A STORY EXAMPLE OF AN EXPERIENCE OF INCOHERENCE.
I hope the about post here as well as my first post helped clarify my deepest intention here: to return civility, dignity, and respect to our culture by learning ways to self-reflect and interact. This will become a story of how to write and possibly help you think a bit more coherently. Yes, it may seem basic education and I believe much of this is extremely important now when many seem less than coherent to me.
Recently I made what I felt was a casual simple remark on a forum regarding a currently very contentious social issue.
I simply said, at least I intended to say, I do certain things not just for me but for the greater good, something that means a lot to me.
This belief arises as I feel everything is connected and the most recent evidence agrees. Waves, particles and now I am hearing of plasma.
What I do, what we do, matters and has an impact. Sometimes I set my own needs or bias aside and choose differently as I sense it may serve coherence and meaning for others. That sense of connectedness not only helps me honor all life but to feel coherence in my life. Life has meaning and makes sense to me.
Recently a “friend” responded to my simple reflection, by changing the topic and sending me off to some very controversial site. That was not my point at all. I felt unheard and that we were not having the same discussion. Emotion overrode coherence for me. She was angry and our intentions differed.
This I hope is an example of incoherence. And I will add, I felt a kind of domination that I will speak more of in the future. Like many, I have had a hard time in college and life feeling coherent and understood. Now after a great deal of reflection and practice with trusted friends I trust myself more and feel more coherent and understood.
MY ASSUMPTION. Friends discuss and share, openly. Domination and off-topic inserts are NOT coherent to me and I imagine others, as I heard from a dear old friend that what I said in the above interaction, made simple good sense. I felt validated yet I had to deal with this distraction or just leave. I chose, as I am doing more and more, to delete my comment. And it was lovely to feel validated by an old friend.
Defining Coherence. This is from Merriam Webster:
Definition of coherence:
1: the quality or state of cohering: such as
a: systematic or logical connection or consistency. The essay as a whole lacks coherence.
b: integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values"The various parts of this house—discrete in color, in shape, in placement—join together with remarkable coherence."— Paul Goldberger
2: the property of being coherent// a plan that lacks coherence.
I hope this has begun to answer my subtitle: What is coherence and how can it help me? This is especially important to anyone who wants to write and inform, share, converse meaningfully. I have mentored many writers and I, too, struggle to be coherent.
To provide the power of coherence and effective writing I share an updated piece I wrote a while back that got some amount of attention especially from educators and writers.
Chaucer and A Good Burger
How a Simple Image that is Juicy can Inspire and Help Writers.
A fellow author/reader recently encouraged me to share some of my methods for helping writers.
His own school district had recently adopted “the hamburger model” which you can find all over the web, for their curriculum for younger writers and I shared a bit of how I learned it as an adult and how I have used it, and here I share a bit more.
Think of a juicy hamburger or veggie burger and all the fixings as you read.
While my friend uses the HAMBURGER method with younger students, I learned the hamburger method of organizing a story in college from a passionate Chaucer scholar, who I, of course, had a crush on.
I remember we used one burger and its fillings for a whole paper. As this was an undergrad class, I believe the papers were short, say five pages, unlike grad school where much more was required. Multiple burgers perhaps.
I find now that the hamburger, bun, and fixings can be used in several ways, each paragraph a burger “part” and/or the whole paper a single burger depending on the length required. It can also be used for a single paragraph and its simple rules bring coherence just like a well-made burger.
Many many models suggest we know the world by smell, touch, and hearing or by sensing feeling, imagining, thinking, and expressing. The first group is from Neuro-Linguistic Programming and the second is from Co-operative Inquiry, my preferred model.
A burger with multiple ingredients is a simple method to envision or smell or maybe taste, intending to create writing or a talk that we were taught often tediously, by playing and naming our ingredients that would be a part/topic/point in a paragraph with an ingredient dripping and leading into the next paragraph which would echo that ingredient as a first-line. Cooking up a paper/talk using food, we all can relate to well. Food instead of tedious writing!
