MIT EECS Senior Lecturer, Tony Eng, helps us understand how pacing delivary can help your audience’s ability to parse the information you are communicating to them.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest Starring Tony Eng, Lead Instructor of Gradcommx & Senior Lecturer MIT EECS 6.UAT
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) “A Rush of Clear Water” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. “In Passage” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers. My name is Adam Greenfield and a while back I was approached by the Office of Graduate Education to help explore a subject that, admittedly, I wasn’t all that familiar with. That topic? Scientific research and professional development in communication. My job was to learn all I could about the subject, then deliver it to you through a medium that I am intimately familiar with: podcast production and interview style formatting.
We decided the best approach to this subject was simply to talk to great communicators and field related iconoclasts, and find out from them what was most important when communicating science. Or in some cases, just communicating, period.
During some of those talks, I was concerned some that there might be terminology, or jargon, that I might not fully understand. But it became clear early on, through the talk with today’s guest, that there are times and places for jargon, and knowing who your audience is can help determine that.
In this episode, our guest’s official title is senior lecturer at MIT. However, if you ask him, it’s a bit more focused than that. TONY ENG I teach engineers how to communicate here. ADAM GREENFIELD That’s Tony Eng and this job description kind of makes Tony the right guy to talk to regarding research communication and professional development. Good thing I had the opportunity to talk to him twice, once in person and once online. And it was this second time where he raised an important point about language and that you don’t always need words to communicate. TONY ENG
In terms of a presentation, I always think of it as a two way conversation even though i’m doing most of the talking and the medium that i’m using, i’m using words, right? But the medium that the audience is using is non-verbal. And even though i’m the only one talking, i’m looking for those non-verbal responses. So I think in some ways that could be a language where words are not being used but thoughts, understanding, opinions are being conveyed to me.
ADAM GREENFIELD
So it’s as if there’s this dance that takes place between a speaker and the audience, a dance we’ll hear about happening throughout this episode, and the audience really is telling you something with these non-verbal clues. To me it’s important to be cognizant of that interaction.
But now let’s get to the verbal part, or the language part, of communication. And it’s not just about the words, either. There’s a rhythm to how you say something and if done right, like a snake charmer, you’ll have the full attention of your audience.
Need examples? Just listen to some of our greatest speakers, from Martin Luther King jr. to Randy Pausch to even President Obama. Their talks and speeches are great references to see how vocal modulation can be equally as important as the words you are using.
Tony had this to say when it comes to vocal modulation.
TONY ENG
So this comes back to the written word and the spoken word. With the written word, I have it in front of me and I can read it and I can re-read it if I didn’t understand something. The spoken word, you typically don’t have a transcript of what the person is saying. You are sitting there listening to these words that are being emitted and don’t know what’s important to listen to. So the burden is on the speaker to do things to help you parse the message.
ADAM GREENFIELD
Don’t be scared off by this burden, though. Sometimes it’s just a matter of varying the speed in which you say things, and sometimes slowing down… for maximum… effect.
TONY ENG
If everything comes out in equal pace at the same volume and everything is the same, nothing is going to stick out. But certainly, if there are important points, you can emphasize that, you can speed up for things that are not so important and you can slow down or pause for something important. So all of these things that have to do with vocal modulation, I think, basically help a listening audience parse your message better. There are tools that a speaker can use.
ADAM GREENFIELD:
We also discussed situations when it comes to highly technical or specific topics, how some audiences may not have the same background and whether or not there is a certain level of attention that needs to be paid to how the subject is being discussed.
TONY ENG:
A lot of my students live and breathe this stuff. They don’t realize that they have to step back and first connect with the audience. Like, “where are you at? Do you even understand what I’m saying?” Yeah, it’s a nuisance because you can’t get to the good stuff but if you don’t do that then you are going to lose them from the very start. So they have to take time to define things or explain things.
ADAM GREENFIELD
When it comes to jargon, it can help explain a detailed subject… but only if your audience understands that jargon.
TONY ENG
If it’s an audience member of like mind and like background, then it is much easier. I don’t have to worry so much about jargon and the words I use. If it’s a different audience, it’s not so much you want to avoid jargon, and you do want to avoid jargon they don’t understand, but you want to use jargon that they do understand. So if you happen to be fluent in their vocabulary, then it’s much easier for them to understand and parse your message if you use words that they are more familiar with and terms that they are familiar with.
ADAM GREENFIELD
As we heard, Tony points out there are many ways to communicate effectively, even if no words are said or used. Your physical movements and eye contact can be a very powerful unspoken way to communicate.
There’s also the cautionary tale of using jargon, as your audience may not be familiar with those terms or that language. In this instance, be sure to be aware of your audience’s background and adjust the way you communicate.
And finally, another effective communication tool is vocal modulation. Here you can alter the pitch of your voice to emphasize important points or speak slowly to give your audience an opportunity to allow the information to sink in.
Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
This is episode is the full, unedited interview with Ted Gibson. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest StarringTed Gibson, Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT’s TedLab
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
Hello, Adam Greenfield here, host of The Great Communicators podcast series. What you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
The idea behind these longer, unedited conversation is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, warts and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes, which again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
Thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation. Patrick Yurick: So, we are going to start with, can you tell me your name and what you do here at MIT?
Ted Gibson: My name is Ted Gibson, and I am a professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. I am a professor of cognitive science here at MIT.
P: Are there some things that you are working on?
T: I work on human language, how people understand, produce, and represent human language. I work on why language is the way it is. I’m looking at evolutionary models of why human language looks the way it is, but we look at how language is today to try to get it at that. So, we look many languages corpuses, like some big texts of many, many languages to try and figure out why words look the way they do, why word order looks the way it does across as many languages as we can try to make inferences about what is natural about human language. That is mostly what I do. That is kind of half of what I do, actually. The other half is, I work with remote cultures to try and also understand language and cognition, cognition more broadly because if you want to, I am telling you too much here, but, what I am interested in is why human language, why human cognition looks the way it does. If you only look at industrialized nations, industrialized cultures, and industrialized languages, then you may be missing out on a huge portion of what cognition is, what language is. Because humans are such adaptive learners, we pick up whatever is useful in anyone else’s culture. So, it could be that language or number cognition or use of color words or something like that is picked up from interacting with some other group as opposed to being some part of innate human cognition. So, you need to look at a very broad range of human, of the way that people live. I worked with tribes in the Amazon to try to look at some of the remotest human tribes to figure out what’s innately part of human intelligence and what is learned from other groups. So, that is another big part of what I do is working with remote groups.
P: That sounds really big, it sounds like a really big task.
T: It is a huge task but, I mean, I am not going to solve it. I mean, all we can do is do our little piece, you know. So, if I want to, I want to know why human language looks the way it does. So, I need to do more than just look at texts of industrialized languages. Anyone who wants to do this seriously is going to have to look at a broader range of the way human languages are. I have to look at least a few. Lots of other people will be working, and we can collaboratively try to answer these questions. So, my group and I, we do a small part of that and, yes, I cannot solve this problem. You are right.
P: No, it is interesting because I feel like that ties really into what the course is about. I mean you are studying, on some level you are studying communication but, languages about communication right? I assume, but, I’m wondering. Well, I have two questions, I will start with what are some things you found that you found interesting about the work, like what is exciting you right now about the work?
T: Well, it is kind of funny that you mention that, that you think it is kind of obvious that human language might be about communication. I agree. Many people agree but, in fact, that is not the default assumption in much of literature. I do not know if you want to know this stuff, but Noam Chomsky, his default assumption is very different assumption. He thinks language is not evolved for communication purposes but is evolved for complex thought, which actually is kind of hard to empirically test. It is kind of difficult to know what the evaluation would be, such a complex thought would be the reason that human language might exist. The sort of most obvious view is the view you are raising, what we think is most plausible in some senses that human language might be evolved for communicative purposes. I find that hypothesis is really exciting, and so we look at dictionaries, lexicons of as many languages as we can, and we look to see how words change over time. It looks like words get smaller. When they become more predictable in context, they get smaller, which is kind of what communication based ideas about language would expect. Then, maybe more interestingly is, I find that interesting on its own, I also find the structure of language as opposed to just the words themselves but how the words get put together. For instance, the order of the words, that I find absolutely fascinating. The idea that there might be, languages that involve for easier communication in some ways. So, it may be that some word orders are actually more efficient for being robust to communication. So, a problem with communication all the time is I need to say something as a speaker. When I’m trying to get an idea across to you, I want to say something that
is most likely to get to you, so that I am worried about noise. Noise at all kinds of levels, the way I might produce, the way you might understand, there might be background ambient noise or just sort of sound noise. I need to say something to optimize the probability that you are going to get the meaning that I want you to get. It turns out that some word orders are more robust to noise, just an agent verb patient word order is more robust about the noise than an agent patient verb word order. So, English has an agent verb patient, subject verb object word order. We say, “The boy kicks the ball,” but a Japanese or Korean or Turkish or Hindi have a verb final or SOV word order. It is very interesting to see how, so they would say, “Boy ball kicks,” that is the default way to say the word order. Ignore, of course, the words are all different, but this is just the order and it looks like the SVO word order is more resistant to noise. The SOV word order, these other languages of many, it turns out those are the two most common word orders across the world’s languages, and it may be that the SVO is more resistant to noise. It is more robust for communication purposes. So, what I am interested in, for instance, these SOV word orders tend to have endings on words to make them possibly more robust, as robust as they can. So, in English, we do not ever, when I say that the boy kicks the ball, I say the boy, or maybe I say the boy kisses the girl, okay? I say the boy and the girl the same way. If it is the boy kisses the girl or the girl kisses the boy. In many languages, there is something called case-marking, which is an ending on the word. So, in Japanese you say boy ‘gah’ which means agent, girl ‘o’ patient, I actually do not know the words for girl and boy, but those are the endings that you say to let the hearer know who is the agent and who is the patient, who is the actor and who is the one receiving the action. You find this across all the world’s languages wherever there is a verb final word, or where you always have this extra case-marking, this ending. When you have this verb medial like English you often do not, suggesting the idea is this case-marking is just like extra information to make that word order more robust to getting that information across. Anyways, so I am interested in why languages have those word orders and maybe they might be more or less robust to communicative purposes.
P: Do you think they change their robustness, changes it all within the context? I am thinking of, within this course we are talking about things like public speaking and we have actually done quite a bit of interviews around people who have been saying this kind of thing tends to work in a public speaking context, but it just strikes me that there is actually, I might be wrong, but the way you are looking at the language is granular, or not granular but like, I just wonder if there is contextual difference. If you were having a conversation like we are, where I am interviewing you one-on-one, would the language have different effect than if I was in front of a group of a hundred people.
T: Yeah, I mean, I think people talk to who they think their audience is, right? So, I will talk to you based on what I think you know. I will talk to an audience based on what I, I mean, if I have a good audience design capabilities, and people will vary greatly on that, so depending on what I think my audience knows, I will say different things. So, there is a lot of research on this is that, we actually do not know how people vary on this, how different individuals vary. But, there are definitely better ways to talk to people, depending on what they know. Depending on what the common ground is enough, I understand what our common ground is then I will describe things in at a very different level, depending on what I think my audience knows, right? If I think they know all kinds of math about say, communication theories or information theories. This guy, Claude Shannon, worked out all of this stuff and if I think they know that then I’ll just start talking with technical terms like surprisal and entropy. If I do not, then I can explain all those. I will have to work through what the details of those things are, right, and explain. I would tend to do that anyway because in any audience sort of situation, I sort of think it is important to bring as many people in as you can. There is always the danger that, any audience, there is always a danger that some people do not know the things that you may assume they know. So, that is a public speaking question, right? So, when you are doing a public speaking, I think it is safer to give broader talks than assume a lot of background knowledge. That is just, but different people do different things. So, some people, I guess, they know their audience then I might.
