So this last week, I had the honor and the pleasure of being invited down to one of the local high schools here in Las Vegas to talk about mental health. They invited me as somebody who has my own experience dealing with mental health issues, working in the field of mental health, doing psychoeducational groups, and as an advocate of mental health. So in this video, I want to talk about the questions that these teens asked me, which might be able to help some of you as well. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. So I do things like psychoeducation, mental health advocacy, all that kind of stuff. So if you're into that, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. All right. So yeah, a local high school here. I was super, super, super excited to hear not only where they actually doing a mental health project, but they invited me down to speak to them. So I went down two days this week to talk to two different classes. They're part of the speech and debate team. So that's kind of cool in and of itself, but they had some different categories that they wanted to talk about when it comes to mental health. So I went down there and these kids had some amazing questions and they did their research and all that. But they were really engaged with me too. Like they weren't just like, I was in high school just like, oh, I got to do this project. They were like in it. So I love that because it means that teenagers, not all teenagers, but at least these ones in these two classes, they really do care about mental health. And that's so important because as I'll discuss with some of the topics that they gave me, that was one of my issues growing up is that mental health just wasn't talked about it wasn't taught or anything like that. All right. One of the first categories that they talked to me about was how to get help. All right. So they asked me how to get help. And the thing is it depends on the age group. Okay. So like for them at their age or if you're a teenager watching this, 18, younger, anything like that, or even if you're still living with your parents, like the first step is to talk to an adult, right? Your parents, a school counselor or a teacher. Typically I recommend starting off with the parents, but from my experience and a lot of people who have talked to me, you know, in the treatment center I was working out, I, you know, we had people as young as 18, 19 years old. And a lot of people are afraid to talk to their parents. One of the biggest reasons that I found just from my experience is a lot of kids don't want to worry their parents, right? They know that their parents have their own stresses and things like that. Like I'm a father and I'm letting you know, no matter what's going on in my life, I would much rather my, my kid talk to me no matter what's happening in my life. Like I don't care if the apocalypse is happening. If you are dealing with something, come talk to me. But I get it. Some kids are not comfortable with that. So then that's where I recommend talking to a school counselor. But even if you don't talk to a school counselor, like find a trusted teacher. Find a teacher who you like and trust and talk to them, all right? Like you have to talk to an adult like, you know, I was pretty brutally honest with these kids. When I was a teen and I know a lot of teens, like it's easy to make really dumb decisions just getting only getting feedback from your peers. Like it's important to have peer support, but it's important to find somebody who has life experience and resources and things like that. Now, how to get help as an adult. I'm going to be doing some videos now that, you know, we're kind of like in that political time of the United States. And I know some of you aren't going to like it, but my first video is going to be about political anxiety. So hopefully it can help you out with that. But in all honesty, like a lot of people don't have the resources to get mental health help, right? So in a perfect scenario, how to get help, talk to your doctor, right? Talk to friends, like talk to your insurance company. See if they can recommend a therapist and things like that. But there are many, many people where even with insurance, even with health insurance, therapy can still be expensive. You see what I mean? So that is an issue that we all really need to care about. All right. So the next topic was teaching common mental illnesses. So one of the reasons that, you know, I started this channel or even taught my clients about this during the psycho educational groups and just kind of educated them based on my knowledge and education and experience is because, you know, I know it's different in different parts of the country, but I know for me in here in Las Vegas, they don't teach you about mental health. Okay. So something I would do with my groups is I would ask them, I would say, how many of you had a physical education class and like every hand would go up, right? And like, this is for you too. How many of you had a physical education class? And then I would say, put your hands down. I'd be like, okay, how many of you were taught about common mental illnesses, right? How many of you in your physical education classes were taught about signs of depression, signs of anxiety, signs of trauma, how to deal with grief and loss, all these things, all these things that happen in life. And maybe if I was lucky, maybe one or two hands went up, but the treatment center I was working at, we had clients from all over the country, like this is an issue. So what do we do at that point? What do we do? If schools are not teaching our, you know, our youth about mental health, what do we do, right? We have to come together. We have to, you know, as parents, something that I do with my son, we've been talking about mental health eats 10 now. I've been talking to him about it since he was like five. You know what I mean? So it's a huge responsibility of the parents, but also like get involved with your community. There's a ton of stuff like in a couple of weeks here.  Like if our schools are not teaching it, like we need to come together and teach it. Okay. So the next one was communication to prevent conflict. And like just so you know, like I got like multiple questions for each of these categories, but I kind of wanted to hone in on some of the most common ones or popular ones. Now this question, I remember because some of these kids, like while they were asking for their project, some of them were asking because of their personal experience as well. And this young lady asked me, she was asking me about if you know somebody has a mental illness and like, you know, she said bipolar disorder.  Because they're struggling with a mental health issue. And I'm like, time out, time out. All right. So while it is very, very, very important to be empathetic to people struggling with mental illnesses, none of us, not me, not you, not anybody is meant to be somebody's punching bag. Okay.  Like having a mental health issue and I was talking about this to an entire classroom of kids and they were all just like honed in because like it's important to understand just because somebody has a mental illness doesn't mean they're allowed to treat you like garbage. Okay. Like we do not have to accept somebody walking all over us. Like one of the most important things is for us to set up boundaries. Like there was a way to do this from my experience and be empathetic, right? Like I I've worked in a treatment center. It was a dual diagnosis treatment center. So you have people angry that they had to get sober and people also dealing with mental health issues. Some of them refuse to take their medications and things like that, but they would snap on me. Right. I'd be like, Hey, I know you're going through stuff right now, but I'm out of here. I'm bouncing like we do not have to sit here and take any type of verbal abuse. And that that to me and one of the questions coming up is about the stigma. That's one of the things that perpetuates the stigma in my opinion, right? Is people who weaponize their mental illness, right? They they lash out.  