Wrong Word Research Articles

Misunderstanding Media by Brian Winston

328 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The major problem with the book arises from the theoretical per­ spective that shapes the analysis. Structural functionalists regard sta­ bility as the normal state of all systems, including “material-processing systems,” and social conflicts as deviations from the norm. Beniger therefore pays only passing attention to the political struggles that shaped the emergence of the information society. As social historians have demonstrated, the methods of organizational control employed by factories, bureaucracies, and the advertising industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries often generated considerable opposition from workers, farmers, and consumers. The Control Revolution de­ scribes one side of the “origins” of the information society. A com­ prehensive history—one that highlights both the methods employed by industrialists to impose organizational control and the conse­ quences for the millions of workers and consumers whose lives were shaped as a result—remains to be written. Cynthia B. Costello Dr. Costello is the project officer for the Employment and Voluntarism Program at the Villers Foundation in Washington, D.C. She is completing a manuscript on women office workers in the insurance industry. Misunderstanding Media. By Brian Winston. Cambridge, Mass.: Har­ vard University Press, 1986. Pp. xi + 419; figures, notes, index. $22.50. Brian Winston is ambitious. His goal in Misunderstanding Media is to prove that recent changes in communications technology have con­ stituted no “revolution” but, rather, predictable evolutionary steps in normal technological change. To make this argument, he posits a general model for explaining the interactions of technical and social forces in the invention, development, and adoption of new technol­ ogies. His principal sources are not recent work in the history of science or technology but the structural linguistics of Chomsky and Saussure. According to the model, technology development always proceeds in the following manner. “Scientific competence” comes first. After being transformed—in the sense of structural linguistics—by “idea­ tion,” it goes through a series of phases: “prototypes,” “invention,” and finally “production, spin-offs, and redundances.” These latter transformations are caused by “supervening social necessity,” that is, the need to create something useful, and the “law of the suppression of radical potential,” that is, the shaping of a technological develop­ ment by institutional and political forces so that it will have minimal effect on preexisting social structures. Perhaps I am merely betraying my narrowmindedness, but I find little value in this model as a mode of historical explanation. Conse­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 329 quently, I have little to say about it. Let me note only that it is presented and employed with scant reference to relevant recent work in the history of technology. Although Winston graciously acknowledges his debt to scholars in the field, he also calls it an “under-tilled corner” (p. x). But which corner did he look in? He has not studied Layton, Hughes, Constant, Aitken, Smith, or Hounshell, for example, and cites only one article in Technology and Culture. The merits of the model aside, Winston’s argument is that for the term “information revolution” to be appropriate to describe recent changes in the telecommunications industry, they would have to break the preexisting pattern. “We shall argue that there is nothing in this history to indicate that significant major changes have not been ac­ commodated by pre-existing social formations, and that ‘revolution’ is therefore quite the wrong word to apply to the current situation” (p. 16). Given this premise, the argument follows naturally. After elucidat­ ing the model, Winston employs it to explain the histories of what he finds are the central technologies in information processing: televi­ sion, computers, integrated circuits and the microprocessor, satellites, and the telephone—in that order. Television is dominant in his think­ ing, so it is rightly first. In conclusion, he turns from description to predicting future trends. Basically, he thinks what lies ahead is far less radical than many futurists have predicted. In presenting his case, Winston covers a wide range of technologies. This is the strongest aspect of his book. Unfortunately, the research is all at the secondary source level and so contains secondhand inter­ pretations and little new information. The greatest surprises are how his model leads...

The Significance of the Early Republic

Until very recently the period from the American Revolution to the election of Andrew Jackson was the most neglected if not the most despised period of American history. Although this has not always been the case, certainly during the past generation or so-during the golden age of historical reinterpretation following World War II-the early republic was slighted and scorned. While historians during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were engaged in major reevaluations of most other periods of American history, they virtually ignored the early republic. And the period consequently developed a reputation for dreariness and for being the most boring part of American history to study and teach. This is a curious situation, and it is not easily explained. The period after all seems to have an immediate and palpable importance for all Americans. During the half century following the Revolution our political institutions were established, political parties were developed, and a political economy was worked out. It is the period when American nationalism is generally thought to have been created. All in all, so much of significance occurred in this period of the early republic that its neglect is puzzling. Neglect may be the wrong word to describe the situation. It is not that no attention has been paid to the early republic in the past forty years. Far from it. There have been many books and articles written, but little has come of them. Unlike the antebellum period or the Populist era, there have been no major attempts made to reinterpret the period, to bring the many monographs together, and to erect overarching compelling syntheses. Ten or fifteen years ago there were

