2019 Creating a Demonstration Presentation

Creating a Demonstration Presentation

2019, Steven B. Zwickel

• Purpose 

Demonstrations may have one or more purposes. Some are strictly informative, while others are intended to persuade the audience to follow a particular course of action.

Instructive demonstrations teach the audience how to do something. Teaching means giving student not only instruction, but the ability to think critically about what they are observing. Professional educators know how to prepare lessons so that the audience can become competent at performing a task or running a process. Instructive demonstrations often include extensive explanations of the theory behind the activity. Examples include teaching students how to solve a math problem or training people to craft something.

Justification demonstrations help the audience understand why something is being done. It establishes the rationale for acting and demonstrates the reasons behind the activity. Examples might include a dentist explaining to a patient why a root canal is necessary or demonstrating different conditions that require testing water for contaminants.

Process demonstrations show how something is done. These are usually not activities that the audience members would engage in themselves, but about which they can learn. Process demonstrations may include explanations of the theory behind the activity. Examples would be an engineer describing how a nuclear power plant works or a demonstration of how they make baseballs.

Plan a demonstration with your purpose in mind. What do you want the audience to know or do when your demonstration is over?

︎✔︎Organize information so it explains the process clearly and concisely. Think in terms of a chronological or step-by-step method of development.

✔ As you go through your demonstration, teach your audience how to recognize and to analyze materials and outcomes for their merits and faults.

✔Assuming that there are options, tell your audience about different choices of materials, processes, and tools. Explain the differences so they can understand why you make the choices you make.

✔Alert your audience to any foreseeable problems and safety issues they may need to recognize.

• Outcomes

The most important outcome of a demonstration is understanding. A good demonstration is more than just giving instructions; it helps the audience understand:

✔How the thing is done

✔Why it is done

✔What makes it good or bad

✔Potential problems

• Explaining “Why?” Don’t assume that the reason for doing something is obvious to all. In some parts of the world, people don’t expect to be given the reasons for doing something, but Americans almost always expect you to tell them why. Giving them a reason "Because…" can be a powerful, persuasive way of convincing your audience to accept your ideas. Keep your explanations simple, but don’t insult audience’s intelligence. If you can’t explain why something is being done, you probably should not be doing a demonstration.

• Before you begin: PreparationThink your way through the demonstration first. This can be complicated if you’ve done it so many times you no longer need to think about doing it. For example, if you make coffee every morning, pretty soon you do it automatically, without thinking. The poorest demonstrations are those that are done on the fly, with little thought.

• Organizing a Demonstration: Start with an explanation of what you are demonstrating and why it matters. You can’t assume the audience knows this. The body should be a Step-by-step Process, followed by a conclusion in which you show how it turns out and discuss any alternatives.

• Creating a demonstration

1. List of materials needed for the process. Describe different options. Giving people choices makes them feel more empowered. 

2. List of tools needed and explain what these are used for, where to get them, and what options are available

3. List and define technical terms can be a useful handout to go with the demonstration.

4. Divide process into steps Number steps and illustrate each step during the demonstration. Too many steps will lead to confusion. If you have too many steps, sort them into logical groups to keep it simple.

5. Set criteria for evaluating results Alert audience to things that can go wrong. Discuss troubleshooting and focus on safety issues

6. Choose a mode for your demo 

✔ Live demo (watch me do it)

✔ Video (stop and start if needed). Good video needs storyboards, script, editing.

✔ Illustrated instruction manual should have lots of pictures. Have someone take photos (lots) as you go through the demonstration. Edit and label these for use in the manual.

✔ Handouts (go with a live demo or video).

✔ Workshop (do the demo and have the audience do it along with you).

Problems demonstrating software: 

✔ active window has unfamiliar icons and tiny text

✔ changes are not always obvious

✔ referring to online instructions means switching windows back and forth

Solutions: 

✔ Take screenshot, drop into PowerPoint slide and enlarge toolbar 

✔ Add clear, large labels to icons: Name the tools you are using and define terms clearly

✔  Be consistent with terminology 

✔  Pause between steps (don’t rush!)

✔  Point and move cursor deliberately è don’t wave it around

✔  Print out instructions and distribute as handout so you don’t have to keep switching windows.

7. Creating a “Ta-da Voila!” Watch cooking shows and you’ll notice the chef prepare the dish, place it in the oven, and, without waiting, pull out a completely cooked dish. This is the “Ta-da Voila!”—showing what the food should look like if all the steps are followed correctly. In just about any kind of demonstration it’s good to show the audience what the completed product looks like.

