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Interpretive Theme Writer's Field Guide: A Pocket Companion to Sam Ham's Interpretation: Making a Difference on Purpose: How to Write a Strong Theme from Big Idea to Presentation
Abstract
The interpretive theme is the most important sentence an interpreter inks on paper. Despite its centrality to thematic interpretation, no single work has dedicated itself entirely to the exploration, art, and craft of strong theme writing — until now. The Interpretive Theme Writer’s Field Guide builds on Ham’s 30-year thematic interpretation research legacy. While leaving theory to his foundational books, this pocket companion offers writers many strong theme examples, worksheets, exercises, inspirational quotes, technique highlights, and other writing encouragements. With contributions from Ham, Ted Cable, Shelton Johnson, Clark Hancock, PUP Global Heritage Consortium, and the National Association for Interpretation, Jon Kohl applies 25 years as a visitor management specialist, writer, speaker, blogger, planner, philosopher, and trainer to provide interpreters, museum curators, speech writers, environmental educators, advertisers, documentarians, and all who connect people to heritage a Field Guide they can carry to desk, exhibit hall, or trail.
But the Field Guide also transcends individual writers. It recognizes that teams, even communities, create heritage themes and introduces the Interpretive Framework methodology developed by the PUP Consortium over 20 years to facilitate community-based theme writing. The Field Guide concludes how theme-writing skills will help humans compete with artificial intelligence already capturing interpretive territory.
Please see a video of National Park Service Interpretive Ranger Shelton Johnson in a multi-media video reading his foreword to the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B1DuCy8ndE
Supplementary resources (2)
Freeman Tilden argues in his Fifth Principle of Interpretation the importance of interpreting wholes for whole people. Yet his examples reveal that in demonstrating wholeness in the form of an interpretive theme, he uses but one perspective for each of his interpreted objects (i.e., birds and places). Based on the premise that every object is enacted through one of multiple possible perspectives, to interpret from a single perspective then must be partial because it reveals only a part of an object, thus falling short of wholeness. This multiplicity of perspectives results in a wholeness interpretation spectrum from a single to a near infinite number of perspectives along which all interpreters fall. This article posits four levels on this scale from pre-interpretation whereby no real interpretation occurs to a post-interpretive enactment whereby the interpreter integrates multiple non-consensus perspectives for a much richer or more whole--holistic--interpretation.
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