Writing Boots

Why?

Because you can tell stories like this one, about a newspaper design pioneer who taught workshops for Ragan Communications when I worked there in my twenties.

(Did you ever know any newspaper design pioneers?)

Anyway, old Edmund Arnold died in 2007 at 93, but he was still teaching workshops in like 1995 at like 81 and saying things like this about modern newspapers: “The front-page images on our newspaper are becoming so big that they don’t attract the reader, they attract the looker. … We are over-designing, and we are over-coloring, so what the reader is confronted by is a three-ring circus. Who do I watch? The bareback riders, the weightlifter or the jugglers?”

In an obligatory attempt to ascertain whether Ed was a wizened iconoclast or an over-the-hill relic, one of us Ragan staffers asked him if he ever felt bad about not remembering his seminar participants’ names.

“Not at all,” Ed said, in his sing-songy, old-timey Michigan accent. “I just call all the guys ‘Champ,’ and all the ladies ‘Honey.'”

My customers are speechwriters, and other professional communicators. This means they’re wonderfully articulate in their “feedback.” Years ago the afternoon snack we offered at our Speechwriting School workshop was described as so scant as to be “nearly churlish” by one scribe, who I am sure has used those rapier typing fingers to go on to great things. (To this day we rate all our buffets on a scale from “churlish to 10.”)

After the very worst session I have ever been responsible for—I recruited a speaker so smug that when he said “good morning” he seemed to be taking credit for it (as old Jerry Tarver would say)—I overheard one of my customers mutter to another in all seriousness, “It’s actually possible the man bonded this community in hatred.”

But generally, the problem with “feedback” is that too much good feedback gives recipients big bellies, while at the same time they remember the one bitter bite. Like a great seminar leader I used to hire in the 1990s, who was nagged by a comment that he’d received in the 1960s, about being a little man with big ears, and a Napoleon complex. Feedback had turned him permanently into an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. Which isn’t a good trait for a leader, however common it is.

So I don’t much like feedback, beyond rousing applause or gales of laughter or telling silence or the smiles and frowns I can see for myself. I’ve been doing this a long time. I know when my customers are absorbed and when they’re disengaged, when they’re happy and when they’re not. And generally, I know why. Sometimes I can’t predict when a speaker will let them down, but I can sense it’s happening, in the room. And: It happens occasionally, and it always will. Sometimes that’s my fault, sometimes it’s not. And sometimes I know what will piss my customers off, and I give it to them anyway because pissed off is what my customers occasionally need to be.

I know it’s rude, in the age of The Customer Is Always Right, to put on a three-day professional event or sell a person a pair of shoes without asking how they enjoyed the experience, and acting eager for the information. But think feedback is mostly useful to out-of-touch corporate executives of Supercuts or Jiffy Lube, who don’t know their business intimately and don’t really have any idea what’s going on in their stores.

Of course, I’m not omniscient, and I can’t see my product through everyone’s eyes at once. Maybe instead of asking how each person found each session, I should ask a single essay question: What was one thing you thought or felt at the conference that would surprise the organizer and emcee (so smug that when he said “good morning” he seemed to be taking credit for it)?

I’d be interested in their answers to that question. Otherwise I’m the rude one, asking customers for opinions I don’t exactly want to hear.

So rude, one might say, to be nearly churlish.