Melanie Spiller

The Five Ways of Learning

spiller — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 21:55:00 GMT

Have you ever felt that other people seemed to be collecting more information than you, and learning it faster and retaining it longer? Or maybe that you were the only one following along, and everyone else seemed to be scratching their heads? Or have you felt that your explanation was clear and concise, and your readers gave you bad reviews and your editor lobbed dry cereal at you?

The reason for this is that people learn in different ways. Oh, it’s not obvious, and teachers certainly don’t address all the ways in school. If you don’t happen to learn the way your teachers do, you’re on your own trying to figure out what was covered in class. And if you’re one of those people who says: “I never learned to study until I got to college,” it’s because you’re a Verbal learner, as were most of your teachers.

I’ll talk about the specifics in a minute, but most people are Verbals. That doesn’t mean that a Verbal person only learns in one way; it means that their predominant trait is Verbal. I’m strongly Verbal, for instance, with a smattering of Tactile. It’s possible to have one dominant trait and more than one secondary trait.

You can’t really change which way you learn and one way isn’t better than any other, although sometimes it’s more convenient to be one way over another. But you CAN use your knowledge of how you learn and how that differs from how other people learn to write clearly.

There are five ways that people learn. Here they are, in order of popularity: Verbal, Visual, Tactile, Kinesthetic, and Aural.

Verbal people need to put everything into language. These are the copious note-takers (that is, in college; in earlier schooling, most Verbals’ needs are addressed in the classroom and they often seldom study and still manage decent grades) and will even copy their own notes over. These people are not the ones who put nasty yellow highlighter all over their books, but they ARE the ones who write (nearly) as much in the margins and on the flyleaves as is on the pages of the book itself. Verbals tend to paraphrase things back to people, not so much to verify that they’ve understood but because they need to translate into their own language in order to truly understand. Most people are Verbal or have a smattering of Verbal. Verbals can be found in most professions. You can’t recognize them by talkativeness, though. Verbalism is a learning style and not a presentation style.

Visuals make pictures of things in their heads. They draw on the whiteboard while they talk, they make symbols for things on their notepads, they think in terms of a timeline rather than a list of dates, and they highlight salient bits in the books they read. Visuals don’t need to be told why this bit of code differs from that bit—they can SEE the difference. Visuals find patterns on pages—that’s why they use the highlighter and why they don’t need comparisons detailed for them. Where Verbals are happy to have something new described to them, Visuals need to be shown. Visuals give directions by landmarks and don’t necessarily know the names of the streets or programs or methods. Visuals can be found dominating professions where insight is useful, like technical management, marketing, research and development, and entrepreneurship.

Tactiles need to touch things. These are the risk-takers; it’s not that they bungee jump, it’s that they need to dive right in and try things rather than have it described or shown to them. Tactiles are quite likely to take things apart in order to see how they work, and they’ll insist on “driving” when they want to show you something new on the computer or when you show them something new. Tactiles often make logical leaps about how a project will evolve because they find building blocks among the premises and construct the thing in their heads. Tactiles learn early to be intuitive about how things work because, for the most part, schools are directed at Verbals and Visuals. The most common trait for mechanical engineers and those wow-style coders is to be predominantly Tactile. You definitely want the guy who works on your car to be a Tactile.

Kinesthetics need to manipulate things. These are the people who need to take two things and add them to two other things to know that there are four things. Kinesthetics don’t like to work with theory or hyperbole as much as they like to take physical objects and change them. Kinesthetics have the hardest time in school because they need to make the changes to words and objects themselves rather than watching the teacher do it. Kinesthetics who have a scientific bent are likely to be drawn to the physical sciences where the changes they effect are apparent. People who are Kinesthetic are almost always also Tactiles.

Aurals remember everything they ever heard or read. These people seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge, because something their second grade teacher said is still vividly recollectable. Aurals seldom understand that other people don’t have this magnificent memory and often assume that other people are either not as bright as they are or are deliberately placing obstacles into an obvious path. Aurals often studied hard, even in grammar school, but once they learn something, they own it forever. You definitely want your doctor to be an aural.

