Analyzing President Obama’s voice

Let’s analyze candidate Barack Obama’s voice in his victory speech after winning the Iowa Caucuses. It begins like this:

Thank you, Iowa.
You know, they said this day would never come.
They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.
But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.
You have done what the state of New Hampshire can do in five days. You have done what America can do in this new year, 2008.
In lines that stretched around schools and churches, in small towns and in big cities, you came together as Democrats, Republicans and independents, to stand up and say that we are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come.
You said the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington.
To end the political strategy that’s been all about division, and instead make it about addition. To build a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states.
Because that’s how we’ll win in November, and that’s how we’ll finally meet the challenges that we face as a nation.

He starts conversationally, “You know…,” and uses contractions. He keeps his language simple and direct. His driving rhythm results mostly from repetition of short phrases:

“They said…. They said…. what the cynics said….You said….”
“too divided, too disillusioned….”
“said we couldn’t do….You have done…. You have done….”
“…can do in five days…. can do in this new year, 2008.”
“to move beyond the bitterness …. To end the political strategy…. To build a coalition….”

He revs up some sentences with beginning phrases that delay the subject:

“But on this January night, at this defining moment in history….”
“In lines that stretched around schools and churches, in small towns and in big cities….”

The whole passage turns on imagery of time and space, from lines stretching to the nation. He uses contrasting pronouns: “they” versus “you” and “we.” His tone is absolutely assured, without qualifiers.

Most of his sentences are either long or medium length. His longest sentence sets up his two shortest: “We are one people. And our time for change has come.” And those two sentences, emphatic by their short punchiness, are the heart of his message in this speech.

[What do you notice in Obama’s voice?]

Writing with spine

Danish radio producers taught me a trick they call “the motor.” They tie an hour-long music program together by repeating a word or image or theme to unify the broadcast, and that thread keeps the listeners listening. The same trick works in writing, where we call it “the spine.”

David John Marotta, a Charlottesville financial advisor, recently wrote a column in The Daily Progress, “What does a (financial) woman want?” After a lead saying that women need retirement planning, his third paragraph quotes the singer Sophie Tucker:

From birth to age 18, a girl needs good parents. From 18 to 35, she needs good looks. From 35 to 55, she needs a good personality. From 55 on, she needs good cash. I’m saving my money.

Marotta then walks through a typical woman’s financial life, from teaching her daughters how to handle money to living in retirement, citing each of Tucker’s stages and adding material from her own entertainment, business, and philanthropic careers. The piece ends with Sophie saying, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor – and believe me, rich is better.”

Sophie’s life is the spine, which appears in different forms: the stages quote, her careers, and two other quotes. The chronology is fun to read, and the readers stay with it to the end.

The 2008 movie “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” has two spines. The larger is the life Benjamin lives backward, and the smaller one is a minor character who keeps telling Benjamin how lightning hit him seven times. Sometimes in longer works, each of the parts has a separate spine.

This blog you’re reading, which is the first draft of a book, has a spine. I keep telling you in one form or another: “Use techniques that work for you.” The second half has its own spine: “Create your own voice from the devices that create the persona you want to represent you.”

All pieces do not necessarily need a spine, but those that have one tend to deliver readers all the way to the end.

[What spines have you used in your writing?]

Dictating drafts

Some writers, including me, draft by dictating to the screen. I type badly and often end up with a mess, so I need a way to produce a cleaner draft. The secret is typing only good sentences, or not typing bad sentences.

I speak a sentence aloud. If it’s what I want to say, I type it. If not, I speak a better version. If that’s what I want, I type it. And so on, until I’ve spoken and typed the whole piece. You can see that dictation is also a form of thinking on the fly.

This method sounds slow, but it’s faster than constantly correcting bad sentences. One side benefit: my prose sounds conversational because it resulted from a conversation with the screen.

At one time in my youth as a university administrator, I had a secretary who took dictation. I liked it at first, but gave it up because she kept snickering at my bad sentences.

A friend of mine lived two hours away from his office as a university dean. He dictated mystery novels into a tape recorder in his car four hours a day, two hours in and two hours out. His secretary would type up the tapes triple-spaced, and he would revise the draft into a finished typescript, which she also typed. He published a novel every two years.