The Ta-da Voila also gives you some protection from Murphy’s Law (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong), because even if your demonstration fails, you will be able to show the audience what would have happened had everything gone well.

Summary

Demonstrations should explain:

✔ How something is done

✔ Why it is done that way (how much theory depends on the audience)

✔ What options (if any) are available 

✔ How to tell if the result is good or not

✔ Problems that may arise and how to solve them

2019 A Communication-Based Model of Leadership

A Communication-Based Model of Leadership

2019, Steven B. Zwickel

I have in mind a model of leadership that emphasizes the importance of communications. I define leadership as the ability to get people to participate in a journey from the way things are to the way they could and ought to be^[1]. The essential elements of this ability are:

• Profound understanding of how things work

• Clear vision of what is possible

• Capable of devising a plan

• Desire to make transition happen

• Ability to communicate vision to others in such a way that they want to go there.

Let me expand on each of these points to explain my theory.

Profound understanding of how things work

Leadership is impossible when those in charge don’t understand how the system works. Organizations don’t exist in a vacuum, so this understanding must extend beyond the boundaries of the organization: a real leader understands both how the organization works and how it interacts with its environment. This understanding of how things get done, of how decisions are made, and of how people come to accept policies is essential. [Albert Einstein^[2]]

Some of it can be learned from reading and study, but a real leader must go beyond book-knowledge to a much deeper, more intuitive understanding of the system. You can read books about how things are done—it’s only smart to understand the “official version” before you can see the unofficial one. A leader must be aware of how both official and unofficial channels work. Being “in the loop” and tuned into the grapevine are as important as reading the memos and reports that constitute the official version of events.

Real leaders learn the rules of the game and they also understand how and when those rules can be broken. [Be Leaderly]

This is where the debate over whether leaders are made or born begins. Some people, it seems, have an innate sense of how systems function. They can look at an organization and intuit how the people and institutions interact. This is part of the gift of “natural-born” leaders and it is the part that most of the rest of us have the most trouble with. 

If you don’t have the intuitive gift, this aspect of leadership means doing research, studying organizational behavior, and listening to how people describe what they do and how they do it.

The mentor can guide, lead, make connections, and give advice, which is why mentoring can be crucial in the development of a leader. A good mentor can help a novice see things that are invisible to the outsider. In law enforcement, a senior officer who acts as a mentor or as someone you can go to for reliable and confidential advice is called a “rabbi.” In American English, a mentor might be called a “guru” or a “career coach.”

Two other roles a mentor can play are storehouse and clearinghouse. A mentor who has been part of an organization accumulates knowledge over the years, like a storehouse of information. Organizations that have a high turnover of personnel can lose all this knowledge and expertise, resulting in employees wasting a lot of time and energy trying to solve problems that have already been solved (or which experience has shown can’t be solved).

A clearinghouse is a place that stores and distributes information, like a well-staffed library. The term is often used to describe a person or organization you can contact to find out where you can get more information. A mentor can act like a clearinghouse, directing others to resources that can help them solve problems.

Clear vision of what is possible

From one’s understanding of the way things are, a real leader can postulate a vision of the way things can be. A real leader can extrapolate from what is to see where the organization will be unless something happens to change direction. A leader who does not have a vision—a view of what could be—is probably just greedy for power.

This is where we separate the dreamers from those who merely want power. There is a time to take action and a time to remain passive. Some overpaid corporate executives feel a need to “do something” even when there is no real reason to do anything (as though they need to be seen to act to justify their bloated paychecks!). 

It is, however, foolish to re-direct the efforts of a successful organization simply for the sake of change. Evidence of this can be found in the bad decisions made by some companies in recent years to enter unsuitable markets or to introduce products for which there is no market.

Many people in leadership positions choose to “stay the course”—to keep the organization on the same track it has been on. This non-strategy is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can leave an organization far behind if management is not vigilant and attuned to changes in the environment. 

Some managers yield to the temptation to let things go on as they have always been because it is easier than making changes and it minimizes the possibility of making mistakes. 

Other managers make changes just to see what their subordinates can do. It’s easier for them to take a risk if they don’t have to face the consequences. Recent history is full of examples of CEOs who made illegal, unethical, egregious decisions and were able to avoid the consequences of their decisions.

Making changes is stressful for the people involved and for the organization as a whole. Some argue that change is inevitable and that workers should stop complaining. But it isn’t hard to find many cases where changes were made for no logical reason and the results were bad for business and bad for morale. Of course, organizations need to change and adapt to survive, but change for the sake of change is a sign of a lack of real leadership. 

