C2001-4 Public Speaking Fundamentals

12. READING THE SPEECH: There are many people whose position in the work world requires them to give public speeches from time to time. Often such people are not used to giving speeches at all, and consequently, they are not used to giving speeches well. This public speaking inexperience is often expressed in such things as excessive stage fright, jitters and other examples of stage - or execution - related difficulties during the speech itself.

They compound those execution troubles, moreover, by taking the time to write out the speech word-for-word, and then they stand before their audience and read that same speech word-for-word. Almost uniformly the results are exceptionally poor and unacceptable. Is that any wonder? What person in his right mind would want to listen to somebody reading some unintelligible mishmash for twenty minutes?

But why are the results poor and unacceptable? Shouldn’t a well-thought-out and well-written speech be more readily acceptable to an audience than some extempore speech given by a person without notes or written material? One might be inclined to think so. The actual reality, however, is quite different from what one would expect.

Speeches which are read often fail to catch the lilt of spoken language. Instead, such speeches emulate the nature of written language rather than the nature of spoken language. We must remember, however, that written language is invariably artificial and contrived - except when it attempts to accurately capture actual dialogue - because written language is an argument rather than a story. Understand that highly important point: written language is always an argument. If the speaker is a gifted reader (and most assuredly, almost no one is), his speech may be marginally acceptable. But there are so few people who read well naturally: most adopt a sing-song - and monotonous - speaking style when they are reading - with absolutely dreadful results.

One problem with reading a speech, I fear, lies in the inappropriate use of juncture. Natural, spoken speech is often characterized by fits and starts and spurts of language, well-separated by strategic pauses, or with what linguists call juncture - the “silent space” between words. An inept reader invariably fails to properly render the text with appropriate uses of juncture. Instead, the reading sounds like a tape recording of a sewing machine running, with all of its cloying mechanical monotony. In the end no one in the audience will be able to recall anything at all about the speech. And that, of course, is the real test of any speech: can a member of the audience paraphrase what the speaker has said? If the auditor cannot paraphrase the speech, then that person surely cannot remember the speech. And, if the speech cannot be remembered, then it cannot influence the auditor, which is the ultimate intent of any speaker’s efforts.

Moreover, another problem with reading a speech, I think, lies in the inherent bulkiness of the written text. Invariably, a written sentence is longer and more convoluted than the spoken sentence. The added length requires additional time on the part of the listener to make those words comprehensible. But the speaker who reads his speech has a tendency to go through his material in a nonstop sort of manner, preventing his listeners from comprehending what he’s saying. The problem can often be corrected simply by writing the speech using very short and accessible sentences. But not many speakers are capable of doing that. Instead, they compose 18th century sentences, filled with endless parallel clauses and phrases, and then they wonder why no one understands what they are saying when they read that mishmash to their audiences.

Let us summarize. A written speech is an argument. Arguments list reasons or descriptions of things, and suggest alternative courses of action for the auditor to employ. The actual speech, however, is a verbal performance that aims to persuade the listener. And if the speaker presents, instead, a list of reasons, his listeners end up with a bullet-list or a to-do list that can be stuffed into a purse or pocket and be quickly forgotten.

13. SEWING-MACHINE SPEECH: You’ve all heard them: they speak in a dull (and rapid) monotone, without syntactical separation or juncture, hardly pausing long enough to capture another breath, and chattering away like a ‘53 Chevy with really bad lifters. They have all the intelligibility of a pan of frying bacon: all sound, sizzle and splatter; but nothing of any real substance. They could talk to you for three days without letup and you wouldn’t understand a single word they said. They are sewing-machines pretending to be speakers, and their lazy, inconsiderate speech habits are never ever worthy of your attention. Walk away from them. No, I just said that incorrectly. Get on your feet and run away from them.

C2001-3 Public Speaking Fundamentals

6. PAUSE: At critical points in your speech, pause long enough to make your listeners reflect on what has been said and to refocus their attention. The most difficult lesson a speaker ever learns is the lesson of judicious silence. And that is so because it is completely counterintuitive: it would seem that a speech should consist only of continuous talking. But every speech should have periods of intentional silence in it to jolt the auditors back into full focus. Silence in a speech builds great tension in the audience. Once the speaker learns that lesson of judicious silence, he will begin to realize the very great power of closing his mouth so his listeners can refocus in order to hear him again. Five seconds of silence will completely re-boot a dead audience. A fool chatters to a sleeping audience; a wise man shuts his mouth to wake them up.

