Don’t water down your ideas, lift them up

Nobody likes watery soup.  Or coffee.  Or hot chocolate.  And it’s probably safe to say that nobody likes a watery learning opportunity.  Or art.  Or writing.

But is it possible to make your teaching, art, writing, communication (you name it!) accessible and clear to people without watering down?  If watering down ideas is something we generally want to avoid, how do we do that while also making things within reach.

Enter the metaphor ‘lifting up.’

But before we go there, what do I mean by ‘watering down’?

This is the practice of infusing so much of what’s not essential to your idea/message/content, with the intent of making it attainable, that the thing itself is really basic, not nuanced, or even unpalatable.  Add too much water, and there is no taste.

With ‘lifting up,’ you focus on your idea and then elevate it with just enough data or details to make it accessible. 

You buoy your idea/message/content with enough support for people to see it clearly among the waves.  The ideas, or whatever your key points are, need some details to make them understandable and to instill the trust of your audience.  The details shouldn’t overtake – you still want to see that main analysis or key point – but rather they should lift up. 

How do you know what kinds of details, or how many, to include to illuminate those main points?  This is where it’s helpful to think about your audience and where they are in their learning or experience with the topic.  What would help to make the main ideas most accessible to these particular people?  If your audience is early in their experience with the topic, too many details will get in the way or bog things down.  If they are seasoned, not enough details will not stretch their learning.  I’ve written more about this here.

Providing details can also instill trust.  It’s one thing to make a statement about your topic, but including details – data, definitions, stories, experiences, etc. – will help exemplify what you mean and that your analysis is grounded.  You aren’t just randomly stating things; your ideas are substantiated with information.

What can this look like? 

Here’s an example from my PhD study.

My dissertation was a study of performance methodology.  I was theorizing the ways that theatre/performance artists – actors, playwrights, directors and others – use their bodies and/or embodied experiences, including social and cultural location, as a large part of interpreting, analysing, and representing or expressing in time and space, in relationship to other people’s experiences whose stories are the basis for the performance.  

For those of you who are artists or involved in performance, you might read this and think “uh, YA, what ELSE would we be doing??”  But I was aiming to theorize this for a specific audience – for folks in the social and health sciences who understand and engage in research in very different ways.  You can find the outputs from this study (eg, the published articles), here, here, and here.*  

As my example, I’m going to take one concept from my study called foolish disrupting.

When performance artists are aiming to analyze and interpret their character’s experiences (based on a real person) they need to foolishly disrupt themselves.  As part of performing someone else’s experience, a performance artist has to physically and emotionally “try out” or experiment as part of their analysis of that other person’s experience; this requires a parallel analysis of their own experiences and body as well.  As they experiment, they’re probably going to look and feel a bit silly and they may even get it wrong; but they have to do it anyway.  Being wrong (or likely being wrong) is an important part of creatively analysing and helps to better understand because you’ll learn something.

What do I mean by “trying out” that other person/character’s experience?  Let’s look at an actor’s work – actors use their bodies and their voices as their “tools.”  Their work is literally to move their bodies and speak, to enact, as part of analysing and telling a story.  When analysing and interpreting, actors will do oodles of research (talking to people, reading, etc), but they also have to experiment with their bodies. Just try or do things.  In rehearsal they might try out different postures, change their breathing and their voice based on their imagined understanding of the research about that person/character – by doing this, they are also disrupting their own embodied way of being in the world.  This means the actor needs to be pretty brave and willing to be very vulnerable as this work can be disorienting.

Here’s something more specific.  Let’s pretend I’m an actor.  I may be a middle-class middle aged woman in the early 21st century living in Toronto, but my character is based on a real person, a poor, middle-aged woman living in Communist/Post-WWII Hungary.  I’ll do research about that time and place historically (etc), talk to people who lived in Hungary in the mid-20th century and pay attention to their emotions and words as they share their stories, among other research.  But at some point I will have to experiment with putting those ideas into my body. I’ll try walking, sitting, changing my posture and the way I speak.  It might be a bit awkward, and I’m probably going to look, feel and sound a bit ridiculous at first.  But I’m going to have to do it anyway, and foolishly disrupt my own body as part of my work.

Of course, I share this about foolish disrupting to help think through the main point of this post.

How to ‘lift up’ ideas rather than water down.  How to provide enough details to support my main idea to both clarify that idea, but also instill trust.  

With my PhD study example, I’ve tried to keep you, my audience, in mind.  I’m assuming an intelligent, creative, non-academic, professional audience, with a wide range of understandings of the arts and arts processes.  And I’ve chosen my language and details accordingly.  I’ve also considered the form – this is a blog post, not a long form magazine article or an academic publication.

If you compare what I’ve written in this post with my academic articles, you’ll see I have assumed different audiences.  With my academic articles, I was assuming an academic audience from the social sciences, and even the health sciences, who traditionally work predominantly with text, language, writing, and even sometimes numbers.

I’ve tried to include just enough information or details to lift up the main idea of foolish disrupting.  I’ve included some thinking and definition around this concept, and I’ve also provided one concrete example of what foolish disrupting can look like by highlighting differences and similarities between my own social and cultural location, with that of a fictional character who lived a very different life.

Was it enough? Too much? What do you think?

*If you have trouble accessing these articles, drop me an email! I’ll help you out. julia@thejuliagray.ca