Cognitive therapeutic issues in the management of complex documents

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Cognitive therapeutic issues in the management of
complex documents

• Technical Writing
• Arcadia University
• Professor Rodolfo Celis

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Things I have learned

• Argue the conclusion
• Chop the sentences down later. But do chop them
  down.
• Dynamic outlining and prewriting
• On second time around for the gaps in the
  translation of your thoughts to the stuff on the
  page
• Look at it as a puzzle to induce fun
• Think clearly every day - raking leaves, doing
  dishes, and sitting in cafes not only does not
  equal writing, but will, in fact, do great harm
  to you if not tempered with daily writing.
• To remove coffee from shirts you cannot use
  bleach on, pour boiling water on them from a
  height of approximately 3-4 feet. For white
  shirts, pre-soak using 4 denture tablets in the
  wash.

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Problems inherent in natural language

• Clarity and John Wilkins.
• Inference management
• Management of face

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Problems
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Bad redundancy and long sentences

• In chapter four, The elusive nature of harm, I
  will adduce a sociolinguistic theory of this harm
  that suggests that certain microsociological
  actions involving the management of anothers
  behavior in face-to-face encounters come, in a
  process of grammaticization (etymologically
  considered in the sense of Meillet 1912) or
  idiomaticization (in the sense of Sadock 1979),
  to be formalized and incorporated into the
  meaning conventions of lexical items to the
  extent that this claim about certain actions
  being selected and made part of the semantic
  structure of words can be verified using tests
  for conventional versus conversational
  implicature.

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Problem of Quantity

• These theories confuse various emotional and
  physiological reflexes (glossed as harm or
  injury in the legal literature) that are
  inconsistently associated with some uncooperative
  speech acts with the socially coercive role I
  will suggest they play in affecting the behavior
  of another within an occasion of interaction.

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• YOU ARE ONLY AUTHORIZED TO RECOMMEND THE DEATH
  SENTENCE,
• IF, AFTER THIS HEARING, YOU UNANIMOUSLY FIND EACH
  OF THE
• FOLLOWING
• FIRST, THE GOVERNMENT HAS PROVEN BEYOND A
  REASONABLE DOUBT
• THAT THE DEFENDANT WAS AT LEAST 18 YEARS OF AGE
  AT THE TIME HE
• COMMITTED THE OFFENSES AND
• SECOND, THE GOVERNMENT HAS PROVEN BEYOND A
  REASONABLE DOUBT
• THE EXISTENCE OF AT LEAST ONE "THRESHOLD
  ELIGIBILITY FACTOR"
• AND
• THIRD, THE GOVERNMENT HAS PROVEN BEYOND A
  REASONABLE DOUBT
• THE EXISTENCE OF AT LEAST ONE STATUTORY
  AGGRAVATING FACTOR AND
• FOURTH, THAT THE AGGRAVATING FACTOR OR FACTORS
  WHICH YOU
• FOUND TO EXIST SUFFICIENTLY OUTWEIGH ANY
  MITIGATING FACTOR OR
• FACTORS WHICH YOU FOUND TO EXIST TO JUSTIFY
  IMPOSITION OF A
• SENTENCE OF DEATH, OR, IN THE ABSENCE OF A
  MITIGATING FACTOR OR
• FACTORS, YOU FIND THAT THE AGGRAVATING FACTOR OR
  FACTORS ALONE
• ARE SUFFICIENT TO JUSTIFY IMPOSITION OF A
  SENTENCE OF DEATH.

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• THREE TERMS THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY HEARD AND WILL
  HEAR
• THROUGHOUT THIS PHASE OF THE CASE ARE "THRESHOLD
  ELIGIBILITY
• FACTORS," "AGGRAVATING FACTORS" AND "MITIGATING
  FACTORS." THESE
• FACTORS HAVE TO DO WITH THE DEFENDANT'S INTENT
  AND ROLE IN THE
• OFFENSES, THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE CRIME, OR THE
  PERSONAL
• TRAITS, CHARACTER OR BACKGROUND OF THE DEFENDANT
  AND THE VICTIM.
• I WILL NOW BRIEFLY EXPLAIN THESE THREE SPECIAL
  TERMS.
• FIRST, A "THRESHOLD ELIGIBILITY FACTOR" IS ONE OR
  MORE OF
• FOUR FACTORS LISTED IN THE STATUTE WHICH CONCERN
  THE DEFENDANT'S
• INTENT AND ROLE IN COMMITTING THE OFFENSE FOR
  WHICH HE MAY HAVE
• BEEN CONVICTED. BEFORE YOU CONSIDER THE
  IMPOSITION OF A
• SENTENCE OF DEATH, YOU MUST UNANIMOUSLY FIND ONE
  OR MORE OR MORE
• "THRESHOLD ELIGIBILITY FACTORS" TO EXIST BEYOND A
  REASONABLE
• DOUBT.