7. DISTANCE: Stand near your listeners to establish an intimate speaking distance, and to avoid the perception of remoteness. Do not hide behind a lectern. Walk right up to them and speak to them as a father would speak to his children. When you stand close to your auditors, you violate their “space.” But you must violate their space in order to persuade or to convince them. They will never feel threatened as long as you stand (or hide) behind the barrier of the lectern.

8. IDIOSYNCRATIC PHRASING: Avoid sandwiching your syntactical units of speech with empty idiosyncratic phrasing, such as, “you know,” or “right?,” or with superfluous grunt words, such as, “er,” “ah,” “um,” or “and dah.” Speakers quickly lose their audiences when they fill their narratives with all those stuffers.

9. EYE CONTACT: Look at your audience members individually. Look directly at a particular person, holding your gaze there for a sufficient period of time to engage that person. Move that eye contact to another person and repeat the process during the entire speech. Do not stare at some imaginary spot on the floor just ahead of you or at the walls or the ceiling. Instead, actively look at your listeners. Make them uncomfortable with your eye contact in order to keep them focused on your speech. Never look from, say, left to right without pausing slightly to look directly ahead.

Always coordinate eye contact with gestures. Both of them are required simultaneously to give coherence to your speech. Disjointed and unconnected gestures not only look awkward; they also pull the auditor in two different directions at once because of the lack of visual coordination. The “eyes” tell a different story than the “hands.”

10. AMPLITUDE: Always speak in a somewhat constricted range of vocal amplitude. Avoid the extremes of shouting or whispering. In every case, do not bomb the target with a pillow wrapped around your munitions, i.e., do not make the “central point” of your speech in a muffled or attenuated - and hence, unintelligible - voice. The “punch line” should be delivered in a rather loud and well-articulated voice in order to make it understood and effective. If necessary, the “punch line” should be repeated to ensure that the audience gets the point of your speech. Be especially aware of extraneous noises when you deliver the “punch line.” A rude cough by someone in the audience that comes out just while you are making your most important point will smother comprehension in the audience. Always be aware of competing noises when you are giving a speech.

11. IDEAL SPEAKING VOICE: Find a comfortable speaking voice and use it. Avoid timbres that are either too high or too low. You will always know when your timbre is inappropriate because you will feel a great deal of strain on your voice when you speak with that unnatural voice.

Women, especially, should seek to avoid that “little girl” shrill voice that many people (especially men) perceive as irritating or nagging or whiney. Think of the simpering teenage girl chattering away rapidly in that eeky little head voice and you’ll know just what I mean.

Also to be avoided are the “shushing librarian,” argumentative, or scolding voices that serve only to force the auditor to concentrate on the relative “bitchiness” of the speaker,” rather than to allow the auditor to focus on the content of her speech. Such women would do well to cultivate the lower registers of their natural voices in order to produce pleasant and attractive timbres.

C2001-2 Public Speaking Fundamentals

1. SPEAK TO THE EYES: Stand erect, with your eyes level, in a posture appropriate for giving a speech. Look directly at the eyes of your audience. Do not look at their feet. Do not slouch. Do not stare at the floor when you talk because you cannot be heard when you do that. Do not speak to the carpet. The carpet cannot hear you. People will think you are mumbling because, well, frankly, you are mumbling: you are speaking to the carpet instead of to them.

Do not stare at the ceiling when you talk because people will not believe that you are speaking to them when you do that, either. Do not speak to the ceiling. The ceiling cannot hear you. Speak to the people instead. Do not stare at the “exit sign” over the door. The sign cannot hear you.

And lastly, do not stand there with your eyes closed when you give your speech. I saw a man do this once, and it was probably the most unnerving thing I had ever seen in my entire life. I don’t know what he did to keep himself from falling over as he stood there with his eyes closed. And it was so distracting that you could not concentrate at all on what the man was saying. Standing there with your eyes closed might work well in a DUI screening test. But it doesn’t work in a speech. Open your eyes. Look at your audience. And speak.

