NASW NEWS

From the Director

Choosing the Words We Live By

By Elizabeth J. Clark, Ph.D., ACSW, MPH

Since age 12, I have had a fascination with words — their meaning, their usage, their placement in the structure of a sentence.

To master the rules of grammar, my eighth grade English teacher insisted that we students become proficient in diagramming sentences. (Those of you under the median age of our membership may not be familiar with this exercise. Sentence diagramming requires dissecting a sentence into its various parts and then representing them in a specific graphical arrangement.)

The longer and more complex the sentence, the greater the challenge, and the more fun I thought it was to tease out all of the components.

One of the lessons I learned was that the placement of a word or phrase could change the entire meaning of the sentence.

On Jan. 28, I listened to President Bush's State of the Union address. I listened closely, not just to the words, but to the phrasing and structure of the address. The next day, I read it in its entirety.

The beginning of the president's remarks was fairly general. The words were easy to hear, and the goals he put forth for employment, health care and the environment were positive, almost soothing.

The difficulty for me started during the last 15 minutes, when the president covered international terrorism, homeland security, and threats and strategies, especially with regard to Iraq. For this section, his words were crafted to convince us of a looming danger and to obtain public support and incite action. I found I had trouble with the transitions, the rhetoric, the evidence, and perhaps most important, with what was not said.

As social workers, we know that words have great power. Words can make us laugh or cry, or argue or agree. Promises, oaths, curses, blessings, prayers and contracts are composed of words. Words can expand our horizons and contribute to our intellectual knowledge. They can increase our understanding of situations and individuals and cultures. Some words can live forever in our minds, our hearts; others are captured in print for posterity.

Each year, NASW deliberately chooses a few words to define a theme for National Professional Social Work Month. This year, those words are "Preserving Rights, Strengthening Voices." These four words focus on the essential tenet of social work -working and speaking on behalf of those whose voices are unheard.

I invite each of you to go to NASW's Web site to review the available materials and suggestions for celebrating Social Work Month, for helping others better understand our profession and our collective goals.

While you are on the Web site, I hope you will take a few more minutes to find and review the NASW Code of Ethics. The code contains the core values and the principles that flow from them, which have been embraced by social workers throughout the profession's history. It is the foundation of social work's unique purpose and perspective, and as such, it covers the values of service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity and competence.

Our Code of Ethics was carefully constructed by some great social work thinkers. It was not written by "spin doctors" for maximum public exposure. It contains no hidden messages, no inferred tradeoffs, no false promises. What it does do, is provide the words by which professional social workers live.

As each of you celebrates Social Work Month, you should take great pride in our activist legacy, our steadfastness and the importance of what we do every day. President Bush's State of the Union address may be complex and confusing (perhaps even impossible to diagram), but the state of the social work profession, what we stand for and the words we live by are crystal clear.

To comment to Elizabeth J. Clark: NewsColumn@naswdc.org. For Social Work Month material: www.socialworkers.org/pressroom/social_work2003/default.asp. For the Code of Ethics: www.socialworkers.org/pubs/code/default.asp.