By Francis Moran
Yesterday morning’s excellent Social Media Breakfast Ottawa got me thinking again about a recurring conversation I have been having about the nature of citizenship. Presenter Mark Kuznicki is an organizing force behind ChangeCamp, which will appear in Ottawa for the first time on May 16, and a consultant who helps forge open, creative communities whose purpose aligns with his personal social mission, “to reinvigorate community resilience and adaptation in response to accelerating global change.” It was an uplifting and thought-provoking session that left me in exactly the opposite state of mind from last month’s breakfast.
ChangeCamp is about “re-imagining government and citizenship in the age of participation,” and Kuznicki bemoaned a devaluing of the concept of citizenship that limits our participation to occasionally voting for our governments and regularly complaining about the quality of the services we receive from them.
In a comment after his presentation, I suggested to Kuznicki that it’s even worse than that. Citizenship has been reduced to a client-service model, I said, where the governed look only to receive the services they individually require and to pay the least amount possible for them, and to pay nothing at all, if they can help it, for services other people receive.
A parsimonious business ethic has invaded the relationship between governments and the governed that has many of us clamouring for the lowest possible level of investment into public services. On a local level, this ethic reached its pinnacle during the most recent mayoral race in Ottawa, where the winning candidate’s platform was the single-note promise that he wouldn’t raise municipal taxes. (That he was unable to even remotely keep his promise speaks eloquently of his woefully inadequate grasp of the realities of government.)
In several recent conversations, I have allowed myself to get a little heated when someone else argues that this city would be better off if the mayor had his way and investments in public services were whittled down to the bare minimum. Not only is this bad for the citizens who rely on those services, it is also bad for the very business and economic well being of the city that these misguided cheapskates, uh, business people, would insist they’re trying to promote. A robust public infrastructure that includes excellent public transit, public housing, public funding of arts and cultural activities — the list goes on and on — is exactly the kind of environment that attracts the entrepreneurial and creative talent that Ottawa likes to think it welcomes. In other words, not only is the right thing to do, it’s a bloody good investment.
More to the point, however, it’s part of our obligation as citizens. I am not a client of the City of Ottawa, or the Province of Ontario, or of Canada, or of the world for that matter. I am a citizen, dammit, and that places on me an obligation to do more than merely exercise my electoral franchise and complain when things don’t go how I’d like them to. It obliges me to invest both my human and fiscal capital into creating a public infrastructure in which all our citizens can thrive.
I suggested to Kuznicki that the client-service model, the minimal-investment model, is a right-wing construct and he objected that notions of right and left are antiquated and that the kind of open government he promotes is as much a threat to the left as to the right. My experience, however, is that I never hear progressive lefties argue against robust investments in public infrastructure; I only hear that from the more conservatively minded. And I don’t think Kuznicki’s open government philosophy really challenges either the left or the right; engaged participation can come from all points on the spectrum. It challenges a closed, silo-like approach where governments build and protect service-delivery establishments that reduce citizens to the business-school role of clients.
By Francis Moran
Any regular reader of this blog will know that inmedia is a shop that prides itself on its writing chops. Indeed, several of us willingly self-identify as grammar geeks.
When someone is looking to work here, I now ask three questions that immediately sort the writers from the rest. First, I ask candidates to rate their writing talent on a scale from one to 10. The real writers don’t hesitate to put themselves eight or higher. But posers will blow air into their answers to this one, so it’s not terribly definitive.
Next, I ask them what other people have said all their lives about their writing. This is the key question. Really good writers stand apart from the crowd and have been hearing ever since they were in school that they are exceptional. The question is not the least peculiar to them; they know exactly what I mean and they answer it right away and without so much as a blush of false humility. It is perfectly ordinary and everyday for their writing to be praised.
Finally, I ask them to name three writing or grammar reference books that they use consistently. I don’t really care what titles they give me so long as they offer them up with very little hesitation. While the posers will hum and haw, the real writers know that this craft is a complex one that regularly requires pulling down dictionaries, thesauruses and other reference guides as we strive for excellence. Besides the first two, I’m really looking for someone who cares enough about their craft that they own and can effortlessly recall at least a couple of standard writing, grammar and editing references such as the Chicago Manual of Style, about which I’ve written before, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, The Reader Over Your Shoulder by Graves and Hodge, or a little tome that actually became a best-seller a few years back, Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss.
If my candidate has ever taken a university-level writing course in any Canadian or American school, The Elements of Style, which two weeks ago marked the 50th anniversary of its original publication, is almost always cited. Although I own a copy from my own undergraduate days, it’s not a reference on which I have ever heavily relied. I have always been somewhat confused by what I have found to be its bewildering rules about passive versus active voice. I have always put my confusion down to the fact that I think I am better at writing well than I am about explaining writing well. In other words, I seem innately to know how to do it properly; I can’t always explain why or how I’m doing it properly.
Now, thanks to a linguistics professor at the University of Edinburgh, I perhaps have an explanation for my confused reaction to The Elements of Style. In a damning article in the April 17, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoffrey Pullham regrets the “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice” he says has been peddled to American students by William Strunk and E.B. (Charlotte’s Web) White. He takes particular umbrage at the guide’s admonition against employing the passive voice, writing that its authors didn’t know what they were talking about and usually identified as passive passages those that were, in fact, active. Much relief over here, I can tell you.
On another front, though, I have always credited Strunk and White when I dictate that adverbs should be avoided. At least, they should be avoided as cheap modifiers of adjectives. For example, it’s just lazy writing to stick a spare “very” in front of an adjective to convey a greater degree of whatever the adjective itself is describing; come up with a more potent adjective that can do the job without a modifier. Where the professor and I agree that Strunk and White were overly doctrinaire, however, is that adverbs are perfectly fine for the modifying of verbs and quite acceptable when conveying particular emphasis on adjectives. Note my use of the adverbs “perfectly” and “quite” doing yeoman duty modifying the adjectives “fine” and “acceptable” in that last sentence!
Happy 50th anniversary, Elements, but, like the professor, I probably won’t be throwing any parties. I’ll still accept you as an answer to my third question, though, so long as it comes without hesitation.
