First of all,I am no writing expert. I am however, a lifelong student of human communication, in all it’s glory and all it’s flaws. Much of what I know about written communication, I have learned by doing it all wrong first, facing the negative results, then learning better ways.
One of my major flaws as a writer, (and as born whistle blower type) was generalizing WAY too much, WAY too often, and pissing off WAY too many people. Time and time again, reacting to one awful injustice after another, I’d leap upon my white horse (ok, white keyboard), and charge off to wake people the hell up. I have a strong and passsonate voice when I am astride my white horse, and the wrongs were so big!
But it kept back-firing, more often than not. People I thought would be glad to know about what was really going on, reacted as if I’d attacked THEM. But I hadn’t, not really. Were they nuts?
No. They weren’t. They were reacting to my generalizations that scattershot the “blame” for the situation all over them, too. The buckskhot hit every vulnerable area: for some of them, it hit the place where they knew they’d stayed silent too long. Some of it hit those who WERE working like heck to change the situation, (but not as hard, or as fast.. as “I” thought they should be!)
In any case, I pissed a lot of people off..and once that happened that’s all they could tihnk about. My orignal burning issue that I wanted tended to, more often that not was buried under the resultant “war” my generalizing tendencies had caused.
I still fall into this one now and then on the blogs, when I don’t wait until I am past the “emotionally reactive” phase I can’t seem to avoid these days.
What this taught me is this: if I have a message I really want others to hear, I need to remember who my readers are, and write in ways that will engage them, not make them want to kill me. (I don’t know how many lives a “messenger” actually has, but I am pretty sure I’ve used most of them up. 🙂
I’ve come to see the value of qualifying words, such as “many” or “most” or “some”. If I need to fling accusations or judgements about, I try to remember to paint a clear and identifiable “target picture” so the readers know for sure who my target is.
Havng been a workshop presentor/instructor for many years, I also have to reread what I write to make sure it hasn’t come across as a “lecture”, because while those don’t get me killed, they do tend to make readers slip into a como like state.
On the blogs, as a commentor, I hd to learn the hard way again..NOT to write comments in the heat of one of my famous emotional reactions. Ohh..that is so hard to do. It feels SO good to just “let fly”, from this safe, anonymous perch. (For about five minutes, till I reread what I wrote, and see the boomrang missiles heading back at me.) (Ok, on special occasions I do enjoy this too!)
Do I always remember all of this? Hell no.
But I am still “here”, which means I must have learned something along the way.
It seems to me that what you refer to is ‘the art of persuasion’ more than the art of writing. But writing is very useful in persuasion.
It always helps to use the conditional, which is considered polite in French. (not that I am bilingual)!
I learned to use conditional phrases when dealing with bureaucracy like “would it be possible” before a request. It is amazing how that phrase distills what may actually be a demand into a polite request.
I had to learn that one the hard way too. 🙂
I wrote something with some complimentary points a week or two back and I’ve pulled a chunk of that and edited to make a comment.
When I’m teaching writing, one of the key things I want my students to come away from my class with is the importance of using their prose to tune the mood of the piece to match the message. This translates directly from fiction into politics or any other place where convincing the reader or listener is important. If I say something so rudely that I cause my allies to walk away, I’ve made a substantial mistake. If one looks at history one can see all too many examples of alliances broken by tone.
Talk to any professional writer or any professional salesman and you will get a further earful on the importance of tone to making your case.
Tone is the difference between making the sale and making an enemy.
Tone is the difference between “blame game,” and “accountability.”
Tone is “STFU” vs, “please be quiet”
Tone is “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” vs. “things were mixed.”
Tone is “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this our sun of York,” vs “My brother’s victory made me happy.”
How you say something is every bit as important as what you say.
Wish I could take a class from you. Matching mood and message says it much better than I did. Thanks.
I’ll tell you what, I like all your styles and effects. Even the ones that didn’t accomplish what you hoped in the way you hoped they would. . .no doubt that is due somewhat to the fact that you and I have a lot of the same things in common, including the need to be knocked off our horse once in a while in order to see a better way to do it.
Keep it coming, sagebear. I’ll always be up for a read and a listen.
Shirl
(sigh)Yep. Some people learn things the easy way, and some of us need to get tossed on our butts a few times first. I am fining my life less incendiary, however, since I put down the flamethrower. 🙂
One piece of advice:
When you are writing a descriptive sentence, there should be a little voice in your head somewhere that says, “Is this literally true?”
For instance, if I write “The Red Sox suck” is it true that they suck? Or are they one of the best teams in baseball? A little alarm goes off and I can already anticipate the counterarguments. They had the same record as the Yankees, they won the World Series last year, they led the league in runs scored.
Then, if I am to stick to my original argument I must dismiss all those considerations and say something like “But they just got swept in the playoffs, therefore they suck.”
Okay. they suck. Everyone knows the Red Sox suck. Even when they won it all they sucked, because they are the Red Sox.
In any case, listen to the voice in your head. It will tell you when you are overgeneralizing, and it will tell you when backing up your argument isn’t worth the effort.
Another thing to keep in mind, in addition to the good comments above, is that if you use the flame-thrower and shout and throw your verbal weight around, you leave absolutely no room for your listener/reader to be in the “conversation” at all. All s/he can do at that point is run, or curl up in a defensive posture.
But if you use the qualifiers, and leave some verbal and emotional space in the argument, you allow the others to take a deep breath, perhaps think about other ways of seeing an issue, maybe even come around to your point of view.
Learn from others: One of the best writers of our time was E.B. White. Read, for example, the essays in One Man’s Meat: It looks as if he’s writing cozy little stories about raising chickens and whatnot, but he’s using the small, personal example as a means of making a much larger point.