I think this blog would be so much more literate, if I started it with a classic opening line, like “Call me Ishmael” or “riverrun, past Eve and Adams”. Those are the opening lines of Melville’s Moby-Dick and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, respectively. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce meant for the book to be circular or cyclic in structure, so the sentence fragment at the beginning of the book is the end to the sentence fragment that ends the book: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”.

I know. It’s complicated. Sort of like having someone explain hash objects or macro resolution with multiple ampersands to you the first time. Just when you think you’ve got it, a neuron in your brain gets distracted by some other electrical impulse and what you thought you understood becomes hazy and confusing. Or you just downright don’t get it the first time.

And now you’re thinking, Cynthia must have been an English major. Yep. Got my P.O.E.M. shirt ( http://www.prettygoodgoods.org/product/show/31755 ). And then, that thought was probably followed by the question, “What does any of that literature stuff have to do with SAS?”

OK, so that question ends this prolog (or hook). Here comes the blog. Now I’m going to tell you what that literature stuff has to do with SAS. But those of you who know me also know that I can explain things in a LOT of detail. So it’s going to take more than one blog post to get through the whole explanation.

But I’ll start with my ending point, (borrowing a technique from Joyce) to give you a hint of where I’m going. The first piece of practical information or practical advice that I want to write about is that learning how to rely on yourself and your own skills will help you become a better SAS user.

Just like nobody is born knowing how to analyze a work of fiction, nobody is born knowing how to write a program in SAS. I learned some skills on the way to my Lit degree that have helped me become a better SAS user. If you hear me out and then you think about it, I bet you will discover that you have some skills which will help you become a better SAS user, too.

SAS can seem big and confusing. However, if you take the time to understand and use SAS, it is amazingly diverse and powerful in all you can do with it: SAS can be used to add two numbers together, to read data, to transform data, to analyze data, to build systems, to provide answers, to determine risk, to forecast demand, to make pictures, and my personal favorite, to write reports. Moby-Dick and Finnegans Wake are both books that have been criticized for being big and confusing, too. And yet, if you take the time to really read and understand the books, you may come to learn why Ishmael is the only character left at the end of Moby-Dick or you may appreciate the beauty of Joyce’s novel that never ends.

Here are the “lit” skills that I used when I first started to work with SAS. Hey, I was a Humanities major, we didn’t use SAS to analyze Melville. But when I found myself confronted with big and confusing SAS (which was long ago, in a galaxy far, far away), I did the same things to approach using SAS as I did when I approached any new work of literature. Over the course of this blog, I’ll elaborate on each of these items in more detail. And I will connect each and every item to the study of literature and to the study (and mastery) of SAS.

1. Understand the work.
2. Understand the type of analysis or type of paper needed.
3. Use the dictionary.
4. Use other reference materials.
5. Learn about and study the experts in the field.
6. Ask questions.
7. Study some more (repeat steps 1-6 as necessary)
8. Write the paper, get the grade, get the degree.

Before I end this installment, I want to share something about my first weeks on the job as a SAS instructor. When I first started, at the Denver Training Center, I got my very own SAS mug. It was 1996, back in the days before fancy stainless steel sippy cups became popular. Now, I LOVE my stainless steel sippy cup, but this mug was special. This mug was a sign. It was a sturdy, no-nonsense, dishwasher-safe, china mug. It had the SAS logo and the phrase: “Education is Experience” emblazoned on the mug. I knew, then, that I’d made the right choice to accept the job with SAS. I knew because the whole quote is:

“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance”

from one of my most favorite books, The Once and Future King by T. H. White.

So, in my next post, I’ll talk about what I mean when I say that learning how to rely on yourself and your own skills will help you become a better SAS user. Specifically, I’ll talk about what “Understand the work” has to do with learning and using SAS.