Worry Plate

Title courtesy of Julie Allinson, founder of Eyebobs, purveyor of fashionable eyewear, from an interview provided as part of the content for this online business course I'm taking.

What's on the worry plate? Let's just say that mistakes were made. To err may be human, but nobody likes to be reminded just how human one's service provider is.

For a dozen years, I went to a dentist who had been recommended to me. He was known for being the reassuring, kindly dentist who went easy on anxious patients. His teeth gleamed, he wore a huge gold watch and always drove a newer model of European luxury car, he was hale and hearty and volubly conservative in his politics (he talked a lot about politics while performing his work; while I didn't share his views, I was loathe to engage him in debate, partly because who wants to argue with someone wielding sharp metal instruments near one's face, and partly because it was impossible to talk while holding my jaws open), and he spent a great deal of the winter skiing or talking about skiing. (Summer was dedicated to tennis.) Already in his sixties when I became his patient, the dentist died several years ago, after I had moved away.

Two years ago, I learned that this dentist had been a bad dentist. Expensive and unpleasant consequences followed this discovery. With the help of my current dentist, I tried to submit a claim for Dr. Bad Dentist to pay for the rework, but then I learned that Dr. Bad Dentist had departed this earthly realm, and that his malpractice insurance ceased covering claims a year after his departure.

So I asked my current dentist about how a consumer can tell that a dentist is good. Dentistry is highly specialized; what average consumer would be able to distinguish shoddy dental work from excellent dental work? How could I have possibly known that the cause of some of those trips to Dr. Bad Dentist was actually Dr. Bad Dentist? We talked about getting a second opinion, but what if the dentist offering the second opinion was Dr. Worse Dentist? Or what if the first dentist was Dr. Good Dentist and the second opinion was offered by Dr. Terrible No Good Dentist? There's really no way to know. My current dentist just shook his head and said you have to find someone you can trust. And I said again to him, Well, and how do I know I can trust someone?

I was thinking about how sleek and prosperous and jovial and reassuring Dr. Bad Dentist was, never failing in his good cheer, and yet--he did some damage is what I'm saying. 

My current dentist showed me some X-rays of what a filling should look like. He explained why it should look that way, and told me the principle underlying the practice. It all made sense to me. Then he showed me an X-ray of a filling of Dr. Bad Dentist's doing. He showed me the flaws and explained why they were flaws. This show-and-tell went a long way with me.

The story of Dr. Bad Dentist is just an illustration. I'm thinking about mistakes I've made and mistakes my subcontractors have made--ones that I caught before I delivered them and ones that I did not.

The mistakes are one thing--but one has to work with people whom one trusts to do their best work, to know what that best should be (and some people truly don't know and truly are unable to distinguish the good from the bad, but that is a different problem), and to fix mistakes when they make them.

From the consumer angle: ask questions. Ask a lot of them. Keep asking until you understand enough to be able to tell if the words make sense. More on this later.

Jobs, Money, and Love for All

Good grammar and spelling skills make your life better.

From Education Week, a teacher's blog post about an employer who screens job candidates to weed out those with poor English grammar skills:

In a fiery post for the Harvard Business Review, Wiens says he flat out won't hire people who are careless with grammar. And to ensure that no offenders slip through, both of his companies—Wiens is also the founder of the documentation-software maker Dozuki—have instituted mandatory grammar tests as part of the hiring process.

Before I read the source post by Kyle Wiens for Harvard Business Review, I had mixed feelings. Is this really necessary for candidates who aren't writers? I know so many smart, capable people who use--oh, let's call it "nonstandard grammar." They're not writers, and so I switch off the inner critic before I read their email messages.

But Wiens makes a compelling argument:

Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English. I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts. 

In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are "essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms." The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings — not just computers. 

And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil's in the details. In fact, when it comes to my whole business, details are everything. 

He's right that details matter.

You can even put a price on details. According to a 2004 article in The New York Times, one spelling mistake can cost as much as $198:

Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he cleaned up and put back on the auction block with the right spelling. They sold for $200. 

An article published by BBC News in 2011 calculates the cumulative costs:

An online entrepreneur says that poor spelling is costing the UK millions of pounds in lost revenue for Internet businesses.

Wayne State University assistant professor Fred Vultee, who conducted a study sponsored by the American Copy Editors' Society, found that not only can readers distinguish edited from unedited text, but they notice and are troubled by errors (more here). Said Vultee, "Editing makes a difference. It's across the board, it's not imaginary, and it's reasonably big."

And if that weren't enough, errors in spelling and grammar can also inhibit romance: "In a survey of more than 5,000 Match.com members asking about the most common profile mistakes, 51% complained about profiles with poor spelling or grammar...."

Over the last almost twenty years, I've worked with writers whose English language skills range from impeccable to not. When I say "not," I don't mean to pick on anyone who makes an occasional typo or some other minor mistake. It's very difficult to proof one's own work; the brain insists on making the text appear as you know it should appear. I use "not" for those whose work displays not just a repeated pattern of error, but sometimes repeated patterns of different types of errors, even after those same types of errors have been pointed out to the writer previously.

Is it prejudice to expect that people whose trade is writing should have strong language skills? Maybe. For me, it's work avoidance; writers who make lots of mistakes cause me lots of extra work. Which means I can verify that mistakes have a cost, because if I need writers, my first calls are to the ones whose writing causes me the least work in terms of content and style.

I don't fault anyone for not knowing something; we all of us stumble on our ignorance sometimes. And yet, it works against us to cling to that ignorance once we become aware of it.

Toward the goal of jobs, money, and love for all, I offer the following resources:
Grammar & Style: Grammar Guides, Style Guides, APA, MLA--LibrarySpot.com
Grammar.net
HyperGrammar at the University of Ottawa
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Pam Nelson: Grammar Guide
The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk, E.B. White, and Roger Angell
The Purdue Online Writing Lab
Top Ten Resources on Spelling and Word Study

When Everything Goes South

Bad news in Florida.

