Forbes Piece on Autistic Workers

Forbes has a nice piece on hiring people with autism. In the piece they highlight Specialisterne, a company founded by a man whose son was diagnosed with autism.

People with autism are potentially great employees -- so long as you expect them to work and do not expect them to be social and engage in office politics.

More, people need to realize that when someone with autism fails to engage with people, that does not mean they are not interested in the job, in the situation, or even in getting promoted. It's not that a person with autism doesn't care whether they are there or not, as too often neurotypicals misinterpret the behaviors of those with autism, but rather that they are more engaged in the work than in talking up the work. Neurotypicals understand that you have to talk up your work, because otherwise your work won't speak for itself; those with autism think the quality of their work is self-evident.

The ideal situation for someone with autism is to have a place where they can work without interruption, with someone to bring things back and forth. For someone doing data entry, for example, just let them work and have someone bring the data to them, and you will have a data entry machine. But if the data stops coming, there is a certain probability that your autistic employee won't think to ask for more. They'll mostly just wonder what to do next.

If this sounds like a lot of hand-holding, you might consider the degree to which you have to deal with all of the social needs of your neurotypical employees. You may not recognize the degree to which you have to deal with such things, and the amount of time it takes up, precisely because you, too, are neurotypical, and such hand-holding seems more natural and less forced. But, if you see things from the autistics' standpoint, most social interactions are a bunch of time-wasting nonsense. This, of course, highlights the difficulties between autistics and neurotypicals.

Still, if you want employees who are powerful bottom-up, analytical thinkers with strong pattern recognition skills and attention to detail, you can't do better than someone with autism.

Creating a Work Environment Conducive to Creativity

Cubicles are not conducive to creativity. Bare, white walls are not conducive to creativity. Florescent lights are not conducive to creativity. In other words, the typical office environment is not conducive to creativity.

At the other extreme, you don't want our office to be too busy -- whether that be the wall paper, human activity, choice of background music, etc.

It's about balance. Interesting pictures, bright colors, natural light create an environment more conducive to creativity. Real plants and flowers feed into our biophilia and make us more comfortable, relaxed, and mentally active. Animals, too, contribute -- fish tanks are known to make people more relaxed. And more relaxed, less tense employees are happier, more productive employees.

Creativity and Innovation in the Workplace

Having creative employees is not enough. You also have to have managers who can recognize that creativity and foster it and turn it into something -- to translate it into innovation.

When are people most creative? When they are given the opportunity to be creative. Some people are creative under pressure; some are creative only when the pressure is off. But in either case, you need the time and freedom to be creative.

Google gives employees Fridays to work on personally interesting projects. If you think you cannot afford to give a full day every week to letting employees "goof off," let me ask you one simple question: are you as profitable as Google? If not, perhaps some lessons could be learned.

Businesses today need to be creative and innovate more than perhaps ever before. The world is moving faster and faster. And that means you need more creative people. Those creative people may already be in your company. But perhaps you need to think more creatively about who you hire. Consider hiring more creative people -- people in the arts, in philosophy, in the humanities. Oftentimes these people will have ideas they have no idea how to implement. Yet, you will have people there who are fully capable of implementing their ideas, but rarely are all that creative on their own. These are the people you need to pair up.

Which gets us back to the importance of having good managers, who can recognize when two or more employees need to get together and work on something. Your managers need to be people-connectors. They need to see the potential inherent in an idea, in two people getting together to create and innovate. It's not about egos -- it's about benefitting the company first and foremost. Those are the kinds of managers you need.

With an environment of creativity and innovation, your company will continue to grow and be healthy. But you have to create that environment. You have to take the risk of making it.

You Learn to Write by Writing, Not by Typing

In the age of computers, most of our writing is done on computers. But typing on computer keyboards may be one of the very things preventing us from writing well.

When we write with pen on paper and make the shapes of letters and words, we are more directly helping to build up the reading/writing portion of our brains (developed by adapting portions of the face-recognition and shape-recognition portions) through which all reading and writing must pass on its way either to or from the language processor. There is a big difference between mere recognition of shapes on a keyboard (or, worse, once you memorize where the letters are, mere finger movement/positions) and the movements needed to write and thus create letters, and to make those letters into words, those words into sentences.

