Emma Lao

Of all the writing styles we have been studying, writing for the ear is the most unique. Typically a story is told through information that is revealed to the reader for them to interpret on their own. In audio-centered writing you instead focus on an giving the listeners an experience by following the action of a plot. The style of writing required to do so would be highly unconventional for reading, but works to keep the attention of the audio listener. 

One of the most important things to do is keep your sentences short and to the point. As Jill Swenson says in her post “Writing for the Ear Instead of the Eye”, you should follow the ABC’s: be accurate, be brief, and be clear. While using complicated jargon or sentence structures may be appropriate for the written word, it is too easy to lose the audience or sound unnatural if you do so in spoken word. Everything you say should sound like everyday speech – if anything rolls off the tongue the wrong way find an easier way to say it. It is also useful to utilize punctuation to signify pauses or emotions that can only be heard otherwise.

Another important tactic for audio writing is to show the audience instead of telling them. A perfect way to show rather than tell is to include some audio of the scene. In almost all NPR radio stories, they will introduce a change in scene by letting the audience listen to the environment for a few moments. For example, if they were visiting a soup kitchen they may play audio of the cooks calling out for orders, or if they were on a farm they may play audio of wind chimes and long grass in a breeze. This allows the listener to take a breath and let the scene in before they are thrown into the action.

When you have finished your writing, no matter what kind it is, it is important to read it aloud to catch any awkward phrasing or simple mistakes. However, it is critical to do so for writing for the ear since this is how it will actually be presented. You also want to do it as many times as possible before the you present your material – practice makes perfect!

Writing for the workplace may seem simple at first thought – all you have to do is be professional and get your point across and you should be fine, right? Well, that is true, but it goes much deeper than that. Every piece of business writing requires rhetorical awareness: the understanding of the purpose, audience, stakeholders, and context of the document. To execute business writing effectively one must go through a long and thorough process of defining the key characters of the writing and how it will affect them, establishing proper tone, and making all the information easily accessible.

The main persons involved in each piece of business writing are the primary author (you), the audience (who will be making the decision), and the stakeholders (who will be affected by the decision that is made). In order to present your point in the most effective way you must preform an in-depth audience analysis where you consider every relevant aspect of the audience and stakeholders. This could include the needs, values, and attitudes when it comes to the subject and their physical, political, economic, and ethical context.

In the kinds of writing that we have done previously the audience does matter and you do need to understand them to a certain extent in order to have one in the first place. However, it is absolutely vital in business writing that you have a deep understanding of who your writing will effect affect and how your writing needs to effect affect those who you are attempting to persuade.

Tone is also an important part of business writing. It will vary from what kind of message you want to convey, but typically you want to have a voice that is confident, courteous, and sincere. Even if the message you are sending is negative, you want to give that message as eloquently as possible. This can be achieved by using proper emphasis and subordination, which is basically amping up the good and hushing the bad. It is also important to use non-discriminatory language that could turn a lighthearted and positive message into an automatically negative one for those who are excluded or demeaned (the most common case of this is assuming that males hold all dominant positions). These are all things that should be kept in mind in other forms of writing, but it is nowhere near as important since you are trying to sell your idea on behalf of a major company, not on behalf of the story itself.

One of the final differences in business writing is the use of proper design. The document must be easy to navigate and should have a table of contents, page numbers, and specific headers. The information itself should be presented generally at first then become more and more specific with headers to match. Every sentence should be simple and clear so that anyone, including people who are not in the primary audience, could read it and understand. The layout of the pages itself are important as well; you should do your best to compliment the information with visuals that follow the Z pattern along the page. Balance and color choice are important as well. While in past writing types the design should be considered, it is again not as in depth as it should be for business writing.

Overall, business writing requires a lot more focus on the audience, structure, and tone than on the content itself. As in all types of writing, revision is highly important. This is more true than ever in a business atmosphere where the last thing you want to do is waste your client or boss’s time since time is money.

