You need a story

Stanley Witkow, who helps people in their job searches, has a good point: you need a story.

In today’s competitive job environment, you need to do more than float your resumé, attend networking events, and make telephone calls. You need to have a plan. Most important, along with knowing what kind of position you want, you need to insure that everything you present to prospective employers, recruiters and networking contacts is designed to tell a consistent story about you.

Here's the plan.

The most effective way for a job seeker to make a memorable impression on prospective employers is to create a story. It should be a consistent story, reinforced through every part of the job search – from the résumé to the business card to the 30-second introduction to the message left on the answering machine.

Here’s an example. Our of our clients is employed in a small business that is declining because of competition from a national enterprise, and he expects to be laid off soon. Realizing that his niche is going to go away, he needs to reinvent himself. He’s held a series of other positions, but they don’t connect in any way—they’re not in the same industry, they’re not in the same functional position (i.e., he was in sales in one position, in finance in another, and he began his professional career in an entirely different kind of working environment).

But he was passionate in his interest in the environment, and had brought that passion to all of his prior jobs. So in re-designing his resumé, we created a story that showed his wide variety of skills that could be applicable to emerging “green businesses”. Then we created a 30-second introduction which began with his passion, and captured how he hoped to find a position that would marry that passion with the wide range of skills he had developed in his professional career.

Rather than attending a wide variety of networking groups, we urged our job seeker to research and attend organizations where individuals and businesses involved in the green world would participate. In this way his valuable (and limited) time would be spent where he would most likely meet people potentially helpful to his job search.

Finally, he created new business cards and other collateral material that emphasized not his history, but his new story.

Now he is telling a compelling story. He is able to express his passion for the environment, to which he is committed to bringing his considerable business skills. He networks with those who can introduce him to opportunities in green businesses. He leaves a compelling phone message, and makes a strong impression on the people he meets. He is making effective use of his time and other resources. And he is well-positioned for success in his search.

Whither the footnote?*

The e-book may inadvertently be driving footnotes to extinction, Alexandra Horowitz writes.**

The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the “page.” Today’s e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom. A spokesman for the Kindle assured me that it is at the discretion of the publisher how to treat footnotes. Most are demoted to hyperlinked endnotes or, worst of all, unlinked endnotes that require scrolling through the e-reader to access. Few of these will be read, to be sure.*** 

I admit to being somewhat mystified that technological innovation is imperiling footnotes. Computers would seem to solve what I see as the main problem they pose — to wit, edging in the superscript numbers on a typewritten page and measuring just the right amount of space to leave at the bottom. 

Footnotes really presage hyperlinks, the ultimate interrupter of a stream of thought, she writes 

But footnotes are far superior: while hyperlinks can be highly useful, one never finds oneself looking at an error message at the bottom of the page where a footnote used to be. Even the audio book has solved the problem of how to convey footnotes. Listen to David Foster Wallace**** reading his essay collection “Consider the Lobster,”***** with its ubiquitous show-stealing asides: at a certain point, his voice is unnaturally distant, the result of a production trick intended to represent the small type of a footnote. Wallace’s e-book was not immune to de-footnoting, though; all these crucial asides now appear at the end of the book in the Kindle and iPad versions.

Even the Kindle edition of Zerby’s history of the footnote is now full of endnotes****** instead.

* "Whither" is rather archaic, don't you think?
** Her article can be found here.
*** But you're reading this one, no?
**** I've kept the hyperlink, although you can't actually hear David Wallace if you follow the link.
***** Ibid.
****** Is this an endnote or a footnote?*******
******* Can******** you footnote a footnote?
******** Why not?

Would you pay to read this?

"How can newspapers and magazines continue to make a profit? Online ads don’t generate enough revenue and paywalls are intolerable; thus, the business of journalism is in shambles. Even though I sympathize with the plight of publishers—and share it by association as a writer—as a reader, I am without pity. If your content is behind a paywall, I will get my news elsewhere. I subscribe to the print edition of The New Yorker, but when I want to read one of its articles online, I find it galling to have to login and wrestle with its proprietary e-reader. The result is that I read and reference New Yorker articles far less frequently than I otherwise would. I’ve been a subscriber for 25 years, but The New Yorker is about to lose me. What can they do? I don’t know. The truth is, I now expect their content to be free."

-- Sam Harris

So these two men are on a train ...

One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?"

The other answers, "A MacGuffin." 

The first one says, "What's a MacGuffin?" 

"It's an apparatus for trapping lions in Scotland." 

"But there are no lions in Scotland." 

"Well, then, that's no MacGuffin."

Alfred Hitchcock tells that story to illustrate the meaning of MacGuffin, who is credited with coining the term.

The word means "an otherwise meaningless object in a film or book that provides the motivation for the action; a flimsy excuse for an action."

The linguist Robert Beard explains: 

For an object to be a MacGuffin, it can have no significance itself; it cannot help us understand a character. Perhaps the most famous MacGuffin is the black statue in The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart, playing Sam Spade, wraps up the case by saying, "Oh, and I've got some exhibits: the boys' guns, one of Cairo's, a thousand dollar bill I was supposed to be bribed with—and this black statuette here that all the fuss was about." A more contemporary example is the briefcase in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't fit the definition since it has meaning outside the film and plays a key role in the film's climax.

You can use today's word in many contexts, Dr. Beard says: "I don't know why Macie had to go shopping. She's on a search for some skincare MacGuffin." In other words, Macie is ranging the mall with only the flimsiest of excuses for doing so. This word may also be spelled McGuffin: "The boss wouldn't let me leave when my project was finished, so I spent the afternoon rifling the filing cabinet for a McGuffin to get me out."

From the bard to your mouth

(American Digest)

Go ahead and aggravate me

I was taught that if you are pestering me you are irritating me, that if you admitted to aggravating me you were using the term incorrectly.

Oops.

The linguist Robert Beard has irritated me on this. Or aggravated me. Whatever.

aggravate /  æ-grê-vayt / verb

1. To make heavy or heavier, to load, burden, as to be aggravated with the responsibilities of someone else's office.
2. To increase the gravity of, to make worse, exacerbate.
3. To annoy.

Here's where Beard gets annoying: I recall being told in grammar school (as we called it then) that aggravate can only mean "make worse" and not simply "annoy," as in "This zipper aggravates me when it sticks like this." My teachers didn't know, however, that the word had borne both meanings since the 17th century and, moreover, the original Latin verb, aggravare, could be used in both senses as well. So feel as free to say that the sticking zipper aggravates you to no end as you would to say, "Jerking it like that when it sticks only aggravates (makes worse) the problem."

History: Aggravate is taken from the past participle (aggravatus) of the Latin verb aggravare "to make heavier or worse." This verb is made up of ad "to" + gravare "to burden", based on the root gravis "heavy". We see this stem in many English words borrowed from Latin, such as grave "serious" and gravity. This word also devolved into Old French grever "to harm", which English borrowed as grieve which also gave us grief. The Proto-Indo-European root that gave rise to gravis also went on to become guru "heavy, serious, venerable" in Sanskrit, the ancestor language of Hindi, whence English borrowed the word when India was a colony.

Good grief, you can see why this guru is irritated.

But what do you really think?

"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered.It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of dogs barking through endless nights.It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.It drags itself out of the dark abyss of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is flap and doodle.It is balder and dash."

-- H.L. Mencken, on Warren G.Harding