We learn to write by writing, not by typing, sentences.

Passing the Writing Buck

Where does the buck stop when it comes to students learning how to write? Nowhere, it seems. Every university department complains students don't know how to write, but nobody wants to teach anyone how to do so. Businesses need people to write well, but universities are too busy passing blame to teach anyone how to write. So don't count on universities or community colleges doing the job of teaching writing. They are using methods that have proven over and over not to work unless you already know how to write well.

Writing is a skill that must be developed over time. And it has to be consistently developed, and developed in conjunction with what is being read.

Businesses that want employees who can write will have to take it upon themselves to hire people to come in and teach those employees how to write. It's not going to be a quick fix. Learning any new skill is never quick. But it can be done with enough devotion and dedication.

Advice from Stephen King

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King

It really is as simple as that. If you don't read, you cannot write. Writing programs around the U.S. have things exactly backwards. If you want people to learn how to write well, they have to read more. And they have to read well-written works.

Movies Synchronize Brains

If there is something you want all of your employees to do or think the same, make a film and have them watch that film together. As it turns out movies synchronize brains. What that means is you can get all of your employees thinking and feeling the same things at the same time. An empathetic character can move your employees to feeling and thinking the same way. And since all of your employees will be synchronized through the film, those same employees will feel more unified. The more unified employees are in regards to the goals of the company, the more productive they will be, and the more prosperous the company will be.

Advice for Autism Awareness Month

Since this is Autism Awareness Month, I thought I would give some advice regarding those with autism: you should hire them.

Here are all the reasons you should hire people with autism:

1. They are great workers; they will obsessively do their jobs.
2. They will not play office politics; they don't care what others think or do, so long as they are allowed to do their work.
3. They are loyal.
4. They do not lie, even to save people's feelings.

Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't problems:

1. They do not play office politics; they don't care what others think.
2. They do not lie, even to save people's feelings.
3. They tend to take anything you say literally.
4. They need the "big picture" explained to them.

If you want employees who play social games and backstab each other, don't hire people with autism. That is my advice. But if you want people who will be loyal and who will do their jobs and do it well, who are very analytical and tend to have high I.Q.'s, then you might consider hiring some autistic employees.

Just don't let their honesty throw you off.

Learning How to Do Something and Tacit Knowledge

In order to learn how to do something, do you actually have to do it? Can you learn something by simply reading about it?

The answer is, quite simply, no.

If you went and read several dozen grammar books, would that make you a good writer? Absolutely not. You will learn the rules, but in such a way that you will know what the critic means when he points out that you are missing a gerund. But you still failed to include your gerund.

Could you learn to code by only reading books about code, but not actually coding? No, you have to actually try your hand at it, to find out how things in fact interact. You can learn a great deal of conscious knowledge by reading, but in order to gain tacit knowledge, you have to actually do it.

This is true of everything you learn. What you hear in a class, what you hear from a teacher, what you read in your textbook, what you read in a writing handbook, those are all ways we consciously learn. Yet, the tacit knowledge that comes with experience and expertise can only be derived from doing the thing, and doing it often, and doing it well.

For example, I read a great deal of poetry -- mostly formalist verse -- before I tried my hand at writing formal poetry. My earliest attempts at writing in a regular rhythm were failures. As I wrote more and more poems with regular rhythms, it became easier and easier to do so. Now I can write in a regular rhythm without even thinking about it. I had to develop how I understood how to write that way. It did not come with instruction per se, and it did not come with reading formalist verse. No, it came with practice. Now, the other elements are necessary; however, they are hardly sufficient.

If you want your employees to learn how to write well, you have to provide them with good instruction, but you even more importantly have to provide them with time to write.

Arts Venues and Social Values

While we are mostly focusing on writing consulting here at Camplin Creative Consulting, there are also opportunities for arts organizations to receive our help. My Ph.D. is in the Humanities, and, more, I have published on the sociology of artistic and literary production and on the difficulties inherent in running a theater.