Some writers use dictation software. You speak into a microphone, and your computer turns your speech into text on the screen. Half the fun is the howlers it comes up with: “Hour farther who heart in heaven, Howard be thigh name.” One drawback: it takes a lot of dictation time to teach the computer your voice and for you to learn its quirks.

Some writers just sit down at a terminal and blast it out, typing perfect copy at supersonic speed. Their colleagues look on with jealousy. How do they do that? Why don’t they struggle like everybody else?

Here’s their secret: they’re not composing as they type. They’re dictating from memory. They compose the whole piece earlier in their heads, revise it in their heads, and then dictate it to the screen. If you look closely, you’ll probably see their lips moving.

“What a great technique,” you say to yourself, “I’d love to compose that fast.” Not so fast, there’s a prerequisite: you have to have that good a memory. See what I mean about you can’t use techniques you’re not qualified for?

[Got any dictation techniques you’d like to share?]

Analyzing Lincoln’s voice

Abraham Lincoln had a powerful and distinctive writing voice, best heard in his “Gettysburg Address”:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Ten sentences, 272 words of indelible prose. What devices make this voice distinctive?

Lincoln begins with archaic language and phasing, not “In 1776” or “87 years ago,” but “Four score and seven years ago.” “Brought forth, upon this continent” has the sweep and ring of the King James Bible. He ends his first paragraph by quoting Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal,” echoed in the closing: “this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln uses simple diction throughout, full of Biblical language: “conceive,” “dedicate,” “devotion,” “resolve,” “perish.” He repeats simple words: “here” seven times, “we” ten, “us” four, “nation” five, and “dedicate” five, creating a sense of unity. His powerful verbs are full of actions. He avoids contractions.

Mostly he writes sentences that branch to the right, with a few short insertions, creating a flowing rhythm and great clarity. His sentences turn on parallel phrasing:

“any nation so conceived, and so dedicated”
“we are engaged…. We are met …. We have come….”
“we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow this ground.”
“It is for us…. It is rather for us….”
“what we say here, … what they did here.”
“government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Most of his sentences are roughly the same length, until the last one, which is 84 words long, almost a third of whole address. The shorter sentences build up a rolling rhythm, and that final long sentence delivers his message in powerful, memorable form.

Lincoln mixes imagery of birth and death with references to land and ground and fields, appropriate for a funeral oration.

Forgetting for a moment what we know about Lincoln, what personality emerges from these devices? I would call it strong and determined, simple yet formal, patriotic and sincere, clear, and absolutely compelling. As with Jefferson, readers want to follow anyone who talks and writes like that.

[What personality traits do you perceive behind this famous address?]

Ways to revise

Most writers revise by crawling through their text word by word, changing anything they don’t like. That’s a perfectly fine method, but it’s slow and only improves local effects. In fact, many writers revise heavily as they draft, and that’s why they’re so slow, particularly since they keep revising things they’ve already revised. That’s the slowest way: just keep writing sentences and revising them and changing anything the revision damages.

What’s the fastest way? You draft the entire piece with no revision whatever, and then revise the whole thing once. Get it down, then get it right. Few writers do it that way because they can’t stand to leave anything wrong or misspelled or poorly phrased on the screen. Writing with the screen off helps them see that they can draft without revising. I draft at my top speed and then revise separately to compensate for my poor typing. (I type four words a minute finished, draft at 25!)

If you revise as a separate step, you’re making changes to a complete piece, rather than just part of it. Each sentence gets revised with all the other sentences in mind, which helps unify the whole thing.

Instead of starting small, at the sentence level, you can revise the structure of the piece first. A lot of phrasing problems vanish when you figure out first what you want to say and how. Rapid drafting gets you there fast. Rearrange first for the structure you want, then fix the transitions, and finally the sentences.

Some writers get a friend (or two or ten) to read their draft and tell them what works and what needs work. Such test readers point out assumptions and holes we can’t see. Oddly enough, the less expert test reader is more likely to see the problems by experiencing them as a reader.

Another strategy involves reading a printed version aloud, putting a tick in the margin beside anything that bumps you, anything you want to change. Then you have a marginal index of everything that needs work.

