This billboard was erected by the pro-democracy group in Tonga, on a crossroad near Tofoa. It’s amazing. At first sight, it’s a sycophantic licking of the royal boots. But look closer: it’s an ingenious piece of marketing.

How do you persuade people to your democratic cause when criticising the king is against the law?

Why, you praise the king!

You give him credit for the democratic changes he promised at his coronation.

You remind him (and all citizens who pass by) that the world’s eyes are upon him.

And in a sly twist, you patronise him: “We are proud of you.” That’s what teachers say to a class of five year olds.

It means: Well done, little one! So far so good. You’ve still got a long way to go, but this is a good start.

Or perhaps: Most people think a king’s status is far above his subjects. But watch it: the king is our servant, ruling because the people permit this. For now…

Is this message Twitter length? Close, at 187 characters. Succinct, anyway.

King George V Icon to the globe and world history as the architect of peaceful political change. “G5 consent to Act 2008 for 2010 election under changed govt. system” We are proud of you.

P.S. I suspect “G5″ is twitter or txt for “gave”.)

So, I arrived in Tonga the same night the Princess Ashika sank. And on Saturday night I watched a press conference where I didn’t understand a word for the first 30-odd minutes. Even so the broadcast was riveting just from the body language.

In three cases I gave my verdict on the speaker’s honesty, and then got to hear them speak in English. In two cases I felt fully justified in my intuitive assessment. With the Minister of Transportation, however, I’m not so sure.

First, a disclaimer. I’m a complete amateur with no expertise in reading body language. In my defence I cite Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’. Here’s what I saw.

Chaotic communication
First and worst was the Hon. ‘Eseta Fusitu’a, Minister of — what? With delicious irony, it transpired she was Minister of Communication. She’s a middle aged woman with an air of authority. Most of the time her face was chaotic. The top half showed (I thought) panic and fear. But the bottom half frequently smiled ingratiatingly. Sometimes the whole face smiled as if to win us over. She was selling us a line. I did not like this picture: right or wrong, I thought this was what she was saying:

“Everything’s just fine and everything is normal. Help, help! I’m a really important person. Help, help! What’s a few score drowned people between friends? Help, help! And if something bad happened, it’s certainly not my fault, so don’t blame me. Help, help! I must talk fast or someone might notice I’ve messed up. Help, help! We’re in deep trouble here — I don’t want to lose my job!”

Later, the Hon. ‘Eseta Fusitu’a spoke in English, answering a question from a New Zealand journalist. As best I can remember, this is essentially what she said.

” Every country has disasters. The US had the Los Angeles earthquake, China has just had a typhoon, and now after many, many years of no disasters Tonga has had its own disaster.”

(So?)

“Unlike the riots three years ago, this is a natural disaster. This is not a man-made disaster, it is a natural disaster.”

(She is so certain, and yet few seem to believe her. Let’s wait for the investigation, which has not even begun…)

“I want to note how well everyone has pulled together on this: the Government, the Police, the shipping company and the community. You have to appreciate the Tongan culture. Tongan people all help each other in times of trouble. In the village, the survivors were immediately given blankets and food. In this case it was the government and the church that helped. That is normal, that is Tonga.”

(Again, should we applaud?)

It seemed to me that her words were entirely congruent with the incongruous mixed signals sent by her body.

Enigmatic communication
Case 2: The Hon. Paul Karulus, Minister of Transportation, spoke directly and with every appearance of sincerity. At the start and end of each speech he looked down, which seemed to emphasise the seriousness of his words. I was inclined to trust him.

Eventually he answered a few questions in English. He said the Princess Ashika had been checked thoroughly twice and passed each assessment. Repairs were made after purchase, which would be normal procedure. (Hm. Really?) There would be a thorough, impartial investigation headed by an experienced New Zealander. If individuals or organisations were at fault, they would face charges, including, if necessary, criminal charges. The vessel was fully insured and so were the lives of those on board.

The Hon. Paul Karulus’ body language passed the test of credibility and so did the words. However, rumours abound about the purchase of this vessel. Today I heard the rumours repeated by the Reverend Dan Dango (Sp.?) who gave us a lift into town: he said the boat was a sieve, leaking before it left the wharf, and the dealers were villains.