Aid and the Environment

impudence. Politicians in general, and Ministers in particular, are expected to be expert on a bewildering range of subjects, moving with or without the sure-footedness of the Swiss chamois from peak to distant peak (and occasionally back again). The verb 'expected' may, I concede, be the wrong word. Perhaps what I should say is that it is part of the tolerance of public life that Ministers are allowed to get away with instant displays of authority and expertise. I hope that that semi-confessional beginning will enable me to trade on your tolerance and good will this evening. If that is not the case, I shall take it as an incitement to be more aggressively impudent in the future. I am invited to speak on Aid and the Environment, a subject to which I bring a clutter of prejudices?most of them I trust ofa relatively benign and well-meaning nature. I am not sure whether I am regarded as a member of the faithful when it comes to environmental issues. In a recent article on Green Politicians?and Fve learnt since my days in Belfast in the Northern Ireland Office that a Green Politician means something else on this side of the water?I am afraid that I failed to trouble the scorers. I rated neither praise nor contumely. All I can say is that I mean to be, and think I am, among the moderately enlightened or Be-Greened, not least since I don't think that anyone who is conscious to any degree of the obligations of the present to the future could conceivabiy be anything else. Aid is interference Aid has been the focus of much controversy in the last few years. There are those who argue that it is not needed by the virtuous, and not deserved by the less than virtuous. There are those who say that the only problem is that there is not enough of it. Whatever the arguement, and whatever the point of view, it cannot be denied that Aid is interference. Donors, who have responsiblities to their own tax-payers, want to make sure that their money is wisely and properly spent. Thus, they are bound to have a major interest in the economic policies of the recipient governments. Moreover, Aid donors help to finance agricultural projects which alter the lives ofthe rural poor. They finance roads and dams altering ecosystems. Such interference, direct or indirect, can be good or bad for the people on the receiving end; and it can also be good or bad for the environment in the recipient countries. Any fruitful discussion of the link between Aid and the environment takes us to the very heart of our understanding both of the nature of Aid and of man's impact on the environment. Both those issues have a moral as well as a practical dimension. The judgement on Aid?whether its effects are good or bad?encompasses cause and pretext as well as result. I have always had some sympathy with the great Lord Salisbury's view that it was difficult enough to go about doing right without going about

Native and Nonnative Judgments of Intelligibility and Irritation

This study compares the reactions of native English speakers and native Spanish speakers who listened to tapes of Puerto Rican learners of English of various levels of proficiency. The listeners completed a questionnaire that examines the following variables: intelligibility, grammar, pronunciation, intonation, wrong words, voice, hesitations, distraction and annoyance. It was found that the English and Spanish listeners differed principally in how they rated the linguistic form of the speakers and in the annoyance reported. The Spanish listeners rated the linguistic form much lower than did the English listeners and also reported more annoyance. This indicates that the Spanish listeners were less tolerant toward nonnative speech than were the English listeners. In addition, pronunciation and hesitations were reported by both groups of listeners to be, overall, the features most distracting from the message.

The failure of repressive monetarism: Chile, 1973–83

(1984). The failure of repressive monetarism: Chile, 1973–83. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 310-326.

