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Duck! (was Re: Remember secretaries? (was RE: Proof that content is more important than style))
Subject:Duck! (was Re: Remember secretaries? (was RE: Proof that content is more important than style)) From:"Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 2 Dec 2002 10:08:25 -0500
kcronin -at- daleen -dot- com wrote:
>
>Some of the wittiest, most articulate speakers I've met are lousy writers. Apparently they cannot simply write the way they speak - they see no connection between these forms of communication. I ran into this when my daughter was younger - she was a terrific reader and a clever conversationalist, but you wouldn't know it to read her writing. I had to coach her to try to capture the way she would speak with her own writing.
>
Keith,
I wholeheartedly agree with much of what you said, but I'd like to address the--here's that word again--canard about writing as we speak.
Until quite recently I spouted this old chestnut myself, but then I observed that when excellent speakers follow that advice they get into trouble. I'm not talking about the Winston Churchills and the John Kennedys of the world--where the prose reads as well as it sounds (I think _well_ is the correct word there, isn't it?). I'm talking about the ordinary lecturer or business speaker or social conversationalist who is dynamic and who successfully holds the attention of the audience without reading from a teleprompter. When these folks write the way they speak, the prose is full of throat-clearing phrases, unneeded repetition, all manner of cliché phrases, etc., that no good writer would use.
A couple of weeks ago my son explained to me that the reason he had not been successful in learning to use a standard transmission was that the instructions we well-meaning adults had given him bore no resemblence to what we actually do with our feet and hands when driving. I told him how devilishly difficult it is to construct in our heads the words to describe motor patterns we internalized thirty or forty years ago and haven't thought about since.
I think the same effect is at play when experienced writers tell novices, "just write as you speak." We think we really mean exactly that, but when the novice tries to apply that instruction, the results are not what we think they ought to be.
Maybe we ought to rethink the best way to say what we are trying to get at when we offer that piece of advice.
IMO, YMMV, etc.
Dick
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