way forward to opening discussion in areas of digital literacies, electronic pedagogies, and connected learning – and so we present our experimental installation as an exemplar for other scholar-teachers to discuss, critique, repurpose, remediate and use for their own work in the still emerging area(s) of digital literacies.

Slippery Slope and Cable TV

In my Critical Thinking class, we deal with "Fallacies that Masquerade as Logic." If you teach Rhetoric or Forensics or Writing or Speech, you may deal with the same issues - like, for instance, the "Slippery Slope" argument. You know - if you give them an inch, they will take a mile, etc. I found some of the most entertaining examples for this logical fallacy in the Direct TV commercials below...

Don't Have a Grandson with a Dog Collar:

Don't Wake Up in a Roadside Ditch

 

While these examples "make visible" the rhetoric of such arguments, it might be prudent to note that some slopes actually ARE slippery, too.

Standing Out

This summer I saw a 3-story tall ketchup bottle outside City Hall in New York. I noticed. Because you don't see a 30-foot tall ketchup bottle everyday. Sometimes you want to stand out like that.

Like when you are submitting resumes or cv's and cover letters to places where said correspondence will join hundreds of other similar pieces of correspondence on the desk of potential employers. You would like to stand out - but in a good way, of course.

I've recently shared links to sites like SlideShare's collection of visual resumes, and other resources - but I just ran across this very interesting letter by a job seeker that definitely stood out - but not because of hi-tech creativity. This job seeker stood out by his use of words. Read his job-seeking letter here. (It is interesting to note that this writer was trying to get the attention of famous movie directors and producers.) In a world where attention to writing seems to be getting rarer, deft utilization of creative vocabulary and imaginative correspondence may be just what you need to "stand out."

**"I Like Words" from the "Letters of Note" blog