Of Nakedness and Children's Books

Of Nakedness and Children's Books Perry Nodelman In Ways of Seeing, John Berger modestly quotes a conventionally-minded art professor's huffy comment about how "John Berger manages to interpose himself . . . between us and the visible meaning of a good picture" (107). Berger proves to my satifaction that the professor is wrong about the painting in question; but the professor is right about Berger. After reading Berger's discussions of pictures, I can't see them the way I did before. And while I don't particularly like seeing the aspects of pictures that Berger points out to me, I believe that they are there to see, and that being able to see them is important. Pictures are things to look at, whenever we feel like looking at them. Looking at them should give us pleasure, and if it doesn't, we have every right to dismiss them. These are truisms; but after reading Berger's Way of Seeing, I find myself unable to take them for granted. Instead, I am tempted to consider the implications of my own language. What if, in these sentences that so accurately describe pictures, I assumed that pictures were people? I would have to conclude that the kind of people they are is the kind called prostitutes. If I did, I would be noticing something interesting about the act of looking at a picture. It is always an act of supremacy-of having power over something. The viewer is always making use of the picture on his own terms and for his own pleasure; the picture is always being used, and it is only satisfactory to a viewer if it gives him what he wants or likes. Those are facts, but not necessarily significant ones; they are equally true of most of the physical objects in our lives. But Berger makes use of these simple facts to develop a persuasive theory of seeing. For people interested in children's picture books, it's particularly significant that Berger's theory begins with the idea that all art is illustration. There is always a vast gulf between what we see and what we can say about what we see: "each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight" (7). Consequently, pictures, which are records of what people see or have seen, always make sense only in terms of the words used to explain them. In this way, all pictures demand and depend on words-the words of their names or their captions, the words the artist used as he tried to formulate his theory of art, the words evoked by conventional images like death's heads and naked little boys with wings. Berger's fear is that we often attach the wrong words to pictures, particularly pictures from other periods: If we "saw" the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms (11). As this quotation makes clear, Berger's position is radically political; he wants to make us see implications of pictures that we would otherwise take for granted, lest they co-opt our values and attitudes without our even being conscious that they are doing so. To be conscious of those meanings is to be radicalized in the truest sense of the word-to recognize how ideas and values that we might prefer to despise become rooted in our unconscious. The best example of the insidious means by which pictures communicate attitudes we might not want to share is Berger's discussion of the sort of [End Page 25] traditional European painting that we think of as being realistic. This sort of realism assumes that reality is what one can see from one fixed point in space...

Frequency judgments by young and elderly adults for relevant stimuli with simultaneously present irrelevant stimuli.

Young and elderly adults judged the frequency of occurrence of right words (relevant information) and wrong words (irrelevant information) that had varying numbers of exposure in a multiple-item recognition learning study list. Elderly adults gave lower frequency values to right words than did young adults but only when each right word was accompanied by more than one wrong word in the study list. This outcome was attributed to an age difference in the distractability created by the presence of irrelevant sources of information. By contrast no age difference was found for the frequency judgments given to wrong words, words that presumably are processed at a superficial level by elderly adults as well as young adults.

Using Problem-Solving Procedures and Process Analysis to Help Students with Writing Problems

Simple inquiry in most any writing class turns up this fact: after years of having their writings corrected and criticized by English teachers, most students cannot state in any precise and useful way just what their own writing problems are. They have had specific pointed out to them, and they have made sweeping generalizations (e.g., I can't punctuate or I use 'wrong words' or even I can't write); but they cannot say, I don't know how to use commas with conjunctions or I tend to choose oversimplified theses. It is, however, these middle-level generalizations which are often the key to devising solutions. Thus we are reminded of one of the most important implications of Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations: it is not enough to point out particular errors in students' writing; one must also help students generalize effectively (thereby reducing a multitude of errors to a manageable number of problems), devise or help them devise strategies for overcoming the problems, and help them incorporate those strategies into their writing processes. Proper and precise problem-definition is often a prerequisite to efficient problem-solution. In this article, we will present a set of writing assignments and class activities for helping students to define their own writing problems, set their own goals, and evaluate their own progress. These assignments and activities are based on the following principles:

An engineer's guide to clear language

Obscure language and verbiage can destroy the usefulness of a technical report. A balance is needed between the technical words that tell the facts and the words that explain what the facts mean. Some of the faults to be avoided are using the wrong words, too many words, passive words, and needless words. Examples from technical literature are used.

Personally Speaking: Feminist Critics and the Community of Readers

IN THE SPRING SEMESTER OF 1978 I taught a seminar on contemporary women's fiction to twelve women graduate students. Taught is really the wrong word. Officially, I was responsible for the course, for grades, for leading discussion; actually it was that rare experience, a class that ran itself. This was partly because the students had designed the course-a course in which some of their own unpublished work would be discussed in the same way as already published fiction-and therefore felt responsible for it. But it was also because a real sense of community developed as our established critical methods failed us and we groped towards formulating new ones. The words with which one of the students, Marilyn Johnson, introduced her project for the course suggest the atmosphere that developed:

