Extreme Writing Makeover - How do you write numbers?

Pick a number, any number.
Do you believe the numbers?
I have a number in mind.  If you do not have a number, we will use mine.  (This line makes the difference between you, the billionaire manager, and me, the analyst).

This is week #44 of a 52-week online writing course, "Extreme Writing Makeover", led by publication coach Daphne-Gray Grant.  If you have not followed up on previous mention of her course in this blog, I urge you to do so.  No matter at what stage of learning you are as a writer, you will learn to write better and faster, beginning with week one of her course.

This week's headline: "Don't numb your readers with numbers".
Last week: "Why and how you must eliminate cliches".
The first line in this blog post may be a cliché.  The bit about analysts and managers was like a cliché at 3M.  I heard it often.  I was the analyst.

Notice how many ways I wrote numbers in the preceding two paragraphs. 3M has to be written that way.  The corporate name is 3M, not 3M Company, and not the name spelled out, Minnesota, Mining, and Manufacturing?

I paused in the writing here, copied and pasted my work into Microsoft Word 2010.  I have the grammar and spelling checker ready to analyze as I type.  There are no errors highlighted for any of my numbers. There is a problem with the spelling of cliché without a diacritical mark.

Numbers dominated my careers as a U.S. Air Force Weather Officer, and as an analyst at 3M.
When I retired from 3M , I saved a huge three-ring binder we published as a user guide. The guide explained how to use the service measurement system I programmed. More than one hundred pages displayed images of menus, criteria fields to be filled in by the user, and examples of every report the program could generate.  I wrote the content of the guide. I wrote the logic in hundreds of computer programs that ran in the background.  A professional IT programmer made it all work online. We hired a professional publishing service to finish the layout and print it.

Imagine an audience involving fifty-two countries. Supply Chain Management specialists, all of them managers or supervisors represented transportation, distribution, warehousing, inventory management, customs clearance, and so on. They had to understand the numbers. They communicated to executives who don't read reports past the first paragraph, and will not read anything longer than one page. 

Somehow, I was a popular guy with management, because I could communicate meaning.  I had the numbers they needed. A picture was worth more than a thousand words, especially in a video conference.  Our Japanese team depended on the graphics projected to be the same format every month.  They had the benefit of a nine-hour time difference to read the printed reports I sent before the meeting, and the reports had to have the same format every time. 

Language differences were important.  On one occasion our U.S. team leader sat in a video conference room in Brussels at midnight, with a German team leader at his side, while the Japanese team were assembled at 8 AM in an office near Tokyo. 

 Why?  We had accomplishments to report.  We had saved the company millions of dollars.  We had reduced the time it took to move exports from the middle of the U.S. to Europe or Japan. Shipments via truck, rail, and ocean could get to Europe in nine days, where it used to take forty-five days.  To Japan, we could do it consistently in thirty days, where it had been as much as seventy-two days and unreliable.

We had a story to tell.  That is the lesson for this week. Try not to start a report with numbers.  Tell the story. 

There is more to a story.  Capture the audience. Here is the lead posted on Facebook yesterday by Tom Skilling, WGN TV weatherman.  He posted a colorful graphic to go with it.

"This is a stunning forecast--not one you see everyday. The immense dome of hot air, depicted on this Sunday evening upper air forecast is to take shape across a huge swath of the US. 90+ deg temps are predicted in sections of 34 states by late this weekend by our computer forecast models. Chicago's 141 yr observational record shows the area's hottest wx has historically occurred from July 16-29."

Here is the link to my publication coach:
http://www.publicationcoach.com

Pictures of My Mind - Dreams and Rumination

Here is a story I may include in my memoir, Pictures of My Mind.   I don't pretend to be a rigorous scholar.  What I have in mind here reminds me of what Emmanuel Swedenborg might have recorded in his journal in the 1740's. He was a scholar and a scientist. He was convicted of heresy by the Swedish Lutheran Church for promoting such thoughts.  Here is how my mind thinks.  Here are my experiences of thought and memory functions today.