They walk all over you. They do these things and say, oh, that's just my mental illness. Like that is not a valid excuse in my opinion. Like for me personally, my experience like if I don't have my anxiety under control, I was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder.  That is not an excuse. You know what I mean? It is my responsibility to take care of those things and try to manage it for the sake of the people in my life. Like this involves everybody. Okay. The person struggling with mental health issues as well as the loved ones. So what I taught to the class was like learn to set up healthy boundaries, learn to have an exit plan, right? Like go to a friend's house or something like that.  When they come back down, if there's a way that you can help or provide them with resources, go for it, but you are not meant to be the person that they lash out on. Okay. So the next one was like coping strategies and prevention. Okay. So something that I've talked about on this channel that I talked to them to is, you know, and this kind of ties in with time management. A lot of them asked me about time management, you know, because of stress and, you know, high school and things like that. We have to be proactive about our mental health. Like a lot of you know, I've just been, I've been going through a lot of stuff lately, right? A lot of stuff and as bad as it was, it would have been so much worse had I not been proactive about my mental health because the analogy I always give is you don't practice a fire drill only when a fire is happening, right?  So this is what I was teaching. I'm like, you need to make time to focus on your mental health and some of the coping strategies that are just very easy, very common. Like soon I'm going to be doing a review of three journaling apps like mood journals on on your cell phone, but like journal every day, right? Meditate every day, exercise every day. Talk to a support group every day. Be proactive because that way it gets ingrained in you. So that way when stuff goes down, you know to pick up the phone or you know to journal, you know to go exercise it, you know to meditate, you know what I mean? Don't only do these things when things are going terrible. All right. So when it comes to time management, like five to 10 minutes a day, like five to 10 minutes a day for your mental health and that goes back to, you know, schools not really teaching about mental health and strategies and everything like that. Like we need to take it into our own responsibility. You know what I mean? Like we need to teach our kids like, Hey, make this part of your daily routine routine. Do this, do that, right? Because we need to be doing something like five to 10 minutes a day. You can find the time.   Like talk on the phone a little bit less.  All right. So the last thing that they asked me about is breaking the stigma, right? And they were talking to me about how they feel as though you're not allowed to talk about mental health. And I was like, do I know about that? Right? And you know, there was a few questions about this and they're like, Why do you think we can't talk about mental health? And here's the thing. Here's what I've noticed from my personal experience, especially recently, is that people are trying to have a monopoly on mental health, right? And people are trying to gatekeep mental health, right? They're trying to say who can and who cannot talk about mental health. And that's a major issue, right? Like think about it. Like just just put this in perspective. I'm sitting in a room of teenagers who are afraid to talk about mental health and then they're seeing other people saying you are not allowed to talk about mental health. Like we need more people talking about mental health, not less. You know, like it is very difficult. Like it is hard for people like for me growing up. Mental health is not something that we talked about, right? I love my dad to death, but he was a type of father who told me to walk it off, right? I'm sad. Walk it off. You went through a breakup. Walk it off. Oh, you're anxious. Walk it off, right? Like we did not talk about emotions in my family, you know, so it was all bottled up and everything like that. So I never developed coping skills. We need to teach people that it is okay to talk about mental health and especially on a public platform. We need to do these things to show people. Hey, it's okay to talk about this stuff, right? And personally, I feel and started to stand up on the soapbox real quick. Like I get it. I've made some missteps, which I'm working on and things like that. But what what all of this conversation has done is it's it's brought us, you know, 10 steps back in my opinion, because now a ton of people are definitely afraid to talk about mental health. And that's one of the reasons why I'm never going to give up. I'm going to keep doing my thing. You know, some people are going to disagree with me and that's okay. Right. But we need more people talking about mental health, not less. So what I encourage these kids to do like, you know, you don't have to make a YouTube channel or whatever, but talk to each other about it, like go and like ask people how they're doing and let them know that it's okay to talk about this stuff. Like I was a triathlete in high school.  Like men, women alike. Like we all just need to be having this conversation more often. Like my goal, my mission in life is to make this a normalized conversation. I want people to talk about mental health as normally as they talk about physical health. And what I was telling these kids is, you know, mental health and physical health should be at the same level.  Right. Physical health is very important. That's why I'm trying to lose the weight. But here's the thing. Like the, the, the hottest, sexiest people on earth, the buffest people on earth can be absolutely miserable. Okay.  All right. But anyways, yeah, these kids had some amazing questions and like, I highly recommend all of you out there. If you, if you have experience, if you have something to offer, like, donate some of your time to your community to local high schools, you know, all of you probably know a teacher. Just say, yo, I have this day off. Is there some time I can come down and maybe talk about mental health and things like that.  I know there's like, let me just say this real quick. Psychology classes are not mental health classes. All right. Those are not there. Like, that's teaching you about the human mind and everything like that. I'm talking about the classes dedicated to teaching about like prevention and coping skills and all that. But get involved in your community. See if there's some time that you can donate. Go to local events thrown on by other organizations. All of you in major cities, not even huge cities. Like, I guarantee there are organizations that take volunteers and all of that. Like, for example, here in Las Vegas, we have multiple organizations. We have one at the college, UNLV. We actually just opened up the first public recovery high school. They are always looking for volunteers. Like I mentioned, there's a walk for suicide prevention happening here in Las Vegas. We do a recovery rally every September. There's so much stuff here in Las Vegas. So go out see what's happening in your city and get involved. All right. But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. You are all amazing and do not forget the Patreon Q&A for March is up. So go ask your questions and if you would like to get involved in the Patreon Q&A, click or tap right there. All right. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.