Dubin's Lives (review)

reviews 175 ing is for him both compulsion and freedom: "One writes with one's desire, and I am not through desiring." The author lives through desires which a text makes partly lucid and partly obscure, requiring finally the organizing skills of a biographer who can read the text of another's self in a way that even the author of that life cannot. By Barthes's implicit definition, each person is a text written partly by the self so that others can read and enjoy. Barthes By Barthes is a text of such pleasure. Rob Wilson University of Hawaii Bernard Malamud, Dubin's Lives. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. 1979. 362 pp. $10.00 I thought biography—the thousands of lives I've read and the few I've written—would make the difference between badly and decently knowing . I thought I would know, at my age, what to do when I had to. So muses William Dubin, the centrepiece of Bernard Malamud's latest novel, Dubin's Lives. It is a bleak yet moving and deeply personal story which expertly blends together several important social themes in modern American life. Its most significant aspect, for the purpose of this review, is that it underlines and focuses sharply on the problems of writing about the lives of other people: biography. William Dubin is a successful biographer in his mid-fifties living in an isolated portion of upstate New York. He started his career writing obituaries. While doing that, he realized a certain deep satisfaction in describing how lives shape themselves. Shortly thereafter he embarked upon a life devoted to writing about the lives of others. He has written successful biographies of Mark Twain, Lincoln and Thoreau and is now working on a life of D. H. Lawrence—a subject he grapples with painfully. Dubin is evermindful of the vicarious nature of his craft: "One writes lives he can't live." But Lawrence seems to be a little too much; Dubin becomes unhinged. At one point, the biographer explains: "When you write a biography you want to write about people who will make you strain to understand them." But the strain of this particular subject becomes all too much for Dubin to bear. In fact, the ghost of D. H. Lawrence haunts the novel. Dubin's Lives is punctuated by numerous reflections on the art of biography. Malamud tells us that Dubin may have "taken to writing 176 biography Vol. 3, No. 2 lives in part to teach himself what others saw better." But Dubin, even after his successes, maintains a skeptical stance towards the didactic possiblities of his trade. He compares biography to "chasing a runner you would never catch up with." But the game is, I suppose, to make the reader think that's exactly what you have done, and maybe in a blaze of illumination even have outdistanced him. It's an illusory farce that holds me by the tail. The central theme of the novel revolves around the biographer's epic, but confusingly subliminal, confrontation with his subject, D. H. Lawrence. It is a complicated affair, but strangely illumined by a series of personal mid-life crises. Dubin suffers intermittently from severe depression and writer's block. And while writer's block is hardly the stuff of great fictional situations, Malamud's graphic description of the painful inertia which strikes Dubin is both realistic and compelling—especially when it drives him close to the borderline of sanity: He worked without energy but feared not working. He labored, striving not to forget. He must hold on to the facts and to language. He must keep the right thing in the right place. The facts could be preserved by often studying his note cards, thousands of them. My notes are good he muttered. I must go on stringing sentences. IfI put them together in the right order I can rewrite later, when I feel myself; make what I've written come to life. Breathe into dead words. But the wrong words were coming too often. When he tried to think of a distinctive synonym of a noun or verb he was down to a rare one or two...

CORRECTION

<h3>Wrong Word Used.—</h3> In the article titled "On Myths and Countermyths," published in the FebruaryArchives(36:139-144, 1979) an error occurred in the use of the term "barbiturate abuser" which appears in the left-hand column, second to the last paragraph, last sentence, page 143. It should read as follows: Anyone who has administered naloxone hydrochloride (Narcan) to a delirious opioid abuser knows the emptiness of this fallacy.