The latter article on how theaters have to negotiate the different values of different social orders -- with an emphasis on the conflicts among economic pressures, artistic needs, and political pressures -- in particular shows how well I understand the pressures on theaters. Negotiating these values makes it difficult for theaters to succeed. I believe I can help theaters and other artistic venues improve their odds of success.

Johnny Can't Write, and Employers Ought to be Mad

Back in November, CNBC had a piece discussing the complaints companies had about their employees' lack of writing ability. The easy thing to blame is "technology," but in the rise of technology and the rise of bad writing habits is a mere positive correlation. The real cause of bad writing habits is the lack of real writing education.

More, our technologies are increasingly text-based. We ironically write each other on our phones more than we call each other. We write emails, we write each other on Facebook, we write blogs -- we write all the time. And we read all the time online as well. That would suggest that we should see improved writing skills. If writing well requires more writing, and people are writing more than ever, we should see writing skills improving.

This mystery can be uncovered if we realize that most of the reading done online is skimming rather than close reading. People skim to get the main points, read only a little bit of a piece to get the gist of things, etc. These are not the reading habits that will lead anyone to writing well. To learn to write well, you have to read good writing, and you need to read it carefully. And it needs to be higher than the 5th grade reading level we find in American periodicals (including online periodicals).

More, much of what we read are the posts of friends, who are themselves often bad writers. If you read bad writing, you will turn into a bad writer. A common complaint among university professors is that their own writing gets worse from having to read students' writing. Now imagine what will happen if your writing is already bad. Bad habits get reinforced. This isn't to say that you should defriend all the bad writers you know on Facebook; rather, this means you need to supplement their writing with Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, and Shakespeare.

You have to encounter good sentences to learn how to write good sentences. And, if you want to become a truly professional writer, you then have to learn why those good sentences are good sentences -- you have to learn the rules of the game explicitly and not just tacitly. You have to have people explain to you why the good sentences are good sentences. Learning postmodern theory in the university isn't going to do that.

Ambiguity or Literalism in Language?

What do you want your words to say? Do you want your words to be ambiguous, so they can be interpreted in a variety of ways? Or do you want your words to be clear and unambiguous, so they can be understood in only one way?

This matters a great deal. For example, if you say that you are going to assess an employee in an annual review, what do you mean by "annual"? What is a "year"? That may seem obvious, but is it? Does the year begin on January 1? Or do you mean a year from when the person was hired? Then there is the fiscal year. When does your fiscal year start? And for schools the "year" begins on the day school begins. You had better be clear what you mean by "year."

Now, there may be areas in which you intend there to be some ambiguity in order to ensure that people can have some freedom to make their own decisions. Here one has to be careful. If you use the same terms in two places, one where you intend ambiguity, another where you intend clarity, you can create confusion. For example, if you have that employees need to demonstrate "effectiveness," and you intend for it to be sufficiently vague as to capture a variety of ways your employees are effective, you cannot then later use the term to be specific unless you specify that -- for example, including the phrase:

here "effective" means...

You must also keep In mind the fact that you are bound to have some employees who take language more literally than do others. In fact, if you keep these employees in mind, you can avoid any number of problems not just with them, but with the rest of your employees.

Hierarchy and Competition to Create Successful Groups/Businesses

Here is a little something I found that business owners should find of interest. In evolution there is a concept known as "group selection," which should be of interest to anyone who runs a business. If you understand your business to be a "group" competing in the market environment, you definitely want your group to have the traits that will allow for positive selection and not negative selection.

So what makes for the most successful social groups? Hierarchical structures and inequality among members. Strong competition within the organization at the top benefits the group by reducing the number of free riders who benefit from collective action, but do not contribute to that action. The worst thing that can happen to a for-profit business is for free riders to take over.