Hey, this is Nico Carver and NebulaFotos.com. The purpose of this video is just to let you know how I'm gonna handle reviews on this channel since I just started publishing my first reviews today. You can read the whole policy written out on my website and the link is in the description. Okay, first point. I will never review a product on this channel for money. Let me repeat that. I'll never review a product on this channel for money. Meaning, if a company approaches me and says, we want you to review this camera on your channel, we'll pay you $2,000, we want you to say these things about it, that's an easy and automatic no for me. I am only interested in unbiased reviews where I get to say whatever I want and I'm not being compensated for the review. Now, this doesn't mean I will never accept money from a company in what's called a brand deal. The difference there is there's things on YouTube which I'm sure you've seen called sponsored videos or a paid promotion as they call them sometimes. I'm open to doing these if my channel gets big enough and I get approached, but those are very clearly ads. YouTube even has a little disclaimer that you can add to the video and I would that says includes paid promotion. I'm sure you've seen these on YouTube channels and at the beginning of every podcast and I don't think they're wrong, they're just ads. They allow creators to actually make a living, making videos or podcasts or whatever they want. So to sum up my first point, I will never do a paid review where I'm told what to say for a fee but I reserve the right to do very clearly marked sponsored videos in the future. The second point is all about free stuff and I put free stuff in quotes because I have companies emailing me all the time now offering to send me products for a review on this channel and of course, this isn't really free at all because they're just trying to trade a copy of their product for exposure on YouTube and I'd actually be doing the work of reviewing it so it's really just like a trade and most of the time you don't get to keep the product anyways especially with the more expensive products like a lens or a camera.  So I have no ethical problem with this of accepting a loan of a product for free if it's fits with something that I actually wanna do on the channel but so far about 99% of the email I get doesn't fit with what I wanna do so I just say no because it doesn't make sense for me to show you some like monopod or a video light or a watch or whatever they're offering. So so far I've only accepted two products on loan for review, in both cases the companies were fine with me taking my time and will have no say over what I put into any reviews that I do of these items. I have a long-term loan of this QHY168C which I've used in a few videos most recently to test light pollution filters. So thank you very much to QHY for this long-term loan. I also hope to do a review of the camera itself as a standalone video. And the only other product I've accepted is this fisheye lens from TT Artisan because I wanna do a shootout review with a bunch of fisheye lenses and I hope to have that video out really soon. So to sum up the second point I will only accept free stuff from companies if they don't tell me what to say and it fits with some video that I'm already interested in doing. I also usually send this stuff back to them. I don't keep it. Now some people may consider accepting a product from a company in exchange for a review a form of bias. Like if I'm accepting the product do I have to give it a good review? And to be clear, I don't think so. If a company did indicate that was a condition of loaning me something that had to be a good review then I wouldn't accept it because I'm only interested in an unbiased review warts and all. Third and final point is about disclaimers and disclosures. The idea here is just to be very transparent about everything I'm doing. So I've always had a disclaimer on my website and in my YouTube video descriptions explaining that I do what is called affiliate marketing. Basically just if you use my link to buy something at Amazon or OPT then I get a small commission from those companies and it's paid out monthly, all the commissions but your price doesn't go up.  Similarly, anytime I'm using something that I've been given on loan I'm gonna disclose that in the video and on my websites. Okay, hopefully all of this made sense and it's not controversial. Many other YouTubers have had to think through these things too and define a policy for themselves and I'm basically just sharing that whole policy in my process with you. I don't see any reason why this would ever have to change but if I do have to change the policy in the future I'm going to make it very clear on the website with a changelog how I'm changing it and if I radically change it for some reason I don't think that'll happen. I'll also record a new video explaining my reasoning. Okay, till next time, clear skies everyone.