Capable of devising a plan 

Having a clear idea of what can be done is worthless if you can’t figure out how to make your dream a reality. A good leader understands how to get from here to there and can plan a course of action. 

There are a differences in leader’s planning styles. Some are “Big Picture” people who come up with grand strategies. They focus on long-range goals and deal with obstacles and setbacks as they come along. Other leaders are “Detail-oriented” and try to plot every move in advance and worry over small details. A leader who spends too much time focused on details is headed for trouble. The problem is micro-managing, which wastes time and keeps subordinates from getting their jobs done.

Good leaders can do both—come up with a grand vision while keeping a not-too-intrusive eye on day-to-day progress. They are focused on their goals and avoid getting sidetracked or distracted. And, they are flexible, not so tied to their original strategy that they are unwilling to adjust their course if necessary. Flexibility is not the same as selling out or giving up on one’s principles. Being able to change course gives a leader far more options and opportunities.^[3]

Desire to make transition happen

Self-motivation is what propels a good leader. It can be based on personal ambition or a quest for power, but to make a dream a reality, a leader has to believe in the goal and have a burning desire to make the plan a reality. That motivation has to be strong enough to overcome any reservations the leader may have. If it is not, the leader will give up at the first sign of difficulty.

Taking on any new challenge is risky, so a good leader has to have dedication—a commitment to follow through with tenacity, even if the odds of success are not good.

This dedication, plus a belief in the plan and the goal, will generate the energy necessary to make change happen.

Which doesn’t mean leaders can’t have doubts; they can and should. But once they persuade themselves of the value of what they are doing, good leaders try not to get discouraged. They keep going in spite of adversity. 

The old saying goes “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” There are times, however, when a good leader knows that any further effort is futile and that quitting makes sense. It’s a shame when a leader can’t give up on a losing plan, so they continue to pour time, money, and energy into a losing cause to no purpose.

Ability to communicate vision to others 

The heart of good leadership is being able to get others to go along with your plan. A good leader can explain, in language people can understand, what he or she is trying to do and why. With carefully chosen words, a good leader can motivate people and persuade them to go along with the plan.^[4]

This kind of persuasive speaking and writing is essential to being a good leader. It helps people see benefits of following the leader, it uses both Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivators. It appeals to logic and emotion. 

It can’t happen if the leader isn’t seen as credible. 

The leader doesn’t need to know all the answers, but he or she should be able to recognize and respond to people’s needs, fears, and values. It doesn’t pander We use the term demagogue to describe a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

And that’s how you get people to go along with you from Where we are now to Where we could be!

^[1] Successful leaders know how to define their mission, convey it to their subordinates and ensure they have the right tools and training needed to get the job done, according to Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State, speaking at Stanford University, November 1, 2005.

^[2] “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else”. Not said by Albert Einstein

^[3] Effective leaders are made, not born, Powell said. They learn from trial and error, and from experience. When something fails, a true leader learns from the experience and puts it behind him. “You don't get reruns in life,” he said. "Don't worry about what happened in the past." Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State, speaking at Stanford University, November 1, 2005

^[4] Good leaders also must know how to reward those who succeed and know when to retrain, move, or fire ineffective staff. "When you get all these together the place starts to hum," he said. "You know you're a good leader when people follow you out of curiosity." Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State, speaking at Stanford University, November 1, 2005

2019 Time Management Skills: When Values and Needs are in Conflict

Time Management Skills: When Values and Needs are in Conflict

Steven B. Zwickel, 

August, 1991 (rev'd 2019)

Values

As children, we are given a set of values by the adults in our lives. Our parents (and others) teach us right from wrong, good from bad, and acceptable from unacceptable behavior. This system of beliefs about the way things “should be” becomes part of what is called a person's “values system.”

Values systems are very important:

• They give us a moral basis for our lives;
• They offer us ethical guidance;
• They provide us with a standard for measuring fairness;
• They set expectations on our behavior.

The different value messages we get about time management may include:

• It’s only common courtesy to show up on time
• It’s OK to be late even if you don’t have a valid excuse; people will always wait for you
• It’s never OK to be late
• You must never put off to tomorrow something that you can do today
• Procrastinators are unreliable and rude
• It’s OK not to respond to an invitation; people don’t really expect you to respond and something more exciting might come up if you wait
• Invitations require responses; if you say you will be somewhere and don’t show up, that’s extremely rude
• Most deadlines are merely suggestions

Needs

In addition to a values system, we each have our own set of psychological needs.   Needs are not given to us the way values are; they are part of who we are from the moment we are born—they're part of our biological and psychological anatomy. Some needs, like feeling thirsty or needing sleep, are very basic. others are much more complex, like a need for financial security or a need for personal privacy.