Certainly sometimes you need people to work together in groups. However, you also need to create the conditions such that people will neither free ride nor succumb to group-think. Both are anathema to creativity and health. Competitive groups would be a good way to encourage creativity and healthy growth in your company. The key there is to only reward the winner and to not in any way punish the loser. Desperation results in bad ideas -- scandal-creating ideas. Good-natured competition where there are only winners and there are not losers, where people are not concerned about losing their jobs if they don't come up with the best ideas, is how you keep the good ideas coming. Even if you have two groups and only one group (A) ever succeeds, that group will be kept sharp by the very presence of the other group (B). It is probably worth the money to pay B to keep A sharp.

Academic Editing

I provide editing services for academics. Including economists. Please note the mention of me in the acknowledgements of The Epistemological Implications of Machlup's Interpretation of Mises's Epistemology.

Unless You Know You Don't Know How to Write, You Can't Learn How to Write

I know I have recently argued that colleges don't know how to teach people how to write, but when students come into college with the attitude that they have mastered writing, we have to admit that the odds are against teaching them much of anything.

You simply cannot teach anyone anything if they think they are already a master. I have experienced this problem myself as a college composition professor. Students think they know how to write, and they often cite their teachers' praise for their writing as evidence. The students who have done so demonstrate with their writing skills that our high school teachers have no earthly idea what good writing looks like. So the problems go deeper than college. But colleges don't improve the situation by then offering writing classes designed for advanced writers who need other advanced writers to help them fine-tune their work.

A Time for Creativity, a Time for Focus, A Time for...

When is the best time to be creative? According to Kevan Lee, there is an answer, and that answer has scientific backing.

Of course, with anything involving the brain, the real answer is "it depends." There are those who are morning people and there are those who are evening people. And morning people are -- and this may at first seem odd -- most creative later in the day than they are in the morning, while the reverse is true of evening people. Why is that? Sharp minds are not always the most creative; creativity is always a bit on the fuzzy side, and if your thinking is a bit on the fuzzy side, you'll be more creative. Your brain is making associations without the censor working all that well, and that's when creativity happens.

Lee also notes that will power decreases over the day. This is well established. So if there is something you want your employees to do that requires a great deal of will power and focus to do, have them do it early in the morning. Have them be creative once you've worn them out, toward the end of the day.

There are optimal times for everything -- creativity, analytical abilities, and focus. If you maximize the times when those are most optimal for most of your employees (of course, ideally one would differentiate for groups of employees with similar tendencies), you will get the most out of them.

The Economist on Grammar

You know if The Economist has a piece on grammar, there is a problem.

Indeed, the piece points at many of the problems with teaching English in general, and teaching writing in particular. But it also misses several points.

The author is right to point out that the separation of linguistic off from English has in no small part been a problem for teaching English. The result is that grammar has gone off to live in linguistics departments. Worse, the way linguists understand grammar is not how it needs to be understood in order to learn how to write well. I have had discussions with linguists before, and they are universally perplexed by my argument that to write well you need to learn grammar. They think of grammar as linguists, not as practitioners of the language, and that makes a huge difference. The writing teacher wants to teach style, using the rules of grammar and syntax as they have emerged in the English language. More, they want to teach a particular style of English, which is different from the spoken Englishes which have emerged in different places around the world. The linguists understand that using language is impossible without grammar, that you literally cannot create ungrammatical sentences, so they are perplexed that we want to teach the rules. The English composition teacher needs something different from teaching grammar and syntax than the linguists provide -- they talk past each other, meaning different things.

So the solution is not to talk to the linguists. Strangely, they are not the best way to learn grammar -- from the point of view of writing well.

What people need to do to learn how to write well is, again, to read. They need to read a great deal, and they need to be taught how to read well. That means close reading. Once people are familiar with sentences, teach them the rules of those sentences. Show them how meaning emerges in a sentence -- and how if they do not word things just right, their meaning may be unclear, or even the opposite of what they intended. Learning the rules of grammar and syntax allow one to fine-tune one's writing; it does not allow one to learn how to write well in the first place.

Let me give an analogy.