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Hi there. This is the session of the Linguistics Career Launch called Linguists Know About Words. I'm Nancy Frischberg, your moderator or host for this session. And Marcus Robinson is our Zoom producer today and he's going to provide any resources in the chat and technical assistance. So I'm going to not take a long time to introduce our guest today, Jenny Reddish, but I want to definitely mention that she has been extremely influential in the world of document design, like I think creating the topic and the name for that field. And she's going to tell us about that as well as a number of other ways linguists might know about words and how you can put that knowledge into a career in writing for the web. Jenny and I think I think we met first in like 1973 or two or around them in Washington, DC when Robin Battison, who's also on the call, brought me to meet her and her husband in their home in Washington DC and that was even before we knew there were careers about writing for the web because the web hadn't been invited invented yet, but I've been following her and I am continually amazed at how she keeps updating and refreshing herself and her material and here you get the latest version of it today. Jenny, take it away. Thank you so much Nancy and thanks to everybody who was with us we're going to be together for about 45 minutes today, and I'm going to talk about two major topics. First, a little bit about my own career journey not only to introduce myself to you, but to make a several general points about career journeys. And then, as Nancy said my topic is linguists know about words but we're particularly focusing on words in the web so careers in writing for the web. So we hope that we'll get to leave about 10 minutes at the end for your questions but I also urge you to use the chat to make comments, ask questions, and as Nancy said she and Marcus will be monitoring the chat if there's anything that comes up that I don't notice show interrupt me to bring that up. Also, I'm going to ask you to participate, particularly in the second part in the careers in writing for the web part by using the chat. So let me start by telling you a little bit about myself. I actually been interested in linguistics since I was in high school when we had to do some interviews for careers we might be interested in. I interviewed a journalist and a linguistics professor. And I then went on to college at Brynmar majoring in Russian is probably not as popular a language today but in those days it was the language we were worried about because of the Cold War situation, but I actually did it in part for the literature and I wanted to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the original. And there wasn't very much linguistics at Brynmar but I did have an opportunity for a summer internship one year. I went to Harvard Computer Center, a little bit of computational linguistics train machine translation and if you don't recognize that picture. It's an IBM punch card, which is how you wrote instructions Robin is smiling because that's what takes us back right. And that's how you wrote instructions for the computer in those days and actually it was a nice place to spend the summer, because those big mainframes had to be kept cool. And it was one of the few air conditioned places on campus. And in Slavic linguistics having the opportunity to spend a year in Amsterdam and if you ask me why Amsterdam not Moscow to study Slavic linguistics I can only tell you that not only whether good professors there, but it was a much better place to spend a year in Moscow would have been especially in the time. And I went on and did a PhD in a very esoteric subject that I had a passion for historical Indo European and it's still a fabulous topic. But my first point about life journeys is, I assumed I'd become an academic, and I didn't. But it doesn't always go the way you plan it. You think about it. There are different stages in your life. And in my case I met and married a MIT grad student who wanted to be a professor of physics. And indeed he finished a year before I did and did get the academic job and in fact has just gone to emeritus status after 50 plus years as a professor of physics and we actually then very quickly had two small children and so my message to you is you can take time out and you can work part time which is what I did combine family and career, but that's a stage and then there are other stages in your, in your life. And when I was ready to work it part time. I went looking for a non academic job as a linguist and I started my non academic linguistics career at the Center for applied linguistics a nonprofit in Washington DC and if you're not familiar with cow. You might want to look it up. It's not the path that I'm going to end up talking about writing for the web. But it is a place for non academic linguists primarily focusing on language policy. And if you can ask what how did you go for being an Indo European linguist to an expert in language policy. Another one of my points about career journeys is that your actual knowledge that you specialized in may no longer be relevant but your skills are likely to still be relevant. And so it was because I knew how to do research. I knew how to listen and observe and interview people with respect. I knew how to analyze and synthesize think deeply connect ideas organize a coherent story, and very much I knew how to write clearly. I went on from cow and to other small nonprofits always project to project, being an expert in language policy for several years, until I was ready to work full time and I ended up at a are the American Institute for Research, originally on a project to evaluate language policy in education, but I was in the right place at the right time and there's another one of my messages serendipity happens, and take advantage of the opportunities of serendipity. So I'd been an AR about a year when a group of the Department of Education decided that they should fund and fund very well a three year project that they named the document design project. And the major questions were, why do so many people have problems with government documents and how can we do a better job. And there were linguists on the team at the Department of Education, and they thought a linguist should lead this new document design project. Well, I was the only linguist at a are at the time because it was, it wasn't is primarily a social science psychology psychometrics instructional design firm. And so I got to be the person who directed this new project we did win the proposal, and the project had three components. Go out and find research in all kinds of fields linguistic psychology whatever else would have relevance, and where there was no research go do it. Apply what you learn in technical assistance projects, primarily with government agencies and create new academic curricula so make new better academic linguists who could do non academic work, and we partnered with Carnegie Mellon University for that. And I what I did very first was go out and hire two other linguists. And as my deputy directors, Vita Charo, who had done her doctoral work on jury instructions, and who had been the proposed linguists on the people who came in second in the competition so recently. I stole the person who didn't get the director job to be my deputy director. And the other was Robin Robin baddison who's on the call with us and whom you're going to hear from on Friday morning and I urge you to. And Robin's background had been in American Sign Language just Robin and, and here we came along to together do document design. And we did a lot of work produced many technical reports. In fact, if you do have a graduate program in technical writing document design usability, it very likely started out of the document design project. One of our books guidelines for document designers was probably the first research based book of