Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

How to tell stories today

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I try to avoid actually providing anything useful on this blog, lest people think they can get something for nothing. But sometimes I just can't help it.

On Monday, the big story was the Kagan nomination for Supreme Court. The New York Times ran stories, but they also ran a six-shot photo-album.

If you just clicked through the photos—and how could you not want to see this curious-looking woman from a few angles? Christ, she looks like Otto Pilot, from the movie Airplane!—you learned about as much about Kagan as anyone knows, just from the photo captions.
AirplaneMovieOttoPilotInflatable

Check it out:

1. Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, will be nominated by President Obama to be the next Supreme Court justice, Democrats said.

2. Her nomination would fill the vacancy left by Justice John Paul Stevens's retirement. Ms. Kagan has never been a judge.

3. Ms. Kagan is known for her easy banter with the justices. She spoke with former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor at a conference in 2009.

4. Ms. Kagan's appointment will require Senate approval, and both sides of the aisle are gearing up for potentially contentious hearings.

5. Born in Manhattan, Ms. Kagan, here in a 1977 yearbook, received degrees from Princeton and Oxford before attending Harvard Law.

6. Ms. Kagan, with former Harvard Law School students, was the school's first female dean, from 2003 to 2009.

Pretty slick, NYT. Pretty damned slick. And a lesson to us all.

Writing Boots Quote of the Week

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Came across this on my weekly rounds for the Executive Communication Report (the free Friday ezine to which all self-respecting communicators subscribe):

"When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag." —General George. S. Patton

The danger of the misreverence that social media breeds

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For several years after I broke into this business, I was afraid to call Roger D'Aprix on the phone, because he was a living legend of employee communication. A lot of the practitioners I was interviewing told me he actually taught them how to think about their job.

Finally I called him and we talked and he didn't bite; he gave me a genial interview. Maybe I had been silly to wait so long. But probably, too, the waiting had prepared me to interview D'Aprix more carefully and intelligently.

Eventually, D'Aprix honored me by writing a chapter in a book I edited, and a regular column for the Journal of Employee Communication Management, which I'd founded for Ragan. Now, he serves as the senior judge on the E2E Communication Awards, which I chair.

And over the years, we actually became friends—me as a stander upon his shoulders, he (I think) an occasional admirer of my writing. And, even better, we liked each other, reveling in the occasional chance for a drink or lunch, and exchanging occasional e-mails that were always friendly and trusting and warm.

And then I check my Facebook page and I see this, on the right-hand column.

Roger D'Aprix

Help him find his friends.

Suggest friends for him.

Why is Roger D'Aprix on Facebook? Surely, because he wants to remain relevant. But I don't want to see him on there, because I want to remain reverent.

I see all the democratizing upside of Facebook and other social media. We're each our own carnival barker now. But how will we organize a profession—or a society—without reverence, and reverence's conjoined twin, irreverence?