There’s no way to tell what style people learn in from listening to them, although you can sometimes ferret it out by reading their writing or having them teach you something. Sometimes, even people who know about the five ways of learning think they’re one type but manifest all the indications of another. It doesn’t matter much, really, unless they’re trying to write educational materials.

It’s useful to identify which way you learn so that you can make sure the other ways are attended to in your writing. If you’re a Tactile, for instance, you’ll write excellent step lists or code, but you might have trouble providing context for why someone would follow it. If you’re an Aural, you’ll have a hard time providing building blocks so that other people can follow complex ideas. If you’re a Verbal, you’re so used to information being directed at you, you might have to deliberately remember that other people learn less verbally and provide contrived interruptions to your text to allow resting places for less verbal people.

Of course, most people are combinations. I’m a Verbal with a strong Tactile bent. That means that I’ll take things apart—that’s almost the only way I can learn things—but I’ll reassemble them verbally. I might quote the professor in the notes I take in class, but when I copy the notes over, I’ll put it in my own words and combine it with something else. I usually come up with all my most interesting questions when I’m copying my notes over, because I need to interact with the language to truly understand it. I suppose that’s why I enjoy editing so much.

You can find these blogs, a little information about my editorial services and me, and a collection of pages about my “real” life on my Web site, www.MelanieSpiller.com.

Making Things Difficult

spiller — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 05:17:00 GMT

I know a writer who has a habit of making things harder than they are. Oh, you know the type—he’s smart, maybe brilliant, but he suspects that everyone else is smarter than him and he’s always looking for the catch.

A conversation with him can go like this:

Me: What color is the third thing from the left?

Him: The first two are green.

Me: Okay, but what color is the third thing from the left?

Him: I don’t see anything on the left.

Me: Okay, see those five things?

Him: Yes.

Me: What color is the third thing from the left?

Him: The one on the right is blurry.

Me: Could be. But what color is the third thing from the left? It’s also the third thing from the right.

Him: Well, I’m not sure the things have been drawn properly.

Me: That’s possible. But what color is the third thing from the left? It’s the one in the middle.

Him: I don’t know why you need to know this.

Me: I’m working on a project that describes the things.

Him: I don’t need to know this.

Me. That’s right, but I DO need to know and you have access to the image. Can you see the image?

Him: Yes.

Me: What color is the third thing from the left?

Him: The ones on the left are green.

Me: Yes, you told me that. I need to know what color the one in the middle is.

Him: It’s different from the others.

Me: Okay, so what color is it?

Him: It’s not a nice color.

Me: Here. Let’s try this. Please tell me all the colors of all the things in the image.

Him: I already told you that the ones on the left are green.

Me: Yes, thank you. What are the other colors of the other things?

Him: They are red and yellow.

Me: Which ones are red?

Him: The one on the right.

Me: And the one in the middle?

Him: That’s not the yellow one.

Me: Okay, well, what color is it, the one in the middle?

Him: It’s blue.

Me: Thank you.

Exchanges like this can take up to 20 minutes, I kid you not. Yesterday, I had TWO such conversations, one with the bonus of him saying that he hadn’t answered directly before because I’d told him to stop working on another (unrelated) project earlier. Now I realize that the exchange that I made up above makes him sound like Trouble with a Capital T, but he’s really a nice man, not at all silly or stupid, and I believe that he really wants to write truly excellent documents. It’s just that he always thinks there’s something complicated behind everything. Sometimes, there’s nothing behind the question—it’s all right up front.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t that he’s obtuse or that he’s trying to obstruct progress or even that he’s trying write a lengthy piece. It’s that he doesn’t imagine that ANYTHING can be as simple as it seems.

So here’s the thing, when it comes to writing (and conversations with your editor): simplify. Just plain simplify.

If you try to see greater levels of depth in everything, you will get so bogged down in the details that you will be prevented from proceeding. We’ll lose context because you’re so busy trying to be comprehensive that you’ll wander down tangents. They might be perfectly useful tangents, but we won’t really need them until we understand the basic thing first. You can see that, right?