And while they can be fun, sloppy burgers are not so easy to eat. Parts pop out and intended flavors meant to be enjoyed together may be lost. The sloppy burger has lost coherence. And sometimes we want a Sloppy Joe and even that yumminess requires correct coherent ingredients to create a real Sloppy Joe.
The hamburger has worked well for me and adult mentees.
The bottom bun summarizes and echoes the top bun and re-iterates all the ingredients you have shared. And as I said, alternatively, each paragraph can be imagined as a whole burger. The writer controlling the number of ingredients.
This is about as much as I am going to say about this device as it is all over the web and can be modified as needed.
The point is to stimulate some sense of a bigger picture that is fun and commonly enjoyed while working on a piece of writing that may be challenging, confusing, and leading to a sense of incoherence, an inability to write cogently, coherently.
This is now ancient history for me yet and as mentioned above, when I mentor adults they enjoy it. And, we experience creative breakthroughs. Almost magically organization and coherence emerge.
Another very simple and widely used method is one for Powerpoints and speeches and is kind of a burger though lean:
1. Tell ‘em what you are going to tell them. This is the top bun that briefly names your ingredients.
2. Tell ’em (your ingredients kept “lean” maybe three to five points/ingredients).
3. Remind them what you just told them. Your bottom bun that harks back to the top and recapitulates your points/ingredients.
I learned this from a gun-toting CA Park Ranger who presented local history: Three steps to a presentation. Just coming up with the topic of each step I find really helps and the buns are very visible in 1 and 3 as they re-iterate.
Here are some thoughts on how this all works:
IMAGINATION and ENVISIONING I find great aids for writing especially when used as a sensory tool. The metaphor may be different yet when we do this together, mirroring and cooking, magic is possible. And though nothing else comes to mind, the burger I can say works. One friend swears by mind mapping.
And now that I consider this I suspect imagining a walk on the beach and picking up shells may work well especially for those who are tactile.
This may all be due to what happens when we imagine and sense: we are a bit distracted from the stress of the moment if only for a small second we let go of “thinking” and allowing another way of knowing put the project at hand on the back burner, simmering safely. No need to check on the pot just yet.
This kind of practice may be considered akin to meditation, hypnosis, and just plain staring with intention. I once did a snowfall meditation in the CO. Rockies, sitting warmly inside rocking and being taken away by the snowfall. One of those moments when the self disappears.
The mind takes a short vacation and again, as many teach, there is an opening for serendipity, synchronicity, and new perspectives on material that may have been over-chewed.
Lots could be said about this state of creating and that is not my aim here. I return to my burger with a brief story of how it worked with a grad student.
I had one grad student ready to drop out of a mandatory class after working years to get into grad school and she succeeded fabulously using some of these methods. I explained the burger method. We worked almost exclusively by text (a condiment of detail)…she went through much angst (more condiments) and then with feedback in our chats she broke through and passed with beyond an A (the second re-iterative bun) leaving the teacher speechless.
Our playing did not do it all. We had some help from the instructor (a dripping onion perhaps in several ways). The instructor did clarify some instructions so I cannot take all the credit yet from the start I knew my student knew the material very well and she has now manifested a major dream. Yum!
Hmmm…maybe this burger had bacon. As they say, try it, you just might like it. Happy chewing and co-creating the culinary way, the imaginal way.
As usual, being passionate about lifelong learning I hope this has “served” someone. This remembering and writing have been enjoyable and now I am hungry.
HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED COHERENCE HERE? You might consider the Chaucer article and you might consider this whole article. In this newsletter my top bun being a story regarding and experience of incoherence. My bottom bun, right here, suggests there are recipes and methods that lead to coherence, enjoyment, and digestibility when the ingredients are respected and used in order.
Oops…an onion slipped out. What might your world “taste” like if you felt respected and considered when in a discussion? Delicious I hope.
Burger yourself happy, full of understanding and coherence.