Suppose we have three children, A, B, and C. Children A and B have watched basketball all their lives. Child C has never seen a basketball game, but has been taught the rules. Child A is taught the rules of basketball, but child B has not. Which child do you think will play basketball better? My guess is that child A will play it best, then child B, then child C. Knowing the rules of something are almost useless if you are otherwise unfamiliar with the game itself. Watch enough games being played, and the rules start to become evident. But then make those rules explicit, and your play will become more fine-tuned, much more improved.

The same is true of writing. The reader will do better than the non-reader, even if we teach the non-reader the rules. And the reader who knows the rules will be a much superior writer.

Want Better Writers? Don't Send Them to College

Once, when I was an adjunct English professor, the assistant dean of the college at which I worked told me I needed to dumb down my classes. Well, to be honest, she said, "Now I don’t want you to dumb down your classes, but . . ." and then she proceeded to tell me I needed to dumb down my classes. The reason? Because she did not want students coming to her to complain that they did not get an "A", though they had not done the work to get an "A". She told me that since community college students typically did not come to community college to learn anything, but rather to receive an "A" and credit for the class, that I should teach in such a way that the students would not have to learn anything, but could rather just be granted their "A" and their credit. Further, she proposed that I attend a workshop the community college offered that would teach me the best way to provide my students with this kind of contentless education.

Here is the crisis in education. It is taking place in not just community colleges, but in practically every university across the United States. Administrators do not want students to fail, because if they do fail (or if they do not get an "A" even), the school loses money. So students get passed, even though they learn nothing. In community colleges, the threat is more direct, since if students fail, they will not want to come back to that community college, complaining that "it’s too hard there." And fewer students also equates to fewer government dollars as well. Government dollars are attached to the number of students in each class, so there are incentives to not just retain students, but to create large classes -- wherein students are less likely to learn anything.

Ideally, teachers should be using grammar, rhetoric, poetics, and logic to teach students how to read, write, and think, but most professors use textbooks that downplay or even ignore all of these things, except very superficial discussions of rhetoric. But then, how deeply can you cover rhetoric if you do not cover grammar, poetics, and logic? For example, I have used the book, The Aims of Argument, which only teaches students about different kinds of arguments. You do not have to learn how to construct good sentences, you do not have to know logic, you do not have to write it well at all. All you have to do is be persuasive. Though the protagonist of "Thank You For Smoking" is a rhetorician’s rhetorician, he does at least know what the truth is. The community college I taught at wanted me to make my students unable to be able to do even that. I am not to challenge my students’ opinions, but only consider whether or not they have an argument. It is no wonder that one of my students told me that she loved my class because I did something the teacher in the English class she had before mine had never done: critique her writing for errors in grammar, facts, and reasoning.

If your employees are bad writers, this is why. When they went to college, this is the education they were receiving. Even when professors want to teach their students well, the bureaucrats won't let them. The choice is to conform and pass every student no matter what, to keep them in school, paying their tuition, or to get fired. One can imagine what most professors do.

Only if you understand what is going on at our colleges can you understand the problems you are having with your employees' skills you rightly think they should have. More, it shows that sending them back to college is hardly the solution.

Advertising, Creating False Memories, and Rhythmic Language

Did you know that advertising can create false memories?  False memories have gotten mostly a lot of bad press from their association with accusations of child abuse. More, false memories are seen as some sort of "defect." However, the fact of the matter is that false memories are not a defect; rather, false memories are an artifact of how our memories work. And, as the article notes, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to have false memories.

We often mistakenly think of memories as video recorders, recording everything exactly. In fact, when we remember things, we are putting things together from fragments -- and sometimes our brains "grab" something close by, that is perhaps associated with another, similar memory. Thus, we misremember what happened when. This is a false memory.

In the context of advertisement, one can place one's own product into the memory of viewers by exploiting how false memories are created through association.

How many times have you been outside in the summer, in the heat, feeling refreshed by a drink. Do you remember what drink that was, exactly? Probably not. Now let me show you an advertisement of people outside in the summer holding a nice, cold beer. Do you remember that it was beer, now? If you are a beer drinker, probably. Make that beer a specific brand, and that brand will be put into the memory. And the next time you plan to get some drinks because you're going to be outside... well, the odds those drinks will be beer -- and, specifically, your brand -- has increased somewhat.