guidelines for linguists know about words. The American Medical Writers Association several, about five years ago, I guess, agreed to redo this. So it was an online available online as an online publication asked me to write a new introduction to it. So there's another possible career. Someone just wrote I still have my copy of guidelines for document designers. There it is now online, freely available. But I did want to mention that medical writing, writing and health literacy is another wonderful possible career for linguists who want to work outside of academia. And one of the things that we said we would do that I think helped a IR, be the people to do the document design project was that we would create a document design center and look for work outside of the original project, which turned out to be a good thing because here's another reality of career journeys. Not only does your life change and you go through different stages, but the world outside of you goes through different stages. And in the US government at least, we have the situation that we have an administration that really cares about people and wants them to be able to understand government documents. And that can be replaced by an administration. It was replaced by an administration that didn't care about people didn't want government. And very early in the administration canceled all the work on playing language in government. So what were we supposed to do with the document design center. Well, serendipity, again, Vita got a project to worry about why lawyers don't learn to write and play language, which resulted in a textbook clear and effective legal writing which still today decades later in a fifth edition I think is the latest one is still being used to teach young law students play language. And Robin took a different tack because just as we were worrying about what would we do, the personal computer appeared. So here again is the world happening when you don't expect it. And suddenly, we became the people to revolutionize computer documentation. Vita went off to have eventually to have a long career in government. Robin went off eventually to be stolen by IBM. Right. Because where our first foray into computer documentation was in fact for IBM. I stated a IR, where we ended up working not only for IBM but HP so many lots and lots of private companies. What were we doing with a theme of the second part of what I'm going to talk about this morning is how everything we write as a conversation. And what we did was turn nominal writing into conversation. So we would have a manual that had been written by the programmers to say something like issue with the top command results and align zero condition. Yeah. And we would write to go to the beginning of your file type top and press enter. So, linguists know about words linguists know about conversation. And the other thing that I did was to introduce usability. And again, this was actually serendipity IBM wanted an outside vendor to do usability testing of their manuals. And my psychology colleague Joe Dumas, and I wrote the first book on how to do usability testing. And again serendipity. I left a IR because I got tired of just putting out fires and worrying about budgets. And I began just consulting outside. And then along came the internet and the web so for like the last 20 years my work has been almost entirely on websites, which led to my current book called letting go of the words. So let me sum that up and advice from my career journey to yours. First, realize that life goes in stages. When I was home with two preschoolers and climbing the walls because I thought I have a PhD and I'm never going to have a career. Someone told me enjoy it now. So that's one of my advice to you find the work life balance that works for you in each of the stages. My other advice, which you can see be flexible expect the unexpected the career you have 20 years from now, maybe something that doesn't exist today. What happened to me over and over and over again. Think about your skills that transfer again your specific knowledge that you worked on in your linguistic academic career may not be the knowledge that you want out in another career but your skills transfer. Take advantage of serendipity and never stop what learning. If you're really interested in career journeys I actually have a book to recommend to you it's called the UX careers handbook by Corey lepson and UX of course is about usability and user experience but there's an awful lot in here that's really about careers and career journeys, and in the course of the 11 or 12 specific careers that Corey had people write about including I wrote one of them several are actually about writing and content. Now, I'd love to chat more about this, but I want to go on and do the other half of the talk about writing for the web. So we can chat more in the question time at the end, so let me go on to the second part. I just know about words websites have words. Therefore, there are careers and for linguists and writing for the web. Now, here's where I want you to join me, and I'm going to pull the chat up here to be something I see better. Thank you for putting in the link to the careers handbook. So I want you to tell me if you were to go to a website to put on your hat as a web user of an information rich or an e commerce website. Not an entertainment site, not a gaming site. What's a website visitors want. Why do they go to websites. Let me see some answers in the chat box. Excuse me. Come on. Information information exactly. So people are saying information they come for the content. And so if you think about it, navigation and search, which is really the field of information architecture is very important if people can find it. It might as well not be there. And design is really important in all aspects so interaction design interaction design visual design graphic design is really critical. But so is technology. The technology has to work. But what do we have here we have three legs of a stool they don't even stand up by themselves. They are all there to support the content, because it's the content that people come for. So we, who can deal with the content are really an important part of a successful website. My other point that I said before, when I was talking about revolutionizing computer instructions, but it's really true everything we write is part of a conversation. And this holds not only for the web. I still do a lot of work in legal writing letters notices reports. And it's not an synchronous conversation. It's an asynchronous conversation, which means you have to really pay attention, perhaps even more to who you're having this conversation with what conversation is all about. So that I want you to think about the fact that, in fact, everything we write in the workplace is really replacing the telephone. And I know that there is a course that some of you may be taking in chat box and voice, which is about conversation, but I really want to make the point that that's not the only conversation, everything we do as a writer is a conversation. So what conversation, are we involved in on the web is people coming to satisfy their goals, their goals, and that is usually to get an answer, or to do a task. So if we think about that. Excuse me. But I just said but everything being a conversation is really true, but there is one huge difference between print and online. And that is, that in paper, you start the conversation. So think about it as the user again, your mail comes, and you perform triage on it right you. That's junk. That's an ad. Oh, I better look at that one who's it from. What's it about. But online. The visitor starts the conversation. The web doesn't exist until somebody comes to it and they come to it with their conversation and their mind. Excuse me. So that means you must focus first on what your visitors want to know. And therefore you have to know a lot about them. So audience understanding is a