So in this case my intuition is not entirely to be trusted. My hunch: here’s a good guy stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Great communication in a crisis
Third case: my hero, Police Commander Chris Kelley. He’s a New Zealander in charge of the Tongan police, and heading the search and rescue operation. His delivery was steady, authoritative, considered… and sad. He listened carefully to questions and answered them all in full.

Chris Kelley spoke in paragraphs. In other words, when he had finished one topic, he paused noticeably. This gave us time to absorb what he’d said, and signalled a change of topic. The pause was the aural equivalent of a paragraph break in web content. It gave me confidence that he was in control of the structure of his message as well as the facts. (Clearly, his delivery was in marked contrast to the chaotic gabble from the Minister of Communications.)

Chris Kelley emphasised that his focus was on the people: searching for survivors, finding the dead, and determining who was actually on board as opposed to those who were listed in the manifest. He was honest about the chances of recovering bodies, let alone survivors. The location and depth of the ship, the extensive area where it might have sunk, and the time since it sank, all made this unlikely, he said.

Communication is more than skin deep. The Commander inspired confidence.

Like I said, when it comes to communication in a crisis — my hero.

Don’t sue me.

PS I only wish I knew how to spell my hero’s name correctly. Kelley or Kelly? the Tongan English language paper uses both spellings in a single article. So does Stuff:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/south-pacific/2735821/Weather-hampers-Tongan-ferry-search
Sorry, no active link provided: I’ve lost the facility temporarily with a WordPress upgrade.

Are people speeding dangerously fast through your street? Consider removing all traffic signs, so that drivers need to slow down and make eye contact before crossing a road. Or have dinner on the front lawn, so that drivers slow down to find out why. It’s the human way to calm the traffic.

These counterintuitive findings are being used in Europe and Australia for speed control.

When David Engwicht spoke on Radio NZ about this, he said humans have two opposing urges that are both strong:

• to go fast (to escape, travel, achieve?), and
• to listen to a story.

The trick is to make the story stronger. A child playing on the street. Dinner in a front yard. A motorist hesitating at a crossroads. That’ll slow us down, because a story is intriguing.

There’s a parallel in reading. With web content and indeed and files sitting on a computer screen, the urge to go fast has become almost overwhelming. I’ve found my eyes popping all over a paper-newspaper, looking randomly for a punchline. I’ve read an article and forgotten it instantly.

At the same time, when I read an online *newspaper*, I skim the headlines and read a few articles from beginning to end. So I have hoped all is not lost. But I’ve been concerned about what this has been doing to my brain—and yours.

Maybe I’ve only got the guts write about this now because I think salvation is at hand, in the form of readable ebooks. OK, I’ve come clean.

Reading by iPhone or Kindle is best with straight narrative. No pretty pictures. No fancy fonts. Just text, pure and simple, that tells a story. And so I see one of my friends reading Jack London on her iPhone, and a couple of others working their way through Dickens. Jack London! Charles Dickens! And loving it.

These are the same friends who use computers or fix computer systems by day, their eyes darting rapidly from key point to key point, in a mad race to consume information.

We all need to do that kind of reading. It’s not so much speed reading as kangaroo jumping over the words, squashing them wherever we land. Thump, gotcha! Thump, gotcha! It’s not a sweet, subtle, satisfying kind of reading, this web reading. But we have to do it, and we have to carry on writing stuff for that type of reader. They haven’t got a second to waste. They’re in a hurry, dammit!

But now, in the dentist’s rooms, at the bus stop, on the train, they’re reading stories again. For no reason. Just for pleasure. Not in a rush, but loving it.

Maybe this development is simply the swing of the pendulum. But for me as a writer and a reader, the iPhone and ebook explosions came simultaneously and just in time. I don’t mind being a gobbly reader if I can still enjoy books. And I am extremely happy to train people to write for gobbling readers, provided we all slip into a Superreader suit at private moments.

Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration by John Tierney is pretty interesting, but it’s the illustration by Victor Koen that I couldn’t resist.

