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duminică, 6 mai 2012

Up Market

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Words in the Brain: Make Them Wave Rather Than Writhe

Posted: 06 May 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Let’s imagine you were hungry for some syllables, so you walked over to your yard’s word tree. Word tree fruit always hangs in clusters of three, so you pick a triad with your left, and one with your right. You gobble the first cluster, discovering only after you chew that those three words were “rectal,” “putrefy” and “termagant.” Spitting the half-eaten leavings of those words onto the ground, you pop the other bunch in: they are “shimmer,” “honey” and “moonlight.” You chew with appreciation, because we taste words by their sounds. The sounds of the first bunch were sour, and those of the second sweet.

Of course, it’s difficult to divorce the sounds of words from their meanings, and one man’s rectal might be another’s moonlight. But paying attention to how your writing sounds, how words taste in your head and in your customers’ heads, can be key to delivering a tasty—and persuasive—message. And it’s not simply that one clanging gong of a word in a sentence can make a reader wince—a sentence is composed of a sisterhood of words. If one sister’s got a bad cold and can barely speak while another is so much taller than the others that her voice shoots over the others’ heads, well, that’s a sentence in a crisis relationship.

Consider these sentences:

  • Mobile technological developments indicate concatenating aspirational undertakings by industry heads.
  • Communication dreams are no longer schemes.

Either might serve as the introductory sentence for a white paper on new telephone technology. But the first makes for poor sonic footing:  it clumps polysyllabic terms, the sound architecture of which causes one to climb up the tilted towers of its syllables and quickly topple. There’s no space to gain a purchase, to scan for the landscape ahead. Hearing that sentence in your head is a series of lurches and stutters.

Don’t Bump Your Nose on Your Sentences

The second sentence, admittedly more abstract than the first, invites you to walk its rhythm without spraining an ankle. There is a beat and a measure to the sentence that is more balanced, more musical. Which sentence invites you to take the hand of the next, and which has you bumping your nose on a door that you didn’t see? You need to check a sentence for its pulse: every sentence has tone, cadence, and pacing. If your sentences are written so some of the word sisters in the sorority carry those hand buzzers—when they clasp palms with the word next to them, there’s an unsettling shock—your readers will draw back, rather than move forward in the reading.

The easiest way to do this is to read your writing aloud after it’s written. Hear whether it flows or fumbles. Become conscious that a well-placed comma can invite a sentence to catch its breath, or that the exclusion of that comma can spark an agreeable acceleration. Even complex sentences, with potentially cumbersome clutches of words, can be structured so that they are a series of smooth steps, or if need be, a graduated set of invigorating leaps. The artful mixing of Anglo-Saxon bread with Latinate butter, short words and long, ones with internal rhyme that gather tightly with their cousins, a two-word sentence next to a twelve-worder—here you have a well-tuned orchestra of words, not a dissonant squawking.

Henry James famously said that “summer afternoon” were the two most beautiful words in the English language. That’s arguable, of course, but Henry could feel—could hear—that a certain succession of letters, of syllables, of sounds are felt and heard in the mind as being pleasing or painful. (James himself perpetrated paragraphs of such intricately twining phrase and clause that you couldn’t locate the originating verb with a microscope, but on this summer afternoon in question, he’s clear.)

Consider that words have both aural shapes and textures that are felt and heard in the mind. Writing that sounds ugly is less persuasive. (Unless you’re playing with foul-faced words for effect, a different matter entirely.) So, pay attention to the sounds and the shapes of your words. Make them swim, spin or sigh in the auditorium of the imagination rather than crash or clatter. Your audience will rise to their feet to applaud, rather than to run.

Photo Credit: Alice Bourget

Is It Time to Go Paperless? The Debate Continues

Posted: 06 May 2012 05:00 AM PDT

It may seem overwhelming to go paperless at first, but doing so has some distinct advantages.

New Facebook Feature Shares Most Popular News Articles

Posted: 06 May 2012 02:00 AM PDT

Has "Trending Articles" hit your Facebook news feed yet? The new feature compiles and highlights social reader stories under a single section of users' news feeds, separated from the rest of the feed by a gray bar. The section includes thumbnail images, headlines, and the beginnings of each story, followed by the name of whichever Facebook friend read the story.

"I, for one, do not like this. I don't mind layout changes and the like but this feels like advertising in my news feed. I really couldn't care less if Kim Kardashian was Photoshopped in this week's issue of Cosmo," wrote Reddit user Daara J in a thread on the subject.

User usedtowork added, "It's just another adoption of Twitter tech…. That said, I think there's cash money to be made if someone wrote a flexible, easy to configure Facebook filter that let you scrub out things like articles, apps, etc., as the feed is definitely too junky for my tastes."

The new feature serves as yet another way to get Facebook users to cross over into Open Graph, the system that customizes the web to each person's individual interests—and publicizes those interests on Facebook news feeds. Tried a recipe for black bean brownies and liked it? Hit the "Like" button at the bottom of the recipe, and see it incorporated into your Facebook profile and your friends' news feeds. Listened to the new Gotye album on Spotify? Tell everyone by hitting that little "Share" button.

As it pertains to articles, be careful. In some cases, the Open Graph platform requires that you log in to a news organization's app, resulting in a detailed account published on Facebook of everything you read—from health articles to juicy gossip stories. Check your privacy settings, or perhaps sign out of Facebook altogether if you want to read something in private.

Of course, feel free to "Like" as many of my stories as you can. There's absolutely nothing wrong with publicizing that.
Publicat de la 09:25

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