A slight increase in the chance that someone will buy your brand of a particular product multiplied by millions of viewers equals an increase in sales.

But are there ways to increase those odds a bit more? Yes. Rhythms and rhymes -- songs and poetry -- help people remember even better. Rhythms act as a carrier wave -- much like radio waves -- that carries information more efficiently into the brain. The brain is itself rhythmic, and can sync with the rhythms of your song or jingle. If you can get your product into the audience's heads more easily, you can rely on their memories to do the rest and associate your particular brand with memories involving those kinds of products.

Learning vs. Aquiring -- Speaking vs. Reading and Writing

More and more businesses are needing good writers, and more and more businesses are finding college graduates cannot write well. Is it the fault of the universities? In truth, yes. But the reason the universities are failing to teach writing is because most of the writing professors themselves don't understand the first thing about how different writing is from speaking.

One of the reasons humans can learn so much so quickly is because of the presence of adaptive modules -- really, instincts -- that both result in the creation of social knowledge and are developed from that social knowledge. Language is a good example of this. Without an instinct to language, humans could not use or make language. The notion that someone came along and decided, one day, to create language is utterly ridiculous. You cannot create language without a notion of language. It is thus an evolved instinct. However, the details of any given language are learned.

I say, "learned," but in fact the details of any given native language are actually acquired, not learned. There is a huge difference between acquiring something and learning it. You acquire your native language and any other language you encounter pre-puberty, but you learn any second language you have learned post-puberty. You can only learn how to read and write -- they are not acquired. But morals are acquired, not learned.

What, then, is the difference between something learned and something acquired? You acquire something for which you have the neural modules. You thus acquire the language you speak, the morals you practice, the aesthetics with which you judge works as beautiful. On the other hand, when you learn something, there are no naturally evolved modules to speed things along; more, the modules available in the brain have to be adapted to the task. For example, parts of the brain modules for recognizing shapes and for recognizing faces, which are right next to each other, are used for reading and writing in the creation and recognition of letters. Other modules are no doubt adapted for other uses as well. For example, we acquire music, but we learn to play a musical instrument.

Unfortunately, we use the same term -- learn -- when we talk about language acquisition and learning to read and write. However, the former is natural and acquired, while the latter two are learned technologies. The fact that reading and writing are learned technologies explains how it is that a person can speak more eloquently than they write, or write more eloquently than they speak. Yet, there is this expectation that, because someone can speak, that they should be able to learn how to read and write just as easily. However, our brains are not designed to read and write -- our brains merely adapt to learn to read and write. And that adaptation comes at a cost: literate peoples are less able to recognize faces than are illiterate peoples. Educators need to recognize these facts in teaching students how to read and write, and in our expectations about our students' willingness to read and write.

Think about it. We may think such a person impractical given contemporary circumstances, but we wouldn't wail and gnash our teeth if someone were to say they didn't like using computers and/or the Internet. There are people who don't like cars and don't like to drive, and drive as little as possible. Yet, too many of us (overeducated elites) are appalled when we come across people who (horror of horrors!) hate to read and are happy going through life not doing so.

At the same time, communication is increasingly written. We write tweets and emails and on Facebook and on blogs and send memos and have to write reports. How much more reading do people do because of the existence of the Internet? Of course, much of that reading is the tweets, emails, etc. of their friends, meaning common errors in composition make their rounds and build within textual communities. But I would venture to guess that even this is not the real problem with college students' writing.

The real problem is that the percentage of people attending college has been steadily increasing over time. Once, universities were primarily full of people who loved to read and had read a great deal. Those same people are going to college, but they are being joined by an increasing number of people who not only do not read, but actually hate to read. You simply cannot teach adult students who do not like to read, and thus have not been exposed to literally thousands of hours of good sentences, how to write well. The hours of reading and writing (and corrected writing) have to be put in well before college. There is no getting around this fact. Student writing is getting worse not just because our high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools are complete disasters at teaching these two technologies -- but because most of the students attending college are now non-readers.