P: Sure, no I think it is, this actually came up when we talked to another, Yang Shao-Horn, was talking to us about audience and developing communication to audience. One of the things she was talking about was, I say, “Who is the audience for your work?” She is like, “Well, I do my work for the scientific method,” you know? I was like, “Woah that is interesting.” So, there is communication that is being used in the published paper, and then she has to re-tool that for her classroom, when she teaches her students, and then she has to re-tool that also to large audiences when she is speaking. My brain is lighting up about how that ends up happening. What do you keep what do you take away for those different audiences and does that change what is understood?
T: You know, that is a very difficult question. I think that is a hard question. The question of where you start and what you present to the audience is difficult. I have a personal way of doing that where I like to start almost from basics all the time, almost no matter what and work my way up in case there are people in the audience that do not have the math they are suppose to have in that class that I am teaching, because it is not that hard to go through those background steps. It does not take very long. It does not bore, and it should not bore the rest of the audience. So, that is my personal style is to attend to, but maybe, depending on what the material is, if there is so much math that that is impossible you know that you cannot start from square one and just teach people lineal algebra or something, so you have to make some assumptions I guess. For the work that I do, the math is not that hard. I can sort of give the equations and explain all of those and in some detail to anyone, I think, so that anyone can get at least the flavor. I know that different people have trouble dealing with math, you know? Just being familiar with the notation basically, I think that is a lot of it, knowing what a lot of that notation is. It is confusing to some people. I try to work that through initially. I give lectures to, you know, undergraduates, i guess then sort of general audience talks and then graduate classes. Those are really very different groups, each one of them. I always start with the same stuff and at the very basics and then work up to, depending on what the class is and how much time we are talking, of course we get into much more technical detail if there is a lot of time. You know, an hour lecture, of course you cannot give that much of the technical detail other than describing what the formulas are and what they mean.
P: Yeah, yeah that is really interesting because there has to be some kind of like a balance. You cannot spend the whole entire talk, for an hour long lecture, explaining the thing that you are about to talk about, right? There has to be like, how do I get to what I am talking about but also establish trust and understanding with my audience so that when they get there, they understand what I am saying. Well, let’s back up for a little bit, the other thing I wanted to ask you about was how do you find this work, and what drew you to it?
T: You know, probably everybody has interesting stories about that. I do not know how interesting my story is. It is kind of accidental, I think, and maybe that is how many people’s stories go, but I was interested in math and computer science all the time. So, that is what I did basically in school and high school. I double majored in computer science and math, and I ran into these problems of trying to understand how human language works, how we process and understand language in an artificial intelligence class in like, an undergraduate computer science class, so I just liked that. It seemed to fit. It seemed like there was a lot of work there that people needed to do there, it was not well done at that point. People are progressing very fast over the last 20 years, a lot of stuff has happened. But, then there was so much stuff to be done, and I really liked the idea of working on language from a formal computational way. So, I just started. I took one class in that, and then I decide to do a masters degree. Once I had done the master’s degree, then the PhD opened up, and I just kept doing this. There were always lots of opportunities, and there still are, you know? So, for all of my students graduating, I mean language has been, especial computational approaches to how language is structured, there is a lot of opportunity there to try and understand that. All of our information, anything we know, is out there on the internet in human language, you know? That is how we communicate. So, if you want to get access to that information, there is like a lot about applied reasons to want to understand language. Say you want to do translation, that is an obvious application. So, there are just so many things that this is led to. I just work on why language looks the way it does and how we understand and produce it, like I am doing right now, how it is I am producing sentences and how it is whoever is listening to this understands what I am saying. That is just a fun problem, right? That is a really interesting question, it seems so intuitively simple and obvious and it is really hard.
P: Yeah, well it is very apparent. I said to Adam yesterday, I was like, hey check this out, you know, the predictive text on my little phone. I just clicked the center button like over and over and over again, and what is shocking to me is, I am not calling Google out our anything, but it just is really funny to me because it will not produce a sentence. It just keeps going on and on and on and on, it just does this insanely long run on sentence, and that is Google’s predictive text on the thing. I just know that there are a lot of people trying to figure out basically what you are talking about on a computational level because, you know, these Siri and all the different devices that they are trying to help people get to be where they need to be in an automated fashion.
T: Well, it really doesn’t have a message. You have a message, something that you want to say. So, you have to frame it, right? So, it is doing a different task, which is what is the preceding sequence that I have heard of words, and all I am going to do is try and guess the next two or three words, right? So, that called end gram predictability. So, it’s just like from a couple of words, can I guess what the next word is or the word after that, which is very different from, “I’ve got a meeting that I want to convey”, like, I have an idea that I want to get across to you. We are not doing that based on just a sequence of words. There is a structure to those words. It cannot do that with such little context. I guess, we are still a ways off before it has a good idea of what you mean, you know, and then makes guesses of how you might say that. That’s hard. If that’s what you really want to do, but that’s hard. It’s doing some trick, right? It’s trying to just look at huge corpus of text, just giant, and then from all of those average texts, from the last two or three words, all of those averages, if you just said two or three words, it can make a guess about what the next one might be. That is what it is doing. It is pretty good, right? It will often get the next word, but then after that, as you said, it is not going to guess a sentence, right? It is just going to guess sequences of these windows of three and four words, and that never turns into a sentence.
P: It’s really interesting. I am equally fascinated, well not equally, I’m not studying it or doing research on it, but I think this is part of the central problem of like communication. There are some through lines through the different interviews we have done from very different departments around here with different faculty. You know, one of them that is really big has been adaptability in the context of trying to do it. Like, sometimes you plan a talk, and then in the middle of it you’re like, this is not working. You have to read that moment of scrambling to reframe something. It seems like people who are good at communication can do that. I am interested in what you would think that would come from.
T: I don’t know. I mean, that just seems to me that if someone is good at doing that, it seems like someone who likes to perform and is a good actor in a way. You know, someone who likes to be up on stage and can perform. That’s just hugely individually variable. I’m not like that. So, I would not be able to do that, the situation you just described of when a talk isn’t going well and it’s clear that people don’t understand, that’s a very hard thing to recover from, for me. Maybe different people have. So, my approach to giving good talks is to over prepare. So, I am not a very natural performer. I think mostly what I do is just prepare, prepare, and prepare. So, I have had students who actually memorize whole giant spiels of what they’re going to say. I don’t do that. I do practice things over and over again. I kind of just don’t like it when people are reading to me, which is what it feels like when something is completely prepared. So, I don’t like it. I prefer to work for message and just keep re-wording it over and over again to myself. I will just practice in a hotel room or wherever I am. I will practice the talk over and over and over again until it’s really easy for me to produce those ideas even though the particular sentences I use each time may be different. I’m not good under that situation you’re describing. When things aren’t going well, I don’t know what to do. I’m someone who needs to practice things an awful lot to give a good talk. It looks like when I’m giving a good talk, it looks like I’m very natural, and I’m really not. It’s just all practice. It’s just tons and tons of practice of doing these things. I have done it the other way without practicing, and it’s awful. It’s just awful. I can’t do that. I know some people can, and I think they are great, but I’m not one of them. I can’t do that.
Adam Greenfield: When you practice, do you practice out loud? Is that something that is cognitively better for preparing for that kind of thing?
T: Yes. So, when I prepare, I speak as much of it out loud. I say all of it out loud, everything is out loud. So, I go through it When I do that, then I find where my problem areas are very easily. It is very easy for me to know when it is not going well. It’s amazing how much better it is the second time after how bad it was the first time, when you tried really hard to find those words, which really didn’t work. The second time they would be much, much better. Then, the third, at some point, it’s smooth and then I won’t do it again. You get this impression that it’s very natural for me, and it really isn’t. It’s just all, you just don’t see behind the scenes. It’s like not at all natural. It’s hard. Well, it’s not actually hard, it’s just time consuming. It takes up a lot of your time.
A: I do poetry recitals, and I have noticed there is a big difference in when I practice it in my head and when I practice it out loud. In my head, it sounds great. The first time I say it out loud, I’m like, “Well, maybe that didn’t sound as great as I wanted it to.” I’m just curious where that comes from? Why that is with saying it out loud ?
T: It is true, I don’t even know what it means to say something in my head, in fact, because I think it doesn’t really work. It is very different from saying something out loud for real. You know, it doesn’t even seem real when I say it in my head. I can fool myself. I have fooled myself, and it doesn’t go well when I don’t say things out loud and really practice everything. So, I think people are very different on this. So, that’s what I teach my students. I teach a class on, it’s a lab class, but a big part of the lab class is they have to do a couple of experiments and then have to present their proposals orally. They have to present their first set of results orally. They have to present the final projects orally. You can write it all out, but I have students who write everything out on your PowerPoint. You know, there’s like a presenter view, and you can just write everything down there. If you want to read it, read it so that I don’t know you’re reading it. So, do it enough times so that I don’t notice that. Maybe, what probably generally happens when you write it out, if you really want to write it all out, is you get so practiced that you don’t have to read it at all because you spent the time writing it out and learned so well that you don’t have to. I mean, people vary. So, this question about, can someone, what happens if something goes wrong? I don’t really have good advice there. It’s like, try not to show your panicking.
P: I think what you’re say is valuable because we have talked to people, a couple people, that really adhere to that kind of thinking, but I would assume that is not every student who is going to be at some point a grad student here. I am guessing there is a good deal of grad students at MIT who probably, like it’s good to hear somebody else who has done a lot of talks to be like that’s not how I give a talk because having multiple ways of approaching that problem is good. If you can be a person who can recover in the middle of the thing, and that’s okay with you, that’s okay. But it’s interesting to hear about the refinement method you are talking about because that’s also come up. Like, the idea of, you know, when you read something that sounds perfect, it reads perfect, and it seems like it’s the first draft of that. It is usually gone through like tons and tons of revisions before it has gotten there. So, yeah, my question. My question coming from that is, what have you noticed with that course? What is the most common thing that students are struggling with when they start trying to interact with taking that research they are doing and presenting it?
T: I think the hardest thing for students who don’t have experience with public speaking is understanding how much they know about their topic and how they shouldn’t assume that we know that, the audience knows that. So, the biggest problem I think people have is understanding how little the audience knows about the things that they know and that you have to give a lot of background introduction. If they assume that the material… anything that I know, everyone else must know and then just start to go into the technical details about the things they’ve done. I think that is a mistake. People, I think, don’t understand how much they know and how, when you’re working at a particular project, not everyone else is also working on that project. So, you have to give that background, and it’s very important in any walk of life that anyone coming out somewhere like MIT is going to be. They are going to have to explain what they are doing to people who aren’t doing that. So, you have to give a lot of background. That’s the biggest thing, I think, they don’t do well with introductory material for their topics initially. I warned them about that because I know that’s what they do, but that is still the hardest thing, what is the background? I guess I have the same problem. I think everyone has this problem, and anything you work on a lot, you can have this mistaken assumption that people you are talking with may also have that same experience in that same area. So, of course you have to explain that. You may have to explain that to them also.
P: Do you have any techniques or tactics that you tell them? I mean, you talked about saying it out loud for yourself, but have you seen other things work for the students that you have said, try this out? If anything comes to mind.
T: No. So, the question is whether there are techniques of getting people to give good talks other than practicing a lot? I actually don’t know of any other specific techniques. My observation is that there are people on a huge spectrum, from being very social and loquacious, so it’s not very hard for them to talk, and then there are people who aren’t. Those are kind of the two extremes. The ones that aren’t, need the most work at being comfortable speaking, you know, just being comfortable. I don’t know because I actually find myself in that camp. I am very quiet in context of a talk. When someone is giving a talk, I rarely ask questions. I rarely interact for example. So, I just tell them to practice and work on it. I guess I don’t have any other deep insights on that.