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Professional advice from Robert Boice

• How writers journey to comfort and fluency A
  psychological adventure

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Boice writing rules for longer writing projects

• Wait, actively.
• Begin early
• Work with constancy and moderation
• Stop, in a timely fashion
• Work with balance
• Moderate negative thinking
• Moderate emotions
• Moderate attachments and reactions
• Let others do some of the work
• Moderate wasted effort

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Rule 1 Wait actively

• Avoid the romantic notion of the inspired poet.
  Sometimes the task before you may not be poetry.
  Sometimes it may not be especially inspiring (at
  least at first).
• Unless you live in a cave, it may be too hard for
  this inspiration out there and waiting to leap
  into your brain to compete with the comparative
  thrill of television or detailing the molding in
  your study with a q-tip.

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Rule 1 Wait actively

• Active waiting requires patience - You must force
  yourself to slow down and prepare for writing
  rather than doing more comforting things (like
  detailing the molding of your office with a q
  tip).
• Active waiting requires suspending disbeliefs -
  This may be new and counterintuitive. You may
  have to suspend, e.g., feelings of inadequacy or
  doubt, or probably most importantly, the natural
  tendency to question if slowing down and waiting
  slowly, patiently, and planfully will actually
  help you. It will.

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Rule 1 Wait actively

• Active waiting means pausing reflectively -
  Reflective pausing is the opposite of plunging
  impulsively into firm decisions and formal prose.
  Active waiting and its awakeness temper
  impatience by putting off pressures for quick
  results. Active waiting brings an observant and
  wakeful tentativeness, often of a playful sort,
  while we get writing organized.
• Its clear seeing helps make sure that the right
  question will be answered once the formal writing
  is underway.
• More gradual, planful beginnings prove enjoyable
  because of their calm, reflective, and engaging
  nature.
• Studies (that I have looked at and appear
  reliable) have shown that motivation based on
  active waiting and its patience/readiness works
  more reliably than drive rooted in impulsive
  impatience, in anxious shame, in looming
  deadlines.
• The best thing about active waiting, in my
  experience, is that it gets you started writing
  effortlessly, before you realize you are writing.
• Emotion management, not time management.

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Rule 2 - Begin early (before feeling ready)

• When inspiration does not come to me, I go
  halfway to meet it. -- Sigmund Freud
• Work brings inspiration if inspiration is not
  discernable in the beginning. -- Igor Stravinsky
• The appetite is in the eating. -- Chinese proverb

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Rule 2 - Begin early (before feeling ready)

• Only the trust and patience that come from active
  waiting enable the beneficial preliminaries known
  as prewriting.
• Do the following prewriting things
• Talk aloud about what you might write.
• Read aloud what youve begun to write.
• Take notes - within reason - about what else you
  might write.

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Rule 2 - Begin early (before feeling ready)

• The trust, and some would say, compassion, that
  comes from active waiting provides the tolerance
  necessary to abide the tentativeness,
  imperfection, and slow, seemingly wasteful, pace
  of preliminary work.

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Problems of trust

• Procrastination. Im way behind on lots of
  other pressing things and I cant afford the time
  to deal with this project at all until the
  deadline forces me to work on it.
• Perfectionism. I dont want to be in the habit
  of producing a lot of second-rate material, not
  even as so-called preliminary writing I want to
  write well or not at all.

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Problems of trust

• Elitism. I believe that really brilliant
  writers write quickly, in a single draft, without
  much of a struggle or a plan they are
  born-writers and I doubt that they need to waste
  much time on preliminaries.
• Blocking. Want to know why the begin-early rule
  wont work for me? Im the kind of writer who
  cant write at all until I am in the mood and
  then I write as much as I can and try to finish
  in one sitting because I may never write again.

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Rule 2 - Begin early (before feeling ready)

• Early starts mean practice at launching a project
  without quite having figured out what you will
  say.
• Early starts mean letting things happen ,
  including surprises, by experimenting and playing
  instead of rushing into deathless prose.
• Early starts rely on process orientations that
  keep you in the moment, mindfully seeing what
  needs doing, and focused on what can be done now
  (in contrast to a product mode that focuses your
  attention, impatiently and perfectionistically,
  on the eventual outcome of your work.

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Rule 2 - Begin early (before feeling ready)

• Early starts mean letting go of mindless
  inhibitions or impulses and allowing calm
  motivation, inspiration, and ideas to appear in
  their stead.

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Dynamic outlining

• After you get a few main ideas going from
  prewriting, and you have the roughest skeleton of
  an outline going, ask yourself the following
  questions (next slide)

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Dynamic outlining

• Does it make sense to begin with this point. Am
  I answering the right question?
• Do the next main points follow from the first and
  each other do they say all that I need to say?
• Am I trying to do too much could I make my
  essential message clearer by abbreviating or
  removing some of the points around it?
• Do the same subpoints appear in two or more
  places?
• Are some essential subpoints missing or
  underdeveloped?

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Dynamic outlining

• Once you get going on this outlining, you will
  probably find that you have begun to
  unconsciously elide into actual prose writing.

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Freewriting

• Traditional freewriting versus imagistic
  freewriting