“There’s a well of water deep inside,

High upon the mountain of our dreams,

That catches every tear we’ve ever cried,

And pour them out again in a cooling stream.”

Elaine Kolb, “Coming From Somewhere”

On a summer night of 1973 in Atlanta, Elaine Kolb was facing intense fear and dread. She was only 23, but everything was already too much for her. She had to escape – so she did. She ran and ran all night long until she blacked out from pure physical and emotional exhaustion. The next morning, she woke up with a song on her head and – finally – the feeling of inner peace.

This piece will tell the story of how Elaine Kolb struggled with feelings of despair and hysteria in her young life and how the song that came to her in a bought of emotional explosion has kept her grounded, hopeful, and compassionate into her senior years. Her words can be easily applied to many young adults today, myself included, who feel lost and anxious about what we are supposed to do in this crazy world. Elaine’s wisdom and life experience brings insight to the human condition of existentialism and how we can find peace and understanding within ourselves. 

There are several instances where Zinsser’s bold claim that when you are writing you should be writing for yourself can be disputed. Ultimately, however, his argument remains true at least in part no matter what kind of writing it is.

His point is the most easily defended form the stance of narrative pieces. Writing that tells a story is much better served when the voice telling it is unique and therefore able to compel a reader. All of the examples he uses in “Chapter 5: The Audience” are narrative pieces and do a good job at showing how a unique and genuine voice can make a piece about almost any subject worth reading.

When you start to stray away from narrative into informative writing, though, Zinsser’s approach to “writing for yourself” seems dangerous. In Steven Pinker’s “The Source of Bad Writing” he warns of common pitfalls that writers make – the main one being what he calls the “curse of knowledge”, or “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.” This “curse” will often times cause confusion for the reader, especially if you have not been keeping track of what they know and what they don’t. So of course if you are only keeping yourself in mind while you are writing, you will assume that the audience (who is you) knows what you know.   

However, that is not what Zinsser meant when he said “write for yourself”. He makes a point to establish a clear distinction between “craft” and “attitude”. Craft is the “technical detail”; the skills that you work on as a writer to make your piece coherent. Attitude comes next – it is the flavor that you bring with your voice; it is bringing out who you are. Therefore, as an effective writer you should be following Pinker’s advice about avoiding the “curse of knowledge” in the craft, then bring your voice to the piece once you are sure the reader can follow.   

Another form of writing where it may be difficult to avoid thinking of the audience is in advertising or promoting a brand through social media. Throughout Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” he repeats the idea that companies often fail at advertising through social media due to the fact that they do not pay enough attention to the platform or the consumer. Again, this fundamentally goes against the idea that you should write envisioning yourself as the audience since focusing on your target audience is highly important in the field of advertising.   

Still, this can go hand in hand with Zinsser’s ideas if you look at his reasoning for it. He says that it is foolish to imagine the mass audience since every person is different and that you will at least entertain some readers if you are able to entertain yourself. The best way to reach an audience is to speak to them genuinely, but you still want to have an audience in the first place. So when it comes to advertising and outreach, it is best is to use your voice when speaking to your audience but to put yourself in the audience’s shoes. This is easier, of course, if you are a fan of the product –  but even if you are not, you can apply methods and styles of writing that you would personally enjoy to your content. After all, Vaynerchuk says himself that your job is to “tell your story to the customer,” and that, of course, requires your voice. 

Emilia Clarke’s essay “A Battle For My Life” is a successful piece of online writing. One of the best elements of this essay is the style. Through her writing she is genuine and it is clear that she believes in her own identity – an identity that the readers come to love. She gives anecdotes about being an actor on one of the biggest shows of the decade and feeling utterly terrified. Clarke reveals that some of that fear is about a disease that could kill her at any moment and shares a vivid story of her first seizure and hospitalization.