P: I was wondering if you had any, when I was first learning to teach and give lectures and stuff, I started watching lectures that I was impressed by, ones that could, and that helped me. I was wondering if looking at exemplars for you forms in any way how you construct a presentation personally. I mean, I don’t know if it does, but…
T: I’m sure it does. I’m sure it does. Watching other people talk gives me ideas about how I would like to present myself, but I think it’ll just a lot of each person has their own personality. So, I like talks where you understand someone’s personality. You get not only the material, but you get a sense of who they are somehow or another. So, to that extent, it’s not very helpful for me to try and copy someone else’s presentation style because I have a different personality from them. I think it’s best when a presentation is kind of true to that person somehow or another. I am just different from other people. I have a certain style where I like a little bit of humor, and some people don’t. I do like language, my research topic, it lends itself to allowing humor to get into almost any area because the topic area is language. There are lots of examples of language that are funny in various ways. So, I try to bring that in, but for many people it doesn’t work. Some people just don’t like to say things, which are funny or too awkward. I have been told by faculty member and advisers here, mentors in my department, that you should never have any humor in your technical presentation. So, this is like different presentation styles. I just ignore that because I think it should be not only, you should learn but it doesn’t hurt if there is something funny, which might motivate you in some way or another to remember things in some way. That’s my own personal style. I wouldn’t recommend, I have tried that. Other people will say to maybe insert joke here in this kind of thing from a student of mine. I remember I did this ages ago. It really didn’t work for him. I was at his talk when he did this, and it fell really flat. He didn’t know what to do when people didn’t laugh at this joke, which was planted. I thought it was pretty funny later, but I was like, I was basically trying to get him to do something that I would do. It would probably work for me, and it just didn’t work for him somehow. I realize I shouldn’t be advising people on that level of how to do the talk. They should do what feels most natural for them. The material has to be there and has to be super practiced, but the way you do it has to be what’s easiest for you, I think. It’s hard. That’s worked for me. I cannot say that there is a right answer to that question.
P: I really, actually, appreciate that. I think that what you are hitting on and what I was interested in what you said is that there is like this personality. I practiced Aikito for a while. One of the principles in that martial art is no two people will ever practice that art the same way. There is a way that you need to understand your body. In the beginning, you are doing very centered moves. Slowly, you’re suppose to learn your own body. To become master, you have to be able to use your own body in that form the way it’s meant to be used and not the way other people use do Aikito because it is going to be very different. I’m wondering, though, how did you figure out what yours was? Was it just doing it over and over again? Trying things?
T: How did I figure out what my personal style for giving a talk is? I mean, that’s just who I am. So, I sort of think that my personality in normal life is not very different from my personality in giving a talk. I think that is the easiest thing for me. I think it works well if it’s the most, I’m trying to get this word. What is the word that there are always using today to describe a candidate who is running for president. You know this word, what is the word? They have to be true to themselves. What’s the good word for that? When you have to be, there’s like a standard word. I’m just getting old and have trouble. There is a word that you guys know. It is a very common word. It’s not an infrequent word. It’s where people have to be true to yourself. What is that? You guys are going to kick yourself when I. How stupid it is that I cannot remember this word.
P: Solid. Truthiness, that’s a Stephen Colbert word. The truthiness factor is off the charts. Reliable? No.
A: Is it mostly in politics?
T: No. I’m not getting the right…it doesn’t help. On the internet, I’m not getting what I want here.
P: You’re going to think of it later.
T: It’s not interesting. It’s a frequent word. Where was I?
P: We were just talking about how you figured out for yourself.
T: Yeah, how did I figure it out how I should give presentations. How I should talk in public speaking forums. I want to be able to give presentations using my own personality. So, that’s what I do.
P: Yeah, it makes sense.
T: Because that is easiest. I think that is probably going to be the easiest for everyone, is to do what is natural for them.
P: Yeah, yeah. What was I thinking of? I was listening to you. It always stinks when you’re interviewing and you think, I should’ve written down, I do have them all written down, but one of the things I was thinking of was, did you find yourself naturally bringing that presence from the first time you presented, or was it something that, I mean, were you really nervous the first time you presented? I don’t know if you remember the first time you presented? How did that teach you about yourself? How did that process come for you?
T: So, I went to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburg. I was in computational linguistics, which was joining computer science and linguistics basically there. Many fields in my experience back then anyway, did not have training in presentations. So, it was just, “Go out there and do it.” You know? I had an advisor who gave me zero, absolutely zero advice about how to give a talk, absolutely no advice. So, I went up there with, back then it was a time for overhead transparencies, that was what we were using. I made a bunch of overhead transparencies describing this particular topic I was working on, which was about how to understand human language. It was a computational algorithm to do some human language processing. I made these slides, which were unreadable. They were 12 or 10 point font on these transparencies, and I realized when I put them up there, I could barely read them and there are all these people. There is like so much text in this tiny font, and I had not practiced. I just tried to work it through. It was awful, and so I learned from the very strong negative feedback that I got from myself, not from other people. Other people were not so negative, but I thought it was just terrible. I think it was just sort of a property of the fields. This guy who was my advisor was, I guess, I guess he was a pretty natural speaker. He was pretty good. I don’t think he really had to work on giving presentations. He could just sort of stand up and knew something and just talk about, and I was not like this at all. He also came from another field where people read stuff, philosophy, they would literally bring up a paper and just read it to you. They would sit down and read it, which I just found incredibly unpleasant. I mean, I can read a book for myself or read a paper, I don’t know why is that person there? I mean I want someone to explain to me in a conversational way, I guess, so I can learn things. On the computer science side, there is also less motivation. There was not a real need to be really great at communication because, the jobs that people, there are so many jobs. It is so easy to get hired, and you are not really getting hired for your communication skills. I really wanted to be good at this, and there was no one training us. So, I mostly learned from watching myself fail terribly, and there was one that was just an awful talk. My very first one that I gave. Then, I gave a lecture in a class, and that was also awful. Then, I learned that I, what happens if I just did it myself, practice something over and over and over again. I got feedback from my fellow students about what you know. I mostly just knew when something was awful. I do not know how much I need someone else to tell me when something is bad, when I I can tell if I am making all kinds of speech errors and I’m fumbling over the correct wording. I know it’s awful. I don’t need someone, I don’t want to watch this I don’t want to annoy record this and watch this again, it’s horrible. I hide until it’s ready, and then people give me feedback. By that point, it’s usually pretty good, I know it is pretty good. So, then I guess I can definitely deal with organizational comments about how I might move things around to the point in a slightly cleaner way in some way or another. But there is an awful lot of back, again it’s always, so much work for me is doing stuff on my own. I am too embarrassed to give a terrible talk in public, and I don’t want to do. It makes me feel too terrible, even for a practice group. I don’t want to give that impression that I know what I’m doing, which means a lot of practice for me.
P: That’s really cool. I think it’s interesting because it does sound like over time, you develop this kind of method to prepare yourself to give the best talk that you can give. I think that just going from that first presentation that you just described to where you’re at now, there’s a lot of critical analysis and looking to solve the problems that you might of had in that talk so that doesn’t happen again. I think it’s interesting there is this bounce back and humility that you have to have about your own, you know, saying to yourself, wow that didn’t work. I know have to fix it and figure out how to fix it. It is really interesting. So, this is like totally out of left field, but this is my last line of questioning. I wanted to get your thoughts on it because of the work you do. We have this week we’re going to be talking about digital communication and like how people network online and the way they connect with each other online. I didn’t know, I feel like it is just such a weird part, like we are seeing all this research come up about emoticons and like language development. I have done some papers that are about language development rapidly changing because of texting, because it crosses, dialects used to not be able to expand as quickly or colloquialisms weren’t able to attend because of the Internet. I was wondering if you had any ideas about digital communication, how to think about that? Would, I am not going to say younger generation, but these PhD candidates going out into the world and having to think about how they’re talking to people through the internet.
T: I don’t know that I have anything.
P: It’s fine if you don’t.
T: I am not sure how to apply things I do to. So, what exactly is the topic? The topic is how students, say grad students, interact with the world through digital media.
P: In communicating.
T: So, via Facebook or Twitter or these kinds of. So, what’s the?
P: The question is, would it be the same as the way you would do it in person?
T: I don’t know. I’m old….in that sense. In that sense, I don’t really know, I don’t really do Facebook. I do Twitter, but Twitter is like a useful way to get a lot of information. That’s why Twitter, I find that, I don’t know what to do with Facebook still. I mean, I know why people use it, but I don’t use it for what they, I don’t know what that, I don’t know. What I work on is like how language like to know how language might develop and change, but that’s different from how you should present yourself, right? This is like how you present yourself to the outside world so other people can see you, so I don’t really know what to say. I mean I could tell you about how languages change. How words develop. Words shorten over time as as they get, not only do they get shorter just because of their overall frequencies, but they get shorter because of their use in particular context. As we know it, I guess texting is a nice demonstration of word shortening. We don’t want to type much. So, as words get more predictable, we type less because we have less effort for us as a speaker; as long as the receiver can understand it, then we will type less and less. That is how we get all these shortenings of particular words that are used in context. So, that is how language words change. That is that the communication story about word development. So, we’ve got lots of evidence that that’s the case in every language that we can measure, but that’s not about how you present yourself.
P: I think it is in a sense, one of the things that strikes me is what you were talking about audience earlier. So like, if you are shortening….what I have seen, I work with teenagers, right? What I have seen is they shorten their language exponentially with each other. Their establishing very quickly meaning around each other, but then they’re not conscious of how to invite other people into that.
T: So, the question is that language serves multiple functions. Language is a communication function, but it also serves the function of letting others know who you are, right? So, it has social functions. So, you are communicating not only some predicate argument structure about some things that you’re going to be doing today and whatever these things, but you’re letting people know by the words you use some features of yourself. Okay. So, what words you use in what context, you know, if you swear words or whatever, these kinds of things, or if you use slang terms, people will make generalizations about properties they think you may be in some way or another. Some people will certainly think negatively of you for some things that you may say in some context. So, you have to be careful of that. I’m not saying that’s right, though. I am not advocating that. It’s hard. But, you should be aware that people make inferences based on what you write, what you say, how you talk, and how you write. If you spell things wrong, people don’t like it. I mean, not people, but some but some people. So, that’s always a problem. It’s an issue. If you spell the word there wrong, a lot of people get so upset about it. So, the argument is, people who don’t like that, that is failing communication. But it is isn’t. It is actually completely predictable in that context. It’s failing because of some sort of social conventions where you’re telling me that when you don’t spell that correctly, that you don’t care enough about our conventions of how you should spell or how you should know it. It’s not a problem for me knowing what you meant in that situation, but you’re actually conveying to me that you didn’t learn enough about what the spelling conventions are in English to get that right. So, then you are conveying to other people, which might be negative. I would tend to be conservative on this and try to figure out the fall those conventions in some ways, but I also don’t really like those conventions. I don’t think it’s so bad. Language changes. People get very upset about the strangest things or people don’t like that we use nouns as verbs all the time. People who are in technical and business dialogue, they get so upset, you know, we talk about impacting, this work will impact something because impact used to be a noun. Now it is turning into a verb. Some people say, that’s not English. You can’t say impact as a verb. It is like really annoying. Every word started that way. You don’t realize that, but the word donate didn’t exist in the English language one-hundred years ago. It actually started as a noun, a donation. Then, someone started using, like started generalizing and saying, hey, let’s talk about donating, and people were very upset about donating as a verb initially. This is true for many, many words. Like the word zoo. Zoo didn’t exist. So, these are words from one-hundred years ago that we had the same discussions about. So eventually, I don’t know eventually if it will happen, but it probably at least will always happen. Half of this stuff will probably always happen, and you’ll always get older people who don’t like language changed, who think that the way they talk is the right way and younger people are messing it up. That’s the way it happens. I don’t think that will ever change. I would be surprised if older people always seem to like things the way they were, to think that was the right way. So, you should be aware of that at when you’re young. You should be aware that you’re going to be bothering older people who may be hiring you.