When your values are in conflict with your needs, the result may be a high level of anxiety, confusion, and emotional pain. Once you are aware of a conflict, you will find that there are several ways of resolving it. Working with a competent counselor can help. In fact, psychotherapy is an excellent place in which to attempt to resolve these conflicts. It is also possible for you to work things out for yourself. Here is one example of how such a conflict might be resolved:

A young woman from a highly-educated family was in a quandary. When she came home from college after her Sophomore year, she had a long talk with her mother.

"Mama, I’m doing well in school, but it’s time for me to declare a major subject and I don’t know what to do. I know that you want me to finish college and go into some profession, like law, medicine, or teaching. I also know that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life cooped up indoors. I love being outdoors. I love nature. I don’t know what to do.”

Her mother wisely refrained from arguing with her. Instead, the two of them went through the college catalog until they found an academic field that involved working out-of-doors.

The young woman's values said: “stay in school. Become a professional.” At the same time, she felt a need to work out-of-doors. Luckily, she found a way to resolve this conflict.

How does this relate conflict between needs and values relate to time management? A person who gets anxious before going out in public needs reassurance and may stall until they get it. The same person may value being thought of as considerate and kind: not someone who keeps other people waiting. The conflict for this person is between the need to feel OK before going out and the value placed on being punctual and reliable.

People sometimes use love-relationships as a way of resolving these conflicts between needs and values. They get involved with a person who represents a polar opposite value in order to have a way of working through the conflict.

For example, had the young woman described in this anecdote decided to go into an “indoor profession”, like law or medicine, she might have a found herself in a relationship with a man who worked and recreated outdoors, even if he came from a dissimilar social background. The relationship would provide her with reasons to spend more time outdoors —where she really wanted to be!

The problem with these relationships is that some people use them to get their needs filled without admitting it. So the subconscious message the chronic procrastinator gets is: “She'll keep me on time”. The high-speed Type-A person thinks, “He'll show me how to relax more.” These polar opposites can drive each other nuts!

Opposites Attract

People sometimes find these characterizations of different types of people and how they manage time—the Jets vs. Horse & Buggys, the Dawdlers vs. Scurriers—interesting (and amusing) because they accurately reflect their own families and love-relationships. Yet the potential for serious conflicts is so obvious that it raises the question of why people with opposite styles get into love-relationships with each other.

The answer is that people use their love-relationships as tools for managing their time. To understand the dynamics of these relationships, we need to look for a moment at some of the psychological factors involved. Some people choose a particular lover because they sense that that person can help them resolve some internal conflict.

Take the fellow who is always running late. He doesn't like being late, but he doesn't feel that he can change the way he handles time. When he meets a woman who is always on time (or even a little early) for everything, he finds her very attractive. If they fall in love and want to have a good relationship, how will they reconcile their different styles of handling time? There are any number of possible outcomes:

• They may never resolve their differences. They may fight and argue over who did what, but they never find a solution. Sometimes he will make her late, and sometimes she will force him to be on time.
• They may sit down and try to analyze their behavior—why is he always late? Why does she have a need to be punctual all the time? They may find that the whole question of timeliness is a symptom of more serious problems in their relationship. It may be that they need to work at being more sensitive to each other’s values. Or they may decide that this is not an issue worth fighting about and choose to ignore each other’s style.
• They may actively work to try to change each other—one trying to get the other to be more responsible, while the other is attempting to convince the first to be less compulsive.
• They may reach a compromise agreement to head off future conflicts. Perhaps they will decide that each will be only responsible for getting where she or he needs to be in a timely fashion. Or they may decide that they follow her time-line when going to “her” events and his when going to “his” events.

Where do you go from here?

You talk about the issues raised by the conflict between needs and values. Here are some questions to get the conversation started:

• Do you think a relationship between people with opposite styles of handling time can succeed? Is it a deal-breaker or can you negotiate to find a solution?
• Can you ask your love-partner to help you resolve these conflicts? What if they say no?
• How can you make changes in the way you handle conflict with your love-partner while still showing respect for each others’ feelings? 
• What happens to a relationship where people can't discuss conflicts like this one?