Preliminary results released Monday indicate that just 27 percent of fourth-graders earned a passing score of 4.0 or better (out of 6) on the writing test. A year ago, 81 percent scored 4.0 or better. . . .

Passing scores plummeted from 81 percent to 27 percent for fourth-graders and showed similar drops in eighth and 10th grades, according to statewide results released by the Department of Education.

(Aforementioned preliminary results here.)


I did what I always do when I come across an item of note, whether it be a dime on the sidewalk or a pineapple in the headlines: I called a friend.


We compared our reactions, which were predictably (and comically, as we spoke simultaneously and in the same lexicon--not only are we friends of many years' standing, but we worked together for years, and are in the habit of oft discussing our work, a habit all the more agreeable as we share so many opinions) identical:

1. What up with the scoring? 

and/or 

2. What up with the test construction? 

and/or 

3. What up with the cohort?

and/or

 4. What up with the cut scores? 

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/14/2799146/fcat-writing-scores-plummet.html#storylink=cpy

Them's being the usual suspects. Occam's Razor.


As it happens, there was a change in the cut scores recently. The state DOE is (reportedly--I didn't talk to anyone myself) taking the line "that the results of prior years were artificially high and these are the real ones." Although the state did turn around and decide to lower the bar so more students would pass.


Take a look at the exemplar writing sets. These show examples of student essays at each score point level.


And then there may be other factors beyond the cut score. Never dismiss the possibility that someone, somewhere, made a mistake. It happens.


According to Stuart R. Kahl, Ph.d., in a paper for Measured Progress,

A test score estimates something--a student's mathematical proficiency, perhaps. It is an estimate because it is based on a small sampling of the universe of items that could have been included on the test. Further, a test score is affected by factors other than the student’s mathematical proficiency, such as: how well or motivated the student feels, whether there were distractions or interruptions during the testing session, and whether the student made good or bad guesses, to name a few. These factors, which can all be sources of measurement error, explain the difference between a student’s calculated score on a particular test and that student’s hypothetical “true” score. That true score, forever unknown, would reflect the student’s real level of proficiency.

Estimate, inference--these are the words we must use when we talk about our suppositions of what a student knows or is able to do when those suppositions are based on the results of a test.


Florida may sit herself down to rest on the lowered bar. Or there may be an investigation. The investigation will crawl through the maze of scoring operations.


If nothing turns up, the investigation could lumber over to focus on the construction of the test. Again, if the test construction is immaculate, there may be something going on with the cohort.


Or maybe it really was just the cut scores. ("Just." As if that's nothing.)


In other news: the latest on the pineapple here, along with newly reported mistakes on the New York State math tests. There's no glee in reporting that. We all of us get tarred by that brush, even if we have nothing to do with that particular test.


That's what's going on today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/14/2799146/fcat-writing-scores-plummet.html#storylink=cpy

Beginning at the Beginning

A great thing about this work is that I do a lot of research on esoteric topics, and in following the bread crumb trail, often end up in surprising places.


Anyone who knows me would be surprised to find me lurking at a programmer's blog. My most recent experience with programming was a college class in BASIC and Pascal, a class I took only because my father wanted me to, which was an early lesson in how disagreeable it is to do that which one is disinclined to do out of a desire to please another.


In spite of my dedicated efforts to the contrary, I miraculously passed this class in which I learned nothing but how to memorize like a monkey. (I got an A or a B, which didn't surprise me at the time--I was just relieved. Now I find it shocking.)


Really, all I remember of the class was how the professor had eyebrows that looked like furry caterpillars crawling across his face and how miserable I was one day, while I was shivering in the front row of the cavernous lecture hall--I'd ridden my bike through torrential rain to get to the campus, and my hair and clothes were soaked through. The skin on my face was wet. Puddles formed on the floor under my chair. 


And yet,today I found myself here in programming land:

I'm going to give you a piece of advice when you're trying to learn something new: Never listen to people who try to make beginners feel like losers. For whatever reason, some people get off on making beginners feel like they're worthless for attempting something. Maybe it's because they feel threatened by new entrants, or maybe they were picked on as kids and this makes them feel powerful. Who knows, but generally if they're trying to make you feel like a loser because right now you're not that good at something, then just ignore them. 

Few people enjoy the disorientation of not knowing what to do, especially those who are accustomed to being what my grandmother would have called quick studies. Probably the more capable one is, the less one likes feeling adrift in the sea of ignorance.


The other day I was telling a friend about how I'd once nearly spontaneously combusted at a country western line dancing class (I had intended to register for Cajun Zydeco, but there'd been a misprint in the catalogue, and so I thought, What the hey, might as well do this thing that I would have never in a million years considered doing, being as the only country music I ever listen to is either Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline, except for this). The teacher, used to students already well versed in that style, gave few demonstrations, but instead called out the names of steps and then corrected students as they flailed. Knowing neither the steps nor the names of the steps, I flailed mightily.


No matter what it is we find ourselves expert at now, we were all beginners once.

The truth is, if us old dogs really believe in a meritocracy, then we should be embracing beginners no matter what their reason for learning. If we believe that someone's capability has nothing to do with their past or qualifications, then that means everyone can improve and you have to evaluate them on their skill at the moment. Running around yelling at people because they didn't happen to follow your path is just spiteful resentment.

Another truth is that it's exhilarating to work with beginners. Their very unfamiliarity makes the whole world new again. They bring a new perspective that can be challenging--why indeed do we do that task in that particular way, is there a good reason, or is it just something that's become habit but has no value?--and this challenge to our established modes can be invigorating. If we let it.