Last week my colleague made a very interesting point about
students’ misconception that detailed information is contingent on the length
of their written arguments rather than their content. To address this issue,
she encourages them to be concise.
As I reflect on my teaching I realize that I help spread
this myth of detail and wordiness. Many students in my class write shorter
paragraphs that lack detailed analysis. Up until now I have always asked those
students to write MORE information, but I think the time has come for me to
change my pitch.
The abundance of information has shaped us for good and for
worse. On a daily basis we are submerged with information in the form of
emails, text messages, blogs, videos and much more. In this context of
overwhelming abundance, conciseness and loquacity become essential survival
skills determining whether our message will be absorbed or discarded by our
audience.
In his new book “To Sell is Human”, Daniel H. Pink
highlights the purposefulness of conciseness when pitching ideas to our
audience. Interestingly enough, a university now uses 140-character responses
from applicants as one of the criteria in their selection of future candidates.
The character limit is a constraint that requires that students be resourceful
and creative in their responses.
So I cannot help but question how my students would perform
with these constraints if they were applying at the Tippie Business School at
the University of Iowa. More importantly, how would my students perform in the
real world were succinctness will be central for their survival? Knowing my students
and their teacher, my guess is that many of them would find it challenging to
say the least.
So my plan is to expose my students to this kind of process.
In the next month, I will expose students to a suitable, real-world challenge
that needs to be addressed in not more than 140 characters. It will be
interesting to go through the process of elimination, starting with a long text
and slowly trimming it down to 140 characters. In this way students will
appreciate that conciseness does indeed accentuate the message.
So I guess I ought to lead by example. Tonight, I will be
tweeting this reminder to myself:
Detail is not defined
by the lengthiness of an idea but by its essence.
