What Storytellers Do

The following I adapted from a speech by Tom Hanks' character in the film Saving Mr. Banks:

Forgiveness is what we learn from art, from books, from plays.  The author forgives himself.  Because life is a harsh sentence to impose on one’s self, and authors redeem themselves through writing.

The author must trust himself, must not disappoint himself.  Where there is blindness, the author gives sight, reveals truth.

The author’s characters, especially the main character, are precious to him.  If he trusts himself, he won’t be disappointed.  And every time anyone reads his words, they will witness characters revealed, understood, saved, honored.  They will love these characters with the guileless trust of children.  They will weep for their cares, they will wring their hands when they lose, and in the story’s final moments, they will rejoice in the humanity of these characters, they will sing.  For generations to come, the author’s characters will be honored, and they, as well as the author, as well as his audience, will be redeemed.  All these characters stand for will be saved—along with the author and his audience—not in life perhaps, but certainly in imagination. 

This is what we storytellers do.  We restore order with imagination.  We instill hope, again and again and again. 

Artists, authors, playwrights, all, trust yourselves.  Prove it to yourselves, and you will prove it for everyone for all time.  Your work is the meaning of your life, the fulfillment of your promise to the universe.

Common-Sense Terminology to Describe Units of Work

A primary purpose of language is to enable us to name things with reasonable terms we can all agree on that make sense.

Units of time, for example, are:  supereoneon, eon, era, period, epoch, and age.  And from there more granularly, I believe we would agree on millennium, century, decade, year, month, day, hour, minute, second, etc.

So what’s useful terminology to express discreet units of work effort?  The terms and the order I propose are:  Project, component, module, process, method, task, step, and detail.  I believe this is a clear, consistent, and common-sense way to conceptually modularize and express the elements of work.*

So I have a project, and I have to consider the components of my project, which is made up of modules, modules which are in their turn made up of processes.  Each process has methods, each method has associated tasks, each task has steps, and each step has details.

I'm not promoting an idiosyncratic grammar merely to appear clever.  My intention is to suggest a habit of easily using one appropriate term or another relative to the work at hand.  Is the work to which I’m referring at the project level, or does it deal with the details of a step?  Am I dealing with the methods of a process, or the tasks associated with those methods?  I’d like to be able to be able to use consistent terminology to characterize work and be immediately understood simply because there’s a general consensus that a task, for example, is more than a step but less than a method. 

Just seems to me that in English we’ve done a better, more precise job providing generally agreed-upon terms for units of time, for example, than for units of work.

*Note:  There are a variety of components in a project, including material.  Materials are, I suggest, part and piece, that is, pieces which make up parts.  There must be other components as well, but in this post I focus on the work effort itself, what must be done.