So the first thing a business needs to do is to create a reader culture within the business. Actively encourage book clubs and reading groups. It could be literary fiction -- if you want your employees to write very, very well -- but it does not have to be. Well-written business and economics books will work as well. We can help set up such groups, and even facilitate them. This is the best way to begin to develop your employees' writing skills. Once they learn what good sentences look like, we can work on helping them to create good sentences themselves.

Want to Move Your Audience/Customer? Use Repetition

In Aeon Magazine there is a fascinating article on repetition and music. In it the author notes that people consider repeated sounds as more musical. More, repeated words become more like songs.  And by extension, more like poetry.

If you want to move your customer, use repetition. The writer who wants to successfully move his audience is one who will use repetition. If you want to make memorable works, you have to use repetition. If you want your work -- poem, prose, play -- to embed itself in the minds of your readers, you have to use repetition. With repetition, your reader, viewer, listener will go away with you forever in their minds.

Think of all of the most memorable commercials. What is repeated in them? Most of them have some sort of memorable jingle. A jingle is, of course, a small song -- usually quite simple, and usually using repetition.

Sonnets, for example, have repeated sounds in the end rhymes and in the iambic pentameter rhythms.

With ghazals there is the repetition of the end phrase.

Then there is the villanelle, in which we have entire lines repeated.

But if we take a poem like In the Multiverse, one may wonder how it is any different from prose simply cut up into lines. Well, first, the poem is in iambic pentameter lines, so there is that level of repetition. But it is blank verse, so sound repetition seems gone. But note that there are in fact several repetitions of sentence patterns:

"If there are..." is repeated. "In some," is repeated. And "And, [gerund]," is repeated. Parallelism such as this is a kind of repetition, and is not uncommon in poetry -- see for example the Psalms.

Poetry is repetition. It is repeated sounds, repeated rhythms, repeated words, repeated structures. This would also explain why some forms of poetry involve repeated lines.

The story, poem, song, jingle for your product will need repetition. Even if your story is told in prose and not using a song or jingle, you will need repetition. If you want people to remember your product, you will need repetition.

Repetition is how you keep your product or service in the minds of the consumers. And that's what you want when they are in the market for your kind of product.

Improve Your Employees' Reading and Writing Skills With Us

If you want to do well in business, you have to have two major skills that practically nobody has:

1) Writing

2) Speaking

Both are communication skills. Communication skills are the backbone of all success, no matter what the area. Scientists who communicate best tend to be the best known scientists. Artists by definition are great artists when they communicate well (and complexly). The most successful business people are those who communicate well.

Indeed, Carmine Gallo points out that speaking skills is the one skill set that will boost your value the most.

As a teacher, I have had to develop strong speaking skills. The better your speaking and presentation skills, the more your students like you. They'll even let you present difficult information and be a tough grader.

More, with my background in writing, I have come to understand the necessary ingredients for clear, informative, and interesting communication in general, and writing in particular.

And as a teacher, I am familiar with the difficulties faced by businesses in having employees who cannot write. I get them first. They come out of high school practically illiterate and almost completely incapable of writing a sentence with even the grammar and syntax of the way they speak (which is itself a problem). Then too many professors don't even want to teach writing. More, I have been told (not at the university at which I now teach, but at community colleges) not to teach grammar and syntax (you know, the rules of the game) when I teach writing. The focus is on "process" rather than content-knowledge. And there is in fact a great deal of content-knowledge in language skill development.

The end result, as everyone in business knows, is employees who cannot write or speak clearly.

This is something we at Camplin Creative Consulting aim to help resolve for businesses.

One of the great benefits of working directly with businesses is that they do not have ideological restraints on how people are taught a skill -- they just want the skill taught. They want people who read and write and speak well. And we here at Camplin Creative Consulting can teach your employees these skills -- by focusing on teaching them the rules of the game, by having them read well-written works, by showing them where they are making mistakes in their writing, and why those are mistakes. By working simultaneously on speaking and writing skills, your employees will develop both more quickly.