critical part of writing for the web. So everything that think about what you probably know is that writing anything is a process, and it's a process that doesn't start with writing. It starts with planning. And so, we have to think about planning at various levels. And I talk about what jobs there are what careers could you have in writing for the web. I want to mention these content strategist content designer content writer content editor UX writer. I'm going to very briefly talk about the first two. I'm going to spend our 10 minutes talking about writer editor, and I'm going to introduce UX writer very briefly at the end. One of the things I want to say is, these are all titles and there are probably lots more titles you may come across if you're looking for a job in the web. Most important read job descriptions carefully because these titles are not separate. They overlap. You'll see great inconsistency and what people think they mean. For example, from a job site one job site drawing from many companies looking for people. Here's a job for a content strategist. Use a combination of data analysis user research benchmarking content audits to make content decisions and orchestrate proactive content development. Well, I think that's a good definition, because it's a strategy, but right under it from a different company, looking for a content strategist, they want someone to draft clear actionable support content. To me that's a content writer, but because content strategist has become a title today, you're going to see a lot of jobs that are called content strategist that aren't really strategy jobs. So what is a content strategist. It's the person who plans in the big picture for what the content in an entire. Web site it could be part of a website it could be all the channels that are relevant. Whatever. I'm not going to spend more time on it because I really do want to spend my time on content writer, but I do have other talks and you can actually see a whole webinar at my website. But another title. Excuse me. That has become very popular as content designer, mostly in the UK and Australia. And if you read this definition, you'll see that it is just a generic title for people dealing with content. And I really think that what has happened is everything is being called design. Let's call the content person a content designer. So the design people will think more highly. And it isn't just writing stuff to put in at the end, getting a seat at the table by being called content designers designer. But I want to really think that the careers we're talking about as linguists writing for the web content writer content editor. And to me the distinction is whether or not you're the person who does the first draft, perhaps getting material from subject matter experts or other people, or whether you're editing somebody else's draft. But whichever of those roles you are. I want to talk about seven points that I think are very different in academic writing and non academic writing. And that is, put the key message first, think bite snack meal, break up your writing, use lots of meaningful headings, write the conversation use pronouns, prefer the active voice, put the action in the verbs, and I guess that was the last one. Let me move on to going through these put the key message first. You know if we think about it, we've all been successful academically in school. But if you had to write a report in school. What was your purpose.  And if I ask, who was the audience, and you're honest. It was your teacher, or your thesis committee. And if you think about whether or not you were teaching people things they didn't already know well for a master's or doctoral thesis you are expected to come up with some new stuff. But, by the time you might do thesis, you really have to not only tell what you learn, you have to prove, you know everything that was done beforehand. And so, academic writing is typically in the narrative style where yes you have to announce your topic but you also have to give the history the background of everything that's been known about it before you. And then the story of what you did. And where is the great result at the end. Well that's absolutely backwards from the best way to write in the workplace, because in the workplace. You have very busy users remember that person coming to your website is only focused on what is my need today whereas the answer to today's question how do I do this task right now. The web is a tool for getting things done to meet a goal that's outside of the web. This is called inverted pyramid and I'll show you a picture of that on the next slide but basically it is put your key message first. And the interesting thing is that starts a conversation, because then people can ask, how do you know that. How do I do that. What's the detail. So you're after that answering people's questions, even if you don't write question headings. Why is this called inverted pyramid. It actually comes from journalism, because journalists know more people read the headline, and basically you lose readers, and the picture here from the work of Jacob Nielsen and Kara Pernese is to show you in a heat map from tracking how many people read the very beginning that's the red and jump down to the bullet list and didn't read much else. So key message first. Another way to think about key message that a lot of people find really useful is the concept bite snack meal, which comes from a another plain language guru Leslie O'Flayhaven and with her I use it in my training too. And the point is that some people only want a little bit. Some people want a little bit more. And yes a few people want the whole thing. If you think about it like an academic journal, it's people. The title of your article is a decision point it draws people in, or they say, it's not what I want. The abstract is perhaps the little snack. It's again a decision point. Is this enough for me. Let me show you an example, a good example in my mind of bite snack meal on the web. So here is aria.com. And on the homepage, who we are, and a little key message about who we are. And notice the link is read our story. It's not read more, which is a really important accessibility point that the links be meaningful. But if you click on that, you get to a page and here's another point and point about writing for the web, the heading on the page matches the heading that you thought you were going to get. And again, a nice little snack. And if you notice, please, how short the sentences are. How short the paragraphs are another point I'm going to make next. And if we go down again, you get the rest, the meal with headings. And again, very short pieces. And therefore, my addition to Leslie's bite snack meal, even the whole meal should be easy to digest. So, at second point, bite snack meal. Third point, again, if we go back to our academic lives, if we wrote things with one sentence paragraphs we probably wouldn't have gotten a good grade, but one sentence paragraph on the web is good. No paragraphs, because if you think about it people don't come to read, and they don't come for paragraphs they come for information that's what you told me a few slides ago. So if the information is best delivered fragments list tables links pictures videos. That's good. Okay, I want you to work with me for a moment. I have two versions of the same document here. A and B. So which is better this is a. This is B. Again, this is. I go back with everybody saying B. Yes, of course, what's the difference. Why is be better than a. What's the difference between a and B. You can see at a glance. It's skimmable. So the really important of lots of meaningful headings. I have to say, I once had the sad opportunity to review a study done by someone whom I actually do respect very much, not a linguist, but a technical writing academic who did a study in the U.S. who did a study coming to the conclusion that headings were of no value. What they did was take a very poorly written document and every so many words put in a heading not particularly a good heading, just a heading. And this becomes what my friend Caroline Jarrett says. This is a good way to study an old document by trying to put a heading on every paragraph, but it will probably show you that the document is not well organized. So good headings and a well organized document. If we are talking about conversation, and we are, then we need pronouns. And in fact, if you had, remember where you are talking about the telephone web is telephone. It's a little piece from the physical exercise that you just looked at.  