2. SYNTACTICAL UNITY: Speak in complete syntactical units of phrase, rather than in periodic bursts of speech. Do not say (as Jimmy Carter would), “I just want to say......that I have come here......to speak to you today...blah, blah, blah.” Instead, speak in complete sentences from beginning to end, without those annoying and unnecessary pauses. Speak from the beginning to the first punctuation point and then pause. Speak until the next punctuation point and pause again. Speak between punctuation points. Understand that: Speak between punctuation points. Continue this process until you have completed your speech. Incidentally, some might argue that the perception of Carter as an incompetent president stems from this very lazy speech habit that he used. The principle is sound: Speak like a fool, and people will come to believe that you really are a fool.

3. DICTION: Speak slowly, clearly and forcefully, from the beginning of a syntactical unit until the very end. Enunciate deliberately and distinctly. Never rush your speech. Never slur your words. Pronounce each word as if it were vitally important. When necessary, repeat important parts of your address - words, phrases or ideas. Be particularly aware of people in your audience who cough (or create disturbances - crying babies, etc.) at precisely the same time you are attempting to make your most important point. It is always better to repeat what you are saying than to risk being misunderstood because some rude person coughed your speech into incomprehension.

Young people, in particular, should study the speech patterns of older people and attempt to emulate that speech. Adults quite often will not tell younger people that their speech patterns are absolutely incomprehensible to anyone other than other young people. The youngsters, quite naturally, then believe that there’s nothing wrong with their speaking habits. But those kids need to be told. Many of them speak like eight-year-old girls at a pajama party - with all of that tittering, breathless, sewing-machine speech. The only way such youngsters could ever be taken seriously would be to stand in front of a dog with a cookie in their hands. No one else on the planet will pay any attention to them because their speech habits make others stop listening to them. Chatter like a monkey and your listeners will go deaf.

4. MODULATION: Speak in a well-modulated tone from the beginning to the end of each sentence. Do not drift off at the end of each sentence, or swallow your words, or turn your head away from your audience so that your meaning is lost to your listeners. Allow them to hear every single word of your speech. Always speak with a chest voice rather than a head voice, and when you do that, project your voice to the far wall of the room in which you’re standing. Speak with enough force that you can hear the natural resonance of the room. When using a microphone, pay attention to the fact that oftentimes such instruments are unidirectional and if you turn your head even slightly away from the microphone, it will not pick up your voice.

Always be aware that a speech can whimper into incomprehensibility when the energy level of the speaker dies before the speech has ended. Often the speaker starts out forcefully, only to allow his speech to die on the vine of muffled speech before his speech has ended. The principle is clear: Speak in a well-modulated tone from the beginning to the end of each sentence, and from the beginning to the end of the speech.

5. ASK QUESTIONS: Engage your audience by asking questions frequently. Make sure that your listeners are required to listen attentively in order to avoid being caught daydreaming and being unable to answer one of those questions because of inattentiveness. Do not allow your listeners to sleep on your watch.

