editing
Poetry editor energy showing in high school
According to Ms. Meador (who was other than being a name-misspeller totally pleasant and did not deserve a student like me in her class, much as I enjoyed it & found it fruitful):
“[Wes] needs to develop a more positive attitude toward classroom objectives and decrease harshness toward fellow students. Very talented art student!”
I haven’t stopped laughing since I read this.
Dated 12/13/1985, this was the end of Fall Semester of my senior year at boarding school (Christchurch School in Christchurch, Middlesex Co., Virginia). I was 17.
Class notes: Density
An excerpt from an in-class discussion about the importance of and one path to brevity in business writing:
Good PowerPoint chops can be a real asset, professionally-speaking. It’s helpful to develop a sense of fundamentals of design and a functional knowledge of apps like Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator. Sometimes the best way to make a complex idea simple is graphically.
A thorough analysis of the information you’re presenting will facilitate identification of the patterns inherent in almost all systems. The human desire to classify what we learn will help you render your impressions in a more concise, ideally better-explicable form.
Class Notes: Speaking; “Progress.”
An excerpt from an in-class discussion of The World’s Worst Power Point, as reported here in the Boston Globe:
You have to be conscious of your end-user. You have to be aware that there is only so much information a person can take in at a time. You also have to have the ability to organize your information and tell its story convincingly. Explicit documentation at this level of granularity does not tell a story at all, but we can say that it provides a detailed backdrop for a convincing speech. A well practiced speaker with 30 minutes and a laser-pointer could make all this information relevant eventually. On the other end of the spectrum, a friend and designer in San Francisco told me recently of a college professor and colleague whose presentations consisted of one word per slide. If you were going to try and refine this slide into one word, what would that word be?
A Biscuit In The Sun 