Writing Boots

I should just make it a wiki, I know, but the trouble with a wiki is that one worries that one won't get all the credit.

So here's another random communication rule (I'll collect these in a book someday):

Never address an audience as an audience.

Unless you're standing in front of a crowd or from the south, never write or say, "you all." Usually, your reader or listener is taking in your words all alone in a kitchen, a cubicle, a car or bathroom. He or she doesn't receive your words in a crowd, so don't say "some of you," or wonder "how many of you," or or refer to "most of you." It only reminds the reader unnecessarily that you're they're one of many and you're a big arrogant windbag.

Hey you: Just write, "you."

FYI, I'll be shouting down a well tomorrow for one hour, starting at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, hoping there are people down there interested in my audio-conference topic, "The Employee Publication: How to Make Yours Great."

Actually, in our house, we refer to Barack Obama as "the Good Witch," as we try to explain to Scout what voting is, and who we hope we're voting for.

Obama is scheduled to appear in Springfield, Ill. tomorrow with the VP we're all waiting for him to name, and Cristie, Scout and I are joining a small coterie of "friends, partisans and Illinoisans," as a friend puts it.

We'll take the Amtrak down—Scout's first ride aboard a "real train"*—and we'll roll down the tracks with a mob of what I hope will be a merry band of likeminded others.

I hope we get there early enough to get past the Secret Service security bottleneck. I hope they let us bring in Scout's DVD player. I hope it doesn't rain.

Mostly, I hope the communal, in-person, this-is-history, "Daddy, is that the good witch?" experience wipes the translucent film of dreariness and boredom that's grown over my exultation about Obama's candidacy.

As the kids say, I'll "report back."

* This phrase has particular currency in our family, as I'm quoted in a book of my mother's as saying, at five, "My glad is bigger than a real train."

Postscript, 8/24:

Like Dorothy et al, on our first visit to see the wizard, we didn't
receive total satisfaction in our decadent desire to be inspired by a
politician and a crowd.

In our case, it was hot as doughnut grease in the sun, we were too far
away to see much and Obama's speech was mostly an introduction of
Biden.

Still, you can't beat a day on the rails, headed to the Old State Capitol the way Abraham Lincoln did it.