F2104-1 The Management Club

    When I worked in western Wisconsin, I was a member of the Management Club, a rag-tag group of foremen and supervisors.  They let me join the club because I was a salaried employee who supervised the maintenance employees once or twice a year when the maintenance foreman went on vacation.  I really shouldn’t have been a member of the club because I wasn’t a day-to-day manager.  But they let me join anyhow.
    A co-worker named Mikkelson tried to sign me up for the club.  I wasn’t attracted to a club like that because it seemed to offer nothing that interested me.  I mean, think about it: you have to work with those guys every day.  Why would you go out and socialize with them at night after you’ve been fighting with them all day long?  But Mikkelson said you got your $10 annual dues back two or three times in benefits.
    The club had four “outings” each year.  There was something called a “Couples Steak-Fry,” where, as Mikkelson explained, “You could bring your old lady and get a steak dinner for $5.00.  Not a bad deal, right?  You’d get your dues money back right there with that one event.”  Then there was “The Golf Outing,” where everybody pretended to golf while attempting to drain the quarter-barrel of beer they were hauling around on their golf carts.  Things could get kind of ugly with the deadly combination of Budweiser and Nine-Irons.  Then there was the “Christmas Party,” where, Mikkelson explained again, “You could bring your old lady and your kids.”  He didn’t seem at all attracted to the Christmas Party himself because “They ain’t got no beer at that affair.  Just Santa Claus and shit.”  But the outing you really wanted to attend, he said, was the Smelt Fry.  Yessir!
    The Smelt Fry was your basic guy-affair: deep-fried smelts, french fries, beer (lots of beer) and euchre card games.  Mikkelson said that after everybody ate and started drinking that “they would be flopping around like fish on land.”  And he wasn’t lying about that one bit.  I had a plate of smelts and some fries, drank a beer or two, and then I went home.  I was the sensible one.  I could see all that spilled beer on the floor and a general rowdiness beginning to settle in among the men.  So I left.  Most of the other men, however, stayed at the clubhouse and drank until they ran out of beer at about 11:00 pm.  Then they went bar-hopping.  When the final count was tallied, the club lost three members who were fired from their jobs because they were in jail and couldn’t report for work.  One man was up on a felony count: something about discussing the issues of the day with a police officer while waving a pistol in his face.  Three or four were out on bail, awaiting trial, for public drunkenness and property damage.   They had remodeled buildings with their automobiles, you see.  We had half a dozen DUIs (Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol) and multiple cases of beer-induced adultery that led to divorces later on.  All in all, a pretty productive night.  And they managed to do all that with only 125 members.  Just think what that Management Club could do with 32,000 members: why, the USA prison population would double.
    We moved to Appalachia shortly after the Smelt Fry.  So I never got to see the antics at the Golf Outing.  But I would guess that giving every golf cart its own personal quarter-barrel of beer was a recipe for membership reduction of a rather large magnitude.  As a comedian said, when commenting about how fast you could make mistakes with a computer, “A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.”  I would add the Management Club outings to that list, too.

B1043-1 Angel Food Cake

    My mother had an uneasy relationship with telephones.  When the phone rang, she often had a look of fear or trepidation on her face as if the Gestapo had come suddenly, knocking on the door, in the middle of the night.  She had a great reluctance to answer the phone, and it was only after five or six rings that she ventured a rather tepid “hello.”  Then her conversation invariably included three other words as well: yes, no, and bye.  Always in that order: “hello,” “yes,” “no,” and “bye.”  Four words.  One minute tops. And then the telephone receiver was back on its cradle.
    One day she was mixing the powdered egg whites from an angel food cake mix.  She had just emptied the contents of the packet - marked with a big “Package A” - into the mixing bowl and started to mix.  Then the telephone rang.  Very slowly she made her way to the telephone and she stopped the ringing after five rings.  Her conversation began true to her usual, tentative form.  But it suddenly it veered off into an extended - and most convivial - conversation.  She told me to “watch the mixer” as she waved her hand in the general direction of the machine.  I suppose that I was about eight years old at the time.  I had no idea what it meant to “watch the mixer.”
    She continued to talk on the telephone, even going to the effort to pass the telephone through the arched opening between the kitchen and the dining room.  She sat on the chair in the dining room while she continued her conversation.  I could not hear what she was saying.  I noticed, however, that she laughed out loud at several times during her conversation.  Perhaps it was not the Gestapo on the telephone after all.  But I couldn’t imagine who it might have been.
    The egg whites worked themselves into a thick froth after ten minutes.  I looked toward my mother for advice about the egg whites.  She was hidden from view in the dining room.  So I continued to “watch the mixer.” After fifteen minutes, the egg whites began climbing out of the mixing bowl.  I used a spatula to fold them back into the bowl.  At twenty minutes, when it was impossible to keep the egg whites in the bowl, I turned off the mixer.  She stuck her head around the corner and asked me why I turned off the machine.  “I can’t keep the stuff in the bowl,” I said.  She ended her telephone conversation and came into the kitchen.  When she saw the stiffened egg whites, she had a very surprised look on her face.  She asked me what I had done.
    I didn’t know how to answer her.  I was told to “watch the mixer,” and that was just what I did: I watched the mixer.  I hadn’t done anything.  “How did you get those egg whites that big?” she asked.  “I don’t know.” I told her.  “I just watched them.  I didn’t do anything.”
    I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was getting pulled into the clutches of something I now call “competency.”  It was always possible to hide completely in ignorance and never have a single person in the entire world suspect that you might be able to stand next to a food mixer, and to transform the contents of “Package A” into towering mounds of egg whites.  But somehow I did just that.  And since I had that strange  - and now un-hidden - talent, I was given the task of making an angel food cake every Saturday for the next four years.  “Billy,” my mother explained to anyone who would listen, “makes the best angel food cake in North America!”
    I found that it was impossible to escape from that cake-making responsibility.  My brothers, when asked to mix up an angel food cake, invariably botched the job.  I was stuck with that Saturday routine until Grandma Tyndall asked me to “take care of her garden.”  She was going away to visit with her sister for a couple of months and she wanted me to keep her garden weeded and watered.  I agreed and began well enough.  But the allurements of Summer dulled the bright promises I had made to Grandma Tyndall.  Weeks went by without me even thinking about the garden.  When Grandma Tyndall returned, her garden was a hopeless, tangled mass of weeds.  “I will never let you take care of my garden again,” she said.
    That very next Saturday I took the contents of “Package B” from the angel food cake mix and dumped it into the mixer.  “Package B” was flour and it did not mix with water to produce those stiff peaks of egg whites.  It only made a sad little puddle of paste in the bottom of the mixing bowl.  “I don’t know what happened,” I told my mother when she saw the abject mixture in the bowl.  She pushed me out of the way and called my younger brother.  “John,” she said smiling broadly, “I’m going to show you how to make an angel food cake.”
    Once again I was hidden from view in the cave of “Creative Incompetency.”  John, however, was caught out in the open.  He began his stint as an angel food cake baker, not knowing exactly what had happened to him.