P: There’s like a scalability of impact that has changed a lot, too. When you used to, even texting is very different than posting something that you would text to your friend on your Facebook wall because the access to that communication can be from a lot of different, what the modern equivalent to standing on the corner on a busy street one-hundred years ago yelling something profane about the president is like exponentially seen because back then, it was only heard by like, what, fifty people in that town square. Now, it’s being heard by anybody who cares to listen in the world, and it’s on some sort of record that that exists in a different way. We didn’t have, I just think it’s interesting because I’m like, this is tangential. I get interested in this because I do see that while students have the natural, just like I did in high school, have the natural impulses to create our own language and shorten the language quickly so we have inculture with each other, they’re not as aware of the impact of that on all of the audience they could have access to that language.
T: I think that’s right. Older people don’t like it when things are changed. They like things the way they are. So, you will always find that, that older people like things the way they were. You will be potentially offending people. I was once asked about apostrophes and whether those are necessary. A guy from Slate.com wrote an article about this. I’m trying to remember what his name is. Matt something. A guy with a british, some government officials of some kind, were trying to get rid of the apostrophes on their signs. They wanted shorter signs, so they thought these apostrophes were unnecessary in some way or another. This guy is somewhere in the middle of Britain, north of London, started up a society to save their apostrophe because he thought the apostrophe was like dying in a written form of English communication, and he was making the claim that we couldn’t communicate with each other without the apostrophe. So, the Slate guy wrote to me and asked me if I would comment on that. I said, “Well, that’s just not true.” There is lots of ambiguity in language, and we have no trouble understanding what’s meant. I’m not saying we should get rid of the apostrophe, but if we got rid of it, it would be zero problem for our writing communication system. There is like no, there’s no place where if you left it off, you wouldn’t be able to figure out what it meant. Yes, it’s true that the word she’ll looks different from the word shell. It’s really hard to construct those examples. Try and find me a location where you put the word shell and you put pair words, she will, where you don’t know which one was intended. It is pretty hard to make up a situation such that you might be confused. So, language is like this all the time. We have words like to. The number two, too, and to. I say this in spoken language, but in written language, the word to actually has multiple meanings, there is an infinitive marker and there is a preposition. Are you confused when I say I want to win or he went to the store? No. You read those things or whatever, and you say them the same way. You are not bothered. It wouldn’t be a problem either for she’ll and shell. You know, you would pick it up in the context, which one was meant. People like things the way they were. There is an older guy and he wanted to keep it. So, he likes it the way it is. It’s not going to be a problem for communication. It will just be a new communication system slightly tiny variant. So, this is exactly the same kind of question you’re talking about when people change the language, young people, whoever, shorten things, and if everyone doesn’t know about those things, they may not like those shortenings since they are used to their old things. So, they may say those are wrong and they inhibit communication, they don’t inhibit communication. They wouldn’t, but they are different. There is learning involved. You have to learn those things. Maybe you don’t want to put time into learning these different ways to write these things because maybe you don’t use use those words in that way like these other groups do, right? You’re not texting. If you’re not texting, it doesn’t matter to you how many characters it is, right? If it’s three versus six characters, it’s not going to be a problem.
A: Out of curiosity, is that the same with commas?
T: Yeah, commas are pretty similar.
A: I thought of the Oxford comma.
T: Same argument. It’s the exact same kind of argument. People have very strong opinions about these things. It’s funny. When you read about the Oxford comma and the apostrophe, and there is one that is so crazy with this writing style thing, you can get people going off on what you write if you’re a writer. Some people put two spaces after a period, and some people put one space. There is one space and two spaces. They get so upset and it’s like look, this is a convention either way. It doesn’t make any difference, it’s just like why? But, people really have strong opinions about this. This is kind of internet craziness. You need to go outside of the internet, everyone has….What do you like? Do you like one space?
A: For me, it’s one space. For whatever reason, two spaces, it’s just not. My understanding of the history that the spaces are there for typewriters.
T: That’s right. That’s the history of it, but it’s like, what difference does it make either way really.
P: The Oxford comma came up as a thing because of typesetting. I mean it was like a way of saving space.
A: But it can change.
P: Well, it can.
T: There are different meanings. But in the context, almost always you will know what is intended.
P: Yeah yeah yeah.
T: There is very, this is the same kind of thing, like, you can set up situations, and people do on the internet, you can get situations where it’s hard to know which was intended. But, those are rare. It’s like really a normal conversation, well writing in this case, it’s writing. It’s like, we know which was meant almost all the time.
A: Does it matter as far as the speed of the cognition of the intended meaning, because if…
T: It might. That would depend on the reader probably, right? So, if you really do learn that there’s a different meaning associated with having the comma in that conjunction or not, then you probably will be a little confused by one or the other of those things, but that’s, yeah, there are just two different conventions, right? So, conventions means, there are conventions, there is a meaning associated with this form. You write a form, and if you have one of those, then it’s going to be weird for you to read the other. If the other meaning was intended and you don’t have that association, then it will be slow for you, for sure. It will be confusing.
P: It kind of brings up this thing of skill that I was talking about. Like, there is an intended, if somebody cares about what you’re trying to say and they don’t understand the sentence, they’re going to try and find out what you’re trying to say even if they don’t get it when they’re reading it. That’s actually grown, and I’ve seen that transaction grow in value. It’s actually really important for my audience to care enough to break through my communication barriers to get to the intended meaning. You see that with YouTube bloggers and and all these people who garner really big followings, they might try something and nobody understands what they’re saying, but the audience still is like invested in finding out. Just going back to the digital communication thing, the thing I was also thinking about is what actually changed the conversation and shifted because we have begun to accept that when we put things online, a lot of people can see it. So, the conversation has shifted not like around judging it, well that’s actually decreased. I have seen a lot of people who will be like, “Well, the Facebook is a personal domain, so we can judge him less for the things he says there.” So, those constructs are starting to happen, but then the worry about everybody seeing it has shifted over into an international/national conversation about privacy, which has little to do with communication, although it does impact how we are afraid or not afraid to communicate in different spaces. Anyway, that’s my interview. That was an awesome interview.
MIT’s Professor of Cognitive Science, Ted Gibson, sits down with us to shine light on how the words we choose, and don’t choose, when constructing communication has definitive effects on our communication abilities.
EPISODE CREDITS
Guest StarringTed Gibson, Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT’s TedLab
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) “The Zeppelin” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. “The Face of the Thrush” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. “Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers.
My name is Adam Greenfield and in this episode, what a speaker can do when it comes to determining the right kind of language to use when communicating with an audience. Also, we’ll find out how language and a communicator’s reputation, like it or not, are intertwined.
Our guest is a MIT professor that, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, well, I kinda disagree with him on some things. I mean, look, he’s an accomplished scholar that shapes minds at one of the more prestigious universities around the world and I’m, well, I’m just a podcast producer. Clearly I know when I’m outmatched and under armed but it’s just… I mean… I don’t know. Let’s just get to our guest and see what happens.
TED GIBSON
Try not to show you’re panicking.
ADAM GREENFIELD
That’s Ted Gibson, a MIT professor in the Brain and Cognitive Science Department.
TED GIBSON
And I am a professor of Cognitive Science here at MIT.
ADAM GREENFIELD
One of Ted’s areas of expertise is the study of languages, how they’ve evolved over time and also how they’re used to communicate with an audience. And when it comes down to it, there really is sort of this delicate dance between language and audience.
Ted suspects that a preconceived notion or fact about the audience plays a role in the speaker’s mind about how this dance begins.
TED GIBSON
I think people talk to who they think their audience is, right? So I will talk to you based on what I think you know. I will talk to an audience based on what I, I mean, if I have a good audience design capabilities, and people will vary greatly on that, so depending on what I think my audience knows, I will say different things.
So there’s a lot of research on that. We actually do not know how people vary on this, how different individuals vary. But there are definitely better ways to talk to people, depending on what they know.
Depending on what the common ground is enough, I understand what our common ground is, then I will describe things at a very different level, depending on what I think my audience knows. If I think they know all kinds of math about, say, communication theories or information theories, this guy Claude Shannon who worked out all of this stuff, and if I think they know that then I’ll just start talking with technical terms like surprisal and entropy.
If I don’t, then I can explain all those, I will have to work through what the details of those things are, right, and explain. I would tend to do that anyway because in any audience sort of situation, I sort of think it’s important to bring in as many people as you can.
ADAM GREENFIELD
And you’re not just bringing them into the conversation, let alone an understanding of what you’re trying to convey. You’re actually giving them insight into what makes you – ”you”. Right or wrong, they’re going to make a judgement about the kind of person you are.
TED GIBSON
Language serves multiple functions. Ok, language is a communication function, but it also serves the function of letting others know who you are, right? So it has social functions.
So you are communicating not only some predicate argument structure about some things that you’re going to be doing today and whatever these things, but you’re letting people know by the words you use some features of yourself.
So what words you use in what context, you know, if you use swear words or whatever, these kinds of things, or if you use slang terms, people will make generalizations about properties they think you may be in some way or another. Some people will certainly think negatively of you for some things that you may say in some context. So you have to be careful of that.
ADAM GREENFIELD
See, now that’s what I’ve been saying all along.
TED GIBSON
I’m not saying that’s right, though. I am not advocating that.
ADAM GREENFIELD
[sigh]
TED GIBSON
But you should be aware that people make inferences based on what you write, what you say, how you talk, and how you write. If you spell things wrong, people don’t like it. I mean, not people, but some people. So that’s always a problem.
If you spell the word “there” wrong, people get so upset about it. So the argument is, from people who don’t like that, that’s failing communication. But it isn’t. It is actually completely predictable in that context.
ADAM GREENFIELD
It’s interesting to me, though, why people, myself included, can sometimes see that as failing in communicating. But is it really? According to Ted, we’ve been taught it’s failing when maybe it really isn’t.
TED GIBSON
It’s failing because of some sort of social conventions where you’re telling me that when you don’t spell that correctly, that you don’t care enough about our conventions of how you should spell or how you should know it.
It’s not a problem for me knowing what you meant in that situation, but you’re actually conveying to me that you didn’t learn enough about what the spelling conventions are in English to get that right. So then you are conveying to other people, which might be negative.
I would tend to be conservative on this and try to follow those conventions but I also don’t really like those conventions. I don’t think it’s so bad.
ADAM GREENFIELD
I just can’t seem to let go of this idea that how you speak and spell really matters… even though it was expertly pointed out that I need to get over it and a little context goes a long way.
But there is a common ground the distinguished professor and I agree on, and that is to at least know that if you don’t agree with some societal expectations when it comes to grammar, right or wrong, you risk losing your audience. To some, following grammar constructs shows you care. Or don’t.
And when it comes to knowing how to best communicate with your audience, if at all possible, try to find out a little about them first. This’ll go a long way in the language you use and how big of a first step to take when the dance begins.
Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
This is episode is the full, unedited interview with David Peterson, language creator. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org)
[MUSIC PLAYING] ADAM GREENFIELD: Hello. Adam Greenfield, here, host of the Great Communicators podcast series. And what you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully-produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. It is shorter in length, and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts.
The idea behind these longer, unedited conversations is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, [INAUDIBLE] and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation, but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes– which, again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the conversation.
DAVID PETERSON: My name is David Peterson, and I’m a professional language creator and author.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Author. And what have you written?
DAVID PETERSON: Well, initially, Living Language– Dothraki, which was a teach-yourself guide for the Dothraki language. But most recently, The Art of Language Invention, which is an instructional book about how to create a language.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Actually, that’s a question I’ll get to in a second, because I want to go through the thought process of creating a language. But to go back a little bit, when did you realize that there was this love of language and creating languages?
DAVID PETERSON: My initial interest in language happened rather spontaneously. I grew up in a bilingual household, but due to an early divorce, I was disconnected from the Spanish-speaking side of my family. And so I didn’t gain full bilingual fluency, I became what’s called a heritage speaker. And so for many years, I was annoyed by the fact that my relatives could speak Spanish so well and I couldn’t, and so I didn’t like the idea of second languages at all.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Is that your background?
