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I was once known as the communication profession’s youngest curmudgeon. Now that I find myself squinting open-mouthed at my computer screen on Zoom calls looking for the bottoms of my trifocals, my attitude has hardly improved.
Just this last week, I have angrily typed the following “ideas” into my Writing Boots file:
• Young woman’s professional bio. She includes among her hobbies, “building an authentically curated life.”
• First-time author, preparing to record his audio book. Asks his Facebook friends if he should read it straight, or let himself get “a little emotional” during the recording. Everybody says he should go ahead and cry. Everybody but me. (I don’t say anything.)
• Whenever someone tries to shame you for not knowing a thing—you’ve never seen Animal House!?—it’s usually best interpreted as a desperate, last-ditch defense of the primacy of their parochial experience. (The correct answer is, “You’ve never read Proust, in the original French?”)
• The most insufferable people in the world aren’t those who begin every answer to a question with the word “So …” Or, those who insert an underhandedly coercive “right?” in the middle of their every declarative sentence. No, the grandmasters of the grandiose are those who frequently begin sentences by saying, “What’s interesting is …”
Shouldn’t it go without saying that whatever aspect of a particular subject you’re choosing to bore me about is the aspect that you find interesting? And isn’t it only polite of you to let me decide whether what you’ve deigned to discuss happens to be “what’s interesting?” Or do I have no role in this conversation, beyond dutifully dying of carbon dioxide poisoning?
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You’ve still got your fastball, David. Let no one say otherwise.
Dean Foust
ceospeechwriters.com
Good to know, Dean. But I am working on a knuckler, just in case.
I listened to an audiobook written by a botanist that sounded so interesting, and might have been had not the author read her story, so deeply moved by her own fairly ordinary life outside the lab. It was agonizing. I now avoid any book read by the author. Saying nothing showed remarkable restraint.
Unbelievable. You should no more emote during a reading of your own work than you should put emojis in your prose.
Don’t think you should avoid all books by authors, though. I recently enjoyed this one very much, partly because it was read by the author, the masterly Louise Erdrich.
http://tinyurl.com/53pw4mh5
And we KNOW this author can read.
https://www.amazon.com/Effort-Understand-Hearing-Another-Ourselves/dp/1633310485
Thank you for the recommendation!