B8003-1 Opinions

DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS OF OPINIONS:

a. OPINIONS ARE COMPLEX INFERENCES: They are inferences drawn from factual or non-factual data, or from other opinions, or from narratives, or from anecdotes about the material or immaterial universe.

b. OPINIONS CAN BE EXPRESSED IN ANY TERMS: They can be expressed in any terms thought to be useful by the holder of the opinion, and are not limited to mensurability even when they contain pseudo-mensurable elements as in some of the following examples:

“Two men robbed the gas station.”
“The nine pennies in the drawer belong to Robert.”
“I got a double eagle on the seventh hole.”
“Some Democrats want to turn this country into a socialist state.”

c. OPINIONS CANNOT BE SUPPORTED BY FACTS: Opinions are not mensurable assertions and can never be supported by facts. They are assertions of belief based on credible (and sometimes, incredible) evidence. The evidence, however, may be Formal, i.e., the rational and logical entailments of consistent and well-structured propositions; or Circumstantial, i.e., “he was there, so he must have done it;” or Anecdotal, e.g., “families that eat together regularly are less likely to have kids who get into trouble.”

d. OPINIONS ARE ALWAYS SUBJECTIVE: Sometimes opinions are considered as low-grade or “subjective” facts”:

e. OPINIONS OFTEN DO NOT REQUIRE A LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION:

f. THE TEST OF AN OPINION IS ITS REASONABLENESS: Opinions are always gauged on their reasonableness and consistency. Since by their very nature opinions cannot have elements of enumeration, extension or duration, opinions are tested by conformance to some known standard of fluidity and grace. If the opinion itself seems to be reasonable and logical and consistent, without compelling errors, it is deemed a good opinion. Often times in scientific circles, this particular test is applied to things such as the Big Bang Theory and Evolutionary Theory. In both cases, there is no factual content to test. As a result, the Big Bang Theory and Evolutionary Theory are often subjected to the LBR Test: if it “looks ‘bout right,” then it passes the test.

g. OPINIONS MAY NOT BE QUANTIFIED: It does not make sense to say, for example, “George Bush is 2.6 percent (or 26 percent or 260 percent) evil.”

h. OPINIONS ARE NOT SELF-REFERENTIAL: They imply everything beyond themselves in the same way that a logical contradiction entails everything else.

i. OPINIONS, GENERALLY, ARE NOT VERIFIABLE AND REPEATABLE BY OTHER COMPETENT INDIVIDUALS: However, others may support similar opinions, or others may support opinions that do not agree with those opinions. One should recognize that considerable variation exists with opinions. As a general tendency, though, the results vary considerably from person to person to the point that opinions may differ widely - even to the point of outright contradiction.