DAVID PETERSON: Just a second.
ADAM GREENFIELD: No problem.
DAVID PETERSON: Sorry.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Is that your background– the Spanish heritage?
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah, Mexico, specifically.
ADAM GREENFIELD: OK.
DAVID PETERSON: And so I just ignored language and rolled my eyes at trying to learn it. I took Spanish in high school because I thought it would be easy, and it was. But when I was 17, I woke up one morning after a dream and was just struck by the fact that millions of people spoke French and that I wasn’t one of them. And so it immediately became my goal to learn every language on the planet.
It happened literally that quickly. And I started right then. I just grabbed any kind of language book I could and tried to start learning them, trying to do the exercise and things like that. And then the next year, in addition to AP Spanish, I took German 1.
I wanted to take French 2. It was the only one available. The instructor wouldn’t let me. I thought that I could catch up, and I’m sure that I absolutely could have caught up, but I wasn’t allowed in. And then when I went to Berkeley, I continued to take languages.
I took Arabic, because I was really interested in it. I took two semesters of Arabic, a semester of Russian, a semester of Esperanto– which was the first created language I’d ever heard of– semester of French, a semester of Middle Egyptian. And unfortunately, that was it. There were many more offerings. I should have taken many more language classes. It’s so easy when you’re in college, not in the real world.
But it was during my sophomore year that I learned about language creation, or I hit upon the idea. So I heard about Esperanto. I took a course in it. And so I knew about languages like Esperanto that had been created for international communication. But while I was taking linguistics, I hit upon the idea of creating a language just for my own personal use– just for fun. And so I started creating it basically as soon as I thought of it. And it’s been 16 years now, and I have yet to lose interest.
ADAM GREENFIELD: So–
DAVID PETERSON: Let’s pause, for just one moment.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Yeah. sure.
DAVID PETERSON: Roman, Roman, Roman! Roman, this behavior is not acceptable. Now, Roman, this is your last chance, you understand? I’m going to put you in the bedroom. I guess it’s just not going to happen. Come here, my boy.
ADAM GREENFIELD: You know this.
DAVID PETERSON: Come here, my boy. Yes. I see it, too. Don’t worry about it. All right. He must have smelled the cat on you. He got real friendly real quick.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Yeah, he’s– yeah.
DAVID PETERSON: My cat, she’s 11. She’s not much of a shedder, but she is very much into rubbing and all that stuff, so it wouldn’t surprise me.
ADAM GREENFIELD: So at this moment, how many languages do you speak?
DAVID PETERSON: I don’t know. Depends on how you define “speak.” I really need to learn what those ratings are for language ability and use those. But I’ve studied more than 20. Right now my project is Finnish, which I hope to learn well enough to be able to do an interview next summer.
ADAM GREENFIELD: So when you say it depends on how you define “speak,” what do you mean by that?
DAVID PETERSON: Well, for example, I think that I know the grammar of Hawaiian and the ins and outs of it a lot better than I do German. But if you talk about dropping me in a country and having to get by, I will take German over Hawaiian any day. Just because when you’re a linguist, you study a lot of grammars abstractly and you know the ins and outs of them, but that doesn’t mean that you’re very good at speaking the language or that you’re going to recall vocabulary.
But with German, I had an entire year of interaction. I got used to saying phrases and stuff. In fact, I just went back to my high school and spoke to a couple German classes there, because my teacher’s still there. And he addresses the class in German, and I discovered that 16 years later, having not done anything with German since then, I still understood everything.
ADAM GREENFIELD: What do you attribute that to? Is that just a brain function that allows you to do that, or? I took a year of Latin in college, and I remember some of it. Is it attributed to just going back and being in that atmosphere?
DAVID PETERSON: It’s just memory. I have a really good memory for everything. It’s the type of thing where it’s like– for example, when you talk about Latin, when I think of it, I think of the four, five months I spent studying Latin on my own from a book that was published by Barnes & Noble in the ’50s, so it wasn’t Wheelock’s Latin. But when I think of the declensions, I remember how it looked on the page. I can still see them. The first one was “rosa,” “rosi,” and so on. Just all there.
ADAM GREENFIELD: So it’s just a memory thing. Do you you have a photographic memory, then, I take it?
DAVID PETERSON: I don’t know. I think so, or it’s just very visual. This is how I did it– I was an English major. I’m a very slow reader, so I could never keep up with the pace that you’re supposed to keep up with in English classes. So I would just get the reading list ahead of time and be reading all of them, say, over the summer or over the previous semester. And then during class, I would just remember it. And then the way I would remember quotes– because I didn’t like marking up my books or anything– I just remember where it was on the page and what that page looked like, and then that would be enough for me to go and find it if I needed to get the wording exact.
ADAM GREENFIELD: OK, OK. So you were then in, I would assume, your early 20s when you first created your first language, or still in teens?
DAVID PETERSON: I mean, I guess I would have been 19 still, yeah. Yeah, because my birthday’s in January, yeah.
ADAM GREENFIELD: And you said that was just for fun? Were your friends involved in any of that, or?
DAVID PETERSON: No, up at Berkeley. I’m from Orange County, so all my friends were down here. So four years that we were just totally disconnected. So yeah, I started creating a language then. I did it totally on my own.
I thought initially that perhaps my girlfriend and I would speak it– my girlfriend at the time– not understanding that this was– I mean, this was really– it was really just for me. This is not something that you give as a present that somebody is going to appreciate. Because you know, learning a language is a pain in the butt.
ADAM GREENFIELD: English is hard enough sometimes.
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah. And I don’t think I actually told people about– just general people– about how I created languages until at least a couple years later. Eventually, I did find the community online– language creation community online– so I had lots of people to talk to there. But yeah, I don’t think I actually mentioned it or told people about it in person until maybe my second-to-last year of college.
ADAM GREENFIELD: So can you go into a little bit of the– not just the thought process, but the process itself of creating a language?
DAVID PETERSON: Sure. So the language itself– the most important thing that you have to do at the beginning is to determine what type of language you’re creating, because that’s actually going to make a lot of your decisions for you. There are a lot of things that languages have in common, but depending on your project, they can be very, very different enterprises.
So for example, if you decide that you want to create a language as if Latin had never been expelled from the British Isles but continued on there into the present, then that’s going to be a very different enterprise than if you’re creating a fantastical language for aliens that have no eyes and ears but 49 tentacles. Totally different process, but they’re still probably– both are going to have words and such.
It’s just that with one, you’re going to be working with the actual Latin language and evolving it up using sound changes that happened in– I always get this wrong. I think it’s P-Celtic is in the west and Q-Celtic was in the east. Whereas for the 49 tentacles, obviously you’re going to have to be working– OK, if they can’t use sounds, if they can’t use their mouths, how are they going to convey language? It’s going to be with their tentacles, right? Well, how is it going to work? And then you go on from there.
So it could be that different when it comes to creating a language if you don’t specify at the outset exactly why you’re doing it. But let’s say that you do languages that I do most of the time– or that I’m called on to do most of the time– which is a more-or-less realistic language that takes place in some sort of a fictional setting. In that case, you have to figure out as much as you can about who’s speaking it, where they’re from, and why.
For example, creating a language in the universe of George R. R. Martin means that you can really start from scratch, whereas if you’re creating a language that takes place– let’s say it’s just a fictional race of people that exist in our world, then, just like our languages, they’ll have borrowings from real-world languages. Their word for “television” is probably going to sound a lot like the English word “television,” so on and so forth.
So that’s another top-level decision. If you’re creating a fantasy language like I do, then what you do is you start from a very early stage. So you create a proto-language. This is something like– in English and Russian and German and Greek, those are all descended from one language that we call Proto-Indo-European.
So as a language creator, I try to create that earliest stage of language. At some very, very early date you have to choose a random cut-off point, because we don’t know how language got started. We can only guess. But from that point, you start with a sound system.
This is what sounds are in the language and how they’re used, how they’re deployed in syllables and words. And then you have a grammar– both the inflection of nouns, the inflections of verbs– to the extent that the language has any– and also how words are put together into phrases, and phrases into sentences. And then the lexicon, which is the entire host of words that the language has. As well as derivational strategies– how you form new words from old words.
Then you evolve it forward. So you start 2,000 years in the past, and then you change the sounds of the language as they would have changed over time. You change the meanings of words as they would have changed over time, and you evolve the grammar incrementally as it would have evolved over time. And the end result is a very believable, very authentic modern language.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Is there some– I don’t want to say is it easier, but is there– is it easier, for lack of better words, to create a fantasy language where you’re even creating the prototype, or is it easier to already have that prototype in place?
DAVID PETERSON: I wouldn’t say that either is easier than the other. They each present unique challenges– unique and different challenges. So on the one hand, it is easier if you’re starting with a complete blank slate because you get to invent everything, and you don’t have to take anything into account except for what you’re doing. But there’s also a lot more work.
If you’re doing something different, like what I described with Latin, then you’re starting with a lot of material– and that’s great. You don’t have to create it. But you’re also beholden to that material. So you need to make sure everything that you’re doing is accurate and makes sense based on the existing material, and also the existing timelines so that you know everything is actually going as it should be.
When you’re creating your own language, you have to take into account the history of the people that you have there, but you may get to invent it as you’re going along. If you’re evolving Latin forward, you really need to be up on the exact timeline of events of what happened over in the British Isles, starting from the Roman invasion.
ADAM GREENFIELD: You mentioned the language creation community. What is that community like? Will they call you out if you’re not following– I guess the rules of the prototype language?
DAVID PETERSON: Oh, yeah, yeah. The language creation community is a very– it’s, at this point, a loose-knit community, and it comprises several different listservs, bulletin boards, and then random people on Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook. And so there was only one community at first, and that was the listserv. And then as time wore on, it expanded to many, many other communities.
All of them essentially have the same goal in mind, which is to produce the best languages possible– advance the state of the art. And indeed, in general, the community has got better at it as time has gone on. So when popular projects come out, I mean, they of course look at them and tear them apart. And usually, tearing them apart is in order, because honestly, before Game of Thrones, there wasn’t a case where there was an actual language creator working to create a language for any famous project. It was just somebody who’d never even considered the prospect before. And so tearing those languages to shreds was really just child’s play.
At this point, I was already in the community for about 10 years by the time I started working on Game of Thrones, and it already established a reputation there. So I think most of the people, more or less, trusted me to do a good job. Even so, I keep that community in mind whenever I’m working on anything now or anything new, because I want to be sure myself that I am holding myself up to the standards that the community has set. And if I ever slip, I expect them to call me out on it, because if they don’t, no one will.
ADAM GREENFIELD: So you’re definitely keeping your audience in mind as far as when you create new languages. You’re keeping not just the general audience, but the people in your field in mind when you’re doing that.
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah, and I think that the best way to describe that is anytime that you’re producing anything– whether it’s a language or a television show or what have you– there’s going to be different levels of viewership, or different levels of audience. Concerning just how the languages are used on Game of Thrones, there is a large percentage of the audience that just watches the TV show, hears the language, and doesn’t give it a second thought. It’s just like, all right, well, whatever. They’re speaking something, and I don’t care about it. There is going to be that level of audience participation.
And there’s a next level where they will pay attention to the fact that, for example, if one person is speaking Valyrian here and then somebody else is speaking Valyrian here, it should sound about the same. Without knowing any idea what the grammar is or what the words are or paying attention to anything like that, they should develop an ear for it so that they can actually– especially after many episodes– pick out, that person isn’t speaking it very well, or that doesn’t really sound like Valyrian. So that they would notice if, for whatever reason, somebody just started writing down gibberish for them to speak.
