Week 3

I really enjoyed Robinson’s TEDTalk.  In the beginning he stated that many people are accused of ‘making poor use of their talents’ and ‘don’t believe that they are good at anything.’  I can relate to the whole not being good at anything, as I’m sure a lot of people can.  I have never believed that I am good at any one thing in particular. Instead, I consider myself to be average or below average in most things.  Math and science have always been two subjects that I’ve never enjoyed nor completely understood, making me less than average at both and I don’t see any reason to better the statuses at this point.  Writing and reading, however, are completely different for me.  I have always loved writing stories about my friends and past experiences, and reading is one of my favorite pastimes. Would I say I excel at these? No.  But do I enjoy them? Well, for the most part, yes!

Robinson said that the people who are most happy with their careers are the ones who do not look at their jobs as jobs, but as piece of “who they are.”  We all know that unless an author writes a best-seller, there’s not a whole lot of profit in an English/Writing major’s future.  But, there is the importance of being happy with going to work each day.  And I know for a fact that if I had to crunch numbers  for the rest of my life, day after day, hour after hour, I’d be one miserable person to be around.

Another important topic in this week’s reading and videos was the issue of presenting information to an audience in a useful and effective manner using presentation of fonts, punctuation, and imagery.  In Goetz’s Talk, he discussed his research on making medical data make sense to patients – whooda thunk! – Taking the information and color-coding it good, bad, and borderline should not have taken as long as it did because so many things in the world are categorized according to color to represent data.  But the reason it took so long also makes sense, according to Godin, because the data wasn’t broken for the doctors who were using it for patient testing and were then translating it to their patients.

                All of this started to make me thinking about all of the advertisements about avoiding drinking and driving.  Fonts, which make statements in all pieces of writing,help attract different audiences and reader attention, along with images that are sometimes placed next to the words. Anyways, these advertisements are meant to encourage drinkers to either designate a driver or find other means of transportation home.  Recently, I saw a bumper sticker that looked like this:

First off, the font does not come across as to be taken seriously, nor does he image of the penguin with the devil horns??  Everyone KNOWS drinking and driving is unsafe and should be avoided, but the seriousness of the action is not always portrayed in a serious manner in stickers like this or even on commercials (I’m thinking of the one where the guy calls his friend for a ride…which turns out to be a horse?).  And secondly, do either the bumper sticker or the cute commercial present the issue in as serious a manner as law enforcement and other officials wish it to be taken? Would stronger fonts and presentations make the audience more aware of the consequences?