The key is to keep coming back to the original question and to make sure that 80% or so of your sentences go toward directly answering the question. Like this:

The third thing from the left is blue. There are five things. The two on the left are green, the one in the middle is blue, the next one is yellow, and the one on the right is red.

In that paragraph, the first sentence directly answers the question. The second sentence provides context—now we know that of the five things, at least one is blue. The next sentence provides the details (which we may or may not need) about all the things, including the basic information that we were after in the first place.

There probably isn’t much more to be said about the colors of the things or the color of the third thing from the left. Maybe there is, though. Maybe what the things are or what they do, or what they’re made out of or used for is also relevant to the big picture. But those topics clearly don’t answer the question “What color is the third thing from the left?”

I’m not saying that you can’t cover the other, more complex aspects of your subject if that’s appropriate. I’m saying to be sure you answer the question first, last, and in the middle. If you find yourself talking about what the five things are made of or whether they are in appropriate colors for the time of year, you have to check in and see what the title of the piece is. If it’s Five Colored Things, then you can go ahead. Provide context first by simplifying your subject with a direct response like this:

There are five things of varying colors. From the left, two are green, one is blue, one is yellow, and one is red.

But if your title is The Color of Middle Things, you’d better start with this:

The middle thing is blue.

So here’s what you do when you have a subject that IS convoluted and complicated. You simplify it into its smallest parts by (yes, you guessed it) outlining.

Let’s say you want to describe something you’ve never done before like, say, programming a cell phone. (I’ve never had a cell phone, so I don’t actually know that it’s complicated. But I digress.) The first thing you do is build an obvious structure that makes sense and that provides a kind of safe haven for the hard stuff. Let’s try it.

I. Open the package.

a. Take the phone and components out of the box.

b. Find the instructions.

II. Read the instructions.

a. Identify anything that is a safety issue.

b. Identify anything that must be done first.

III. Start assembling the phone.

a. Put the battery in.

i. Verify that the phone turns on.

b. Check for a dial tone.

IV. Follow the instructions for basics.

a. Enter time, date, etc.

b. Enter the number that makes this phone ring.

c. Choose a ring tone.

V. Find the instructions for programming the phone.

a. Identify what you want the phone to do.

i. Enter frequently called numbers.

ii. Enter how your name will appear on Caller ID.

iii. Select options like Caller ID.

VI. Follow the instructions for programming the phone

Yup, I know that doesn’t cover actually programming the phone, but you can see that I’ve laid the groundwork for it. Now, as I read the instructions/specs/marketing materials and play with the phone myself, I can easily place new topics that are real into appropriate places in my outline. And, as I discover how to actually program the phone, I can cover that too.

I know my title is How to Program a Cell Phone, but I’ve got all this basic stuff in the way before I actually get to item VI: Follow the instructions for programming the phone. Somehow, I’ve got to get directly to that answer without all those tangents.

Okay, so the answer to the question cannot be put into a single outline point. That means you have to discern which of the basic stuff you’ve got to cover so that your audience can follow along. You need basic definitions (like brand names, keypads, special features, and so forth) so that your readers can follow along. Look at my outline and see where you’d put that physical description of the cell phone.

Got it? Yup, that’s right. It belongs between II and III. You can unpack the phone, and you might want to look at the directions, but you can’t get very far if you don’t know where the keypad is or where the battery goes.

Now you have to decide if you need any of that other stuff that came before (unpacking the box is pretty lame, after all) or if anything should appropriately be moved to the definitions or the actual programming of the phone. Then you can snip and add merrily until it’s all fleshed out AND simplified and you can write the piece.

You know that context is as important as the topic under discussion. If you don’t know your colors (or numbers or letters), or you’re colorblind (or visually impaired in some other way), or you don’t have access to the image (or the phone), or if you only see two things (and neither is the On button), of course you can’t tell me what color the third thing from the left is (or how to program a cell phone). It’s important to clear writing that you just say: I don’t know. Say it to yourself first and you’ll see that it’s not that painful not to know something. Then you can figure out who to ask or whether there has to be an answer.