Now is the time to get your employees up to speed on their writing and speaking skills. Camplin Creative Consulting can help.

Telling Your Product's Story

One of the main services I can provide as a consultant is by ability to tell a story. As a writer of plays and short stories, and with a Master's degree in creative writing, focusing on short stories, I am an expert at creating stories.

Now, what does a company need with a storyteller? Do all companies need the kinds of services I can provide?

All companies who wish to sell something to someone needs a storyteller. As Jonathan Gottschall argues, the most effective ads are those that tell stories. People spend most of their day telling stories, listening to stories, watching stories (television shows or movies). We understand the world through stories. We best remember information when we get that information through stories.

What information do you want to provide? Information about your product. If you want people to best remember your product, tell them a story about it. Better, include them in your story.

One of the things stories do is allow your audience members to empathize. If they see a story, and that story has a character in it, your audience will empathize with that character. And if that character likes your product (or dislikes your competitor's product), then your audience will similarly feel like (or dislike). People who like your product buy your product.

This is why you need a storyteller. Any time you decide you are going to change your advertisements, look around at your team. Is there a storyteller in there amongst them? If not, give me a call -- I will be happy to join your team and show you how to tell your product's story.

Want to Stay In Business? Stay Creative

Businesses now more than ever need to be perpetually creative in order to stay in business. The Internet and globalization together have contributed to this situation. Thus, it is important that businesses foster as much creative intelligence in their businesses as possible. In Creative Intelligence, Bruce Nussbaum lays out what he calls the five competencies of creative intelligence:

1. Knowledge Mining
2. Framing
3. Playing
4.Making
5. Pivoting

The last one is the movement from creating to making, which emphasizes the fact that having a great idea isn't enough. You have to follow up on that great idea and actually make something.

All of these are features of every great artist who has ever existed. Great poets have read the great poets, and even memorized many of their poems. All artists engage in framing. Art is play (a nonserious thing done seriously). And the artist has to move from conception to making, and actually make the work. The same is true in business. You have to know the history of your field -- and not just of your field, but of many other fields, related and unrelated. You cannot know where a great idea may come from. But it will not come from an ignorance of the history of your area of business.

Artists are particularly good at all of the areas listed. One could make the argument that every team whose purpose is to be creative really needs a poet, a playwright, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, etc. on their team to keep the team thinking as truly creative people think, and to keep the moving on to turning the ideas into things. Businesses who do not hire creative consultants -- whether as outside consultants or by direct hire -- are going to be at a disadvantage to those businesses that figure out they need such people.

Think about how people in theater -- playwrights, directors, and actors in particular -- can provide a creative team with considerable creative input when it comes to "framing," given the three kinds of framing:

1. Narrative Framing, or "how we interpret the world" (35)
2. Engagement Framing, or "how we interact with each other" (35)
3. What-If Framing, or "how we imagine the unthinkable to innovate beyond our wildest dreams" (35)


Every artist engages in What-If Framing. That's what they all do. It's the very soul of being an artist.


Directors and actors would be particularly adept at helping with Engagement Framing, as that is, in many ways, their main area of expertise.


And playwrights, novelists, short story writers, etc. would certainly be able to help a business with their Narrative Framing, helping a business to tell the best story to get the most business form the most people.


The missing piece in most businesses is the presence of creative consultants. If you want to keep in business, you have to keep creative.

Consulting Work at the University of North Texas at Dallas

I have recently successfully finished two projects for UNT-Dallas.

The first project was the creation of a Non-Course-Based Option (NCBO) for those needing developmental reading and writing. Although I was teaching developmental writing as an adjunct at UNTD at the time, the NCBO development project was separate from that and I was paid separately for developing this program, which will be the foundation of the program at UNTD.

The second project was an editing job to edit the Faculty Handbook.

I am hopeful the UNTD administration will continue to keep me in mind for these kinds of projects.