It’s about concentration. As Jenny Bornholdt lamented in a poem, you can’t read and listen to the radio at the same time. Winifred Gallagher is one of the researchers quoted.

“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

She has tips for concentrating and doing your best brainwork. But you can read that for yourself. (Don’t start the day with email…) I just had to show a brilliant image that millions have doubtless seen already.

Now I’m going to focus.

Eyes top left is an article I wrote in 2007, and a mini tutorial as well. (Some people just can’t help themselves.) Sean Laffey responded with some fascinating insights into this hypnotic target for human eyes. Thanks, Sean!

Dear Rachel.

After reading your article on Eyes = Top left , here’s my take on what
was found, I offer this as both a photographer and biologist.

In picture making and picture taking there is a rule of thirds, the
most pleasing easily remembered images have a focal point 1/3 of the
way in from the edge of the frame.

The most striking example is when this focal point is at the top left
third. Photographers say that this gives the subject of the photograph
“space to move into” . This relates to the way most people in the
west read from left to right, the eye naturally tracks away from the
left once it has locked on.

Why might this have arisen? Here’s an evolutionary explanation.

Most people are right handed and we feel safer if our strongest arm
is free to protect and defend us. So it is best if we keep any new
person we meet slightly to the left of us, this accounts for the right
handshake where we have to turn our bodies fractionally to the left
to greet someone.

In this situation, our visual field places the new person to our
left and we make eye contact by looking ahead or upwards, (unless of
course we are relatively taller than the person we are greeting). If
we leave space to the right of the person and space above them in our
visual frame we have time to judge how friendly they are ( space above
means we are a few steps away) and having space to the right gives
us an exit route should we care not to meet them.

This is probably hot wired into the brain and would help explain the
natural reaction to look top left first.

It would be interesting to compare the “Eyes Top Left” method with
people who are left handed, exceptionally tall people (who have no
choice but to look down to greet people) and cultures such as many in
Asia where writing is read right-left and bottom to top.

All the best

Sean Laffey

Here’s what I’ve learned: once you stop blogging, it can be hard to start again. It’s two weeks since I got back from holiday. Come to think of it, that’s not long, and I have had a few excuses (for myself). But it feels like ages, because of the GUILT. But hey, how hard can it be to do what comes naturally, namely blog?

Years ago I slid off a mad fat mongrel horse as it tore through gorse and blackberries. I landed with a helluva thump and I thought I was paralysed. My future life in the Burwood Spinal Unit flashed past my eyes. But I was just winded, and eventually picked myself up and got on that gross animal and continued the ride, as prescribed. (Get back in the saddle, they say. In this case there was no saddle.)

This morning I considered gentoo penguin dashing urgently through the muck and snow, and felt humbled. So here I am, back in the saddle again. Good morning.

How to look at a painting by Justin Paton has just been republished in hardback. Which is a supreme compliment to an author: graduating to hardback means The People (or Awa Press, the publisher) believe this book is a keeper. One to reread and lend and jealously reclaim.

They’re right, it’s a little beaut. The 2006 Montana Book Award for Contemporary Culture and three pages of accolades from 22 reviewers underline this fact.

I love the way Paton does actually give lots of tips about how to look at a painting. This isn’t just another art critique in disguise.

How to look at a painting? If I thought I could get away with it, I would have answered that question with one word: slowly.

That’s a great start. People shuffle past famous paintings in solemn queues, gallop around galleries in pursuit of a personal best, adopt instant karate poses to defend themselves against art, attend gallery openings for the wine and gossip, or are blind to the painting right under their nose. So slowly is salutary advice.

Paton describes a fully kinetic and human involvement with paintings. He walks the length of a big one, squints at some up close, dives in, gets looked at by them, and spends quality time with them. And he gives us permission — no, he instructs us — to notice the obvious: respect the thing. For example, a whopping wooden board sends a different message from a flimsy piece of paper. If the frame dominates, that’s a big deal too.

Paton bubbles over with enthusiasm. This is fun! Which is not the run of the mill attitude to art. Many are frightened of art, think of it as an enemy to be overcome. They think an opinion is required, and their opinion is worth nothing, and they’ll look like an idiot. So this might be Paton’s most liberating tip:

When looking at a painting, before answering the question ‘What do I think’ try ‘What did I notice?’ No opinions without observations.