Finally, you need to stop revising when the piece is finished. At a certain point, further revision makes a piece heavy and less readable. As a writing coach, I find that quick revisers like their pieces better.

[Let’s hear your revision tricks.]

Revising good sentences

Let’s revise a sentence in multiple ways to see what effects we can achieve. Here’s the sentence: “Attribution is the writer’s primary device for indicating the validity of information.”

I think like that, but I don’t have to write that way. We phrase our sentences to fit our audiences, the rest of the piece, and what we want to say.

If you read that sentence aloud, it flows, and the meaning is perfectly clear. A fine sentence, if readers know the technical term “attribution,” and if they would know for sure whether “validity” refers to truth or accuracy. This sentence makes several assumptions that would be clear to journalists or academics, depending on the context, but maybe not to others.

Let’s shift the focus from the writer to the reader: “Attribution is the reader’s primary device for judging the validity of information.” This version features the receiver, but we still have problems with technical terms.

Let’s try again, defining “attribution” and “validity”: “Knowing where information came from is the readers’ primary means for judging if it’s true.” We can make the sentence more immediate by changing the past-tense verb “came” to the present tense “comes”: “Knowing where information comes from is the readers’ primary means for judging if it’s true.” That last phrase, “if it’s true” chooses truth over accuracy, and we could blur the distinction by saying “if it’s valid.” (As an explainer, I prefer to keep things unblurred, but sometimes….)

Remember our basic diagram of emphasis by position? In the latest sentence, the readers sit in the unemphatic middle. Let’s emphasize the readers and attribution: “Readers judge the validity of information based on where it came from.”

Since this exercise is about the readers’ knowledge, let’s get that into the sentence: “Readers judge the validity of information by knowing where it comes from.” Less abstract without the phrase “based on.”

Our sentence is still a little academic and formal, so let’s aim it directly at the reader rather than the writer: “How do you know something is true? First, by asking where the information came from.”

All of these sentences are good sentences, and they all say essentially the same thing. But they say it in different ways, with differing effects. Which one would you choose? It depends on what you’re trying to say, and how you want your readers to understand it.

[Got an interesting sentence you played with?]

Writing without plagiarizing

The word “plagiarism” comes from the Latin “plagiarius,” ‘kidnapper.’ Plagiarism is stealing other people’s precious children, their words and ideas. Writers consider their words and ideas as part of their self, so we could call plagiarism a form of identity theft.

Plagiarism is presenting another person’s words and ideas as our own. It’s borrowing without credit.

We use other people’s words and ideas all the time, often unknowingly. I suspect that phrase just above, “borrowing without credit,” came from somebody else, but I don’t recognize it, and so can’t credit it. Borrowing is fine, as long as you do it honestly and acknowledge the source.

One form of plagiarism is publishing a whole work by someone else as your own. If the piece is copyrighted, you’ve violated that person’s legal rights, and made yourself subject to a civil suit. Such wholesale plagiarism is rare, luckily, and a form of fraud.

Another is taking bits and pieces of a work and splicing them into your own writing without identifying the origin. This common practice has become epidemic in our age of cut-and-paste and the Internet. It’s usually easy to spot, because the voice changes twice, before and after the insertion. Readers notice when you sound like Maureen Dowd in one paragraph, George Will in the next, and Herman Melville after that, interspersed with bumpy sentences.

A third form, called “patchwriting,” very common in schools, involves taking a passage and changing a few words, moving things around, deleting a little, etc., in other words, editing, again without credit.

All of these practices are literary sins against the integrity of another writer’s identity, thought, and effort.

Why do writers plagiarize? Mostly they lack confidence in their own ability to do creditable work. Or they’re having a dry spell and simply can’t write at all. Or they drown in envy of other writers’ success. Or they get in a hurry and take shortcuts. Or they want higher esteem, usually a grade, than their own talents and efforts deserve.

Why shouldn’t you plagiarize? For the same reason you don’t swipe other people’s children: it’s dishonest and destructive. Destructive not just to the people you steal from, but also to you. Plagiarism becomes a habit and progressively lowers your self-esteem, leading to more plagiarism and worse writing.You cheat yourself as well as the person you plagiarize. If you borrow others’ work, you don’t learn anything. You don’t master the information, and you don’t improve as a wordsmith by stealing words.