It is July 13, 2011, 5:10 AM. A robin is on the lawn on the lakeside of our house. I put on my glasses to see the robin that was just a dark object I knew was not usually there on the lawn. I take note that the Sun has not risen.  A week from today will be a month after the Summer Solstice already.  The Sun had risen by 5:10 AM a month ago.

I observe such changes as the rising time of the Sun, the quality of daylight at any moment, what is happening in Nature, and what is happening on the lake.  Any of these observations support my creative writing practice.  Professional writing coaches make money telling you to practice such observations.

Before I pulled back the covers and left the warmth of my bed in our guest room, I think I was in a peculiar state of awareness.  I think I was awake. I think I was ruminating.  I know I had been dreaming.  I congratulated myself for observing so many creative thoughts.  I thought I should allow that flood of creative imagination to flow uninterrupted.

I already had forgotten the dream content by the time I was aware that I had been dreaming.  It did no good to follow lucid dreaming practice, to have a journal at hand to write out the dream. In fact, I had prepared myself for lucid dreaming last night.  I had been writing about it, typing and quoting a lucid dream website into one of my memoir documents on Microsoft Word.

It does not work every time to write out my thoughts immediately after waking up.  I have not recovered the dream content.  I have not recovered the content of the flood of creative thoughts.  I conclude that that hour may have lasted only a few minutes.  The flood of creative thoughts was like a different level of consciousness, still in the dream state.  Not every memory training practice overcomes memory loss.

It may be an accomplishment in training my mind to record such observations.  Awareness of a flood of creative thoughts appears to be a separate function, distinctly different from the dream state function.  Images and stories from the dream state appear to be different from the flood of words coming through rumination.

  Lucid dreaming practices

“Lucid dreaming is the experience of being completely aware within a dream that you are, in fact, in a dream.”

     “First, tell yourself before you go to sleep that you WILL remember your dreams.”

“Sleep cycles are 90 minutes long on average and REM sleep occurs at the end of the cycle. So if you set your alarm for any 90 minute interval after you fall asleep, you will most likely end up waking up during a dream, making it easier to remember.”

I took these quotes from a website called High Existence.  The complete “Lucid Dreaming” topic may appeal to you for memory training.  http://www.highexistence.com/lucid-dreaming/

The 90-minute cycle caught my attention. I followed that cycle during my workday at 3M.  It helped  meet deadlines.  It was essential for me  to take a break while writing user guides, fiscal procedures, and computer programs for data analysis.  I would stop working on a high priority, and do something else to refresh my mind.
For my dream work, I do not set an alarm to wake up.  A thought is enough to pre-program myself to wake up.  I learned from a man who practiced Sufi meditation that we can make use of those middle-of-the-night waking periods to accomplish many things.  Once I bought an Oreck Vacuum Cleaner after watching an infomercial at 2 AM.  Mostly likely, I will be aware that I am dreaming at the end of the first 90-minute cycle around 12:30 AM, and again after 5 AM.

Bedside Journals

Most important for remembering dreams, I keep a journal on my bedside table. Most of my journals are general purpose.  For several years I set aside a plush orange-colored journal specifically for dreams.  The touch and feel of the soft cover makes it easy to find in the dark.  I can always find a pen on my dresser.    Dreams recorded in my general purpose volumes can be detailed, but often are fragmentary.  No matter what kind of journal I use, if I have recurring dream themes or dream images, I make note of them at the end of the dream record.

What's Blossoming?

Remember my posts based on Reverb10 prompts?  I still get a prompt from Reverb each month.  "What's blossoming?" is today's prompt.

Today we toured Thomas Jefferson's Monticello at Charlottesville, VA.  Last week we walked the Capitol Mall twice at  the  beginning of Cherry Blossom Festival.  We toured Historic Jamestown and Williamsburg this past weekend.  In that brief span of time, the temperature jumped from the 40's to the 80's, and trees leafed out in a hurry.  Suddenly we were washing tree pollen off the windows of our van.

Here are a few samples of photos.  If you happen to make it to the Cherry Blossom Festival sometime, the best views are from the Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial, looking across the Tidal Basin toward the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument.  You don't want to miss the FDR memorial anyway.

Jefferson Memorial

FDR Memorial

Monticello

Monticello

Historic Jamestown