Public Health Affairs

Category: Uncategorized

  • What’s Your Font

    There was a very interesting article, a link dump without the links if you will, in the December 6th New York Times, lead by the following:

    Every day, hundreds of thousands of scholars study human behavior. Every day, a few of their studies are bundled and distributed via e-mail by Kevin Lewis, who covers the social sciences for The Boston Globe and National Affairs. And every day, I file away these studies because I find them bizarrely interesting.

    In this column, I’m going to try to summarize as many of these studies as space allows. No single study is dispositive, but I hope these summaries can spark some conversations[.]

    What an interesting concept! I know that folks like Bora Zikovic and the folks at Seed Magazine have science focused blogs, but to see something similar in the Times, well, that’s something else. There was one article referenced by the author that I found really interesting because it deals with information uptake. It speaks to that critical part of communication wherein the receiver has been given the information, found that he understands it, and attempts to internalize it. What makes people take information they hear and master it. According to the study, it might be something we consider counterintuitive.

    People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts.

    What font was your last public document written in? Do you even know? (I do, but I’m a font geek.) What does that mean for the future of our work together? Should I write this blog in Harrington!?

    No. And no, you shouldn’t change all of your default styles. There are few things in life as acceptable as a nice sans serif font, enjoy that. But consider what’s implied by this study, everything, everything that goes into our public documents is important. Font, whitespace, headings, colors, order, all of it is just as important as the content.

  • Via a shel of my former self: A point-by-point demolition of the latest case for blocking employee access to social media

    An article by Barclay Communications appearing in a tech publication from Northern Ireland is strident in its insistence that blocking employee access to Facebook is a requirement in the face of so much risk.

    “According to a recent MyJobGroup study, over half of the UKs workforce could be trying to check and update their social networking sites in work,” the article asserts.  “As a result social networking has become one of the biggest and most dangerous time wasting activities in the workplace.”

    via blog.holtz.com

    With my blogs and my Facebook pages and my Twitter accounts, you can tell that I’m a pretty solid social media supporter. You, here, reading this, are probably neutral to positive on the whole thing, too.

    There are those, however, that are Luddites unable to see the benefits of social media. Every once in a while, one of these folks finds an outlet where they can cow companies and government agencies into blocking social media access by their employees. There are some standard points that these folks raise over and over (I don’t fault managers and supervisors who don’t know better and accept these arguments on face value, they’re just looking to make sure everyone is safe).

    Mr. Holtz answers each facet of the supposed “case for blocking social media access” pretty effectively. If you’ve heard some of these reasons as to why you can’t access these sites, this might give you some ammunition to respond.

  • Readability and How to Best Achieve It

    This meandering article in the Washington Post a couple of weeks back seems to be advocating for increased job opportunities for veterans, which I can’t imagine is something that anyone is particularly opposed to. The beginning of the article, and the headline, focus instead on the Plain Language Act that was signed by President Obama this fall. (I can’t understand the wild shift in focus either.)

    The law defines its purpose: “to improve the effectiveness and accountability of Federal agencies to the public by promoting clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.”

    As someone who regularly works with—and is sometimes guilty of writing—confusing government documents, I can tell you what a sea change that statement is. I recently spoke with a subject matter expert who felt that the extra step of rewriting for usability sake was a burden and ultimately diluted the message being proffered. And that person has a point, I think.

    In my field there are many concepts that are very specific, but which demonstrate very little difference to the public at large. The best example is the difference between bacteria and a virus. I don’t have any expectation that the general public knows the difference (in fact, the research on patients demanding antibiotics for what is clearly a virus shows how little they know about the difference). And both words raise the reading level of the document that they’re in. So when we rewrite for readability sake, one of the first things we do is to change both (or either) to “germ.” Everyone knows what a germ is and, for the majority of people, there is no functional difference between the three terms.

    For the doctor who wrote the document, though, the only similarity between the terms is that they learned about both in medical school. There are so many things inherent in calling something a virus or bacteria, the etiology, the treatment, the transmissibility, the biochemical processes, the disease progression, that in their mind it’s tantamount to malpractice by conflating the two.

    On the flip side, the vast majority of nearly completed documents produced by health departments are nigh unreadable by hundreds of millions of Americans.

    So where’s the happy medium?

    I think there’s two ways to handle this situation. Unfortunately, both are best done in traditional risk communication situations (read: non-emergencies), though the second one, I argue, should be attempted during emergencies.

    The first is to stop divorcing the writing and rewriting processes. Have the subject-matter expert work hand-in-hand with the risk communicator to adapt the source document with a mind toward readability. This doesn’t solve the problem but, over time, may help the expert consider readability in their initial drafts, while allowing the risk communicator to understand the subtle differences that their axe-like (as opposed to a scalpel) approach to rewriting can gloss over. Maybe an important distinction is preserved, which wouldn’t have been if the doc wasn’t in the room.

    The second is my preference, and can work in both emergency and non-emergency situations. They say that emergencies are also opportunities. I agree with this in spades; opportunities for teaching. What a better time to teach people about the difference between viruses and bacteria than during a pandemic! The public is already paying attention to you, the media is beating down your door, and it’s relevant!

    Here’s how I think this should work. The experts write their jargon-filled documents, then (ideally working with the expert) the risk communicator cleans it up for readability sake, but instead of just washing away the difficult words, she defines them, uses them in readable sentences. Instead of just saying, “Don’t ask your doctor for antibiotics, because they don’t work on the flu,” explain why. That’s the nice thing about going direct to your public, you don’t have to fit your message into a 5-second soundbite. Then you can point the public to your agency’s YouTube page where the Health Officer has a 60-second video on improper antibiotic use and how that contributes to resistance, or to a website with basic disease information (highlighting the difference between viruses and bacteria).

    Your public isn’t dumb, and they’re (for the most part) not children. Talk to them like adults who just haven’t been through semester after semester of biochem. Teach them and maybe next time your messaging will be easier.