Nowadays, in our era of search engines and online companies that specialize in spotting copying, plagiarists almost always get caught. If nobody catches them, they do it again, and again, until they do get caught. All the plagiarists I know have a record of getting away with it, until they didn’t.

Plagiarists, regardless of their motives, become outcasts, ranking just slightly above kidnappers.

How can your prevent plagiarism in your own writing?

First, take careful notes, clearly identifying sources. I write my initials, “DF,” in my notebook margin to distinguish what I said and thought from what the source offered. Use consistent systems that will remain clear to you (and perhaps to a jury) long after publication.

Second, be aware of when you’re quoting and when you’re paraphrasing. Mark quotes clearly with indentation or quotation marks, and attribute so the readers know where the quote came from. Accompany paraphrases with clear attribution. Where you’ve borrowed just the idea and none of the words, you still include the source. Transparency pays off in reader trust.

Third, tell your readers exactly where the material came from. Besides being honest, it lets your readers follow up on things that strike them. Every professional organization has its own system of citation, which you should use in their publications. Merely using their format marks you as a member of their club, and makes their editors more likely to accept your work.

Richard A. Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism (New York: Pantheon, 2007) clarifies the legal and ethical issues.

[Care to share any problems with plagiarism?]

The rest of this book

This blog is the rough draft of a book on how to write your own way, and in your own voice. It shows you how to take many of the techniques described and combine them into your own writing process that works for you, that uses your strengths and avoids your weaknesses. It also shows you how to decide what kind of writing voice you want, how to create it, and how to modify it.

Today I read over the 240 pages I have posted, and I can see that the end of this project approaching. I have written the posts as their subjects popped into my head, mostly in response to pieces I’ve read. I’m normally a PLANNER, and this sort of free-form lack of planned structure seems strange to me, but I think it has given my writing a spontaneity and punch it sometimes lacks. (I wasn’t sure how to spell “spontaneity,” so I used my wife Joan’s trick of typing the word into Google, which gave me a “Do you mean…” response.) Now I’m going back to planner mode to figure out the whole structure and subject matters of the finished book. I will fill in the holes by writing about things I’ve left out or just not thought about yet.

Many of my readers have responded with their own techniques to add to the collection, and I am grateful to all of you. Now I want to ask a favor. To make this book more useful, I want to know what you want to know about writing. What about writing drives you crazy? What do you struggle with? If you’re an editor, what do you need to tell your writers? What techniques do you know that you would like to read about?

You can let me know either in e-mail [donaldkfry@gmail.com] or by contributing comments to the blog itself. I appreciate any suggestions you give me.

Writing short for Twitter

Jon Winokur invited me to contribute to his Twitter feed, @AdviceToWriters. I decided to write a tweet about a technique I use as a writing coach to help writers who stall while drafting, or even worse, become paralyzed by writers’s block. I advise them never to think of themselves with their fingers touching keys, unless they’re writing autobiography or a memoir. Otherwise they’re off the subject while they’re typing.

And when you think about yourself while writing, your Internal Critic grabs the opportunity to undermine your confidence more he usually does. If yours is anything like mine, he screams things like this:

What a stupid sentence!
The one before it is worse!!
You don’t know what you’re talking about!!!
If you publish this, people will laugh at you!!!!
You’re wasting your life writing this crap!!!!!
You’re no good!!!!!!

Notice his sequence: from a rough sentence to career failure to worthlessness. If you let him keep that up, you’ll give up in despair, maybe even leave our profession.

So how do I say all that in 140 characters and spaces? Actually, 132 because I have to leave room for six letters (d-o-n-f-r-y) and two spaces. Here’s my first try:
“Never think about yourself with your fingers on the keys, unless you’re writing autobiography or a memoir. Otherwise you’re off the subject. DON FRY.”

Jon said that was too long (148) and shortened it:
“Nvr think about yrself wth yr fingers on the keys, unless yr writing autobiography or a memoir. Otherwise yr off the subject. DON FRY” (133).

