Articulate people share exactly how they mastered speaking confidently and concisely

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/articulate-people-share-exactly-how-they-mastered-speaking-confidently-and-concisely

Arm Angles in American Sign Language: The Textbook That Teaches What Other Textbooks Ignore

Watch any native signer and then watch an intermediate student. The difference is not in the handshapes. It is not in the facial expressions, though those matter. The difference lives in the arms. The native signer’s shoulders engage when emphasis requires it. The elbows extend and contract with meaning. The signing space expands for formal address and contracts for intimacy. The student, trained to focus on hands and face, moves through space as if the arms were merely transportation for the fingers. This is the gap that Arm Angles in American Sign Language addresses. It is the textbook we wished existed twenty years ago.

Most ASL instruction concentrates on the parameters everyone agrees matter: handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, non-manual markers. These are the building blocks, the phonological primitives that distinguish one sign from another. What gets lost in this necessary attention to fundamentals is the architecture that supports everything else. The arm is not merely a delivery system for the hand. It is an articulator in its own right, and its positioning carries semantic weight that affects meaning, register, and comprehension in ways that intermediate and advanced learners rarely understand explicitly.

Consider the sign UNDERSTAND. In citation form, the index finger flicks upward near the forehead with a wrist movement. The arm positions the hand, but the movement itself is distal, located at the wrist and fingers. Now consider the same sign in emphatic use: the forearm moves, the signing space expands, the shoulder engages. The handshape has not changed. The location has not changed. What has changed is proximal articulation, the engagement of shoulder and elbow and upper arm in the production. That engagement signals emphasis, formality, certainty. Reduce the arm involvement further than citation form and the sign reads as casual, rapid, intimate. The same lexical item carries different pragmatic meaning depending on how the arm participates.

This is what we mean by proximal articulation, and this is what the textbook examines across twelve chapters and comprehensive supplementary materials.

The Collaboration

Janna Sweenie has taught American Sign Language at New York University for over thirty-five years. She created the ASL 5 course for the NYU minor, served as Program Coordinator from 2017 to 2020, and has worked as a consultant for Microsoft, Google, and New York City museums. She is a two-time recipient of the NYU Steinhardt School Administrator Award. She was born Deaf in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and graduated from the Iowa School for the Deaf. For eighteen years she has served as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for the Deaf in the State of New York Department of Education.

David Boles has taught American Sign Language at NYU and other institutions for over two decades. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975. His background in dramatic literature informs the textbook’s attention to register, performance, and the expressive possibilities of signed discourse.

Together we have written Hand Jive: American Sign Language for Real Life, Picture Yourself Learning American Sign Language, Level 1, Day One: Learning American Sign Language in 24 Hours, Hardcore ASL Textbook for Levels 1-7, and American Sign Language Level 5. Our work spans beginning to advanced instruction, print and video, classroom and self-study. What we have not done until now is write the book that addresses what we kept having to explain in person: why the arms matter, how they function, and what happens when you get them wrong.

What the Textbook Contains

The book opens with anatomy. Not because anatomy is inherently interesting, though it is, but because understanding the skeletal framework, joint system, and muscular apparatus of the signing arm clarifies everything that follows. Why can the shoulder rotate in ways the elbow cannot? Why do certain sign movements fatigue the arm while others remain sustainable? What does neutral position mean anatomically, and why does departure from neutral carry meaning?

From there the textbook moves through the three spatial dimensions of signing space: vertical (height carries semantic information distinguishing verb tenses and marking formality), horizontal (enabling reference establishment and tracking), and sagittal (the temporal plane that maps time onto space, with forward movement indicating future and backward movement indicating past). Each dimension involves arm positioning. Each dimension affects meaning in ways that isolated attention to handshapes cannot capture.

The core theoretical concept is the proximal/distal distinction. Signs produced with more proximal involvement, engaging the shoulder and upper arm as primary articulators, tend to read as more emphatic, more formal, more careful, more public. Signs produced with more distal involvement, wrist and finger movements, tend to read as more casual, more rapid, more intimate, more efficient. This is not absolute. Sign-specific conventions override general tendencies. But the correlation provides a heuristic that helps learners understand how arm engagement affects the social and pragmatic meaning of what they sign.

Subsequent chapters address classifier predicates and arm-as-referent, two-handed coordination and symmetry constraints, elbow mechanics and sign modification, non-manual marker integration with arm positioning, biomechanics and signing health, acquisition and pedagogy, and variation across dialect, generation, and individual style. The final chapter considers future directions in ASL research, including technological developments in sign language recognition and the evolving landscape of ASL instruction.

