Steve Neiderhauser

Parallel Structures in Writing

Bonnie Trenga describes how to develop the skills to create parallelism in your writing. Parallel structures make it easier to read your prose and also provide an element of influence. Consider JFK's famous inauguration speech.

Bonnie lists the building blocks of parallel structures:

Parallel elements have the same weight and are often the same part of speech. Noun, noun, noun. Check. Adjective, adjective, adjective. Yep. Verb, verb, verb. Parallelism is all about equality; parallelism creates a nice rhythm in your sentence.

Power of Curiosity

In Writing for Emotional Impact, author Karl Iglesias writes, "Curiosity is the emotional state of wanting to learn more about something, the intellectual need to answer questions and make sense of things. We love stories because we long to know what happens next."

Before people can read a thrilling story, the author has to sell it. A query letter is a marketing tool that helps the author sell her story.

The best way to understand a query letter is to read it in action. One of Blake Snyder's favorite writers, Kathy Hepinstall, put together the following query to market her novel:

"I have written a literary novel, about 80,000 words, set in Louisiana in 1941, about a very peculiar bordello, run by men..."

Kathy got a 10 percent response with this approach. She wasn't satisfied and realized that for a query letter to really pull, the first sentence must grab and arrest the agent's attention. With this new perspective and writing skills in hand she rewrote the query. After sending out the letter she received triple the response rate and sold her novel in three days.

Want to see the power of a first sentence and the new curiosity-grabbing query? Go to Blake's post.

Brain-like computers

IBM has started a project to create a computer that is structured and acts like the brain. Because of the complexity of this goal, IBM will draw from the field of cognitive computing and bank on the collective skills of neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists.

I've always felt that this kind of breakthrough needs to occur before we have a great leap forward in computers, due to the limitations of the Von Neumann computer architecture, an architecture we have relied on since the dawn of the computer. As humans, we're also limited by our work environment; we model and become like our tools.

In the early 1980s Craid Boyd coined the term technostress and wrote a book with the same title, describing how we unwittingly model the computer — binary (Yes/No) thinking, internalizing the speed of the computer...

In business school my professors required us to write reviews of books we've read. Although, I see that Technostress is unavailable on Amazon, you can read my review of the book.

Back to our motivated dream weavers at IBM. Dharmendra Modha, the chief IBM scientist for this project, says the time is just right for a cross-disciplinary project; the disparate disciplines are coming together in a perfect talent storm. And how does he feel about the potential benefits of the project?

"We are going not just for a home run, but for a home run with the bases loaded."

Persuasion Equation

A couple weeks ago I attended Jim Fortin's Persuasion Equation class, a class that increases your communication and persuasion skills. This is one of those seminars where just sitting through the class helps to transform your skills.

In the class I learned language patterns and that people have different thinking modalities: Auditory, Visual, Kinesthetic, Gustatory, Olfactory. The training leans toward the sales side, but the information can also be used by managers or change agents.

Fact is, the Project Management Institute tells us that management is 90% communication. And yet, the only thing I remember from my PMI training is that there's a sender, a receiver, a message. I'm sure there's more. Perhaps I dozed off during one of the key 44 processes.

Because the only tool we have to persuade people is our words, it's important that we master advanced communication skills. Now, the concepts I learned from Jim aren't new age, they are based on how people learn. In How to Learn Anything Quickly, author Ricki Linksman describes four learning styles based on our senses. When the material is presented in our dominate learning style, we are able to learn quickly. I'm not sure if schools are identifying the student's preferred learning style at an early age and then providing it to teachers, but that would be a smart approach.

Likewise, in business, it would be helpful to identify the preferred communication model of executives so their subordinates can provide information in an optimal fashion.

Sharing your business with others

Kare Anderson writes about how to share your business to drive growth. In addition to the tips about growing community, I was drawn to the following wisdom:

Use your business as a lab for trying new ideas.

Open with a story that pulls in your reader.

Modeling Projects

When you model anything in business, you should be able to create the model in a fraction of the time it takes to actually complete the project. Excel is like that. You can build financial models in short order that show the value of the project.

WBS Chart Pro allows you to define the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for a project at light speed. You could use Visio or other drawing tools, but these aren't designed specifically for the WBS. In fact, because WBS Chart Pro is easy to use, you can meet with your software team, define the tasks needed, and create a model of the project in one session.

If your management is interested in accurate estimates, this method is helpful because once the tasks are defined you can use a bottom-up estimate technique.