But I like words too much to abbreviate them, so I tried this version:
“Never think about yourself with your fingers on the keys, unless you’re writing autobiography. Don Fry.” Much shorter, 102, but I’ve left out the Internal Critic. So adios “unless you’re writing autobiography or a memoir” to make room for the monster.

Then I tried a telegraphic, guru-ish version:
“Never think of yourself with your fingers on the keys. Don Fry.” A count of 62, but I’ve lost the reason for not thinking about yourself.

I could gain a little room by giving up “fingers on the keys,” but the visual image makes the advice memorable. And I can’t give up the monster because every writer struggles with one. So here’s the next version:
“Avoid thinking about yourself with your fingers on the keys, or your Internal Critic will start talking about failure. Don Fry.” 126, but flat and clumsy.

Let’s streamline the sentence:
“Thinking about yourself with your fingers on the keys starts your Internal Critic whispering about failure. Don Fry.” 115 and better, but your Internal Critic is always there. He doesn’t “start,” and I don’t like his verb.

One more try:
“Thinking about yourself with your fingers on the keys lets your Internal Critic rave about failure. Don Fry.” 107, bingo, done.

Notice what I didn’t do. I didn’t get there by shaving a letter, a syllable, or a word here and there. When I finally got to what I wanted to say, the count worked. If it had too many words, I revised what I wanted to say or how to say it. Here’s the principle: achieve brevity by selection, not compression.

[Let’s hear about your struggles with Twitter.]

Overcoming Writer’s Block

Almost all of us experience writer’s block sooner or later, although some people never do. It’s the inability to write at all, as opposed to being temporarily stuck somewhere in the writing process, usually in the DRAFTING stage.

Some people deny there is such a thing as writer’s block, but I’ve been there several times, and can guarantee you it’s real and painful. You feel like you have nothing to say, or that your writing is hopelessly inept, or that everything you’ve ever written is junk, or all of the above. Once into writer’s block, you can’t see any way out; you’re doomed. Your literary career is over; you might have to sell insurance or become a tunnel guard.

If you get depressed enough, you might take the easy way out: plagiarism. I’ll write a post later on plagiarism, but essentially it’s submitting somebody else’s work as your own. Resist this urge. Plagiarism is not just dishonest; it’s also usually fatal to careers. Sooner or later, you’ll get caught, especially in our age of universal search capabilities. Then you’re a pariah.

What causes writer’s block? From the list of symptoms in that second paragraph above, you can see that it’s failure of confidence. You just suddenly realize that you can’t do it anymore, and when you sit down to type, nothing comes out. As a writing coach, I’ve helped a lot of writers, including Julia Child, dig their way out of writer’s block. Here’s how to save yourself.

Since failure of confidence causes writer’s block, restoring confidence pulls you out of it. You think about something you’re written in the past that really worked, that people praised, that you were proud of. Then you recall the whole history of that piece, how you did it, beginning with the idea, all the way through publication. Then you ask yourself what worked in that piece and how you made it work.

And then you say to yourself, “I could do it then, so I can do it now.” And then you type something, anything, without judging it. And praise yourself and start writing again.

How do you prevent blockage in the first place? One way to think about writer’s block is that your Internal Critic finally screams so loud that he shuts you down. Mine never yells below 110 decibels, taunts like “You’ve wasted your entire life writing talentless drivel! Everybody knows you’re an idiot! Stop inflicting yourself on people!”

Our Internal Critics keep twanging our failure button. Jon Favreau, President Obama’s chief speechwriter, said, “If you start thinking about what’s at stake, it can get paralyzing.” When you think about what’s at stake, you’re thinking about failing. At the deepest level, you’re thinking about yourself. Yourself failing.

Of course, you can’t not think about something. If you try to think about not failing, your Internal Critic salivates. But you can think about something else.

So you never think of yourself with your fingers on the keys, unless you’re writing autobiography or a memoir. Otherwise, you’re off the subject. You think about the subject you’re trying to write, not about yourself writing it. Say things out loud like these:

TYPE!
Type to the end. (I use this one a lot.)
What do I want to say here?
This is just a draft.

If all else fails, turn the screen off and just type.

[Had any experience overcoming writer’s block?]