For Whom This Book Is Written

This is not a beginning textbook. Readers should have completed at least intermediate ASL coursework or possess equivalent proficiency. The book assumes familiarity with basic phonology, parametric structure, and glossing conventions. It is written for advanced students preparing for interpreter certification, working interpreters seeking to refine their skills, ASL instructors developing curriculum for upper-level courses, Deaf education professionals, and researchers in sign language linguistics. It is also appropriate for mature signers who want to understand the theoretical foundations of what they do intuitively.

The supplementary materials include a comprehensive glossary, notation guide for representing arm angles in written form, practical exercises for each chapter progressing from observation to production, self-assessment checklists, and additional resources pointing to video materials and research literature. Instructor materials include lesson plans, syllabus templates, frequently asked questions, observation guides, and assessment rubrics. The book is designed for both independent learners and classroom adoption.

The Problem This Book Addresses

ASL instruction in the United States has improved dramatically over the past four decades. Recognition of ASL as a legitimate language with its own grammar and syntax, rather than a simplified gestural system for the hearing impaired, has transformed both research and pedagogy. Yet instructional materials continue to treat arm positioning as secondary, intuitive, something that will come naturally with exposure. It does come naturally for some learners. For others it does not, and they plateau at a level of competence that never quite reads as fluent even though their vocabulary and grammar are technically correct.

The plateau is not a vocabulary problem. It is not a grammar problem. It is a register problem, a prosodic problem, a spatial problem that lives in the arms. The signer who never learns to modulate proximal and distal articulation across contexts will sign like someone reading aloud from a phrasebook: comprehensible but mechanical, correct but not native. This textbook addresses that gap directly, providing the explicit instruction and theoretical framework that allows learners to understand what they need to practice and why it matters.

Getting the Book

Arm Angles in American Sign Language: A Study of Proximal Articulation in Signed Discourse is available now as a Kindle edition for $14.99 at Amazon and paperback version for $19.99. A free PDF is available at David Boles Books for those who prefer that format or who want to evaluate the textbook before classroom adoption. Additional materials are available at HardcoreASL.com.

The arms have always mattered. Now there is a textbook that explains why, that teaches how, and that gives learners and instructors the tools they need to address what other materials ignore. This is the book we wished we had when we started teaching. We are glad to finally offer it to everyone else.

What is a mood?

There’s a rather unique theory of moods from Christopher Bollas expressed in The Shadow of the Object. He writes (loc 259) that they are “storehouses of unthought known states arriving, apparently out of nowhere, as simple existential facts that envelop up”. There are two things I like about this account:

• The idea of the “storehouse of unthought known states”: they are past states which have become frozen in some way in our unconscious personal idiom. We got stuck in them in the past and, when they return, we get stuck in them in the present.
• This stuckness is experienced phenomenologically as an envelopment. The mood surrounds us, constitutes a sudden atmosphere to our being, cuts us off from the air of the object world.

There’s a positive kernel to this analysis in that he sees them as “perhaps awaiting that day when they can be understood and then either transformed into symbolic derivatives or forgotten” (loc 329). In this sense there’s an emancipatory possibility for moods, particularly when we are in them (isn’t that idiom telling…?) such that we have an opportunity to reach a symbolisation which eluded us at the time. What is going on now, in this moment, with what I am feeling? How is it different from what I was feeling only hours ago? We rarely feel moods settle down on us but their presence is striking once they have: a moment of awareness that offers an opportunity. He writes on loc 1787 of how moods shape our relation to the other:

A curious feature of being in a mood is that it does not totally restrict one’s ability to communicate with the Other. A person can be both in a mood and capable of dealing with phenomena outside the mood space. Yet to an onlooker it is clear that the person who is inside a mood is also not present in some private and fundamental way and this absence marks out the territory of mood space. The space in which a person experiences a mood is created, in my view, both by the territorial implications of the individual’s difference in being and by the Other’s recognition of such a state as a legitimate area in which self experiencing has limited priority over self‒Other relating. It is a space, therefore, that is often licensed by a recognition of its necessity.

What is this necessity? Bollas notes how often we intuit that someone in a mood needs space to emerge from it out of their choice. To try to reach them, particularly to go in and get them out, will be a mistake. He sees moods as fundamentally conserving something from the past. From loc 1692:

Moods typical of a person’s character frequently conserve something that was but is no longer. I will call that experience-memory stored in the internal world a ‘conservative object’. A conservative object is a being state preserved intact within a person’s internal world: it is not intended to change, and acts as a mnemic container of a particular self state conserved because it is linked to the child self’s continuing negotiation with some aspect of the early parental environment.