And then there are further levels beyond that. There are people that will actually write down all of the words. There are people– there’s a fan of Valyrian in particular– he can spot grammatical errors on the first airing, where he’ll just hear it and say, that doesn’t sound right. In fact, that sounds like what they said was this. And if that’s what they said, that was a grammatical error– that I probably made. I try my best to say that. Oh, no, the actor just made that error. They just screwed it up. It wasn’t me. But sometimes it’s me.
So I think with that in mind, you have to keep all of the audiences in mind. It’s got to be accessible to every single level so that if somebody wants to dig into it, there’s something to dig into, but it’s not a total barrier to somebody who doesn’t want to do that. For example, if subtitles were not included for any of the lines on Game of Thrones, I think that would be totally unacceptable. That would just be too high a barrier, and it would be off-putting to a large portion of the audience. And you want everybody to be watching it. That goes the same for anything that you produce, I think.
ADAM GREENFIELD: As a side note, I was listening to an interview with– oh, her name is totally escaping me– the actress that plays Daenerys.
DAVID PETERSON: Oh, Emilia Clarke.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Yeah. I was listening to an interview with her, and she mentioned that she’s gotten to a point now where she can spot her own mistakes when she’s speaking, and it’s interesting. Did you have any involvement in teaching the actors the languages?
DAVID PETERSON: Not on Game of Thrones, no. It’s depends. I’ve been involved with a lot of the actors on The 100 and a lot of the actors on Defiance, and then some actors for other productions. It depends. It’s an entirely– it depends on the show writers or director and what they want, and the actors and what they want.
In the case of Game of Thrones, though, it’s been running for six seasons now, with a seventh season coming up. And certain of the actors have just had so many lines that they’re developing their own– I mean, I wouldn’t say fluency in it, because they don’t know what they’re saying, but they’re developing their own ear for it. And so absolutely, I believe if she can just tell that something doesn’t sound right– even if she can’t put her finger on exactly what’s wrong, she might have a better ear for it than I do at this point.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Wow, interesting. OK, so as I mentioned, this project– it’s essentially about the importance of effective communication of technical or highly-specified subjects. And that includes, again, both audiences in a general sense and within the field. So when you’re asked to create a language, do you ever go into the specifics of how you’re creating that language in order to get feedback and ensure that you’re giving them what they want, or can too much background muddy that process?
DAVID PETERSON: Sometimes going into detail is warranted, and sometimes– most of the time it’s not. For example, when settling on the sound of a language– and if I know I want to employ some sort of phonological process, whether it’s dissimulation of stops before other stops or word [INAUDIBLE] voicing, I don’t need to tell them that so long as I can say, here’s what I’m thinking sounds like. Does that sound good to you? And they can just say up or down, yes or no.
And I always tell them to give whatever feedback they want, and I know how to interpret it. So if they say, oh, it needs to sound softer or harsher or there’s too many stringent consonants– they’ll come up with any type of adjective. It’s totally meaningless, but at this point in time, I get what they’re after, and I can look at what I’m doing and interpret what they’re saying.
So usually we’re working at that level, especially when you talk about production. But sometimes, if I need to really make it point-specific, then I’ll have to get into details, in which case it’s best to start off with what they know and then build from there. Just essentially teach a mini lesson so you can get to the point where you can say, here is the issue that I am having. I want to do this, but right now, what’s in the script calls for this, which is the exact opposite. Could we perhaps alter this so that we can do what I want to do here?
ADAM GREENFIELD: Have you found them to be a little flexible in that?
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah, actually. Usually– I mean, and we both have to be flexible there. But usually, if I ask for some sort of change and it’s not important to anything else– important to the script– they’ll just go ahead and do it without even asking why. But also sometimes– for example, this happened a couple seasons ago.
We translated this line about– it was originally, you sit before Daenerys Storm-Born, blah, blah, blah. It was this and a whole bunch of titles. And since Valyrian is a case language that inflects with suffixes, her name changed, as it would, because it was in a different case. And I wrote up, I could say, we really wanted her name to be recognizable, can it not change?
And so then the response to that is not, OK, let’s rip out the case system, but I say, OK, can I recast the sentence, then? Can I just, for example, make it a passive sentence? So elevate her to subject position so it sounds the way it should. And that’s when they said– as I explained it, they said yes, that’s fine. Just so long as we still hear her name and it means approximately the same thing, then it’s fine.
So that’s the type of discourse that usually happens when it comes up. And this type of thing comes up maybe once or twice a season. And I found usually they’re pretty amenable to the changes that I want to make.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Do you ever find yourself under a time restraint of how long something is being said? Because in television, you have to move it along– move the process along– and not be so extensive in what you’re trying to say. So is that ever a limitation when creating language?
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah. I’ll give you three different answers, here. So on something like Game of Thrones, they’ve actually been very, very, very, very tolerant of what I do with it. In other words, they’ll just take whatever I translate, and that’s what it becomes. And however long it takes, that’s how long it takes. And that’s great, but they, of course, also don’t really need to be worried about how long the show is. They can say to HBO, hey, we want another 10 minutes for this episode, and HBO says fine. They don’t have to worry about commercials or anything like that.
I have discovered, in other shows, that there is a loose constraint– which is if the director, on the day of the shoot, is hearing something and decides it’s too long, he may just decide to indiscriminately lop off a word. And sometimes it absolutely destroys the grammar of the sentence. And so in that case, I keep in mind– if something is getting very long, I’ll try to recast it on my own so that it’s close to the same length of what the English would be.
The nice thing is that acted English often takes up much more time than just casual conversation English. I think it just goes back to theatre. That theatrical strain is still in there a lot– where when they’re acting the English, it doesn’t sound like two people speaking. It sounds a little bit more like they’re performing.
The third thing, though– one of the things that I think I’ve done in my work that’s the most interesting and that I also hate the absolute most is translating songs, and I’ve done it a lot. I counted up– I think I did more than 20 songs on Defiance. And some of those were original lyrics, but most of those was translating either popular songs that they got the rights to or original lyrics written by the show writer. And that was just a nightmare– an absolute nightmare– because English is so compact, so amazingly compact. You can say so much with so few syllables, and it’s the syllables that are really important, rather than the number of words.
ADAM GREENFIELD: And there’s context, too.
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah. So for example, I had to translate the song “Doll Parts” once, which is a song by Hole. And lyrics of this song is like, “I am doll legs, doll eyes, doll mouth.” Four lines, each one two syllables. And I was translating this into a language which is, first of all, SOV, so the verb comes at the end. So you can start with something like, I am. And second, the shortest I could get just the title “Doll Parts” was five syllables.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Which language?
DAVID PETERSON: This was Castithan for a show called Defiance. And so there you have to be very, very clever. With that one, I ended up looking at just the entire first two stanzas as a whole and saying, how can I convey this content in roughly the same way? And I just broke it up differently so that by the end of the first stanza, I had said basically, “I doll’s legs, eyes,” and kept going so the verb was at the end of the second stanza. Had to cut out a word. I think I ended up cutting out “legs,” because there was no way to get it super short. And so after two stanzas, it fit the syllable count and mostly meant the same thing. Very, very difficult.
ADAM GREENFIELD: So when you explained that to them, were they adamant about just making sure that it worked, or were they?
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah. I mean, there were two different levels there. So the one who was writing the lyrics was not the songwriter, right? Or the one who requested. I know, obviously, the lyrics– it would be the show runner. So he just says, let’s do a version of this and translate it. So he just cares that the meaning is the same.
Then I had a separate working relationship with Brendan McCreary, who was the one who actually ended up doing the songs. He was great, because he could pronounce my languages very, very well, so that was nice. But also, he was good with working with what I gave him.
So I would give him my translation, and then I would say, here it is. If you have to start cutting syllables, these are the ones to go first. If you have to do even more, these are the ones you can do if absolutely necessary, but it’s going to sound a little funny. And he would be able to work with it and get something that was still recognizably the language.
He wasn’t cutting too much, but also managed to fit and sound natural. He was a genius, and I think I was very lucky to have him on the team. So it was very much a collaboration.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Sometimes your audience isn’t necessarily part of the world you’re in when it comes to language creation, or even linguistics as a whole. So what are some of the requirements of convincing that audience– whether they’re clients or public or even students– that you really are someone of authority on the topic, and not just some guy who’s throwing sounds and things together?
DAVID PETERSON: There’s two different ways to do this. I mean, first you have to demonstrate mastery of the subject matter, which means that you know all the terminology and you can use it. But for people that don’t know the terminology, it’s just going to sound like gobbledygook. And to a certain extent, they’ll hopefully trust that you know what you’re talking about. But it helps to be able to demonstrate exactly what you’re talking about in a way that somebody who can understand.
Language, I think, is a very– it was a very easy field to do that in, because whatever you’re saying about language data, there’s always the data. You can always just write down some words, pronounce them, and say, this is what’s happening. This one’s changing like this– using very, very simple terminology. And it’s like, well, why is it changing? Well, it’s changing to make it a little easier to pronounce, just like we change our T’s and D’s in the middle of words to something that sounds like a D.
So we don’t say something like– I always have trouble coming up with an example off the top of my head, and “matador’s” a bad example, because that comes from Spanish. Like “little,” for example. We don’t go around saying “lit-tle” with a very clear and obvious T. It just gets reduced a little bit to something that’s D-like to make it easier to pronounce. “Little.”
That’s kind of what’s happening with this example that I’m showing you. It’s getting easier to pronounce, and sometimes sounds change like that. So you can work with it at that level to make sure that they just understand what’s happening. They don’t necessarily need to understand, in a very complicated way, why it’s happening or why, for example, one is easier than the other, or what other options there were, or why it doesn’t happen or when it doesn’t happen– like why the T changes in “little” bit it doesn’t change in “photography.”
They don’t need to understand that, but they need to understand that there’s something going on there. And I think, especially with language, it’s easy to do, because the data is always going to be– here’s a word, or here’s a sentence, or here’s a sound. And since we’re both human beings, we can pronounce them and figure out what’s going on with it.
ADAM GREENFIELD: And the understanding of what you’re trying to say is still coming across.
DAVID PETERSON: Oh, yeah.
ADAM GREENFIELD: We interviewed a linguistics professor at MIT, and we talked a little–
DAVID PETERSON: Who?
ADAM GREENFIELD: What was his name? Ted Gibson. And we got into context. I was an English major, and there are certain things that, like I guess a lot of people in society, bug me. Like Oxford comma– when that’s not being used. And he told me the story about– or he was telling us a story about a guy who was like, apostrophe’s aren’t necessary because context is still there. People are going to understand it either way. It might take them a little longer, but they’re going to get it.
So when you were talking about that, that reminded me of that conversation– that context is still going to be there. But when it comes to this technical stuff, do you think that things can get lost in context or translation if you’re not being specific about not only just your writing, but your speaking as well?
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah, so I’m trying to think about how to respond to this. You think you can re-ask this question? I’m trying to think. So give me a scenario.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Sure. So if I’m contracting “that is” to “that’s–”
DAVID PETERSON: Oh, yeah, no, no, no, I know that.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Yeah, but if I don’t use that apostrophe, people are still going to understand. In memes you see things grammatically incorrect, but you still get it.
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah, absolutely.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Do you think the context can ever get lost if you’re not speaking effect– [INAUDIBLE] communicating?
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah, one of the reasons that we have these things like apostrophes which you don’t hear in speech is we use them for disambiguation. So there’s always going to be things that are ambiguous. And so since writing is a static medium and you have all the time in the world to do what you want there, we employ these simply for the purpose of disambiguation, because things can be ambiguous when you speak, since it’s not there. And so I think there is definitely that potential there.
It’s hard to– especially on-the-fly– construct the perfect example of ambiguity, but it absolutely can happen where you could have two people coming away with two totally opposite interpretations of what you’re saying. I think it’s helpful, especially, to know where those problem situations can emerge so that you can be aware of them beforehand and make it absolutely clear what it is you’re talking about.