Before she continues to talk about her recovery, she goes back in time to when she first started acting and the pressure she felt to remember her lines; a pressure that is re-visited when she describes a terrifying night in the hospital:

“One night, after I’d passed that crucial mark, a nurse woke me and, as part of a series of cognitive exercises, she said, “What’s your name?” My full name is Emilia Isobel Euphemia Rose Clarke. But now I couldn’t remember it. Instead, nonsense words tumbled out of my mouth and I went into a blind panic. I’d never experienced fear like that—a sense of doom closing in. I could see my life ahead, and it wasn’t worth living. I am an actor; I need to remember my lines. Now I couldn’t recall my name.”

The way she intertwines her story is compelling and her attitude about her career and her struggles with the disease are easy to understand.

Clarke’s words flow perfectly. When I was reading this piece, I could hear her writing as if she were speaking in an interview about her story. Nothing she said sounded like it would be unnatural in speech. The flow of her writing was unnoticeable. There was not a single moment where I was pulled out of her story or questioning word choice or usage.

This piece was simply enjoyable to read. Even though she is one of the biggest actors today, Clarke clearly has a talent for sharing her story in a way that connects her to the audience. Her voice came to me clearly and my respect and admiration for her has grown after reading this piece.

Good Readable Content: How To Build A Daily Habit Tracker In Trello (And Reach Those Goals!)

Bad Readable Content: How To Use Trello for Video Production Project Management

When choosing the two writing pieces for this assignment, sources I used in my own blog post about project management immediately came to mind. Why? Because they are fundamentally the same, yet I distinctly remember liking one much more. While at the time the reasons were not so obvious, the Australian Government’s Content Structure Guide and the first few chapters of William Zinsser’s On Writing Well explain my first impressions.

First of all, the structure in the “bad” content shares a skeleton with the “good”, but makes several of the mistakes the structure guide warns of. The content does look good on mobile devices, but is an annoyance to read on desktop with the website’s banner and menu taking up about 20% of the screen. The paragraphs do allow for white space, but perhaps too much. At times, his writing feels sporadic when almost every sentence is a new paragraph.  The same can be said for the visuals he uses, there is no clear reason to why he uses the visuals he does and they do not add anything to his article. The author’s subheadings were present, but did not front load key words. What is most noticeable about this writing is the inconsistency of his format, particularly when it comes to listing.

The “good” article has a much cleaner and understandable format. Her subheadings were clear and effective. The directions she gives are easy to follow since her use of lists is optimal. To enhance understanding, she has plenty of useful visuals. However, the reader could still get by without them.

The differences in structure are dramatic enough, but where the “good” piece is really good is in the style of writing. Even though the content is a simple how-to, the reader feels connected to the writer of the “good” piece because she had good style. According to Zinsser, the more you believe in you identity and opinions the better your writing will be. I was drawn to her content because she wrote like she was an actual human. I felt that she was genuine. On the other hand, the “bad” writing seemed to have no identity. It did its job in a how-to standpoint, but it did not stick out to me. In fact, the only reason I remember this content is because it was a foil of the article that was so memorable to me.

Stories can push us to feel emotion and empathy for those with whom we share our world. Stories are what connect us to others and inform us on how different people lead their lives – and my goal is to help people share their stories through the art of documentary film.

My nonfiction projects include a film on a ten-year-old boy’s love for rapping, short films on the issues surrounding members of New Haven’s Mothers and Others for Justice, a film about the road homeless dogs from Louisiana take to find their forever homes, a biography of singer-songwriter-activist Elaine Kolb, and a film on a woman in India who assists girls in local villages.

In addition to my personal projects, I am a professional assistant editor at Triple Threat TV in Stamford, CT and regularly organize footage and assemble rough cuts for television series. I also do freelance filmography and editing for local businesses and organizations such as Elm Shakespeare Company in New Haven, CT and the River Advocates of South Central CT in which I create promotional videos and record and edit their events and shows.

I will soon graduate with a BA in Film, Television, and Media Arts from Quinnipiac University and will continue to hone my storytelling and content creation skills by pursuing a MS in Interactive Communications and Media.