My Keynote Speech
For the Communicator of Achievement award presented today at the Illinois Woman's Press Association awards luncheon.
What an honor to be here today to accept this award as the IWPA’s Communicator of Achievement for 2024. When I first learned that I’d be receiving this, I was in disbelief–and I’m still in disbelief. Especially when compared to past winners, including Marlene Cook, my resume pales in comparison, especially for service to the National Federation of Press Women, our parent organization.
But if I have one thing to say about success in the communications field, it’s about the importance of persistence in my journey. At this point in my life, I don’t give up easily on goals, short-term and long-term. I want to write a book, a collection of personal essays on music, so I’m working on that now.
When I was a kid, though, I never could have dreamed of a moment like this. I’m a staff writer at PopMatters, the international web magazine; a sometime columnist at the Good Men Project; a blogger; a college writing tutor with a decade of experience in such a role, and a TEDx speaker with a master’s degree in English. I’m more than competent; I’m considered an expert in my field.
I will say that I don’t think of myself as a journalist–at least a standard news journalist, before anyone asks me why I’m being honored today. I’m a writer, storyteller, and music historian, and as weird as it feels to say, I deserve this.
When I was a kid, I was bullied for everything I did, including for my trouble understanding figurative language–all the slurs like “retarded” were hurled my way. I didn’t know I was autistic, but I knew I was different, and I got a lot of crap for my writing. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was determined to become a great writer.
In that spirit, I want to share this award with four extraordinary women who nurtured my creativity and my writing skills, in and beyond Illinois: first and foremost, my mother; second, my late grandmother, who is beaming wherever she is; third, my most formative, important, and influential teacher, Anupama Arora; and fourth, my middle school English teacher, the late Patti Lagattuta-Borges.
All of these women believed in me and my writing when I didn’t. And as I was speaking of my childhood, I wanted to relay a comment Patti wrote in a 7th grade English report card: “Joshua has a great deal of writing talent. I look forward to reading his published works of art in the not too distant future!!!” with three exclamation points. I didn’t remember her writing that when I discovered that note a couple years after her death. But it made me feel good realizing that she saw things in me that I didn’t. Needless to say, works of art or not, my writing has been published very often, especially in the last decade, so I hope her vision came true.
The way I’ve tended to think of it, though, I didn’t really become a strong writer until college, at least when it came to analytical essays. When Anupama, my first college English professor, assigned a close reading paper, where you make an argument about a passage of text based on its details–tone, word choice, sentence structure, and so on–I was lost in a metaphorical wilderness. Unsurprisingly, I did not get a great grade on that paper, but, shocked as I was at the time, I used that experience as a catalyst to work on my writing.
I’ve credited Anupama with teaching me how to write, but today she says I was always a strong thinker and writer. Writing this, I see a pattern of me having trouble taking credit for my accomplishments, so I want to give extra credit to my consistently encouraging mother and grandmother, without both of whom, I doubt I would be getting an award like this. But maybe I’m still not taking enough credit.
In my writing and public communications work, I’ve taken sides and angered plenty of readers (and internet trolls who don’t read my work), but one thing that this organization, especially the Professional Contest, has taught me in some respects is to use feedback to remain teachable. No one, including judges, has all the answers, but I’ve used experts’ feedback as opportunities for improvement. I could never describe myself as humble because . . . that’s not humble, but I think I can describe myself as teachable . . . which, I’ve heard, is another definition of “humble.” I’ll try to untangle the ties between the two words later, but I will say that being teachable has helped me in my writing career.
So, to the students here today, always strive to do your best work, but, one, the first thing to do with every writing assignment is–believe it or not–to make sure you’re addressing that assignment (not to start writing); and two, remain teachable whatever grades or awards you receive. That’s one way you can succeed.
Another way is by reading a lot and immersing yourself in whatever fields you want to engage in: news journalism, magazines, TED talks, TikTok videos, academic scholarship, corporate communications, whatever fields you want to write in, engage with, or study. And reading doesn’t just mean reading a printed page; as novelist Elaine Castillo describes in her 2022 essay collection, How to Read Now, reading means finding new ways to interpret and engage with the world around us. I’d like to think that autistic, hyper-literal understandings of language and communications like mine, rather than deserving stigma, can help point the way forward to new understandings of the world in this age.
But however you read or study anything, learn to have faith in your understanding of the world while critically learning from others and remaining teachable. I also want to encourage young communicators to work on your forms of communications–writing, visual design, blogs, social media, yearbook, and so on–extensively to find your own voice. In other words, whatever you do, work to find your way of doing it well.
One way that I’ve developed my own voice is to write by hand as much as possible when drafting my work. Writing without a digital device forces me to not edit as much while I write, and it works a different part of the brain, yielding different kinds of insights. Writing by hand, reading widely, immersing yourself in your fields, and working to remain teachable are key tools that have helped me succeed in writing and communications.
I would be remiss if I didn’t address the current climate that is hostile to journalism, to ideas of diversity, and to books about marginalized groups such as people of color and/or LGBTQ+ people. Unlike many, including in our organization, I’m not a neutral “absolutist” when it comes to free speech, thinking that “all speech matters (equally).” But I will say that the hysteria around so-called wokeness helps neither “free speech” as a cause or this planet as a whole. Such an environment is not about the freedom to learn; it’s about dictating the freedom to ignore. That doesn’t encourage success for anyone in the communications field. As a country that theoretically values the freedom of the press and free exchange of ideas, the sad truth is that such an environment is actually consonant with the long history of the United States. We aren’t even moving towards a dystopian future; we’re already there.
That said, even with the meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with apps like ChatGPT representing one of the most startling trends in communications in recent years, there is more of a need than ever for great communicators. AI will never replace the need for human communication and connection. There may be new jobs relating to the growing use of AI, but as others have pointed out, there are abundant problems with AI relating to how good humans make it, including racist and ethnocentric biases in the technology. Those facts may not stop AI from proliferating, but they do give us pause to think about how we can improve as communicators: not to make our articles full of “clickbait”-style content or, on the other hand, verbosity to match the style of ChatGPT-generated writing, but to offer what AI cannot in terms of quality communications.
In this day and age, to strive for a better world in the field of communications and beyond, I offer two song lyrics that point a way forward:
“You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything,” from 1990s country artist Aaron Tippin, paraphrasing Malcolm X
“Be afraid, be very afraid, do it anyway, do it anyway,” from contemporary singer-songwriter Jason Isbell
In other words, when it comes to standing up for justice in journalism and beyond, acknowledge your fears and limitations, work through them, and do the right thing anyway. Work in communications requires courage, which many acquire by doing courageous acts, rather than planning to be courageous. In other words, you can gain courage by acting like you have it and doing the right thing regardless: “fake it ‘til you make it.” You don’t need all the right tools or preparation to be courageous. In the words of a saying associated with the novelist Alice Walker, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
To the high school students, I want to say that you all are doing far better work than I did in high school, and you, too, can win something like this someday. I hope what I had to say today was useful, and congratulations to all of our winners. Thank you for having me speak today.