It is also, of course, always helpful when people listening ask questions, because that’s the best indicator that something you said wasn’t clear. But yeah, there are certain cases, especially– so responding to things that you earlier said, where if we got rid of apostrophes, well, context will always help you to determine the difference. If you add an infinite amount of time in there, I will agree.
However, if all you’ve got is an hour, and you said something that is slightly ambiguous or vague, and then the hour ends and there’s no possible way to disambiguate what was said, then it remains forever ambiguous– until maybe another hour comes along later and you can clear it up. So it’s something that I think that one should be mindful of– as mindful of as possible ahead of time– so that it’s maximally clear.
ADAM GREENFIELD: OK, yeah, because sometimes, at the end of that hour, they won’t have– just as you said– an opportunity to clear that up, so. So when you create a language, how much of the utility– or, I guess, usefulness– of that language comes into play as you’re parsing everything out? So speaking of the ambiguity part, are you allowing for some of that when you create a language?
DAVID PETERSON: When I create a naturalistic language, it should be indistinguishable from a natural language that occurs on Earth. And that means that it will function fully– so it should be perfectly usable for translation. But it also means that it has all of the irregularities, all of the vagueness, and all of the potential for ambiguity that exists in any natural language. If you’ve done anything else, then you haven’t created a naturalistic language. You’ve created something that’s rather fake.
ADAM GREENFIELD: OK, yeah. What about slang? Do you ever throw that in?
DAVID PETERSON: That’s more of an issue for what we are able to represent on screen. So if you have one person and this one person is speaking the language and they only speak it in one type of context, then you really only get one type of language. If you have a bunch of different types of speakers who come from different places or different backgrounds, then that’s when you have the opportunity to do different registers.
So one of the things that I had a lot of fun with was, in Defiance, we had an age group of people that come from a different planet and were born there and raised their whole lives there, and came to Earth and learned English as a second language. And then you had their offspring– were raised bilingually at best, sometimes maybe as heritage speakers with English as their dominant language. And so they spoke their home languages differently from their parents.
And in fact, with traits that were definitely influenced by English– which, of course never would have happened with those languages back on the home planet. And so when I was doing a speech for the younger generation, I could demonstrate that. And that was really cool, and it was a lot of fun.
And also, on something like Game of Thrones, we’ve had some fun with people who are non-native speakers of a language who don’t always get everything right, and so that’s another little registry you can do. So when I’m working for television shows and movies, I of course am always thinking about it, but I’m able to do it to the extent that the script calls for it. And then in that case, it’s just totally on me to represent it.
ADAM GREENFIELD: OK. So to flip the script some, when you’re part of the audience, what are some things that a speaker or writer can do when it comes to the language they’re using that can distract you from the message or topic?
DAVID PETERSON: The more tokens you have for a language– and I guess this is more for audio than visual, like looking at a book. The more tokens you have– a token being just a sentence– the more likely it is that the casual viewer will pick up on inconsistencies. And not inconsistencies like, wait a minute, you were supposed to use the dative with that post-position, and in this one, you used the allative– no, nothing like that; nothing like that.
But just the fact that if you hear five sentences of Russian spoken throughout the course of a movie, you can tell that it’s Russian even if you’ve never studied the language. And it’d be really weird if the fifth sentence, some new actor comes out and is saying–
[IMITATES RUSSIAN INCORRECTLY]
And it’s like, that’s not Russian. I don’t speak Russian. I don’t know a word of Russian, but that’s not Russian. So you can tell. So the more sentences you have, the more opportunities to hear the language you have in a movie or in an episode of a show, the more likely it is going to be that you can pick up on the inconsistency of sound. And so that’s what, as a listener, I hear– the inconsistency from sentence to sentence and speaker to speaker, and also just the fluidity.
And that’s something that– it’s easier to be fluid with a language that works like a language than with just a bunch of random words, because languages will have repetitions of the same types of consonant clusters to begin a word and consonant clusters or consonants to end a word. And even with something like English, where you think about, well, English can have anything to end a word. This is absolutely true.
But in a random sentence, certain codas– that is, certain consonants that end a syllable and end a word– are going to pop up more than others, because they’re more common. And so you hear that and internalize it, and it helps to build a rhythm for the language; as well as, of course, the intonation for the language in general, which should be consistent from sentence after sentence after sentence.
And this is something that, typically, those who are constructing gibberish and saying it’s a language– they don’t think about this. They’re just like, whatever. Just put that in there. And then the actors treat it very inauthentically so that they’re speaking their English lines with their acting English voice and doing very well, and then suddenly they come up to this created line, and they’re saying–
[POORLY RECITES LINE IN CREATED LANGUAGE]
I don’t even know what that was, but that sounded awful. It sounded fake. And that’s what I think that I am looking for, just even as a casual viewer. It just needs to sound right. It can’t sound obviously fake. It has to sound authentic.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Do you think things like– I heard you a couple years back on the Nerdist episode, and you were talking with Jonah Ray about the Pidgin English that they speak there.
DAVID PETERSON: Hawaiian Creole English, yeah.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Yeah. Does that distract you, knowing that– or do you consider it, even– I don’t want to say lazy, because I think that’s a bad word for it. But is that a distraction for you when you know that it’s a bastardized version of the native language, I guess?
DAVID PETERSON: I’m going to try to answer this question in less than an hour.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Did I open up a can of worms, there?
DAVID PETERSON: Little bit. First of all, the state of Hawaiian Creole English at present is basically just a dialect of English, which means that it has the exact same status of any dialect of English. It’s not better than any others It’s not worse than any others. It’s simply English. The earliest forms of Hawaiian Pidgin English were very much more a Pidgin in that they did include a lot of Hawaiian words, and there was some influence of Hawaiian grammar.
That influence has been watered down a lot over the centuries– a couple centuries– to the point where I would say that HC is pretty much just a dialect of English at this point, but very much a proper and appropriate dialect of English for those that speak it natively. So there’s no connection, or there’s no real direct connection any longer between HC and the Hawaiian language proper– just a lot of vocabulary.
Pidgin languages themselves are called Pidgins because they lack the consistency of a language, and also just the range of expressivity and the vocabulary. So that means that if it’s at the stage of a Pidgin, one person may be speaking it one way. Another person may be speaking it another way, and it hasn’t really solidified yet. The stage of a Pidgin happens at the very earliest stage, when– and it happened a lot, historically– when people who spoke many different languages were brought to a location and they didn’t share a language in common.
And at the same time, there was often a power imbalance. So there were people that spoke one language who were in charge, and then people who weren’t in charge who spoke many different languages. And the result of that was a Pidgin, which was the only language they shared in common was the overseer’s language. But they were never taught it– in fact, specifically were not taught it. And so they just picked up whatever they could as best they could and formed a makeshift language. But that’s a Pidgin.
A Creole is something different. A Creole is when a Pidgin essentially solidifies. It solidifies and becomes a full language that has a very consistent grammar. In other words, a Pidgin you can’t really speak wrong as long as you’re using the same words. A Creole you absolutely can speak wrong, so that somebody can tell you, no, that’s not how you say that.
Probably the most famous and most robust Creole spoken in the world today is Tok Pisin, which is one of the official languages– and probably the main language for most people– in Papua New Guinea. And Tok Pisin is something that evolved in precisely this way over on those islands. English was used as this lexifier language, but its grammar is entirely distinct from English.
And so even though you can look at a sentence of Tok Pisin and recognize– well, that word came from this English word. That word came from this English word. They don’t mean the same thing. The grammar is entirely different. The grammar is consistent, and it’s basically– yeah, children learn it, children use it, and it has the full range of expression.
There’s an entire literature in Tok Pisin, in addition to radio programs, news programs, other TV programs, and all that. So at this stage, Tok Pisin as a language and the fact that its vocabulary was derived from English is basically a historical footnote. It would be wrong to call it a bastardized form of English. It just wouldn’t make any sense.
Like I said, at this stage, it’s just historically related to English– in a similar but less significant way than something like Spanish is related to Latin. Spanish clearly evolved from vulgar Latin, but there were a lot of influences from other places. And if you look at the Spanish future tense, for example– the composite future tense– and look at how it’s formed and see what its history was, a Latin speaker– a pure Latin speaker from the days of the Roman Empire– will look at that and say, well, that’s just bad Latin.
I mean, we have a future tense. Why aren’t you using that future tense instead of this made-up gobbledygook you just did? But that doesn’t mean anything. It certainly doesn’t mean anything to modern Spanish. They’re just two different languages at this point that have a historical connection.
So does it bother me? Far from it. I mean, Pidgin and Creole languages are one of my favorite areas of linguistics. And I was very fortunate. I was able to take a course taught by John McWhorter at UC Berkeley while I was there, and it was amazing. And not only that, Creole languages have been very informative when it comes to demonstrating how languages evolve, because their time depth is such that we can actually go back and study them at the very beginning.
And not only that, we know the sources that they were drawn from, as opposed to if you start going back with Latin, you get to Proto-Indo-European, which we can just guess at, and there are absolutely no written records of. And going further back than that, it’s even greater guesswork. So anyway, that’s about my response to that.
ADAM GREENFIELD: That was good for now. I’m sure you could have talked for another hour on that, so. Just a side comment you brought up– Spanish. I just finally caught up with Orange is the New Black–
DAVID PETERSON: I’m not fully caught up.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Oh, OK. Well, I won’t give anything away, but–
DAVID PETERSON: Cool.
ADAM GREENFIELD: –sometimes when they speak, there’s a mix, and within a sentence, they’ll go from English to Spanish. And I really enjoyed that. I had never heard, really, many people doing that.
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah. . Hear a couple of cool examples of code switching happening in Game of Thrones, but it’s fun. It’s fun when you can do it, and I did all kinds of stuff like that in Defiance. That was great. Loved it.
ADAM GREENFIELD: So when you do that, then, do you ever end up repeat– because you said that there’s a– for “Doll Parts,” or legs, it was a five-syllable word. So I mean, do you ever end up– when you’re code switching like that, do you ever end up repeating a word, or are you able to get through one half of one language and the other half of the other language without mixing?
DAVID PETERSON: Oh, yeah, no, code switching only really works if you said what you said. So I know exactly what you’re thinking of. But for example, let’s say that you started out in English right, and then you say the verb and then you switch to Castithan, it’s not going to make sense to repeat the verb again. That wouldn’t work.
So usually what happens is you can switch, and you just entirely switch to the new grammatical form of the language that you’re switching to without repeating any of the old elements. And so usually it happens when it’s more convenient so that you don’t have a bizarre thing where you’ve said the verb in one language and say it again in a different language. There have actually been a lot of studies on code switching in natural languages that demonstrate that there’s a lot of internal consistency to it across languages. And so it’s a very interesting literature if you have time for it.
ADAM GREENFIELD: All right. Finally, do you have anything– I guess advice for grad students when they’re trying to communicate something to an audience? Are there effective rules, or rules that are very more effective than others?
DAVID PETERSON: Audiences– and I should say, I give talks on language creation all the time– all the time. And most of the time, the audience has absolutely no background in linguistics. And actually, I just knew this already from being an audience member. Audiences know when you’re dumbing things down, and they don’t appreciate it.
So the goal is to not dumb things down, but to recognize the areas where things are going to be complex– so that means both when new terminology has come up and when the concept itself is complicated. And in those circumstances, with the terminology, of course, repetition helps. But also, the will and testament method– so in other words– the reason we say will and testament is one has a background in English, one has a background in French. And back during the days of Norman-French, you needed to use both so that everybody would understand what you were talking about, even though they meant the same thing. So that’s why we say will and testament.
So I do that, too. I start with the formal term, and I usually have it up so people can see it so they know how it’s spelled. But then immediately say what it is in a simpler way and keep referring to it until you can gauge that everybody knows what you’re talking about. But then the best thing is to follow up immediately with a concrete example.