A child left to solve a problem beyond their capabilities will often write that problem into the fabric of their identity, preserving it as a potentiality which comes to the fore in parallel situations in future. In a mood comes the possibility of reopening the problem as an adult with greater capabilities. It’s not just symbolising what was formerly left beyond the symbolic, it’s a case of finding some movement through the mood (rather than simply waiting for it to pass). It’s getting a grip as an adult on the transformational object that eluded the child: the possibility of resolving, diffusing or transcending what has been experienced as a continual tendency to get stuck on a certain terrain. He continues on loc 2052:

Consequently moods are often the existential registers of the moment of a breakdown between a child and his parents, and they partly indicate the parent’s own developmental arrest, in that the parent was unable to deal appropriately with the child’s particular maturational needs. What had been a self experience in the child, one that could have been integrated into the child’s continuing self development, was rejected by the parents, who failed to perform adequately as ordinary ‘transformational objects’, so that a self state was destined to be frozen by the child into what I have called a conservative object – subsequently represented only through moods.

#articulation #christopherBollas #moods #TheShadowOfTheObject

Demystifying the unconscious: building the meshwork in everyday life

When you’re reading a book a certain phrase will sometime stand out to you. When you’re listening to music a certain lyric is heard with a greater force than the others. When you’re listening to a friend a particular image they use will sometimes feel oddly prominent. These are common experiences which all embody the role of unconscious communication in the sense that an aspect of what you encounter evokes something in you which is not immediately present to your consciousness.

These experiences often prompt reflection and elaboration. We might play the song on repeat, dwell on the phrase from the book or find ourselves returning to the unsettling image. There are a wide range of mental activities associated with such reflection and elaboration. It might be quite analytical (“why did that bother me so much?”) just as easily as aesthetic (i.e. continually returning to a track over the course of the day) or creative (i.e. writing something as you mull over what you’ve read). In doing so these actions often lead to further things which grab our attention, move us in some way and direct our attention in ways which cannot be explained by what is immediately present in your consciousness. In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud described this in terms of a network:

The dream thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings: they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.

We can explore this meshwork through free association, creative practice and through analysis. But we build the meshwork through everyday actions of objects in the world evoking things in us which lead us to act in a range of ways. Bollas suggests in The Evocative Object World a kind of magnetism in which “organised inner compositions … attract further impressions and serve as the self’s creative articulation of the inner compositions themselves” (pg 30). If we’re already occupied by a particular effect of a recent object then things are likely to evoked in us which reflect that as associations bind together into particular clusters within the meshwork. Crucially this is something we can do with other people outside analysis. Indeed it’s a common experience as Bollas suggests on pg 14:

Indeed, in free dialogue, when two people free associate in the course of a long conversation, as is typical of friends, they create unconscious lines of thought, working associatively, as they jump from one topic to the next. This is easy to do because we are open to such unconscious mutual inlfuence when relaxed in the presence of another.

This process is underway across all communication. What we encounter in others evokes things in us which are not reducible to the contents of our consciousness i.e. it’s all the reactions we are having which aren’t simply a matter of what we are explicitly thinking about. The same process is happening in reverse in ways which lead the other person to act in relation to us, much as we are acting in relation to them. This in turn then produces an emergent relational layer which provides its own source of evocative objects which feed into the interaction.

What makes the analytical process unique is that it formalises this feature of interaction in order to make it apparent. The analyst’s subjectivity is used as a device to bring the unconscious into explicit form as an object for the interaction. However the practice of free association itself can be done just as readily outside of this setting, even if it might remain restricted to the preconscious:

The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other not to hold back from any communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material.

In practice this is attending to what comes to mind and how you react to it. Then narrating it internally or externally, with a view to evoking something else. It’s the same mode of relating to evocative objects, it’s just that an internal object is evoking something within you. The things you feel reticent to explore are exactly what is most interesting to do this with. It also suggests a parallel practice of cultural engagement centred on dwelling on what is evoked when reading, watching, listening etc. This isn’t delving into repressed contents strictly speaking but it enables a generative engagement with unconscious process with the capacity to change one’s relationship to it.

The thing which fascinates me here is the relationship between evocation and articulation. When objects evoke something within us they are contributing to the meshwork and through our articulation, trying to put what has been evoked into words, we are steering the subsequent elaboration of that meshwork. This is the essence of creativity I think: the relationship between what Freud called the ‘psychic intensities’ of everyday life (contributions to the meshwork and the stuff of dreams) and practices of symbolic expression which remain in contact with those psychic intensities.

#articulation #associations #dreams #Freud #meshwork #Network #thought #unconscious