And even in the little bits of micro copy and that's going to take us to the UX writer. That's what UX writers are doing writing these little pieces in the interface, like instead of search. How may we help you. If you were taught in your academic career that you have to write in the passive with no pronouns. That is an ancient myth. In fact, one of the most important articles of the 20th century, Watson and Crick's published in nature one of the top journals starts out, we wish to suggest the structure for the soul of DNA. We weren't afraid to take credit for their work and write we in fact most academic journals today if you read their guidelines for authors want active sentences and personal pronouns prefer the active voice I don't have to go over this with you folks. Each non linguists. This is an important point to get them to understand active and passive and to write in the active voice. But one you may not have thought about is how nominal so much writing in the workplace is and how important it is to get out of nominalizations. So, if I were to ask you in this sentence. What is the verb, it's only is, and if I asked you where's the action, you're going to tell me it's in retention and requirement. So, I'd love to have you rewrite this sentence for me someone want to unmute and make this an active action sentence. All researchers need to retain their data for a period of seven years. Okay, thanks. That's a good first one. You put the all researchers first, and you had need to which in fact made it active mode many people start with this one. So, research are required to, but that in fact is passive. So you got us very well in much legal writing it has to be must rather than need to but that's fine. So, in their data, did you really need for a period of, or to make it order, we could get rid of that. Right. Okay, can we make retain a more simple word. Somebody else. Keep, keep. Right. Let's have simple plain language words. All researchers must keep their data for seven years. Can you make it personal, conversational. You must keep your data for seven years. Exactly. You must keep your can you make it an imperative. If you're a researcher, keep your data for at least seven years. Right, you can do that. And one of the things that Jacob Nielsen's research shows is that numerals, even under 10 are much easier for people to grasp. Because they are skimming and scanning. So any one of these, but let's make them as plain as possible. Okay, I want to finish up quickly so we have 10 minutes for our even five minutes for some questions. The UX writer is the newest career in writing for the web. And again, you will find job descriptions for UX writer which basically say write all the content on the entire site. But there's a narrower definition that is probably more common. And that is the UX writer is the person who writes the little pieces of content in the interface rather than the big articles. And as in this list from rich stats. So I want to just point out two kinds of writing that UX writers are generally responsible for. One is messages. So Robin again smiling right this is whatever messages look like when we were first dealing with computer documentation and you can see how helpful that early is. But here's a more modern one. Short is clear. It's helpful if you know what 200 kilobytes and KB stands for, but if I were training a UX writer, I would say you can do two things to make this like this better. One is why call it an error. The system had a limitation, not that you made an error. So something like could not upload file images must be less than 200 K. But also to think about what you could do in the interface to not need this message to come up as often as it might. And that would be to make sure that on the previous page there was a piece of micro copy that is little bit of copy that says maximum size 200 K KB right a nice link to an article about this. One says the latex errors on say overly for really funny. Yeah, that's a whole other topic that I can't get don't have time to get into. But the whole idea of tone is really important and you can look up tone and voice there's a whole field on getting the tone and voice and the personality of the site. It's a really lovely topic. Just my last thing. Another piece of micro copy is in forms, helping people know what's acceptable, rather than having them make a mistake, and having to go back and fix it. Well, I've used more than my time so I want to thank you for listening and time for a few questions. Now I see a hand raised. It must be Monica. Yes. This is very exciting. I really like enjoy your talk. And it comes to my mind how this clear leadership that we don't want to say dominion of English in this digital revolution and being a native of Spanish and a late layer learner of English as a second language I would frequently exploring a website I would prefer to go to the English version, because not because I've been living for a long time in the US but because it's much more clear, and it's straightforward. So, my question is, how is the job market on this area in other languages. Is it developed here in the US, or because really I, I see a need like urgent need of clarifying and helping the development of websites in other language, or at least I can speak for Spanish. Absolutely.  The US government does almost everything bilingual and national National Cancer Institute has a usability lab where they. I don't know if she's still the lead the lead was a bilingual person. The Center for plain language gives out clear mark awards every year in English Spanish and for the first time this year in French primarily from from Canada from French, from Canada from Canada, but yes, and most commercial sites are that are global are translated and in fact localized into many many languages. So yes that is a huge field, and I urge you with your skill in Spanish to get involved in that. Thank you. Thank you very, very much for someone says gracias Monica. Jenny, can I add something to that. Yes, please, Robin, because there is a, I mean, the plane English or plain language movement doesn't have an active in many parts of the world but it's been significant in the US and in England, where there have been plain English campaigns. But I think that in other countries with significant languages, I'm thinking, particularly France and Germany, there were conservative movements because the centralized education and administration of those two countries. They had the central language societies. What was it called, and books published. Like, like the Academy you mean. Yeah, the Academy for on says and in Germany I think a book called the dude and who very prescriptive about language, and you must do it this way and they, they reinforce the bureaucratic heaviness of their language. And so there have been contravailing forces in those two countries at least. I don't know what it's like in Spain and in Latin America. Robin you're absolutely right, but there's also the plain language movement has really been been spreading. And at our annual conference this year we had people from 55 countries. And in fact, in Sweden, where you lived for a long time in the Scandinavian countries there is tremendous government work in in plain language. So this is this is spreading. You're absolutely right that some countries have been very, very