And here are some ideas for solutions (all of these require open and honest discussions):

• Take separate cars: arrive (and leave)  at different times.
• Discuss what needs to be done ahead of time and promise each other to start at a particular time. Promises must be sincere! 
• Determine how much time each of you will need to prepare and respect one another’s different timelines. No sarcasm; no demeaning remarks or put downs.
• Not every job is a rush job. Find a way to weight the items on your to-do lists so the important stuff gets done on time.
• Agree on a list of what needs to be done, deciding who will be responsible for each task and discussing how long you expect each task will take.

Hardball
Beware those who turn a disagreement over how to manage time into something much bigger. They may be playing some kind of psychological “game” to get their needs met at the expense of the relationship. Some issues in resolving these conflicts that may be games are commitment, sincerity, and maturity. 

• People who are truly committed to a relationship will make the effort to find an acceptable compromise. They have insight into their own limitations—what they can and cannot tolerate—and know that not every issue is a deal-breaker. Someone who is not really committed to the relationship will make no effort to find a solution.
• Sincerity is an issue in any situation where people’s self-esteem is on the line. These are called “ego-involvement” issues and they go to the core of a person’s value system. An insincere promise to solve a problem of this type can be seen as a betrayal of trust and end the relationship.
• People who play games instead of trying to solve problems often have maturity issues. Creating an uproar over something trivial, distorting the main issue so that it becomes a metaphor for something unrelated, or using the disagreement to attack the other person identify the way some immature people handle disagreements. A person who says, “That’s it. I’m outta here.” is merely using the disagreement as an excuse for acting-out behavior.

2019 We Could Have Won Moot Court

We Could Have Won Moot Court

Steven B. Zwickel, Esq.

2019

One requirement for completing the program at the law school I attended was mandatory participation in a competition called Moot Court. Working with another law student, we were asked to put together oral arguments supporting a hypothetical legal case. My partner (the wonderfully calm Susan Bergman Addamo) and I did the best that we could, but we never made it past the first round of the competition; we got no feedback and never found out what we should have done better.^[1] 

        This has bothered my for more than 40 years, but now I think I know what we should have done way back when.^[2]

Facts of the case

A man, identified as Plaintiff, happened to witness a horrible automobile accident, in which a person named Victim was mutilated and killed by a car driven by Driver. Plaintiff claimed that, as a result of having seen this terrible sight, Plaintiff suffered from insomnia, flashbacks, emotional turmoil, and other psychological effects. Thus, Plaintiff sued Driver for damages for the negligent infliction of severe emotional distress.

The Law

The case was governed by the law of torts. A tort is what lawyers call a wrongful act that causes someone else to suffer enough of a loss or harm to result in legal liability for the person who commits a tortious act. Examples of torts include assault, battery, causing an injury (deliberately or by negligence), causing financial losses, or invading someone’s privacy.) 

        The Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress is recognized as a tort in New York and it was and is grounds for a legal claim^[3]. However, in New York in 1974, unintentionally inflicting emotional distress was not considered a valid basis for a legal claim. In other words, deliberately scaring someone so that they have a heart attack is a tort, but accidentally frightening the hell out of someone is not.

        In our case, the lower court ruled that New York did not recognize Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress as a tort. That Plaintiff would witness the accident and suffer emotional distress afterwards was deemed “unforeseeable”, so the court ruled in favor of Driver. Plaintiff appealed, and we were supposed to argue Plaintiff’s appeal of the original judgment before the moot court.

Our (faulty) Argument

The best argument we could come up with was that New York should change the law and recognize Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress as a tort. A reckless driver, we said, whose behavior resulted in an accident, should be held liable for all the consequences of that behavior—foreseeable or not. Asking an appeals judge to overturn a longstanding legal principle was a weak argument and we deserved to lose.

How we could have won

Had we followed the progress of psychological medicine in recognizing the aftereffects of witnessing some awful event, we might have come up with better support for our argument.

        The idea that some people have strong, adverse reactions to witnessing horrifying events is not a new one, but for a very long time it was viewed as a “female” problem. For many centuries women were seen as subject to an illness called hysteria, which was characterized by symptoms like crippling anxiety, trouble breathing, fainting, nausea, nervous tics, insomnia, etc. It was believed that the cause of these symptoms lay in the woman’s uterus, thus the term hysteria, from the Greek foruterus. Obviously, men could not suffer from hysteria because they lacked a uterus. 

        In the old days, women were generally regarded as the “weaker” sex, ruled by emotion rather than by reason, and hysteria, also called neurasthenia, was just an extreme expression of typical female traits. 