Heck. It’s not even that painful to make a public mistake because you didn’t know something or you were typing too fast or some such thing (as I know from having my errors pointed out to me by helpful readers).

The trick is to be brave, to simplify as much as possible, and then to go exploring for the harder stuff and write about it as simply as the subject will let you. That might mean short sentences or short paragraphs. It might mean that you repeat or paraphrase yourself. It might even mean that you use the identical words as are in your title.

When you have a direct question to answer, perhaps asked by the title of your piece, or maybe you’ve got to fill a hole in your plot, my suggestion is that you just head for the simplest, most direct answer first. You’ll probably need to elaborate to provide context, but start with simple. If you can manage to stay simple, that would be appreciated too.

So now tell me: What color is the third thing from the left?

You can find these blogs, a little information about my editorial services and me, and a collection of pages about my “real” life on my Web site, www.MelanieSpiller.com.

Losing My Mind

spiller — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 20:03:00 GMT

I was watching BBC television the other day, and I was struck by how versatile that little word “mind” is. The lady called out to her son, “mind how you go!” and I realized that Americans don’t use that expression to tell someone to be careful. Then I started thinking that the word was a chameleon, like the word “like” that I discussed a few blogs ago to great popular acclaim (over 1200 hits in the first three days, more than 4600 to date).

Let’s have a little look at the word “mind.” There are two basic forms: one that is a noun and has to do with paying attention or memory, and the other that is a verb (both transitive and intransitive) and has to do with paying attention or memory. Hmm. That doesn’t sound very distinguishing. I’d better trot out the dictionary and some examples.

Noun:

Recollection: keep it in mind.
The active mental activity of an organism: wrap your mind around it.
Intention or desire: change your mind.
The healthy condition of mental facilities: your mind is sharp today.
Opinion: of a like mind
Disposition or mood: quick mind.
A person or group embodiment of opinion: public mind
(Obscure) From Christian Science: God
(Obscure) A conscious substratum or factor in the universe: (um, sorry. I can’t think of an example here.)

Transitive Verb:

Remind (chiefly dialectical): Mind him to bring a sweater.
Remember (chiefly dialectical): Mind the good old days.
Attend closely: mind how you go.
To make aware of or notice: I wasn’t sorry, mind you.
To give heed attentively in order to obey: if you’re firm, the dog will mind you.
To be concerned about: I don’t mind the rain.
To be careful: mind you don’t trip on the stairs.
To give protective care to: mind the dog while I’m out, will you?

Intransitive Verb:

To be attentive or wary: mind the rickety step.
To become concerned: mind the stormy clouds and bring an umbrella.
To pay obedient attention: a good dog will mind the master’s commands.

I don’t know about you, but these seem like variations on fewer themes than the dictionary would have us count. To me, there seem to be just four “buckets” of definition:

The brain and its functioning (in my mind, I’m a genius)
Paying attention (mind the stairs)
Obeying (mind your mother)
Calling attention (it wasn’t difficult, mind you)

I’m not including the obscure or dialectical options, because I’ve simply never heard or read them, so I don’t think they’re common. If you like, you can make a fifth bucket and toss in those lesser known options.

Twenty years ago, I tutored three Chinese ladies in the complexities of American English. All of them had a pretty good grasp of the basics, but when it came to synonyms and homonyms, they really struggled. I remember spending a whole hour with them and the dictionary looking at the word “mine.” They had watched a news program about land mines, listened to their husbands talking about data mining, saw a magazine article for a new sort of business that was a gold mine, and heard their children each insist that some toy was mine. How on earth, they wanted to know, did a listener discern which meaning was which?

First, you have to firmly clasp all these variants to your bosom, ready to dispense them at a moment’s notice. As a native English speaker, this isn’t too hard, as by the time we’re adults, most of us have heard (or used) quite a few such words. It’s simply a matter of screening for suitable meaning. But what if your personal catalog of homonyms consists solely of the two I’ve covered in my blog thus far (like and mind)?

