Three Languages Separate Good Ideas
When I finished explaining the syllabus and the progression of the assignments in the writing course, a student raised his hand and asked, “So basically, we’re creating a marketing campaign?”
I told him I find that definition too limiting.
It’s easy to put something into a broad category like “marketing.” Anything placed into an advertising box could easily fit into a box labeled “knowledge” or “learning” or “art” too, yet each label puts a different spin on the contents.
Marketing makes people think of “business” and “money” and—unfortunately for marketers—it paints the contents of the box as a product with a price tag. For many people, there is an air of selling, which quickly jumps to hyping, which easily leads to the dishonest con or the inauthentic “sell out.”
Yet everything is advertising. Everything we do is an evolution of ideas. Each and every one of those ideas—your alarm clock, your toothbrush, your frying pan, your car—only succeeded and became part of our daily lives through successful sharing, which means some form of promotion had to occur.
One could reach a negative opinion of the contents of my course just as quickly with a label like “creative.” If the lessons of my course revolve around “voice” and “writing,” just as many people will distrust the subjectivity and risk of the art and entertainment worlds. Then my “Wall Street” course easily becomes a “Hollywood” seminar.
Even the words “knowledge” and “learning” and “research” lead too rapidly to university stereotypes. The academic world and its elites and ivory towers and confusing study results also make certain eyes roll.
Yet creativity and research are as significant to ideas as advertising and funding.
When I went to college, I wanted to understand all the parts of ideas. NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts accepted my application, but I quickly went to their equally recognized Stern School of Business and asked if I could double major.
Neither program would allow it. Interdisciplinary thinking was young and both schools only had an arched eyebrow for the other back then.
A typical undergraduate major requires 30+ credits in the discipline. Stern said I could get a minor in general business if I completed 40 credits. I planned out all eight of my semesters before I finished the first and completed all the Stern credits and all the Tisch credits in four years. Statistics and Calculus almost finished me.
As a result, I’ve always thought of Wall Street and Hollywood and NYU as parts of the same engine—investment, imagination, and investigation—and that each loses their way when they forget the other two. Imagination needs the soberness of funding and research. Investment needs the purpose of knowledge and ingenuity. Investigation needs the bearing of the wallet and the heart.
When I teach writing, all three worlds easily inform the three parts of rhetoric. There’s the passion of art, the credibility of inquiry, and the logic of commerce: pathos, ethos, and logos. Our most noble and nuanced efforts require all three, so I’ve worked hard to combine their metaphors, meld their jargon, and remove their stereotypes.
Is The Interactive Voice a marketing course? Only if you consider the books of Virginia Woolf, or the speeches of Dr. King, or the papers of Albert Einstein, or the documents of the American founders… marketing.
I consider all of them promotion and exploration and innovation.
I consider them good writing.