        Over time, ideas about hysteria began to change; by the 1800s, doctors began see hysteria as a mental, rather than a physical disorder. The minds of women who were hysterical were perceived to be “alienated” from reality and a new medical specialty arose to care for them—the Alienists—the ancestors of today’s psychologists and psychiatrists. Near the end of the 1800s, doctors began to accept the theories of Sigmund Freud, including the idea that hysteria was not physical, but an emotional, internal illness that could be dealt with by trained psychologists.

        It should come as no surprise that women in the Victorian Era and well into the 20th Century had many reasons to become hysterical. For example, It was a time of severe sexual repression that left women bewildered, frightened, and ignorant about their own sexuality. Many, if not most, women lost babies and young children to disease and infection in the days before people knew about germs and sanitation. [One of my grandmothers had 5 children die as babies and toddlers; my father was the only child she had who lived to adulthood.] 

        Life was full of things that could traumatize any woman, regardless of class, education, or physical health. [My other grandmother experienced something similar to our Plaintiff. She happened to be on the scene when a streetcar in New York City ran over a woman and severed her leg. Grandma pulled the woman to the curb and wrapped something around the woman’s leg as a tourniquet. My mother, who was just a little girl at the time, witnessed this and carried the memory of this horrifying event with her for 60 years]

        Women in the bad old days were supposedly suffering from hysteria, but men with similar symptoms were diagnosed with “nerves.” [In 1866 hysteria was joined by a new diagnosis that had a similar set of symptoms: it was called railway spine, and it was a nervous disorder believed to be caused either witnessing the accidents that the dangerous railways of the time generated in large numbers or by what we now call whiplash. Unlike hysteria, railway spine affected both men and women. -Wikipedia] 

        Men were supposed to be the stronger sex—stoic, rational, and unemotional—the exact opposite of women. Real men were tough; they didn’t cry or express emotions.

        It’s not clear exactly when or how that began to change, but awareness of the fact that men did have emotional reactions came from experience on the modern battlefield. In spite of the carnage of the pre-firearm battlefield, there are few records of men having an emotional reaction afterwards. 
        One example of a soldier suffering the aftereffects of combat is the lead character in Shakespeare's 1601-04 play Othello. The play is based on a story from the mid-16th century that mayhave started with an actual incident involving a Moorish soldier in Venice. In Othello, Shakespeare describes a combat veteran who suffers from anxiety, anger, paranoia, and depression—all symptoms of what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. Shakespeare has the villain Iago refer to Othello's condition as "epilepsy" in Act IV when Iago lies about having slept with Othello's wife, and Othello passes out. That is just one of Iago's many lies. Shakespeare's play demonstrates that more than 400 years ago people were aware of the after effects of combat.

         That changed during the 19th century. People began to notice that some soldiers, and some civilians, with no physical evidence of wounds, were acting strangely. In 2015 the National Museum of Civil War Medicine mounted an exhibit on the mental health of Civil War soldiers, some of whom were diagnosed as having “acute mania” and “soldier’s heart” or “irritable heart”. Clearly these men were suffering from the aftereffects of combat.^[4]Accounts of the survivors of the bombardment of Vicksburg during the American Civil War include psychological trauma to both men and women^[5].

        It was the First World War that really opened the door to the idea of men reacting to horrifying events. Over the course of the 20th century, doctors began to understand that something terrible happened to men who went to war. It was called "shell shock"^[6]and “gas hysteria” in the First World War.

        Doctors also revived an older term, neurasthenia, to describe a psychiatric disorder which was the result of the terrors of modern warfare. Exact numbers are hard to find, but as many as 80,000 British soldiers suffered from shell shock in WWI. Unfortunately, some victims were stigmatized for not being manly enough, for cowardice, and for shirking.

        In WWII, the condition was called “battle fatigue” and soldiers were said to have “a thousand-yard stare” to describe the blank, unfocused gaze of men who have become emotionally detached from the horrors around them.

        In the Korean War the condition was diagnosed as "operational exhaustion.” 

        In the 1960s, “combat fatigue syndrome” or “combat neurosis” was recognized as a problem for Vietnam War veterans. Nowadays, the condition is called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD was not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980, six years after we argued our case in moot court. 

        There were articles published in professional psychiatric and psychological journals about PTSD in the 1960s and 1970s, but, even if we’d known about them, I don’t think we law students would have had access to them. {Before the internet, you had to go to an academic library to find journal articles in a specialized field. We didn’t have any way of doing that.} 

        The keyword we missed was “stress”; had we used that term, we might have found articles that could have led us to the growing field of PTSD. Stress management books and articles didn’t really become popular until the growth of the self-help movement in the late 1970s and 80s.^[7]

We could have made our arguments stronger

Had we known about PTSD, we could have told the story of hysteria—how it was once considered a “women’s problem” and over time, as described here, it became clear that terrifying events affect both men and women. We could have demonstrated that, while hysteria is no longer recognized by as a medical disorder, a strong emotional response to terrifying events, as Sigmund Freud noted, can affect both males and females. 

