Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Becks like us: Why all communicators need journalism experience

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So Glenn Beck acknowledges that, during his "Restoring Honor" speech at the Washington mall, he lied about having held the George Washington inaugural speech in his own hands.

Why did he tell the white whopper? Because "I thought it was a little clumsy to explain" the elaborate document-viewing process at the National Archives.

Saying (with outreached hands and quavering voice) that he actually held the parchment, Beck said, would "be a little easier than to say, 'Yesterday, I went to the National Archives, and they opened up the vault, and they put on their gloves, and then they put it on a tray, and they wheeled it over, and it's all in this hard plastic, and the because you're sitting down at a table and you can't—because of [Former National Security Advisor] Sandy Berger—you can't actually touch any of the documents because they are very rare'…..I thought it was a little clumsy to explain it that way."

This is why experience in journalism is, was and always will be essential to speechwriting and other communication disciplines.

Instead of saying he held the speech in his hands, Beck could have simply said, "I was almost unbelieving as I beheld the actual manuscript with my own eyes." Alternatively, he could have gone deep, describing the document-viewing process in even more detail than he does above (minus the Sandy Berger swipe)—and the reverence he must have felt as the speech was being brought out. That wouldn't have been clumsy. It would have been powerful.

Journalism contains the art of making the most of the facts—not making the facts themselves. It's not saintly—it can be just as manipulative as an outright lie—but it is a crucial career-saving skill for professional communicators like you, me and Glenn Beck.

Happy Hour Video, Labor Day Edition: Work holds us together

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Labor Day is the most meaningful holiday of the year, because work is the most common human endeavor of all. Not everyone can talk credibly about sex, not everyone cares about sports, and many people don't even think much about food.

But get people talking in detail about their work—often you have to do some persuading that you're really interested—and you've transformed them into a passionate expert, on computer programing, train driving, deal-making, dancing, public relations or hairpiece-sewing.

Here are a few reflections on work, drawn from Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by deep-thinking motorcycle mechanic (or mechanically competent philosopher) Matthew B. Crawford.

The dichotomy between blue-collar and white-collar work is stupid.

"First, it assumes that all blue-collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white-collar work is still recognizably mental in character," writes Crawford. "… trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White-collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation …" 

And to illustrate briefly how intellectually involving blue-collar work can be, Crawford shares the recollection of a carriage-wheel maker, writing about the complexities involved in fabricating the wooden rim of a wheel, called a "felloe":

It was the wheelwright who had to make [the felloes look alike]. He it was who hewed out that resemblance from quite dissimilar blocks, for no two felloe-blocks were ever alike. Knots here, shakes there, rindgalls, waney edges (edges with more or less bark on them), thicknesses, thinnesses, were for ever affording new chances or forbidding previous solutions, whereby a fresh problem confronted the workman's ingenuity every few minutes. He had no band-saw … to drive, with ruthless unintelligence, through every resistance. The timber was far from being prey, a helpless victim, to a machine. Rather it would lend its own special virtues to the man who knew how to humor it.

Sounds to me like … writing, which I think of as one of the building trades.

It's good to have a trade.

And the very luckiest people in the world are those who have found a line of work that connects with everything else in their lives.

"… there are vocations that seem to offer a tighter connection between life and livelihood," Crawford writes. "Can such coherence be traced to the nature of the work itself? A doctor deals with bodies, a fireman with fires, a teacher with children. … these things are real enough, and the practices that serve them demand the kind of focused attention around which a life might take shape."

Both my parents were writers, I'm a writer. I deal with words, and much of my writing is for other writers.

"I try to be a good motorcycle mechanic," writes Crawford.

This effort connects me to others, in particular those who exemplify good motorcycling, because it is they who can best judge how well I have realized the functional goods I am aiming at. I wouldn't even know what those goods are if I didn't spend time with people who ride at a much higher level than I, and are therefore more discerning of what is a good motorcycle. So my work situates me in a particular community. The narrow mechanical things I concern myself with are inscribed within a larger circle of meaning; they are in the service of an activity that we recognize as part of a life well lived. This common recognition, which needn't be spoken, is the basis for a friendship that orients by concrete images of excellence.

So it's a happy Labor Day for me, and, I hope, a happy one for you too. If not, though, let's work on it. With our heads and with our hands.

Vital Speeches finds: challenges outnumber opportunities more than two to one

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Slamming together Vital Speeches of the Day the other day, I wasn't sure whether I had or hadn't inserted a George Allen speech into the final document, so I searched for "Allen." Allen was there—but what the search also turned up in the month's dozen speeches, 42 uses of the term chALLENges.

The entire document is 40,000 words, so I did the math and found that "challenges" makes up almost one percent of the words in these speeches.

A wicked smirk pulling on my cheek, I did a similar search for "opportunities." Nineteen. So about 1.5% of the words in the best speeches in the world are either "challenge" or "opportunity."

As for why so many challenges and relatively fewer opportunties? Hey, these are tough times indeed.

But I wonder if I didn't just stumble into a new measure of overall well-being. Mulling over a monthly Vital Speeches Leadership Confidence Index ….

Today the Dow Jones was is up 100 points on higher-than-expected Leadership Confidence Index figures. Vital Speeches of the Day reports that this month in speeches delivered by public- and private-sector leaders, "challenges" outpaced "opportunities" by only 15 percent, the lowest number since Vital Speeches started keeping records, back in September of 2010 ….