And again, this is going to differ depending on your field and language. It is so wonderful to be able to just have language data that people can work with and look at. And it also helps to start with a language that everybody speaks.
So when I’m around America, I do English. But when I went to Spain and Mexico, I used Spanish examples. And then when I was in India, I used Hindi examples. Just something that– or, in northern India. I guess I’ll have to switch to Tamil when I go to southern India. But it helps so that people say, all right, I know this. And then you say, all right, you know this. Now let me demonstrate something that you don’t know about this. And that’s going to illustrate my point.
So with sound change, this is something that I think a lot of people have no idea about– that sounds change over time. One thing they do know is that English has funky spelling. So it’s wonderful to take an example like knight and night– knight spelled with a K, night spelled without a K, but both of them spelled with a funny GH– which, who knows why? And demonstrate that these words were actually spelled this way because they were pronounced differently at some point in time in the past, and show them how gradually, the sounds changed so that we got from “kuh-nee-ght” to “nite,” but the spelling didn’t. And that is a really easy way to demonstrate both why we have irregular spellings and how sounds change over time.
Same thing with grammatical evolution. That is a crazy complex idea– the idea that grammar subtly and slowly evolves over time. But we have a wonderful example in English with our go future, where everybody knows that the future tense is something like, “I will eat,” or, “I shall eat.”
But we also have a different one with go. And you can show how we would have started off with some sort of prolix expression like, “I go to London to eat,” where you’re saying that actual definition using the verb on its own– the way that it should be used– and then expressing what you’re going to do when you get there. And then you show how you can just, well, take away the destination.
Now you’re saying you’re going for some intention. And then things slowly change, so you say– instead of “I go to eat,” you say, “I am going to eat,” and then “I am going to eat,” then “I am going to eat,” and then “I am gonna eat,” “I’m gonna eat,” “I’m gonna eat,” “I’mma eat.” And you get all the way to the present.
And so you can demonstrate that and people get that, because they know it, without having to go straight into the technical terminology and without showing them am example that might potentially be more interesting. I think it’s tremendously interesting to demonstrate how the cases evolved and merged– the accusative and genitive cases– evolved and merged in Finnish. But I think it’s a little opaque for English-speaking audiences.
So you start with the easy example, then you can move on to great examples, and just basically bring them along with you. And I’ve had a lot of success doing it in precisely that way. So that most of the time, especially what people say at the end– wow, there was a lot of terminology I didn’t understand, but I was able to follow what you were saying, and that’s really cool. And now I get what you’re doing. And I think that’s the best part, because then if they want to know about the details, they can go investigate themselves.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Do you think language is ever going to get to a point where there’s so little words, but people will still be able to understand? Like the, “I am going to eat” part– it’s all of a sudden down to two, three syllables? Where do you see this– where’s this endpoint going to be?
DAVID PETERSON: A lot of people have noticed that. This was George Orwell’s whole thing with his fool novel, 1984. Anyway–
ADAM GREENFIELD: Not a fan?
DAVID PETERSON: Nah. But they often don’t recognize the other end of it, which is this– when things start to get too small, that’s when we add more words. So you notice, especially with– you talk about this future tense– the most natural thing to do at this point is not to say “I’mma eat,” but, “I’mma go eat.”
So in other words, it got too short. We just threw in another go. Why not? But yeah, at a certain point, things get too short, and so people feel that they’re not being explicit enough, and so they just add more verbiage. And this is something that, actually, writers complain about every single century.
Where it’s like, why say this? It’s too prolix. Instead you could just say this simply. Well, you spotted something. And there was something else I wanted to say. Oh, yeah, yeah– and the most productive– usually the most productive– language creators, shall we say, in this macro sense– are teenagers, actually. And I don’t think that teenagers are ever going to stop being that way.
They want to distinguish themselves as the new generation, so they say things a little differently. That means shortening certain things and expanding other things and changing the meaning of things. Some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t. But that is absolutely never going to change.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Yeah, I listen to a podcast called A Way with Words. Are you familiar with that one?
DAVID PETERSON: I’m not, actually.
ADAM GREENFIELD: It’s basically these two highly intelligent wordsmiths, I guess. I can’t think of another, better way to explain them. One of them, his name is Grant Barrett, and he’s written dictionaries and works on dictionaries and things like that. And they talk about the etymology of words and sayings and things like that. And recently, there was one episode where they were reciting graffiti from back in medieval times and even further back than that, and it’s that kind of stuff that doesn’t change. How it’s said changes, but it’s always going to be there. I thought that was interesting.
DAVID PETERSON: That’s really cool.
ADAM GREENFIELD: Yeah, that’s all I have. I really appreciate it.
DAVID PETERSON: Yeah, no problem.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This podcast was written and produced by Adam Greenfield. The Executive Producer of this podcast is Patrick Urich. The Great Communicators podcast–
The Great Communicators podcast, Grad Comics live Grad Comics The Game, and the Technically Speaking comic book series are part of a professional development initiative called GradX. GradX is–
GradX is made possible by the Office of Graduate Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To find out more about–
To find out more about GradX, as well as get access to other episodes of the Great Communicators podcast, go to gradx.mit.edu. For more information–
For more information and links on the music used in this episode, please see the show notes.
Language Creator David Peterson discusses how we can learn from the construction of language in order to communicate better. Peterson is famous for his work creating the Valyrian & Dothraki languages for the Game of Thrones television show.
Erik Tillman, Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC
The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education.
MUSIC & SOUNDS
“All The Best Fakers” by Nick Jaina is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Micro” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Tar and Spackle” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. “Alchemical” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License. (http://freemusicarchive.org) “Deliberate Thought” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
ADAM GREENFIELD Welcome to The Great Communicators Podcast presented by The MIT Office of Graduate Education, a professional development podcast expressly designed to bring lessons from the field to our graduate student researchers.
My name is Adam Greenfield and in this episode, we’ll hear from a language creator, his cat, and both how and why language can be used to communicate effectively with an audience.
When I tell people I’m a podcast producer, sometimes they look at me weird and ask, “What’s a podcast?” Every time I stumble over my words as if I’ve never been asked that question before.
The question itself, though, feels weird to me. I’ve spent years making and listening to podcasts so to me talking to people who aren’t familiar with it can be a challenge. But I have to. It’s my job.
So now what? What can I do or say to make sure I don’t lose my audience?
That’s where this episode’s guest will help.
DAVID PETERSON
My name is david peterson and I’m a professional language creator and author.
ADAM GREENFIELD
And the books David has written are far from Dr. Seuss rhymes or lazy crime dramas.
DAVID PETERSON
Well, initially “Living Language: Dothraki,” which was a teach-yourself-guide for the Dothraki language, but most recently “The Art of Language Invention,” which is an instructional book about how to create a language.
ADAM GREENFIELD
David and his family live just south of downtown LA, closer to Disneyland, near Anaheim, and after meeting his wife and very cute baby, David and I set up shop in one of the back rooms in his quaint ranch-style home and began our conversation.
At one point early on in the interview, one of David’s cats began to playfully attack my foot.
DAVID PETERSON
Roman. Roman. Roman.
ADAM GREENFIELD
And of course, as much as we try to point out how much their actions can sometimes displease us…
DAVID PETERSON
Roman, this behavior is not acceptable.
ADAM GREENFIELD
… and also try to give them opportunities to redeem themselves…
DAVID PETERSON
Now Roman, this is your last chance. You understand? I’m gonna put you in the bedroom…
ADAM GREENFIELD
… well, they speak an entirely different language.
DAVID PETERSON
This is just not gonna happen. [ruffling] Come here, my boy.
ADAM GREENFIELD
[over audio still playing]
Look, I’m not trying to say you’ll be giving talks to an entire audience full of nothing but cats, as entertaining an image as that is. Just know that while the irreconcilable language gap between human and cat is bad for poor Roman….
[door closes, audio fades out]
… you don’t have his problem. You’re communicating with other humans and sometimes all it takes is a slight adjustment. But first you have to catch that you’re off. A great example comes from an interview I saw with an actress on the television show Game of Thrones.
Not to go too far down the rabbit hole but for those that don’t know, in the original story in which Game of Thrones is a single book, the language David created, Dothraki, is spoken by a group of people called, you guessed it, the Dothraki. One of the actors whose character speaks this language is Emilia Clarke and I once heard her mention in an interview that even though she doesn’t know the language well, she’s reached a point where she can tell if she says something wrong.
DAVID PETERSON
In the case of Game of Thrones, it’s been running for six seasons now with a seventh season coming. And certain of the actors have just had so many lines that they’re kind of developing their own- I mean, I wouldn’t say fluency in it because they don’t know what they’re saying – but they’re developing their own ear for it. And so absolutely I believe it if she can just tell that something doesn’t sound right. Even if she can’t put her finger on exactly what’s wrong, she might have a better ear for it than I do at this point.
ADAM GREENFIELD
Being immersed in something, whether it’s a new language or scientific research, can eventually lead to a deep understanding or proficiency of the subject, just as Emilia Clarke experienced with speaking the Dothraki language on set over and over.
And this actually leads nicely into the next aspect of language and communication David and I talked about, convincing any type of audience that the one communicating is an authority on the subject. This is something I’ve been the most curious about regarding, not just language but, the entire professional communication subject this series is focused on.
DAVID PETERSON
First you have to demonstrate mastery of the subject matter, which means you know all the terminology and you can use it. But for people that don’t know the terminology, it’s just going to sound like gobbledygook and to a certain extent they’ll hopefully trust that you know what you’re talking about. But, it helps to be able to demonstrate exactly what you’re talking about in a way that somebody can understand.
ADAM GREENFIELD
And language, as we’ve discovered, lends itself well to that task.
DAVID PETERSON
Language, I think, is a very easy field to do that in because whatever you’re saying about language data, there’s always the data. You can always just write down some words, pronounce them, and say, “this is what’s happening. This one’s changing like this.” Using very simple terminology. And it’s like, “why is it changing?” “Well, it’s changing to make it a little easier to pronounce.”
ADAM GREENFIELD
But during all this you don’t want to underestimate an audience’s capacity to understand something. Again, you won’t be talking to a room full of cats.
DAVID PETERSON:
I give talks on language creation all the time and most of the time audiences have no background in linguistics. I have found that audience members know when you’re dumbing things down and they don’t appreciate it. So the goal is to not dumb things down but to recognize the areas where things are going to be complex. And that means both when new terminology has come up and when the concept itself is complicated.
ADAM GREENFIELD
So then keeping terminology and a complicated concept in mind, David uses something called the Will and Testament Method.
DAVID PETERSON
So in other words, the reason we say “Will and Testament” is because one has a background in English, one has a background in French, and back in the days of Norman French, you needed to use both so that everybody would understand what you were talking about, even though they meant the same thing. So that’s why we say “Will and Testament.” So I do that, too. I start with the formal term, and I usually have it up so people can see it so they know how it’s spelled, but then immediately say what it is in a simpler way and keep referring to it until I can gauge that everybody knows what I’m talking about. But then the best thing is to follow up immediately with a concrete example.
ADAM GREENFIELD
Alright, so back to my original conundrum of explaining a podcast to folks who aren’t familiar with them. If I follow David Peterson’s advice, I want to make sure I’m not being overly simplistic and underestimating an audience’s ability to understand something.
At the same time, I need to be aware if I’m losing my audience, human or feline, and make adjustments. That adjustment can be as simple as using another word that says the same thing, or the “Will and Testament” method.
Thanks for listening to The Great Communicators Podcast brought to you by The MIT Office of Graduate Education. My name is Adam Greenfield, and feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
This is episode is the full, unedited interview with Mandy Korpusik. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
This is episode is the full, unedited interview with Professor Shao-Horn. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
What happens when we forget to bridge our work to the interests of our audience? MIT’s W.M. Keck Professor of Energy, Yang Shao-Horn, tells us a cautionary tale about just that.
This is episode is the full, unedited interview with Professor Ian Condry. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined.
