Writing Well: Listen to You

Writing Well ~ A Short Guide ~ References ~ Read Writing

Reading aloud is a great reminder that writing is meant to be heard, if only in the mind's ear. Commas and semicolons and periods (and spaces between words) were added to the Roman letters (our alphabet) to signal pauses. It is possible for a writer to be easy to listen to and hard to understand, of course, because we don't always listen for comprehension.

Here are some ways reading aloud can help your writing:

• When you read your own writing aloud, you can hear the punctuation more correctly than the rules teach.
• When someone else reads your writing aloud, listen for rough places.
• When you read someone else's writing aloud, you will hear the flow, rhythms, and stops of expert prose.

Punctuation Is Pauses

Yes, it's true, those commas and such are simply ways of making the reader pause. Little pause? Comma. In England, the period is called a "full stop," and that's what your father meant when he said, "I mean it. Period." Here's a bit of blasphemy: Some comma rules are almost arbitrary. If you put commas in the places where you would logically pause, some rule will justify them.

The catch is in the adverb "logically." What is a "logical pause"? It's one that you would do regardless of any physical situation. If you are panting, you might read "Four score, and seven,, years ago, our fathers brought, forth." Those aren't logical pauses, any more than the pause as you turn the page in the middle of the sentence. The logical pause comes after "ago," and the question is, comma or semi-colon?

Semi-colons are supposed to join complete sentences (most of the time), and the words preceding "ago" are not a sentence, so a comma's the best bet. The primary function of a semi-colon is to join two sentences without a joining word like "and." Like this: "I threw the ball; he raced after it." Read that aloud, then read it as if it were two sentences: "I threw the ball. He raced after it." And then read this sentence: "When I threw the ball he raced after it." Hear the comma? It's not as big as a period or a semi-colon in the other two examples, but it's there. What's more, the longer the delay before you get to "he raced" (the subject/predicate, your grammar teacher intones), the more absolutely you must have that comma. Read this one aloud: "When I threw the ball across the huge back yard he raced after it." Comma after "yard," right?

Listen to Your Reader

One catch in reading aloud: You know what you meant, so you will read to enforce the meaning. But once it's on the page, you aren't there to point, nudge, smile, give a little squeak at the end to signal a question. Two ways around this problem.

First, you can tape yourself reading and then listen to the tape without reading along. If you have trouble understanding, or if you hear hesitations and other clues that things aren't going well, make notes. Then listen again, reading along and marking changes. This is a low return solution. You won't get as much help as you will from the harder method, below.

The best solution is to have someone unfamiliar with the writing read it to you, listening to their first attempt to understand it. You can read along for this. Do it in an organized way. Be sure to tell them that they should just read, without asking questions or commenting until after. And plan ahead how you are going to mark your manuscript. We all read faster than we can write. You won't have time to revise while the words are slipping into your ear. I circle trouble spots, or just draw a line down the page beside them.

Here's an example of what can happen if you hear a sentence you've written but not listened to.

The web encourages self-indulgence Writing on the web is "free" of editorial process. You just write, eh? Nobody to tell you can't say that! Hence forum flame wars and blogs on what someone had for dinner. But getting read on the web is a whole different matter. Web readers want short sentences, skimmable text, chunks of information. Screens are hard to read, and they only hold about a quarter of a page of information. Imagine reading The Lord of the Rings in big type on notecards. But the rules from College Writing 101 aren't discarded; they're augmented. Good writing is not wasteful, and there's no time – or room – on the web for waste. Dragged down by its own weight, it sinks to the last pages of a Google match and disappears. Molly Holzschlag introduces some of these ideas in Chapter 5 of 250 HTML and Web Design Secrets.

In an essay on The Lord of the Rings I had written:

So I finally got around to the books, probably in the late 60s or early 70s, having been quite vocal in my refusal to take 'hobbits' any more seriously than I took, say, smurfs.

My friend read it like this:

So. I finally got around to the books. Probably in the late '60's... or early '70's... having been quite vocal in my refusal to take 'hobbits,' anymore seriously than I took – say – smurfs.

A sad moment for me, and my fault. The sentence sucks; it's clumsy and self-indulgent. The web encourages self indulgence, but we don't have to succumb. Here's a rewrite:

In the late 60s or early 70s, I finally got around to reading the books. Before then, I didn't take hobbits any more seriously than I did smurfs, and I said so to my friends.

The point is not so much that my friend read it "correctly." She read it the way it sounded to her. Knowing how it sounded to her, I knew how to take out the sounds I didn't want her to hear: the labored righteousness of the tone, the clumsy rhythms. If I had read it myself, I would not have read those things in. I might have noticed the choppy waters around the smurfs, but those long, self-important pauses? I doubt it.

Pay Attention to How
Good Writing Sounds

If you are reading someone or something you like, shift to reading aloud. (Best done in the privacy of your home. But hey, if it's good writing, why not share? Listen to how the sentences move, how you pause, hesitate, halt, go on. Exaggerate the punctuation to get a feel for how it works. This is like a runner watching other runners in slow motion replay. Only for pros and would-be pros. That's you, right?

Not all good writers read themselves aloud very well. Never mind. You don't want to listen to them read; that just teaches public speaking (or rather, public reading). There's a special thrill is hearing the voice of a beloved poet, however poorly performing. It's a pleasure to listen to good readers, and if you want to play Will Patton's James Lee Burke readings in your car, great. But that is no substitute for reading Burke aloud yourself.

To get the best effect, read contemporary writers known for their writing, not speeches. Public speaking is a different use of language than writing; it has its own rhetoric. Great speeches don't work any better pinned to the page than do great plays or butterflies. Likewise, great writing may have a weight and discipline about it that we can't grasp when the words just buzz by. What you are looking for, in this exercise, is how good writing sounds to the reader in her mind's ear.

You want to hear how the black ticks on the page translate into sounds. All reading is a transfer from symbol to sound, just as squiggles on vinyl or bits on a CD will transfer sound to headset. Speedreading teaches you not to subvocalize, and it's handy to be able to skip that step when we are in a hurry to comprehend something. It's a bit like feeding the CD player straight to the headphones rather then speakers in another room. But to hear how writing works, you must pay a different attention. Reading is sound transcribed. So listen to it.

About Being Understood As a writer, you need to balance being good against being understood. That's hard in a culture that considers self-expression more important than communication. You have something to say; if people don't understand it when you say it, what good is that? A good writer creates humbly, an eye on the reader's comprehension. If the reader doesn't understand, a writer who cares about communication looks in his own portion of the exchange, in his writing, for the problem before dismissing the reader as a boob. "No one can write well who is contemptuous of his reader's intelligence." –E. B. White