If that’s the case, you’re in trouble. English is full of words that sound or look the same and have different meanings. It’s probably because English is an amalgam of so many other languages (German, French, and Latin at the forefront) and they’ve been blended mercilessly. The only thing I can tell you is to keep your dictionary handy and read all the definitions for every word you look up.

I wondered if there’s a list of homonyms (words that look and sound the same) somewhere. A list of commonly used homonyms would make a useful tool, like a thesaurus, for writers and non-native English speakers. I found a few useful sites online, although there were more homophones listed than homonyms. Homophones sound the same but aren’t spelled the same (ade, aide, aid, there, they’re, their), homographs are spelled the same but aren’t necessarily pronounced the same (getting your just desert, Sahara desert, Polish nation, polish the furniture), and homonyms sound and look the same (such as mean, mine, mind, and like). Here’s what I found in a Google search on “homonym:”

Alan Cooper’s Homonym List: A collection of words that sound the same (homophones), but don’t necessarily look the same (heterographs) with brief definitions. http://www.cooper.com/alan/homonym_list.html

Commonly Misused Words and Phrases: A collection of homophones and homographs with brief definitions. http://wsuonline.weber.edu/wrh/words.htm

Taupecat Consulting: A list of homophones without definitions. http://www.taupecat.com/personal/homophones/

The rest of the Google results seem to be quizzes for students and teachers, which are useful—maybe even more useful than a bald list because they provide context—and definitions in dictionary and encyclopedia listings.

You can find these blogs, a little information about my editorial services and me, and a collection of pages about my “real” life on my Web site, www.MelanieSpiller.com.

Writing Advertising Copy

spiller — Fri, 05 May 2006 23:49:00 GMT

Advertising copy is a crusty little animal. Without the bouncy doglike curiosity of fiction, the sinewy catlike independence of non-fiction, or the jagged chameleon of personal memoirs, advertising copy has its own personality.

The theory of “any press is good press” says that advertising copy must be memorable even if the reader doesn’t remember the product. You have to be able to identify your existing audience and reel in prospective audience.

Identifying your audience means you also have to be able to place your ad where your clients will see it. If your target is, say, middle-aged men working in IT departments, you wouldn’t place your ad in a knitting magazine, right?

But you also need to be able to think outside the box. You want to attract new people to your spiffy product or service, so you’ve got to find that little self-published bi-annual publication, the non-mainstream conferences, and the well-read blogs. This might involve chatting people up at the mainstream conferences or surfing the net, or it might just involve reading everything ever written on your topic, even if it was some high school kid’s term paper.

Okay, so now that you know where you want to advertise, you need to create campaigns that are specific to these venues. If the magazines you target are all serious, high-end, glossies and the other ads are serious four-color works of art, your ad probably shouldn’t be cartoonish, overly verbal, or bland. If the venue is playful, humorous, and surprising, your ad shouldn’t be serious, classic, and highly verbal. If your chosen publisher is academic, verbal, and comprehensive, your ad shouldn’t be smart-alecky, glib, or rude.

That’s not to say that a serious arty magazine couldn’t use a little academia or fun, that a witty site couldn’t use a little high-class focus, or that that conference brochure shouldn’t make people smile, but to break the rules successfully, you need to know both the audience and the nature of the publishing entity.

If you were posting sales on Purple People Plotters at the local Electronic Gallery, you probably only have a few words to say your piece. You need to name the product and its current price at the very least. Better is to name the “regular” price and the sale price along with the product name. (Did you know that “regular” means that the price will return to the named sum after the sale and that “original” means that it won’t? That might just be a California legalese, but it’s worth noting if you’re comparison shopping or advertising.) Best yet is to name a feature or two that will compel buyers to pick up your product and plop it down by the cash register.

Let’s look at a few miniature bits of copy to go with a nice picture.

Purple People Plotter version 3; fast, low bandwidth, backward compatible with version 2. Reg. $1400, sale $999.

