Notes for My Book-in-Progress on Writing, Talking, Listening and Thinking

I'm coming back to the idea of revising my Aphorisms on Writing, Speaking, and Listening. In particular, though good writing never changes, technology does. I need to talk more about how to use software in writing articles. I need to talk about programming style and posting data and code on the Web. I need to talk about online seminars.

---

The "gunner" in law school is the student who answers questions too eagerly and quickly. It is worth discussion how to be a good student-- when to answer a question, when not to answer, and when to ask a aquestion of the professor.

---

On LISTENING,  someone wrote on Twitter: 

My daughter’s fifth grade teachers were tired of getting emails consisting of, “hi, i don’t understand the hw. can u help. thx.” So they had a lesson on it, and last night’s homework was to write an example of a proper email requesting help. Here is my daughter’s.

There are two parts to the skill of asking for help: manners, and substance. Manners are as important as substance. If I get an unmannerly request for help from a student, scholar, or administrator, I will very happily either ignore it or respond with a rebuke. I say "happily" because an arrogant request is one I can deny in good conscience and save myself the effort of helping. Indeed, it is my duty to refuse it, lest I encourage arrogance.

Mrs. Glaser's daughter has mastered the skill of asking politely. That is the most important and easiest skill to learn. As with most of Manners, it only requires notifying the person that they are gauche, uncouth, and liable to be despised unless they follow basic easy rules. Note that a big part of why they are likely to be despised is that it is so easy to be polite, and not knowing it shows that you must be a very ignorant person indeed. Most fifth-graders, being children, are indeed very ignorant, so this is not a moral fault, but it is one reason most people don't respect children or take them seriously. (I, by the way, take them far more seriously than average, precisely because I think about things like this.)

The second part of the skill, though, is substance. How should a person ask for help? Not just politely, but in a way that makes the recipient able to help them. Saying politely, "I need help" is close to useless, because the helper has very little idea of what you need help with. Sometimes you do need to ask for help like that, because you really are totally confused. Here, the requestor has done better. She says she needs help because "because I did not understand page 3 problem 2 of my math homework." That is not as good as she could have done, though, by a longshot. First, she needs help in English as well as math. She is old enough to know that she should write "because I did not understand problem 2 of my math homework, from page 3", which is what a person would say in natural language, rather than the crude "page 3, problem 2". More important, I think she really meant that she couldn't answer the question, rather than that she couldn't understand it, though I could be wrong there and she could answer it but not understand it, as is often the case with math--- the student can apply the formulas, but not really understand what is going on. This would be clear if she explained what she wanted the teacher to tell her about. As it is, she says the problem's instructions are unclear, but she gives zero hint as to which part of it is unclear. When asking somebody to help you with a problem, you need to give them somewhere to start. Her teacher could look at the problem and think, "Usually students are confused about part (c) and about what the word 'divisor' means" and answer that question, but that requires the teacher to put in extra effort and it might well be it was something else about the question that was confusing. It is much easier for the student to say what the student doesn't understand than for the teacher to have to figure it out, and student thinking time is an investment in future ability rather than a cost like the teacher's time, especially if it is an experienced teacher who already knows how students think.

All this is to say that learning to ask questions is a difficult and important skill. Part of it is learning how to be polite, and another part is learning how not to waste the teacher's time-- or the consultant's time, or the attorney's time, or the judge's time, since this skill comes up repeatedly over life. People who don't think about are enormously inconsiderate, coming for help and expecting the helper to invest enormous time to figure out things about what the requestor knows and doesn't know that the requestor could figure out with relatively little effort.

---

Andrew Gelman's Statistical Thinking is an example of a blog with good comments.   Usually heavy moderation is needed, as with letters ot the editor in a newspaper.  Professor Gelman's blog is on a technical subject, and that keeps out the riff-raff. 

---

---