Tim Phillips makes the bad noises stop
In the final part of our guide to Talk Normal and Talknormalisation, how jargon has infected the media, why social media isn’t always a good thing, and tips for better writing. Ease yourself into the weekend, as local radio DJs say, by listening to it:
Again, if you’re a subscriber, you will need to visit the site. Hope you’ve enjoyed the podcasts. I’ve got another recorded interview for you next week, but someone else will be answering the questions. That, for some of you, might be a relief.
More from Talk Normal’s chief solutions advocate (that’s me): in this podcast we talk about HR jargon, CSR, thought leadership and other rubbish you hear at work. Stick in the headphones during your lunch hour and let us take you to a better place.
Eighteen minutes of joy. Note: subscribers – you’ll have to visit the site to listen, but it’s worth it.
All go at Talk Normal headquarters. My publisher has created three podcasts about Talknormalism, the problems that jargon causes, and what we can do to solve them. I’ll add the other two parts in the next few days. Here’s part one:
Maybe you can listen to it while you’re on mute in a conference call.
What a Crossrail station will look like. Memo to architects: if you leave your car there in East London, don't expect to see it when you get back
I’m having a bit of a Talknormalish to-do at the moment with Crossrail, or at least one of its contractors. The people I speak to tell me they are listening, though we all know they’re just tolerating me until I go away. If you’ve tried to complain to anyone with a complaints process recently, you know what I mean.
It’s about what we think consultation means, and what they know it means.
To recap: I live in a flat that’s facing the Olympic site for London 2012. As you can imagine, I’m accustomed to construction noise by now.
From time to time someone pushes a leaflet through the letterbox which tells me the builders are going to lower the street outside my door by two metres (this actually happened), or turn off the sun for the weekend, or put up a giant animatronic statue of Lord Coe.
The contractors are careful to phrase the leaflets in town planning jargon so you actually know less when you finished than when you began. They put a badly-drawn map on the back that looks like it was printed with a potato.
This is what is known in the construction business as consultation. Originally from the word consult: to seek advice, or consider, in this context it means telling us what they’ve already decided to do, and have often already started. It’s like going for a consultation with the doctor and discovering that he already sawed your leg off in the waiting room.
It’s all change in Stratford because, as well as the Olympics, we’re getting Crossrail – a new railway to take some Londoners left to right, and others right to left. It will be finished in 2017, but the contractors need to put this bit of Crossrail in now or else they’ll have to dig the Olympics up again as soon as it’s finished; and by that time they’ll have planted flowers for the tourists.
Crossrail has decided to extend its work to the evening: between the hours of 0800 and 2200 Monday to Friday, and on Saturdays too. They’re do this with a machine that the leaflet calls a piling rig, which is a giant BANG BANG BANG hammer which BANG BANG BANG thumps metal things BANG BANG BANG repeatedly until your KABOOM head explodes. I know this, because they started doing the work the week before they consulted us about it.
I can’t wait to spend the long summer evenings relaxing while I listen to it in action, mixed only with the background noise of tired babies crying.
So, I complained to the consultation number on the letter, and a liaison person called me back. It went like this:
Me: Why weren’t any of us consulted about the extended hours?
Her: We got permission from the Newham Borough Council. We have the obligation to consult you by sending out the letter to say whats happening.
Me: That’s not a consultation then.
Her: We’re just the contractor.
Me: Still not a consultation though.
Her: Crossrail organised the consultation.
Me: When?
Her: Before the Crossrail bill went through parliament*.
Me: But your leaflet doesn’t even explain what’s happening.
Her: What do you mean?
Me: It’s in jargon. Half the people in Newham have English as a second language**. They don’t know what bored piling to form the abutments for the bridge is, so they can’t understand what you’re telling them.
Her: We don’t write the final leaflet. We’re just the contractor.
Me: (overexcited) And you wrote that the work would start at 0800 and finish at 2200, but then that there are one hour startup and shutdown periods, so that means the work will actually take place between 0700 and 2300.
Her: (bored now) I see.
Me: (frothing) And you say that you will keep noisy work to a minimum on Saturdays and in the evenings.
Her: (frosty) Yes.
Me: (triumphant) Ha! But that just means that you will be doing noisy work on Saturdays and in the evenings. This is supposed to be information, you’re not meant to be twisting the truth to make yourselves sound nice.
At this point she offered to ask the director of jargon dissemination (not his real job title) to call me so I can give him the benefit of my irritating advice on his choice of words. I’ll keep you in touch, but I won’t hold my breath.
* To be fair, this consultation did take place. Eight years ago.
** I’m exaggerating here. It’s 47 per cent.
It’s a couple of years old now, but if anyone can find a more toe-curling radio interview than this classic, recorded with Icelandic ban Sigur Ros for NPR, I’d like to hear it. Scratch that! I don’t want to hear it, I’m still too tense after listening to this one all the way through. Next time that I’m struggling to work out the definition of 10 Base-F having asked someone to explain it five times, I’ll count my blessings.
For a feature I’ve just written for Research Magazine I’ve just been chatting to David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge about how we present statistics. He admits he shouts at the TV when they use statistics that scare or confuse you without helping you.
There are plenty of stats that use percentages or relative likelihoods to compare stuff (before versus after, or this versus that), without really giving us a clue. An example: if you drive 10 miles to by a lottery ticket, you are between 3 and 20 times more likely to die in a car wreck than win the lottery.
The answer to this is not, as my mum pointed out, that you can buy lottery tickets online these days. Comparing the risk of driving (from which, every time you don’t die, you usually get a benefit) and the reward for buying a lottery ticket is like comparing a gun with a gnu because they use the same letters.