Purple People Plotters, only 12 available, essential for R & D. Sale, $999.

Purple People Plotters, small foot-print, low toner usage, small-business-friendly. Sale price too low to publish. Call for price and availability.

All three of these examples offer the name of the product and some essential information. The first provides details that a purchasing manager needs, but not much detail for the techies who might use it. The second limits the buyers to a specific group and encourages a rush to the store, and the last one addresses limited office space and budgets. The last one might also be deliberately deceptive in that the product might not actually be on sale, or maybe only one or two are and the rest are at full price. Once they get you on the phone, they can sell you any number of useful things as well—or instead of—the highly desirable Purple People Plotter.

Punctuation in advertising should follow the usual rules, but the publication itself might have its own style. A retailer I did some work for wanted a dollar sign in front of full amounts and none if there was change involved ($10 versus 9.99). They also never put a period after the price even if it ended a sentence, and used em-dashes in body text and en-dashes in headings. None of these things comply with Chicago or AP styles—they followed that company’s own style. Paying attention to the publication’s style will make you popular with their editors if you’re not providing camera ready (unalterable) ads, but won’t make a whit of difference if your ads are packaged and ready to go. Try to stay true to your company’s style if you can. Consistency is everything (right after outlining).

Take a minute and think about ads that really stuck in your head. “Got milk?” is one that sticks in mine. It’s succinct, the images were funny, they used both popular icons in awkward situations and everyday everyman experiences, and it’s very clear what the product was. But that ad didn’t have to tell prospective buyers where to get the product—it had the luxury of being ubiquitously offered at any store that sells groceries, in fast foot joints and posh restaurants, and in vending machines. The trick in imitating this one is adding the information that will get your gizmo into everyone’s head like that.

Let’s look at Microsoft for a minute. They seem to be everywhere, and even non-users can name products in their line (Word and Windows jump out at most people, I’d guess.) Their trick is to make sure that they stay innovative, keep their ads appearing on all media, and that they address bad press with self-deprecation and honesty. Remember that big lawsuit back in the early nineties about the Windows user interface brought on by Apple? Anybody remember how that was resolved? Yup, they changed their advertising style almost immediately to be less techno-nerdy, they promptly invested publicly in Apple stock, and they preached community over technology (they’re still doing that with their television ads).

Your product is likely to be less universal than milk and not as audience-specific as ASP.NET. Your challenge is to name ALL the flavors of audience and target each of them specifically. If you do the exercise of naming all of them and trying to target them and the media they’re most likely to read, you might find some trends, some language, or some images that will serve you across several potential buyer types. That’s the real trick of marketing mavens: to find a few ads that serve all audiences in all media. Keep your focus narrow and your mind open, and you’ll be all right.

You can find these blogs, a little information about my editorial services and me, and a collection of pages about my “real” life on my Web site, www.MelanieSpiller.com.

Writing Political Satire

spiller — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 02:52:00 GMT

Does anybody write satire anymore? Oh, I don’t mean satire of the Saturday Night Live ilk. I mean the really writing a good tale that is part parable, part morality play, and a hundred percent tongue in cheek. Did satire come to an untimely end with the likes of Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift?

Let’s look at “Gulliver’s Travels,” shall we? Let’s see what a miracle of satire it really was, and then maybe one or two of you, gentle readers, can tell me about any comparable satire written by our own contemporaries. I’d sure like to know about it if it’s still being written.

Okay, here’s the story of Gulliver in a nutshell, in case you haven’t read this since you were 12 (it deserves an adult reading, for sure): Lemuel Gulliver, a failing businessman and surgeon, is shipwrecked. He awakens to find himself tied to the ground by tiny threads. His captors are the itty bitty Lilliputians and are prone to violence, scurrying all over him to secure him. They feed him at great expense (he consumes more than a thousand Lilliputians could) and he is presented to the emperor as a form of entertainment. Despite his captivity, the Lilliputians use him as a weapon against the enemy during a war about a silly principle (the proper cracking of an egg). Gulliver is convicted of treason when he urinates to put out a fire in the royal palace. The emperor pardons him at the last minute and he trots off to the land of the enemies, where he builds a boat and sets sail for home.

