OmegaMom

Grabbed from another blog:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 161.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

“Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa–the shield volcanoes that from seafloor to summit are the highest mountains on earth–stand close to the southeasterly tip of the Hawaiian Islands.” — from Rising from the Plains, by John McPhee. OmegaDad is very into John McPhee.

When OmegaMom was in her second stint at college, at Loyola University in Chicago, she took a psychology class. Her professor, a man who signed all his commentary on term papers “Dr. Robert H. BlahBlah, Ph.D.” (gimme a break! Picture OmegaMom rolling her eyes bigtime on that one!), regularly stood in front of the lecture hall with his big stack of index cards…

And read each one…

Word for word.

I had another professor, a computer professor, who did this in my final college stint at CalState Hayward. He accompanied his reading with overheads. (Do you rememer overheads? How twentieth-century. These days, he’d have a PowerPoint presentation.)

Again, word for word.

Sheesh. Just give us the overheads at the beginning of class, then let us go outside into the sunlight and read them on our own, why don’t you? We had students in that class who sat at the back and slept through every one of his lectures.

At the XYZ conference, we had one presenter who did the same thing. Well, almost; he had a PowerPoint presentation with bullet points, but he also had a sheaf of paper on the podium before him, which he read…

Word for word.

Sigh.

He was obviously–obviously–incredibly knowledgeable about the subject. It was a subject that my boss and I were desperately interested in. We really wanted to hear what this guy had to say, how he approached the questions inherent in the subject, how he solved problems we have already encountered. The presentation style, unfortunately, detracted from the gist. (The upside is that we have the presentation in electronic format, so we can read it at our leisure, and we can call him up or arrange a meeting to dig into his expertise further.)

The problems with reading your presentation directly from your crib notes: 1) Some people just can’t read out loud. Sorry. That’s just the God’s own truth. 2) The presentees could get that directly from the notes; give us something more to chew on, please. 3) Often, the presenter can only get partway through the presentation–if you’re doing it on-the-fly, you can glance at your watch now and then, estimate how much time you have left, and adjust your presentation accordingly. 4) If you’re reading from your notes, you are not connecting physically with your audience. In a presentation, you need to be looking at people, using their body language as a gauge to determine if you need to expand on this point, or keep it short and sweet on that one.

Outlines are Your Friends. Trust me on this. Do a high-level outline in your PowerPoint. Do a more detailed outline in your notes. Then wing it. If you know your subject dead cold–which this guy did–you’ll do just fine.

I learned the art of outlining in high school, and have found it to be an invaluable resource in the years since. (Just like typing. Word to the wise: Have your kids take a typing class. It’ll be boring, but oh-so-useful.) How did I ace essay tests on a regular basis? I would read the question, and immediately write an outline on the inside front cover of the Blue Book. Higher-level, then bullet points beneath. I’d do this for each question. Then I would write the essay, a paragraph or two for each sub-level. The outline ensured that the essay would be coherent and that I’d cover all the important points.

Basic tools from school: Reading. Writing. Arithmetic. Fractions and the art of outlining.

Somewhere in OmegaMom’s collection of boxes which have been schlepped from house to home to cottage to apartment to the current Big Pile of Logs (thanks, GrrlTravels, for the nickname!), there is a yellowed, aged clipping from the Wall Street Journal. It is one from a series of ads for a product, service or company that I can’t remember, but the ad–that I remember very well (though I had to get the exact wording from Anthony Huey).

Keep it Simple.

Strike three.
Get your hand off my knee.
You’re overdrawn.
Your horse won.

Yes. No.
You have the account.
Walk.
Don’t walk.
Mother’s dead.

Basic events require simple language.

Idiosyncratically euphemistic eccentricities are the promulgators of triturable obfuscation.

What did you do last night? Enter into a meaningful romantic involvement, or fall in love?

What did you have for breakfast this morning? The upper part of a hog’s hind leg with two oval bodies encased in a shell laid by a female bird, or ham and eggs?

David Belasco, the great American theatrical producer, once said: “If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.”

As I was growing up, OmegaGranny, a journalist by trade, regularly shared with me the philosophy that if there are two words that can be used in one sentence, the shorter the word, the better. It was a case of “Germanic words” versus “Roman words”; in a fight between “gut” and “abdomen”, she said, go with your gut.

Some people use a variety of words simply because they love words and playing with words, the sounds, the rhythms, the subtle shadings that different words bring–and that attitude comes through. But then, there are some people who can’t write without tossing in long words or unusual synonyms as a code for “Hey! Look at me! I’m educated! I know lots of big words!” I read their writing and grit my teeth; most of the words I know, but the phrasing feels forced and awkward. A former copy-editor, I find myself mentally gripping a red pen, savagely crossing out “sagacious” and replacing it with “wise”, “savvy” or “observant” taking the place of “perspicacious”. I come away from their writing impressed by their snobbery, not by their writing.

Many years ago, I stumbled across a fantasy series by Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever. Now, I know lots of words–some would say too many. But even I had to read Donaldson’s books with a dictionary nearby, looking up at least one word per page, which had the unfortunate byproduct of making the narrative choppy and hard to follow. How can you keep the thread and rhythm of the story when you have to stop, re-read the word, haul out the Big Dic (a little dic wouldn’t do because the words were never in there; it had to be the OED), look up the word, then go back and re-read the sentence with the meaning in mind? Fer the love of God and little kittens, why use “clinquant” when “gleaming” or “glistening” are perfectly good words and mean the same thing?? A really rip-roaring good read was turned into drudgery by Donaldson’s use of obscure words.

Folks, a word of wisdom. If you are thinking of pursuing writing as a career, keep your customer (the reader) in mind. The best way to see if a big word will work is to read your paragraph out loud. If you stumble across that big word, or it sounds clunky in the midst of your sentence, or if you find yourself losing your breath halfway through, stop. Dig out your thesaurus, look up your big word, and go backwards. Look for the smallest words that mean the same thing and have the same shadings of meaning (not just any of the synonyms will do!). Plop them into the paragraph, and re-read it. Remember that if you stumble, your readers are more than likely to stumble, too, and that takes away from the effect you’re trying to create.

If you’re trying to communicate something, showing off your lexicon is the wrong way. The reader doesn’t want to know how sagacious and perspicacious you are–the reader wants to be swept away into another world for a while, a world where ringing phones go unanswered, the dishes can wait to be washed, the unpaid bills are ignored, and the book gets carried into the laundry room for one last paragraph before the dryer gets unloaded and the wets go into the dryer.

Coming soon: Presenters who read their notes, word-for-word. Argh.

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Mr. OmegaMom likes the cut, but says he can’t see anything different. My boss, on the other hand, when I snuck back into the presentation rooms to sit in on another session, said, “Oh my Gawd!! I love it! It’s red, but it’s subtle!” Male versus female.