j. OPINIONS ARE NOT TRIVIAL:

k. A COLLECTION OF OPINIONS CONSTITUTES A LIST: As opinions themselves can imply everything, so also lists can imply everything. Lists, sometimes called “data,” are used, however, to form subsequent opinions or more deeply articulated opinions. But the lists themselves are not limited to a definite conclusion.

l. OPINIONS, COLLECTIVELY GROUPED IN A LIST, ARE NOT INTER-RELATED: They are intransitive and independent of one another.

m. THE CONFUSION OF OPINIONS WITH FACTS: Science, as a self-styled, mensurable activity, frequently falls into the error of confusing opinions with facts. All scientific “evidence” is ultimately based on opinions and not on facts, even though the “data” will appear to be “factual.” In fact, the work of science is to make opinions appear to be objective by quantifying that which cannot be quantified.

n. THE MATHEMATIZATION OF OPINIONS YIELDS PARTICULAR DESCRIPTIONS OF RELATIONS:


OPINION NARRATIVES:

a. BIKER LOG: Some time ago I was directed by others to a web-site that featured a so-called report of a bicycling trip across the state of Iowa. On the whole I found this report unsatisfactory for several reasons. The author had a very perky and sophomoric style of writing that eventually enervated the reader with its strained effort to be funny. The attempts at humor were so contrived and forced that the work was difficult to read through in its entirety (I couldn’t finish it). It was far too long to keep anyone’s attention, and if one did not share a cycling passion with the writer, it was uninteresting as well.

Instead of supplying a useful narrative to his readers, the writer had only observations and opinions of what he had seen on the trip across state of Iowa. And invariably, the citizens there were pictured as hopeless and flawed individuals, who had voted Republican in the most recent elections, and who entertained perverse ideas, such as hostility to a variety of liberal views on taxation, gun control, and the death penalty, etc.

On the whole, the antic style of this particular writer reminded one of the perpetual class cutup back in grade school who always attempted to amuse his classmates with his highly inappropriate coprolalia. Either that, or this writer sounded like an inept person who tried to tell a joke that you had already heard before, and told that joke with such a telegraphic style that you were bored to death before the person ever got to the punch line. The only thing that could possibly make his writing worse would be his writing with him under the influence of quart of tequila.

On the whole, though, the article was useful for the lessons it taught about writing in general, strange as that may seem. Normally, one would expect to find a cycling report that described the trip and some of the things that were seen on the trip and some of the lessons that are learned there. Instead, the reader was treated to an endless, piecemeal memory-dump on the part of the author. Particularly annoying were his uses of foreign words and phrases mixed in with the most trite language possible. I suppose one was supposed to gauge his sophistication by the use of those haute words, but his childish style ruined the effect completely. By combining those sarcastic and ill-chosen words in the same sentence, the man merely looked foolish, like the rookie writer trying to be a sophisticate and a comedian at the same time. It simply didn’t work.

But I would have to say that his complete lack of narration gave a very staccato effect to his writing - almost a bam-bam-bam slide show effect - that made it very difficult to see the point the man was trying to make in his writings. Instead, each paragraph detailed a separate, unconnected view of what he saw on that cycling trip.

The comments were stated as his opinions of what he saw and did on that trip; or opinions of what he thought about the inadequacies of the citizens there; or his opinions of life in general. And he offered those opinions over and over as if any reader in the world might be interested in what he thought. But instead of being something that could be received with grace, those opinions merely showed a disillusioned and bigoted fool, who seemed to be convinced that the world thought he was God’s gift to writing. Of course, he wasn’t. Fools always come off as fools; they’re seldom seen as geniuses or as God’s gift to anyone. And this writer was no different. He was a garden-variety fool, with touches of literary talent, who managed to annoy everyone who looked at his piece of writing.

b. RAW OPINION: “The greatest of this [environmental] writing is neither sentimental nor obvious - instead, it is very nearly shamanistic, allowing the natural world to translate itself into English in all sorts of ways. The emotional ways, taxonomic ways, descriptive ways, intimate ways, Olympian ways. It is a community of writers, with all the particulars of their upbringings, tastes, genders, mental states, seeking faithfully to serve as some sort of connection between people and the rest of the world. That faithfulness demands the most scrupulous accuracy - you have to know the tree’s resilience, the coyote’s circling route, the carbon molecule’s structure. But it also demands that you care, which is the highest form of objectivity [emphasis not in the original]” (Bill McKibben. “Speaking Up for the Environment,” The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, Marie Arana, ed., New York: PublicAffairs, 2003, pp. 363-364).