After a short visit with his wife and children, Gulliver sets sail again, this time ending up in the land of Brobdingnag where the residents are giants. Again, he is treated as an amusement for royalty and here he makes music for the queen. The Brobdingnagians are crude and unrefined and Gulliver is repulsed. During a joy ride, a bird snatches his cage and drops it into the sea. He manages to get rescued and returns to England again.

In his third journey, Gulliver is attacked by pirates and ends up in Laputa, where a floating island is inhabited by theoreticians and academics who oppress the nearby continent, called Balnibarbi. Residents seem whimsical and random, and using magic, they conjure up legendary historical characters who seem ludicrous out of context of their own times. The aged and senile immortals living nearby convince Gulliver that age and experience do not necessarily impart wisdom. Once again, he returns home.

On his fourth journey, Gulliver is the captain of a ship, but his crew mutinies and confines him in his cabin. They set him on land in Houyhnhnm, where sentient horses rule and where humans—the Yahoos (yup, Swift coined the term)—serve the horses. He learns the language of the Houyhnhmns and tells them about his voyages and the constitution of England. They treat him well, but when his physical resemblance to the crude and repulsive Yahoos is revealed, he is banished. He leaves by canoe reluctantly, and is picked up by a Portuguese ship captain from a nearby island. He can’t help but see the captain and all other humans as brutish, like the Yahoo, ever after.

Gulliver concludes his narrative by saying that although he isn’t sure that colonialism is a good idea, his presence in these foreign lands claims them for England by default.

Okay, now that you remember the story (you’d forgotten all but the Lilliputians, didn’t you? Even Microsoft Word’s spelling checker knew that word but none of the other names except Yahoo. Makes you wonder about the naming of the Yahoo Web site, doesn’t it?) let’s look at Swift’s life.

Swift lived from 1667 until 1745. He grew up in Ireland, was educated there at Trinity College, and later became the secretary of a politician in England. At age 27, he took religious orders in the Church of Ireland (Anglican). He became a country parson and returned to Ireland, where he began to write political satire. He bounced back and forth from Ireland to England during the middle of his life and soon published “A Tale of a Tub,” directed at political critics of the Anglican church, and “The Battle of the Books,” that argues the superiority of the classics over books of modern thought and literature. He poked around in politics for a while and finally joined the conservative Tory party because of their strong allegiance to the church.

The Tories fell out of power in 1714 and the 47-year old Swift fell out of favor despite his fame. He returned to Ireland, where he became the dean of St. Patrick’s. He’d begun writing Gulliver’s Travels while in England when he associated with other famous satirists, like Alexander Pope, but he did not complete book until 1726, back in Ireland. He became a loud and vocal supporter of the Irish fight for autonomy, including writing the still shocking “A Modest Proposal.” (Read that right away, if you haven’t already read it. That’s an order.) Swift had what appears to be a stroke and was deemed unable to care for himself in the last three years of his life. Many said that he became so convinced that mankind was all the horrible things he observed in “Gulliver’s Travels” that he lost his sanity and then he died.

It’s fun to see how blatantly Swift parodies what was going on in the real world. When you look at that (I’ll try to give it some context as I go), you can see how directly Swift made his point. From the distance of the 21^st century, “Gulliver’s Travels” just seems like an entertaining tale.

Okay, so the Anglican break with the Catholic church was about 130 years old when Swift was born. The Saint James edition of the Bible was only about 60 years old. Galileo got in deep trouble with the Catholic church when he proposed the heliocentric version of the planets and sun’s arrangement about 30 years before Swift’s birth and Descartes and Pascal made their great contributions around that same time. The English civil war ended about 20 years before Swift was born, and Cornwall crushed the Irish rebellion about three years after Swift’s ancestors moved to Ireland and 17 years before he was born. Gulliver, Swift’s most famous fictitious character, was born about seven years before Swift himself (heh), and the plague and the great fire of London happened in the two years before Swift actually appeared on the scene. His father died a few months before he was born, and Swift lived in Dublin with an uncle while his mother and sister moved back to England. John Milton wrote “Paradise Lost” the same year (1667) Swift was born.

