Pick a rock

A friend from our cubicle days is sitting in my living room talking about the last speech she gave. Her story goes like this:

As I was doing my research for the speech, everything shifted for me. I suddenly saw that, in gathering my material, I was stepping into a river of information. If I came to this river tomorrow, the information would be different. It changed the way I looked at everything. And I realized it made no sense to prepare a linear speech about information that was not the same from one day to the next. So I gathered some river rocks, wrote a different topic on about 20 of them, placed the rocks in a basket, and went off to give my speech. I asked people to "pick a rock" and then I'd talk about whatever was written on it. We picked rocks until the time ran out. If different rocks had been picked, it would have been a different speech.

My friend has been the dean of a communications school for 15 years. When she speaks, I listen.

Garbage and greatness

From out of nowhere a quote pops into my head: "People are a mixture of garbage and greatness. Listen to their garbage; speak to their greatness."

I heard it 25 years ago from a man who was a proof point of the first sentence and a practitioner of the second. The usefulness of his advice lies in the semicolon, which acts as a stop sign. So you read the sentence like this: Listen to their garbage (STOP!) speak to their greatness. In other words, don't DO anything with the garbage -- just listen to it, then speak to the greatness. If you do anything at all with the garbage, you lose.

A DeLillo sentence

If you've ever read the quotes to the right of this space, you may have noticed that the first one is from Don DeLillo. It's all about the sentence, with him. For that reason alone, without fretting over some of the things his bewildered reviewers must consider, I buy each of his new books as soon as they come out. My favorite sentence from his new novelette goes like this:

A hundred years of junk, this is what I saw, glass, rags, metal, wood, alone here, we'd left her, and the feeling in the body, the sheer deadness in my arms and shoulders, and not knowing what to say to him, and the chance, the faint prospect that we'd be standing on the deck in faded light and she'd come walking along the sandpath and we'd barely believe what we were seeing, he and I, and it would take only moments to forget the past several hours and we'd go in to dinner and be the people we always were.

I see a lot of trust here, in us, his readers, to paddle out into the current and just go with it, from comma to comma, taking comfort in his lists of things, because he does like to do that, list the things he sees, in a kitchen, or a shed, nothing special about them, except that we read them and know we've been there ourselves, and then feel things we've felt, and know things we've known, and what about her, the one that was left alone there, yes, that night, what about her?

A sentence worth writing

Delbert McClinton has his "sky blue ragtop Mustang, 1964." Richard Thompson has the infamous "Vincent Black Lightning, 1952." I don't have any of that. I like sentences. So it was fun this morning to find Verlyn Klinkenborg in The Times invoking a single sentence he'd read somewhere back up the line. It went like this:

I cannot see these cats...without thinking of a sentence by the writer Guy Davenport: "My cat does not know me when we meet a block away from home, and I gather from his expression that I'm not supposed to know him, either."

I read it to my family and they laughed. We've all seen that cat.

The perfect introduction

Leonard Cohen, introducing his song Ain't No Cure for Love:

It's been a long time since I stood on this stage in London. It was about 14 or 15 years ago. I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I've taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I've also studied deeply in the philosoplhies and the religions -- but cheerfulness kept breaking through. But I wanted to tell you something that I think will not be easily contradicted: there ain't no cure for love.

It's personal, authentic, surprising, revealing, funny, establishing, evocative, endearing -- and 75 seconds start-to-finish.

6 categories of suckitude

Nancy over at the Duarte blog is going off right now on Steve Ballmer's launch remarks for Windows 7. She took a transcript of what he said and marked it up with six categories of suckitude. They are:

Apple campaign references

Unnecessary filler words or phrases

Confusing words, phrases or statistics

Ballmer's references to himself

Upgrade fixes problems

Bold statement with no supporting information

Her mark-up reminds me of some work I did recently with a person who writes scripts for quarterly earnings calls. I was brought in to help him improve his writing. I'm not a teacher, and I don't have a how-to-write list. So I told him to just do the next one as usual, I would edit it, and then I would make some suggestions based on the kinds of edits I made. As Nancy did, I came up with six problem areas. I sent them to him in this chart:

LESSONS TO CARRY FORWARD FROM 3Q09 EARNINGS SCRIPT
1	EMPTY PHRASING	Eliminate “empty” phrases, sentences or paragraphs that take up space without saying anything. (“Before we get started…” “Let me highlight…” “We can’t tell you when these storm clouds will pass, but when they do…”)
2	SOFT WORDS	Be vigilant against “soft” words in key places. For example, “we will continue to strengthen…” is a more assertive way to close than “we will be well positioned to emerge…”
3	LAZY STRUCTURE	Watch for instances of “lazy structure” – such as bundling seemingly unrelated points into a paragraph that starts with “Let me highlight a few key points for the quarter…” It’s a stronger statement if you can begin that same paragraph with “We beat our own expectations in several key initiatives. For example…”
4	BURIED NEWS	Look for “buried” news – items that deserve to be mentioned earlier in the script, and move them up.
5	RUN-ON PARAGRAPHS	Check for paragraphs of a third of a page or more, and break them up.
6	UNNECESSARY COMPLEXITY	Always be alert for opportunities to use a smaller word, a shorter sentence, a tighter paragraph.

The following quarter, he pulled out this list and went to work on a new script. His improvement as a writer was dramatic.

To edit Mr. Volcker

Reading Paul Volcker's prepared statement for his appearance this afternoon before the Senate Banking Committee, and fighting the urge to edit it. Well, maybe just a few lines, dealing only with words and structure:

Him: Mr. Chairmen, members of the Banking Committee: You have an important responsibility in considering and acting upon a range of issues relevant to needed reform of the financial system.

Me: Mr. Chairman, members of the Banking Committee. You have an important responsibility to consider and act upon a range of issues that are vital to us as we work to reform the financial system.

Him: That system, as you well know, broke down under pressure, posing unacceptable risks for an economy already in recession.

Me: That system, as you well know, is broken. It broke under pressure. And it broke in a way that added unacceptable risks to an economy already in recession.

Him: I appreciate the opportunity today to discuss with you one key element in the reform effort that President Obama set out so forcibly a few days ago.

Me: I'm now going to focus on one key element in the reform effort that President Obama set out so forcefully a few days ago.

Him: That proposal, if enacted, would restrict commercial banking organizations from certain proprietary and more speculative activities.

Me: I'm talking about the proposal to restrict commercial banking organizations from certain proprietary and more speculative activities.

Him: In itself, that would be a significant measure to reduce risk. However, the first point I want to emphasize is that the proposed restrictions should be understood as a part of the broader effort for structural reform.

Me: By themselves, the proposed restrictions would go a long way toward reducing risk in the financial system. But it's important that we see them as part of the broader drive toward structural reform, which takes us to the heart of "too big to fail."

Him: It is particularly designed to help deal with the problem of "too big to fail" and the related moral hazard that looms so large as an aftermath of the emergency rescues of financial institutions, bank and non-bank, in the midst of crises.

Me: After all, our greater cause is to eliminate the moral hazard that looms so large when financial institutions, bank and non-bank, know they can gamble with no fear of losing.