C1008-3 Writing Stories: Narratives

1.    OUR STORY:  Each of us has a cluster of stories, personal vocabulary, quirky, idiosyncratic habits and sayings that in totality constitute what might be called “our narrative.”  Often, but not always, our characteristic gruntings most aptly define and characterize who we really are.  To be sure, we should recognize that there are times when we can give the impression that we are espousing a particular notion by using some particular piece of vocabulary when we, in fact, believe quite otherwise.  Yet, we should also be aware that the impression that others form after dealing with us often come from small - even unitary - words, gestures, or phrases.  When we hear someone using a word like “karma” in a conversation, our minds automatically pigeonhole the speaker as one familiar with Hindu philosophy, even when doing so might well be a mistake.  After all, the speaker’s usage may reflect only a passing familiarity with the word rather than a settled philosophical conviction.
     If we had sufficient time and opportunity to observe and listen to an individual, we would begin to assemble an accurate picture of that person’s narrative.  We might recognize then that “karma” was a word our narrator used whenever he wanted to give the impression of sophistication, even though he may have thought that the concept of karma itself was silly beyond comprehension.  Only long exposure to his narrative would reveal the true beliefs of the narrator.

2.    INCOMPETENT NARRATION:  There are those who reveal their uttermost characteristics in a chaotic and incompetent manner.  Such people are, as the saying would have it, their own worst enemies.  It is not that they actively seek to deceive their auditors.  Rather, they are incapable of delivering a coherent message to others, or of expressing themselves in a way that can readily be understood (cf. “A fool’s narration is like a burden on a journey, but delight will be found in the speech of the intelligent” [Sir. 21:16]).  They are inadvertently ambiguous communicators.  Sometimes we refer to this phenomenon in a particular situation by saying that “he cannot tell a joke.”  In a similar manner, others cannot tell their personal narrative without creating a great deal of confusion in their listeners.  Often the reaction of others is perplexity and confusion.  “What the hell did he mean by that?” is a typical follow-up question to his narrative.  So, all I can say is: Hey, you people know who you are.

3.    MISLEADING NARRATION:  At other times, circumstances force us to make assessments of others based largely upon a single word, gesture or phrase.  The fleeting burst of information that comes our way is often insufficient to make an honest and realistic appraisal of the other person.  Thus, a misunderstood word here and there can take our minds off and running in inappropriate directions, when a more faithful transmission of information would never allow us to misinterpret what we are hearing in such a way.  A smiling person may convince us that he is warmhearted; when he may be, in fact, a simpering idiot who grins at the wind and every passing car just because he doesn’t know any better.  Or, conversely, the unsmiling man we meet may appear grim and forbidding, when he may have just forgotten “to look pleasant,” as his wife told him earlier in the day, just before he slammed his fingers in the car door.  We can be seriously misled by these momentary bursts of narration (or looks) and we should always be open to the possibility that our “first impressions” are just that: they are first - and not necessarily correct - impressions.

4.    OPINION-FORMING NARRATION:  I once met a man at a wedding reception.  He was standing outside the reception hall and he was “watching the sky,” as he explained to me.  I wondered very greatly what it meant to “watch the sky.”  I asked him why he was doing that.  He seemed to notice that I was perplexed by his intense scrutiny of the skies, and I think he anticipated my question.  He suggested darkly that “they were spraying here last week, and now everybody was going to get sick.”  I was surprised by his remarks and I asked him who was spraying what.  He said the 910th Airlift Wing was flying those C130 aircraft on those lowpass missions over the village again, and that they were spraying biological agents on the people.  “I could see the liquid shooting out of the nozzles at the rear of the planes.  You watch and see,” he said.  “Everybody is going to get the flu or whatever it was that they were pumping into the air.”
     Well, yes.  I had seen the very same airplanes from time to time myself.  They were flying very low, just above the treetops.  The noise from their turboprops created a huge rumble over the village.  But I never suspected that they were spraying anything from the rear of the fuselage.  And since I had no other source of information about airplanes spraying pestilence or other apocalyptic substances into the air, I could only conclude that my sky-watcher was a disturbed individual suffering from some ill-defined paranoia.  The narration I heard from him did not move me from indifference to concern about the spraying per se; rather, it made me think I was dealing with a garden-variety, certifiable nut.  And his “narration” made me think that he was bonkers.