Bartholmew Fair by Ben Jonson

reference, Reibetanz would have done better to stick to his comment that King Lear “decimates attempts at reduction” (p. 119). The solecism does not invalidate the intended truth. The questions raised in this book are not intellectually demanding, and they could have been discussed in simple and unpretentious English. But more strenuous attention is needed to follow it than to read, for example, Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of Kant. This is because Reibetanz sometimes writes in a jargon in which abstraction is piled on abstraction until the mind boggles: Shakespeare has indeed presented us in this play with a great stage of fools. His moriae encomium complements the play’s affinity to a tradition of morally polarized characters, and reinforces its effect by defining that opposition from another perspective, (p. 107) In this welter of abstractions the little word “its” seems lost; does it refer to “encomium,” to “affinity,” or to “tradition” ? The text is also liberally sprin­ kled with Latinisms, many of them unnecessary, like “ab ovo,” “sui generis,” “reductio,” so that one is tempted to exclaim with Dull: “ ’Twas not a hand credo, ’twas a pricket.” The general rule of contemporary academic prose seems to be to prefer the recondite to the familiar, the abstract to the con­ crete, the foreign word to the English, the specialist term to the common expression. It is a pity that a book which places Shakespeare’s play in the context of the dramatic art of its time, and which offers a number of valuable insights, should have been partly written in this style. Ge o ffrey durrant / University of British Columbia Ben Jonson, Bartholmew Fair, ed. G. R. Hibbard (London: Ernest Benn; New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). xxvi, 180 This is a particularly welcome edition of a famous, wonderful play by the man who is surely the best living scholar in Canada of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. We have already benefited greatly from his several volumes in the New Penguin Shakespeare, including Coriolanus, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merry Wives, the introductions to which plays are among the very best. That Hibbard’s Bartholmew Fair not only is superior to most other New Mermaids, but is also one of the best editions of a Jonson play in any series is therefore not surprising. Moreover, it is fitting that this play should have been edited by a scholar in Canada, for in recent years Canadians have made it very much their play: William Blissett, Guy Hamel, Joel Kap­ lan, and R. Brian Parker have all written excellent essays on it, duly listed under “Further Reading” in Hibbard’s edition. 364 Because we know that Jonson normally took great care in the publication of his works, most of them present editors with relatively few problems. But the original version of Bartholmew Fair is a messy text, full of errors, many of them obvious misprints, but others of them puzzling. There are missing words, obviously wrong words, probably missing lines, and the printer almost totally ignored Jonson’s own careful punctuation, substituting his own in erratic fashion, often careless of whether a full-stop or comma was required. Even in a modernized text, an editor of Jonson will usually want to retain most of Jonson’s punctuation, but in the case of Bartholmew Fair he must strictly provide his own. Hibbard of course benefited a great deal from the editions by Herford and Simpson, E. A. Horsman in the Revels Plays, and Eugene Waith in the Yale Ben Jonson. But his text at a fair number of points differs from them, and usually convincingly. At several points Hibbard’s text improves upon Horsman’s, while for other passages the two texts provide interesting alternative possibilities as to what Jonson actually wrote. At ii.ii.no, Hibbard emends Folio’s “winne out wonders” (followed except for modernizing by Horsman) to “wind out wonders,” and tells us in his note that while no sensible parallel for “win out” has been found, “wind out,” a hunting term, suits a play rich in animal and other hunting imagery. More daring but less persuasive is his emendation at m.v.21 from “a young pimp...

Nature Poem: Demanding Stiff Sentences, and: Riven Doggeries

28 THEMISSOURIREVIEW NATURE POEM: DEMANDING STIFF SENTENCES / James Tate We wanted something: a nude instance of gaga, a tern in a sunken hammock, anecdotes that end with angry pigeons, pinnocle won. Should think profound— profound was the wrong word. We won't get anything so don't expect anything, a babe in the mouth and knees sacked dandling the natal muse, the hysterical victim's bouquet in Springtime. But we wanted somthing more than a fire's embrace and a worker's trance. We wanted one wail that would benefit the whole adventure or a last nickle to call home and thank ma. Geography, now there's a short street— the buildings, the great outdoors (which remain just that) flirtatious as blood-donors— why, I don't know—who sleep by the fountain in the shade of the palm. They didn't know the first thing about fishing, which was their lifelong ambition. Rivers, like churches full of bawdy ballads, the keen sloth greeted by scrappy doves raving in the sky. And fish, the furniture of fish, talked back. Typos in a U-boat, we were all members of Nature's alphabet. But we wanted more. James Tate 29 RIVEN DOGGERIES / James Tate A miserable day, his dog had leapt from the window The dog had leapt from my seventh story apartment into a Police helicopter that had been hijacked by some well-meaning murderers. But it was for dogs they entertained no mercy. And that afternoon, late, after a cold shower I went for a ride in our elevator, an immaculate dive, home of the lost soul and once third base to late working things. My animal has sunk he doesn't exist he won't come back. The ideal pet, however, is unrecognizable when it arrives in the river awash in the land afar. ...