Hm. Cool. We can all do that.

So, how to look at a web page? Most of the time, quickly. Very quickly. Do it like you do already, hunting for the information you need. If you find what you need almost immediately, the look and feel don’t interfere with your search, that’s a good web page.

That would be a very short book. Appropriate, don’t you think?

P.S. Exceptions, exceptions. They are myriad. I mean web sites that you do want to look at slowly. Waste all day on them. They’re about art: no coincidence.
Over the net and on the table
Local: Amsterdam Souvenirs
Postcard from Puniho
The Doing wire netting chair

Mere words can’t do justice to Neil Cohn’s web site about the theory of visual linguistics. Does visual linguistics sound boring? Not when a graphic artist/academic applies everything he knows about visual language to his own web site.

One glance at the site and I was hooked. That’s the way it should be. What a way to use blog technology! The relevance to web content is resounding. I mean strobing. Or, well, obvious.

Neil Cohn – Emaki.net

Last week I had a 5-day migraine, or maybe that was 6 migraines in 5 days. That’s my annual allowance in a single week.

I tell you not to gain sympathy (oh all right, if you insist) but because it reminded me just how amazing our faculty of sight is. And especially the gift of reading. I bang on about accessibility all the time, but the problems for me personally are largely hypothetical. In real life, I can usually read and write. How marvellous is that?

But last week text splintered into bits and bobs, holes appeared in paragraphs, book pages pulsed with yellow and grey polka dots, staircases and shells and sparkling diamonds competed for my attention, and I could not fixate on more than one word at a time.

And although I am a gun touch typist, errors; ega appearing on mewhave i wort. [Sic: that was a demo.] I couldn’t recognise a typo if it jumped off the screen and bit me; it was just another blur. Moreover, the words I wanted were often just out of — what’s that word — stretch, beach, windsurfer, pie — reach!

Nothing new here, just the duration of that particular brain blitz in the experience of one of the world’s neurologically privileged. A migraine is a small stroke. We don’t like them.

But after my second visit to the GP I came away relieved that this was “only” a migraine. It passed. It got no worse. It’s not eye disease or a brain tumour. Which means this week I revert to reading with ease.

Lucky people like me take sight and reading for granted. Even so, it’s not easy reading on a screen. Computer work is the main cause of a heck of a lot of people’s migraines. I’m fine today, but super-sensitised, I dare say. I can still see glimmering patches of light and shadow on the screen, and those letters are not entirely still. I dare say our clever brains usually edit out these flaws.

When writing web content, have mercy on your readers. Orderliness and white space help us. So does conciseness. So I’ll stop now.

I’ve got a silly question: which is the better term, Plain English or Plain Language? Or Clear English or Clear Language? That’s silly because the answer should be blindingly obvious—considering the topic.

But to me, it’s not obvious. I’m thinking…

• Plain Language/English conventions require that in such a case we use the more familiar term, and stick to it.
• In the US and Canada, Plain Language rules.
• In the UK, Plain English seems to be the norm.
• In non-English speaking countries, clear language (translated) seems common.
• In Australia, language and English are found about equally. (For example, DEST.gov.au goes for Plain English, but the Office of Parliamentary Counsel says Plain Language has a broader meaning.)

I’m trying to nut out the reasons people have for choosing one label over the others.

• English restricts the work to the English language? (Surely that’s fair enough: initiatives in other languages have their own terms such as Lenguaje Claro or KlarsprÃ¥k.)
• Language can be more easily perceived to include visual language?
• Language might imply inclusion of other official languages such as Maori and Sign language?
• English is perceived as the property of England, that non-American nation, country and coloniser?
• English refers to the actual language we’re talking about, and so is the correct term?
• Plain sounds boring compared with clear.

Why would anybody care? Well, we’re about to form a Plain Something organisation in New Zealand and it would be nice, just for once, to name something appropriately first time around.

Meantime, we can watch videos of the US plain language bill hearings on The Center for Plain Language web site.

Image: “PLAIN” in American Sign Language constructed from chart found on Library.Thinkquest.org