prescriptive about about language but also the web has really brought the idea that we must be conversing with people to countries that had been more prescriptive about their language. And so I think there is real movement in that. I know from the comments that the real academia has also been loosening up lately. I see some comments coming in, just in the interest of continuity I did have something additional on the theme of government supporting plain language or not supporting administration. You noted the historical fact that when the new administration came in in 1981, I guess it was, and immediately turned off all the plain language support from the government. The American Institute of Research and the Document Design Center did have the revenge on that administration a few years later, because one of the first computer projects that we worked on a computer handbooks and creating a brand new style was for an IBM office system called Profs, which stood for the professional office systems I think and it had. This was 1981 that started that email it had calendars it had documents you could share. Ladi Dadi all those kinds of things in a in a primitive mainframe way but they did that and it was aimed at corporations and they sold an installation of that system for the White House to the White House the White House bought it. Well, along comes the Iran Contra affair and Colonel General whatever, all over north trying to defend himself and talking about messages but there were documents that were deleted. Oh, they weren't deleted. They weren't deleted because they didn't read the handbook that we wrote about what's really happens when you delete something it doesn't really go away. So, you know, that is that is true Robin and props was a wonderful, a wonderful project we created icons before icons existed before the graphical user interface. We had icons in our print document. Right. If you will remember, and we really. Of course, Mr north exemplified a problem that we definitely had in computer manuals and is something we have to recognize on the web to. He didn't read it. Great manual. He didn't read. I've linked an LA Times article. Put that in the chat so people can read the story. That's funny. But one of the things we have to remember about writing as a conversation is in fact that people skim and scan and read as little as possible to get the job done. And yeah, your story is is a is a great one takes us back to the document design center. Paulina has her hand up and so I'd like to meet Paulina. Yeah. Hi. It's, it's something you mentioned it's not directly to like the topic itself that you were working in a non-governmental governmental platform like for applying linguistics right at the beginning you mentioned CAL. And I was wondering how because it's a concern I'm having currently about if I should try to pursue greater studies like pursue a mass PhD degree in order to try to get into a career. I know you study in Harvard. And you then you went to in this non non governmental organization. Do you think someone without like your background in that case, could it be a chance to work in in UX design or like in the kind of web content that you were mentioned to us. That's a very good question Paulina in in my personal case the jobs that I got my, the fact that I had a PhD counted heavily towards my getting those jobs. But I even though even though the job had nothing to do with the topic of my PhD. I, however, I don't think it's necessary to get a good job. Especially today, if you want to work in UX, then you really should have perhaps a master's degree there are or a certificate there are a lot of academic programs in that offer you. Masters in in UX, and that would probably be the degree that you want to get started. PhDs in UX do more likely become academics. And, and the other thing is, if you're not sure that that's what you want to do. You might get some junior level experience. I went straight through education. That is I went from my undergraduate to my graduate work. And to advise someone today, I think it might be good to get some real practical experience in a team. There's so much and I know this is, I think, what Nancy and Robin are going to talk about on on Friday morning but there's so much in the workplace that just is something to be able to deliver a product on time to work collaboratively in a team to know what the work work environment is like and and actually in different places because corporate cultures or company cultures can be so different. Robin probably remembers we worked for IBM and Hewlett Packard at the same time, and we would go out to California and I don't know about Robin being male but as a female, I would pack my three piece suit to go to IBM and my genes to go to Hewlett Packard corporate cultures just vary tremendously. But what I'm saying is you might want to get some experience before you decide to go to graduate school and then go and particularly in UX and get a master's degree. The thing I was kept interrupting Robin because I wanted to highlight is the your brief comments about bite snack meal I went to bed last night thinking who's going to talk about that do I have to mention that. And thank you very much for reading my mind because I find that very helpful, even when I talk to people who aren't writers but have to put together content that they should think about bite snack meal as their. It's a wonderful concept and I'm very grateful to Leslie for letting us. Leslie also teach this important point. Yeah. If you want more about it on that slide I do have a link to her website. And you can find her original article about it on that website. And it's so famous it's got a Wikipedia page. Oh, I didn't realize that. Okay, that is wonderful. I was just wondering for content writers. I've seen some job postings where they have to deal with a certain field like health or business or Lars and things like that. Do you think that you need like any sort of background in that to in order to be able to make it more clear. Or is it fine to just like kind of go into that field and learn as you go from your experience. You will certainly do better in a job search. If you have a background in the domain, particularly health health literacy, because that is a huge field. And if you don't have the background in it. There are a couple of here are a couple of suggestions one read. Read in the field so that when you go to, if you get an interview, you can talk about the people in the field. And what they, what they say what the general things for example, one of the differences in a lot of health literacy are compared to what I teach and preach is that some of them still believe in readability formulas, which is linguists we know is hogwash. But I've been putting up his head like I, I'm still writing articles about why not to use readability formulas. My other suggestion for you, Denise is go and read a lot of health websites and see what is good and what is not about it. When we were hiring people at the document design center and the rule was we could not give people a test, but I would say to them, find something that you think is not well done, and redo it, and then come and tell the story. To the audience, why did you make the decisions that you made. So there are ways in which you can get experience, even without going back to school on your own, and there are ways in which you can build your skills in the domain on your own. You might find a lot of podcasts or webinars in the field. Again, to make you build your own self confidence self esteem about your knowledge of the field and put yourself in a better position to getting a job in the field. Okay. Thank you. Perhaps, we should close this and move on, but I'm really happy to have worked with so many people. And again, I'm happy to continue this conversation offline, and I look forward to the other talks in the series. Thank you so much, Jenny.


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