A sticky sentence

The second principle of sticky ideas, in the Heath Brothers' fine book, Made to Stick, is Unexpectedness. "We need to violate people's expectations," they say. It is not their intention to make this next assertion, but it is mine: you can violate people's expectations with a single sentence. My five-year-old grandson did it recently in a supermarket parking lot.

He hadn't had any breakfast or lunch, and we were in the middle of grocery shopping about 1 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Adam wanted to start eating the fresh pizza we had picked up in the deli department. I said no. He asked again at the checkout counter. I said no. On the way to the car, he asked if he could eat a slice on the way home. Again I said no. As I started to back out of the parking space, his stomach growled, and he said:

"I just heard myself starving."

Grammy and I laughed so hard I had to stop the car. I've repeated that sentence to lots of people, and they in turn have repeated it. Expectations are violated every time.

Words: how they look, and the sounds they make

I was working with a graphic designer friend on the renaming of a company, and he suggested the name: plumb.

I guess I didn't warmly embrace it. So he says, "Bill, sometimes you pick a word for how it looks more than for what it means." He points out the descending "p" and ascending "b" at the front and back of the word, and in the middle, the round mounds of the "m" right behind the scooping "u." And I saw the beauty of it all.

Tonight I was looking at a piece of print copy I had written and thought, "Yeah, and sometimes you choose a word for the sound it makes." Like this:

There’s a place where this can happen.

A pace at which it all unfolds to your liking.

A case for why it works.

A grace in the daily nature of it.

And a space, in the midst of it all –

among the activities, the friendships, the continuum of care –

a space that feels like home to you.

One sentence

He was steady in his approach, and positive in his outlook.

Our leader wanted to pay tribute to his father in a speech. My colleague was asking questions trying to draw out some life lesson from the father-son relationship. We listened as the son described his early family life. Eventually, my colleague reduced it all to that single sentence: "Well," she said, "it sounds like your father was steady in his approach and positive in his outlook -- which is what we all like about your leadership style." 

So did the father ever say, "Son, be steady in your approach, and positive in your outlook"? 

No. 

Did the son ever say, "My dad was always steady in his approach and positive in his outlook"? 

No. 

It was the listener in this conversation, taking what she liked about the son as our leader and finding a way to match it with the description of the dad. And then she gave it elegant voice in 11 words averaging less than 1.5 syllables each.

We used her sentence early in the speech, and came back to it late. I was comforted by it the first time I heard it, and I'm comforted by it now. Give me leaders who are steady in their approach and positive in their outlooks, and I'll sleep well at night.   

On the physicality of words

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in yesterday's New York Times about "the lost art of reading aloud." About listening to a book being read aloud and reading it aloud yourself, he says:

Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words -- and the pattern of the words -- the reader really sees.

Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

Over the course of my married life, I have occasionally been called to account for my shortcomings as a mate. The last time this happened, I suggested that we shouldn't cherry-pick the downsides without considering the wholeness of what I bring to a relationship. So I started listing the upsides. I ran through the predictable Men are from Mars qualities and then surprised myself with a heartfelt "and when I'm reading a book I think you'd like, I read it aloud to you, page after page, late into the night, until you fall asleep--hell, that alone is worth cutting some slack on a few character flaws." As I reached the "that alone" part I had convinced myself that this was powerful stuff. Well it may have been.   

Jarvis, page 117

I realize now that there's a particular kind of paragraph that makes me happy. It's built on a parade of simple declarative sentences with parallel constructions. Subject-verb-object. Subject-verb-object. Subject-verb-object. Often involving the same subject or the same verb. I found happiness today on page 117 of Jeff Jarvis's book, What would Google Do? Third paragraph down:

Newmark operates by many of the rules in this book. He created a platform and network for his communities. He trusts the wisdom of his crowd. He brings communities elegant organization. He understands that free is a business model. He relies on the gift economy. He dooms middlemen. He runs a disarmingly simple system. But then he adds his own unifying principle of technology, communities, and the internet. Here it is, with classic Craig brevity: "Get out of the way."

The cadence of the paragraph goes like this:

Newmark ta-da ta-da ta-da. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

But then! ... he deetle-dee-dee. 

And here it is: babada-boom.  

All my children

My teammate emailed to ask how I felt about the piece I had written for our client. My first thought was: With the changes that were made during the review process, I felt like the copy had become a gondola car for predetermined messages that would not be credible or even interesting. But I didn't say that. Instead, this is what I said in my return email:

A client asked me one time if I felt differently about each speech that I wrote. I told him they were all my children, and I loved them one and all. But for some, I saved to send them to the best schools; and for others, I encouraged them to keep going to baseball practice. For this little piece I just wrote, I hope there's a decent trade school, and maybe somewhere down the line, a job as a draftsman or a teller in a bank. 

My teammate wrote back:

At Version 4, it needs to move out of the house and live somewhere else.

Later we wondered about a project that seemed to have run away from home to join the circus ... and we were pretty much okay with that. 

What Bill Simmons wrote...

Three great paragraphs from Bill Simmons at espn.com: 

I will always appreciate this Bulls team because they did the impossible: They made a fan base that just won a title care even MORE about their own team. Last season barely matters right now. All that matters is winning the most incredible playoff series ever played. I don't even care what happens after Game 7; we can't beat the LeBrons anyway. This is our NBA Finals. Right here. The Celtics fans feel that way, and so do the Bulls fans. I can promise you.

I thought about all of these things during my marathon walk. And this, too: When I was 6, my father took me to the greatest basketball game ever played: Game 5 of the 1976 Finals. I slept through the second half, the first overtime and most of the second overtime before waking up for Havlicek's running banker. I can still see it. Happened right in front of us. The Celtics won that one in three overtimes. Thirty-three years later (ironic number), they played another three-OT classic and lost. I was a little boy for the first one; for the second one, I watched most of it with my little boy. He had no idea what was going on. When he's older, I'm going to tell him that he did.

Sports keeps moving. You get older. You pass the love down to your kids. You think you will care less ... and you don't. The Tony Allen sub killed me. The Pierce foul killed me. The Rose block killed me. Two toe-on-the-line 3-pointers ... I can't stop thinking about them. Add everything up and that's how I ended up 500 blocks from my house fretting about Game 7 and rehashing everything that happened in the other six.

What do I like about this? 

Those compact sentences: This is our NBA Finals. I can still see it. You pass the love down to your kids. 

The repetitive constructions: The Tony Allen sub killed me. The Pierce foul killed me. The Rose block killed me. 

The linkage between three generations of Celtics fans.

The reference to "Havlicek's running banker." (Every now and then, we ought to write for the 10 percent of our audience that needs no explanation. That 10 percent will love it, and the other 90 percent will get it from the context. "Havlicek's running banker" maintains the cadence. And in this run of sentences, cadence is more important than the information that would have been gained from, say, "before waking up with six seconds left and the Celtics down by one when John Havlicek, famous for revolutionizing the sixth-man role, took the ball and drove for a running one-hander in traffic to put the Celtics ahead 111-110 as the horn sounded.")

Take those three paragraphs and run them through your Microsoft Word spell-checker with the "readability" function activated and here's what you get:

Words per sentence: 10.7

Characters per word: 4.1

Passive sentences: 0%

Flesch reading ease: 83.2

Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 4.1

Fourth grade reading level! The speech I wrote yesterday was 11th grade.