        If Driver caused the accident by negligence, then we would argue that Driver is responsible for any consequences, regardless of whether they were foreseeable or not. PTSD is a real medical condition and, whether caused by intentional acts or by negligence, it should be considered valid grounds for a tort.

After 44 years, I rest my case.

---

^[1]The moot court requirement was controversial at my law school back in 1975. See the article “Moot Court Hazing” in (1975) The Justinian: Vol. 1975 : Iss. 3 , Article 2: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/justinian/vol1975/iss3/2

^[2]This article on how we could have won was inspired by the marvelous Prof. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin Law School, who let me sit in on her Torts class in 2016 (preparing for a presentation I was asked to do on how to teach Millennials). I learned more in one hour with Prof. Charo than I did in two semesters in Brooklyn with an arrogant, condescending schmuck of a teacher.

^[3]The author of the textbook on torts that we used in law school described the evolution of this particular tort in an article he wrote for the Michigan Law Review. Prosser, William L. “Intentional Infliction of Mental Suffering: A New Tort” (1938-39; v.37, p.874.)

^[4]See Horwitz, Tony, Smithsonian Magazine “Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD?”; Jan. 2015; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ptsd-civil-wars-hidden-legacy-180953652/

^[5]During the siege, Union gunboats lobbed over 22,000 shells into the town and army artillery fire was even heavier. -Wikipedia

^[6]“Shell shock,” the term that would come to define the phenomenon, first appeared in the British medical journal The Lancetin February 1915, only six months after the start of the war, in an article by Capt. Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps -https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-shock-of-war-55376701/These videos demonstrate the effects of shell shock, but they are hard to watch: See Shell Shock - The Psychological Scars of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Specialhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvTRJZGWqF8,The Effects of Shell Shock: WWI Nueroses | War Archiveshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWH,Shell Shock during World War Onehttps://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/shellshock_01.shtml

^[7]My own book on the topic, Workplace Stress: Nine One-Hour Workshops (Families International, Inc.) wasn’t published until 1994. 

2019 Not-so-bad Military History Books

Steven B. Zwickel

August, 2019

My dear wife hates military history. She says it’s boring and meaningless.
     Consider: 
“At 0944 General so-and-so ordered an attack on the left flank, which met fierce resistance from Field Marshall Blunder’s hussars, uhlans, dragoons, and lancers. Fighting continued until 1414, when the redoubts, parapets, “mamelons and ravelins” were enfiladed and stormed. The battle went on, and on, and on…” 
She’s got a point.
     
I was first exposed to military history in elementary (K-6) school, when we were required to write and present to the class our book reports. This was back in the 1950s and two of the more popular books that (only the boys) reported on were Quentin Reynolds Battle of Britain (1953, Random House) and Richard Tregaskis’ Guadalcanal Diary (1943, Random House). Both of these were about the Second World War—something all of our parents had recently lived through, though they rarely spoke about it.
     The Reynolds book sparked a school-yard discussion about whether the title was misleading or not. Some boys held that, without machine guns or bazookas, it was unfair to refer to the “battle” of Britain, which only involved German bombers and English Spitfires. The “Diary” (a word most of us associated with girly-type writing) gained credibility when one of my classmates claimed his uncle or cousin or other relative had been there and it was just like in the book.
     Book report presentations always ended with the pupil telling the class, “If you want to find out how it ends, read the book.” Not terribly original.
     My elementary school didn’t really teach a lot of history, much less military history. I think we went from Columbus to Lincoln in 5th Grade and as far as the Spanish-American War in 6th Grade.

     ☞ The school building was itself a veteran of that war, having been built in 1898 as a hospital for recovering soldiers. The most famous graduate, although I didn’t learn this until many years later, was the actress and silent film star Clara Bow. 