When Swift was four, Sir Isaac Newton invented the reflecting telescope and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz made a calculating machine. When Swift was seven, sperm was described for the first time and Benedict de Spinoza wrote and published “Ethics.” The speed of light was calculated for the first time in the following year. The year after he entered Trinity College, when Swift was 16, the same guy who described sperm described bacteria. Peter the Great became emperor of Russia and the Turks besieged Vienna.

At 21 (1688), Swift left Ireland due to political unrest and visited his mother in England. He became ill while working for that Whig politician and returned briefly to Ireland. When he came back, he received his MA from Oxford and was published for the first time. James II’s troops were defeated in Ireland and the Salem witch trials happened in that same year. Queen Mary II died when Swift was 27, and he returned to Ireland and was ordained. He went back to England and the first practical steam engine was invented when Swift was 32, in 1696. (Gulliver was stranded on Lilliput in 1699.)

Swift was appointed vicar and then prebend (a stipended clergyman) in Dublin the same year John Dryden and Charles II of Spain died and the Great Northern War began (1700). (Gulliver landed in Brobdingnag in 1703.) In 1706, Edmond Halley predicted the return of “his” comet, and Benjamin Franklin was born. Swift returned to London to lobby for the church and the first accurate map of China was made in 1708. The following year, Bartolomeo Christofori invented the piano (and Gulliver departed on his third voyage, to the land where academics and magicians rule). In the next year, Swift’s mother died and he returned to England yet again, this time as a recruit for the Tory party. In 1712, when Swift was 45, George Friedrich Handel came to England and stayed.

Queen Anne died in 1714, changing which party had political power and, with a price on his head, Swift returned to Ireland. Alexander Pope wrote his famous “Rape of the Lock” and Bernard de Mandeville wrote “Parable of the Bees” in that same year, and King George dismissed Bolingbroke and reinstated Marlborough. In the following year, Louis XIV of France died. Shortly thereafter, Halley declared the movements of the stars independent, Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe,” and Ireland was declared inseparable from England.

In 1720, Swift began writing Gulliver and a plague in France killed 40,000 people. Six years later, Gulliver was published anonymously in England. In 1728, Vitus Bering discovered the strait and the next year, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote “St. Matthew’s Passion.” In 1731, John Hadley invented the navigational sextant and in the following year, Benjamin Franklin wrote “Poor Richard’s Almanac.” In the next two years, Alexander Pope’s most famous work, “Essay on Man” and Carl Linnaeas’s “System Natural” were published (that’s the whole family/phyla thing you struggled with in biology).

In 1741, Bering discovered Alaska and the following year, Swift was declared unsound of mind and memory. Handel’s “Messiah” was written and performed that same year. Swift died in 1745, the same year as Walpole and three years later, Bach wrote “Art of the Fugue.” In 1749, Henry Fielding wrote “Tom Jones,” and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born. The following year, Bach died. In1752, England adopted the Gregorian calendar, losing 11 days that year. We’re still using that calendar. In 1756, Wolfgang Mozart was born and the Seven Years War began. In 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven was born, the Boston Massacre occurred, Thomas Paine wrote “Common Sense,” Adam Smith wrote “Wealth of Nations,” and America declared its independence.

Okay, now go back and read the synopsis of “Gulliver’s Travels,” or, better yet, read the book. It’s amazing stuff. I’d love to know if anybody’s still writing like this. Oh, I suppose Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” and some of Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction pieces fill the bill, but tell me about what you’ve read, would you?

Although I have read “Gulliver’s Travels” many times, I’ve read a lot in the meantime, so I cribbed some of the synopsis for this blog from http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gulliver/ and much of the chronology from http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/chron.html.

You can find these blogs, a little information about my editorial services and me, and a collection of pages about my “real” life on my Web site, www.MelanieSpiller.com.