5.    CIVIC NARRATION:  Any definable group of people (tribe, city, state or country; organization, etc.) will possess what might be called a civic narrative that describes the hopes, dreams, pride, regrets, shameful nostalgia and other items of interest to that community.

a.    LOST PAST NARRATIVES: For example, I saw an obituary in my local newspaper several months ago for a man who had been the president of the labor union in a shop where I had once worked.  He had retired some months before I actually began working there.  As a result, I cannot really say that I knew him.  But I did hear quite a bit about him because he was one of those legendary, fire-breathing union presidents.
     He was a person who “pioneers” a spate of radicalness in a company just before the bottom falls out. And, at the end of the day, that man’s grandsons must move away from the area because the grandfather had created the very conditions that sent jobs elsewhere.
     For this area where I live, that is a rather common story.  In fact, it is the defining story of this region: a nostalgia for the very things that unionism has destroyed.  Much of the city looks like Warsaw after WWII.  Hundreds of hulking, empty brick buildings stand in testimony to the thoroughness of the unions’ destructiveness.
     The one thing a visitor to this area will notice immediately is that none of the locals ever see a connection between the rabid unionism of the past and the dearth of jobs now.  Somehow, in their minds, the two events are disconnected, unhappy co-incidences and really have nothing to do one with the other.  Instead, what the visitor sees is nothing but an obstinate blindness about the region’s unionized past.
     The city has lost 50,000 residents since I moved into this area thirty-some years ago.  It is now of such a small size that it cannot effectively counter the Republican votes of the other parts of the state.  That is significant because presidential elections are lost without this counterbalance.  But more importantly, the loss of population is a reflection of past union”triumphs” which resulted in chasing manufacturing concerns to the American South or overseas.
      Almost everyone around here remembers the heyday of manufacturing when General Motors, Delphi Automotive, General Electric, Republic Steel, Youngstown Sheet &Tube and others employed tens of thousands of people.  In their minds they couple a prosperous middle class with strong unions and imply a casualty that does not really exist.  They forget the heady machinations of mere co-incidence.  Yes, strong unions existed then, along with a prosperous middle class.  But then, strong unions co-existed as well with, say, an imperial Soviet Union.  One could hardly suppose unions “caused” that imperialism or vice versa.  The two existed on the same planet at the same time without any connection between the two.
     It is important to remember that a union at it most basic level is a coercive, collusive, and adversarial party in a labor negotiation.  It does not exist to con-celebrate prosperity or indulge in feel-good sentiments about shared success.  Instead, it seeks to sequester some of that prosperity for benefit of its members at the expense of the owner/investor class.  Unions, when they are most effective, take so much away from the owner/investor that they destroy the host much like an incompetent parasite.
     The loss of 50,000 residents from the city is proof positive that the union efforts have been successful in destroying every employment opportunity in this area.  Rational owner/investors who sink large sums of money into facilities and equipment (think of a steel mill, for example) do not just walk away from those investments unless it becomes uneconomic to continue in the business.

b.    PESSIMISM OF USELESS MYTHS:  In the United States, the “Lost Cause” narrative of the American South is prototypical of such a narrative.  It describes in endless detail the reasons why the South should have won the American Civil War (1861-1865).

c.    IMPROBABLE DREAM OF RECAPTURING THE PAST:  So often a narrative  of this type will center on the rebuilding of an amusement park or downtown theater that now lies in a state of utter disrepair.  The thinking seems to be that the lost glories of the area will be reestablished by the incidental restoration of a particular form of architecture from that lost past.  It is the silly dream of nostalgia clouding the judgment of an otherwise rational people.