De Spraak- en Taalgestoorde Mens

Confrontation with deviant, unexpected behavior often leads to uneasiness, uncertainty and fear, and, finally, to discrimination. People with speech defects or language disturbances are different because they sound different; they can even sound slightly frightening sometimes, but they are completely harmless and certainly not half-witted. This paper presents some general advice and some specific recommendations for encounters with those people. Generally: focus on the content of the conversation and try to forget what is wrong with the presentation; never raise your voice unnaturally; do not simulate understanding; if you want to help in cases of misunderstanding, paraphrase in simple words and short sentences what you think your partner intends to say; as far as your own speech is concerned, speak slowly and simply and do not overarticulate; finally, use of mimics, pantomime, gestures and the like is helpful. Specifically: aphasies all have word-finding difficulties and often use the wrong word. Some of them (Wernicke a.) have more speech and language fluency, others (Broca a.) have less, but this does not correlate with their capacity for understanding language. They can be emotionally disturbed, and they all need social communication. People who are hard of hearing obtain their language in-formation from both their ears and their eyes, through lip-reading, Make sure your mouth is clearly visible; avoid background noise, and keep your head still. With the deaf, misunderstandings are sometimes unavoidable: let your deaf part-ner handle such instances, for he has the experience. Be aware of the language disturbance (mostly syntactic) that can occur besides the poor speech. Finally: do not begrudge the deaf their own manual communication (if they want to use it) among themselves.

The ‘Indianization’ of Southeast Asia: Reflections on the Historical Sources

From about the second century onwards, principalities (“empires” is probably the wrong word in all the earlier cases) began to appear in Southeast Asia, first along the isthmus of the Malay Peninsula, round the coast of the Gulf of Siam and of the southern part of Vietnam, later in the archipelago and eventually spreading throughout the area now known as Southeast Asia except for the north of Vietnam and parts of the archipelago in the east. These principalities are assigned to the historical record by inscriptions using Indian languages and scripts, stone remains attesting Hindu and Buddhist cults, and foreign accounts, mostly Chinese, indicating various features of Indian culture. Two of the questions which underlie historical studies of this evidence are: how did Indian influence spread through Southeast Asia? and, how far did Indian influence dominate Southeast Asia? In principle, these questions may be answered independently of each other, the first being chiefly concerned with the “Indianization I” discussed in an earlier article, the second with “Indianization II”. Attention will be directed here chiefly to the first, and to the second primarily only to the extent that is entailed by examination of the first. Various conflicting views have been advanced by historians; the purpose here is to suggest that, in the absence of convincing evidence for any one of them, an eclectic interpretation is not only legitimate but cogent.

Effects of high intensity white noise on short-term memory for position in a list and sequence.

Seven experiments are described investigating the effect of high intensity white noise during the visual presentation of words on a number of short-term memory tasks. The findings were: 1. In a free recall task recall of items decreased at the highest intensity used (85 dB) compared with a quiet and a 75 dB condition. 2. In free recall, recall by category decreased and recall in the original sequence increased in the 75 dB compared with the other two conditions. 3. Recall of the position of words in the list increased as noise intensity increased, but only when the learning of position was incidental, not when it was intentional. It is inferred that the effect is due to direction of attention or change in the learning strategy. 4. Recall of the original sequence (as shown by the ability to give in response to a word from a list the word which had followed it in the original list) was superior in the 75 dB compared with the other two conditions, but only when recall of the second word was required, not when it had to be recognized among all the items from the original list. It is argued that this can be explained if noise intensity affects the strength of traces and hence the interconnexions established between them, on which retrieval depends. The results for position learning are compatible with the theories of Hockey & Hamilton (1970) or Dornic (1973), but the results for sequence learning cannot be explained by either of these theories. A final experiment confirmed a prediction from the above theory that when recalling the original sequence, omissions (recalling no word) will decrease and transpositions (giving the wrong word) will increase as noise level increases.

Will you be sued this year? the legal aspects of public relations

AbstractLaws and regulations affecting the public relations function must be adhered to if legal entanglement due to wrong words or pictures is to be avoided.

Crichton's Criticisms

To the Editor.— A recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (293:1257, 1975) published Michael Crichton's criticisms of attempts at report writing by medical scientists— poor flow of ideas, verbiage, redundancy, repetition, wrong words, poor syntax, excessive abstraction, unnecessary complexity, excessive compression, unnecessary qualification. Readers who do not have access to The New England Journal of Medicine will find an abstract of Crichton's article in the Jan 12, 1976, issue of Time . From what I read in medical journals and from what I see from time to time in your editorial pages, I believe that Crichton's criticisms are justified. As far as I know, Crichton, although he holds an MD degree from Harvard, does not practice medicine nor does he usually write articles for medical journals. He is a highly successful, talented novelist. Would he be equally successful at writing a medical case report? I wager that he

Wrong word too early

Invertebrate Endocrinology and Hormonal Heterophylly. Edited by Walter J. Burdette. Pp. xviii + 438. (Springer: Berlin and New York, 1974.) $21.50.