I peeked (yes, I was one of THOSE kids) and read to the end of the 6th Grade history book, where I discovered that, in 1914, a war broke out in Europe that would eventually embroil the entire world, including the United States of America! This, I assumed, must be the World War that had ended a decade or so earlier. Later on, one of my classmates explained to me that there were TWO World Wars; we won the first one, but the sore losers demanded a do-over, so we had to do it again.
     We read some war-related books in junior high school. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane was required reading, so we weren’t too enthusiastic about it. Books about war seemed to be either personal memoirs or military histories. Memoirs, like Red Badge, gave readers a sense of what war was like, but no real idea of who was fighting, why, and how the war played out. Many of us read Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, a minute-by-minute account of the D-Day landings.
     Later on, we read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead, and I think quite a few of us were scolded for trying to sneak a euphemistic “fugging” into our conversation in imitation of Mailer’s GIs.
     Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, was the big anti-war book that caught on with my generation as we faced the dilemma of the Vietnam War. Vietnam split the nation—doves (peaceniks) who opposed the war and hawks who supported it. I was lucky, in that I was rejected by the Army because I have only one working kidney. This good fortune, however, left me with many decades of guilt: because I did not have to go to Vietnam, many others did, all of whom paid a price for doing so.
     My guilt led me to read everything I could about the Vietnam War (entirely personal memoirs) and that left me feeling even worse knowing what my countrymen had gone through while I sat at home. After that, I lost any interest in reading military history.
     Twenty-five years later, after my father died, I inherited several boxes with his souvenirs from his service in WWII. For a few years, they sat in my basement, but eventually I started going through them to see what was there. That was when I realized I really didn’t know too much about the war in the Pacific and why my dad had spent part of his life on a tropical island. My curiosity induced me to start reading military history; I wanted to learn more about WWII, not just the campaign my dad was in, but the larger picture of the war.
     The war history books were fairly helpful in understanding what led up to the war, what happened during the war, and how it ended, but I also came across lots of books about battles, military units, and warships. Some of these were personal memoirs and I found them incomprehensible. They alluded to people, places, ships, and machines without any discussion. A reader who was not there—in that battle, on that ship, flying that type of airplane—couldn't possibly understand what the authors were talking about.  

      Here is an example:

The Front Royal was a T2-SE-A1 (Navy designation) tanker which was the workhorse of the tanker fleet – 481 being built during the war. A typical tanker crew had 42 to 45 mariners and 17 Armed Guard. A T2 was typically 523 feet long overall, had a 68 foot beam, 30 foot draft, displaced 10,448 gross tons (21,880 loaded displacement tons) , with 6,000 shaft hp turbo- electric propulsion, a speed of 14.5 – 16 knots and a liquid capacity of 141,200 barrels (nearly 6 million gallons). T2’s were named after monuments, national parks, forts, battles, historic settlements, trails, lakes or swamps. The ship was likely named after the 1862 Civil War battle fought at Front Royal, Virginia but this is unconfirmed. *

Surely, only someone who served on Front Royal during the war would find this both interesting and intelligible. 

     I teach communication courses, and a main requirement is that my students write with a clear understanding of why they are writing and for whom they are writing. I will not give them a passing grade if they can’t explain their purpose and audience.
    The WWII memoirs baffled me; I could not figure out why they were written or who the intended readers were. Why were these books written? Why had they been published? Was there really a market for these books? Their very existence was a puzzle.

It was only a few years ago that a news story on TV helped me understand the purpose and audience of the World War II memoirs. 

The United States has been at war in Asia for more than 18 years and as of this writing (in 2019) fighting in Afghanistan continues. We now have a new generation of war vets who have returned from the battlefields with their own memories, including painful recollections of terrifying events that have caused many to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). These men and women may experience symptoms of PTSD as described by mental health experts, such as:

• vivid flashbacks (feeling like the trauma is happening right now)
• intrusive thoughts or images.
• nightmares.
• intense distress at real or symbolic reminders of the trauma.
• physical sensations such as pain, sweating, nausea or trembling.  https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml

Many efforts are now underway to understand the effects of PTSD and to help vets deal with the symptoms. The story I watched on TV described how social workers and psychologists were helping a group of Iraq/Afghanistan vets. As part of the process, the veterans were asked to write about their experiences in combat, including those horrifying episodes that had triggered their PTSD. By writing down their stories the vets were somehow able to come to grips with what had happened to them and to deal with the stressful aftermath.

That’s when it hit me: the indecipherable World War II memoirs were the veterans’ way of dealing with the horrors of war. 

The reason for writing the memoirs was to help the authors jettison the psychological pain and trauma. The audience for these stories was no one but the authors—they were writing for themselves, trying to deal with their memories. The World War II vets didn’t have access to all the social and psychological services vets have today, so they came up with their own solution to dealing with PSTD: they wrote it down and got it out of their heads.

And that’s why there are so many “bad” books about warfare out there.

* from A Memoir of Edward Frederick Barta’s Service in the United States Navy Armed Guard during World War II <https://www.armed-guard.com/barta.pdf>