The professor would rather we stuck to presenting statistics, where possible, as what would happen to a set of people (10, 100, or for rare events, 1000): for example, according to the Office for National Statistics, for every 1000 people who died in 2008 around 330 died from circulatory (heart) disease – and only five in transport accidents. This might imply that overweight gamblers might be better off walking to buy a lottery ticket than driving. Unless you really, really like living dangerously.
I don’t understand why magazines and newspapers – and marketing departments and think tanks – don’t have a house style on how statistics are presented – for example, insiting that spokespeople qualify “up by 20 per cent” statements with what the expected outcome would be in terms of death, or Euros, or gnus (plus a confidence limit). Newspaper style books have pages about the correct title for a judge and whether you can use aggravate as a synonym for irritate, but I’ve never seen one with instructions on comparative statistics. Maybe it’s because the people who compile style guides know a lot about the meaning of words, but less about the meaning of numbers.
It’s not as if the “for every X people” stat isn’t visual enough. For example, I can give you the interesting (and true) statistic that for every 10 people who come to Talk Normal from a search engine, two have searched for either naked or naked people:
Try this article from Joanna Blythman in The Herald called Scientists must not dictate on public health matters (better leave that job, it seems, to Joanna Blythman). While complaining about Professor David Nutt, she tells us that scientists think their knowledge
is superior to other types of knowledge we might bring to bear on our decisions, such as intuition, experience, observation, or even common sense.
Even when they have used all four, plus scientific method too. She’s a skilled polemicist:
The huffing and puffing of Nutt and his indignant allies has obscured the fact that whatever the rest of society thinks or knows about cannabis…
Note: thinks or knows. As in, if Joanna Blythman thinks something, and has used intuition etc, then she knows it, so it must be better than anything a scientist has boiled up in a laboratory. Especially if she agrees with you.
It doesn’t stop her throwing around a few stats at the end to make her point that the only scientists who know about statistics are the ones who produce statistics she likes. For example:
Now we learn, once again from bona fide scientific research, that pregnant women taking folic acid supplements are up to 30% more likely to produce babies with asthma. Yet still the folic acid lobby is arguing that we should press on regardless with blanket fortification of bread and continue to advocate supplements during pregnancy…
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to use statistics to confuse people. Quite apart from the fact that she neglects to point out that the research isn’t from a random sample and shows a weak correlation, that a lack of folic acid causes spina bifida and other problems, we don’t have a chart that shows the effect of this up to 30% as an outcome for 1000 babies born today. We can’t draw one, because so far this research doesn’t tell us enough with enough certainty. On the other hand, we know a lot about the damage caused to babies by poor nutrition during pregnancy.
One of the problems with the presentation of statistics in the press is that you can always slice the results to be more dramatic then they really are, and that suits a speak-your-branes columnist like Blythman. Even journalists who don’t know much about numbers know how to do this. And so I can’t help thinking that in-house standards for newspapers on how they present statistics about are far more important than pages of rules on how to refer to the wife of a marquess or an earl*.
* marchioness and countess, respectively. Pointless as it is, the second one’s good for pub quizzes.
A typical winter's day in the Buffalo area
Some of you might have been wondering what has happened to my blog updates in the last week. Hey! Get off my case already! I’ve been travelling, notably to Buffalo in the frozen North of the United States, where everyone found the story of how London was paralysed by 10cm of snow last winter hilarious. I even gave an interview to the students at Canisius College about ethics in journalism for their TV station*. They turned out to know far more about the subject than I did, but they were very polite about it.
Meanwhile, while I open my post and wash my shirts, enjoy Maxim’s office email translator. Back soon with a proper post.
* they also asked if I was worried that people would connect the Tim who writes Talk Normal with the serious journalist Tim. I wasn’t until they asked me.
Kudos to the far-sighted guys at Speed Communications who, looking for a journalist’s view of spokespeople for their weekly newsletter, decided to consult the chief solution advocate of Talk Normal.
If N is the number of column inches, R is the relevance to current news obsessions, I is the importance of the academic whose name is attached to the press release and ∂ is a greek character that I introduced to make the whole thing look like it came from a university rather than the desk of a public relations consultant, then the formula for press coverage of a made-up scientific formula is too depressing to invent.
I’ve just been at the British Science Festival where journalist, author and enemy of chiropractors everywhere Simon Singh presented Why Journalists Love Stupid Equations and Other Problems in the Media. If you have been under a rock and so missed the stupid equation trend, over at Apathy Sketchpad there’s a collection of the Telegraph’s miserable Formula For stories. Also, the same blog’s collection of PR-concocted science from the Mail, and then there’s the Sun story on the formula which tells us if a boob line is too low – which, as Ben Goldacre points out, doesn’t even work. Idiots. You can read more detail about what Singh had to say here.
I declare an interest: a few years ago I was called in by a PR company to work out why the newspapers had stopped printing stories for their price comparison web site client. The answer: because all they did was make up increasingly asinine formulae for the tabloids, freesheets and women’s magazines. At the time they were desperately pushing the formula for a perfect bargain (I’m not making this up), which had half a dozen variables to consider, and eventually gave a number between 100 and 700 which you had to compare to a table of results. You were meant to use this calculation while staring into a shop window FFS, and they couldn’t even be bothered to (or didn’t know how to) make it come out as a percentage.
I suggested to Singh that naming the PR companies who rely on this guff might act as a deterrent. “Problem is, if you name them, then people who want to get in the papers are going to say, fantastic, we should go to that PR company,” he pointed out.
Like an internet survey of 23 people, or a the story of how some type of vegetable will save your from cancer, the fake formula offends me because it is cynical lowest-common-denominator PR. It offends me because as journalists we all know this is crap – but we publish it anyway. And it offends me because we assume this is all the science that readers can tolerate without their heads exploding while they’re reading the paper.
