Write How You Write, Not How You Speak-from Daily Writing Tips

“If you’ve ever seen a transcript of an extended discourse — a written record of someone’s comments, rather than the prepared script for a speech — you’ll understand how widely spoken and written English can diverge.” DailyWritingTips.com

7 min ago

He’s talking here about phrases like “so to speak” and “In my opinion,” but the difference between the written and spoken words goes much deeper. A transcript is a “written record of someone’s comments, rather than the prepared script for a speech.”

“Readers expect your prose to be direct and dynamic,” and the spoken word is not. It’s riddled with “um”s and “uh”s, self interruptions, reactions to distractions, and lazy speech. You know can be a bid to buy more time or a request for reassurance that the listener is actively listening and understands your point.

There are a wealth of differences between the spoken word and the written word, and most people don’t give them a second thought. But that is precisely the focus of transcription. A transcript of the spoken word edited to the expectations of the written word would be unrecognizable.

Recently, I wrote about word patronage, the often-unnecessary inclusion of self-referential expressions as “as you will” and “so to speak” in one’s writing. This post expands on that one to recommend that you inspect your writing for anything that smacks of spoken English.

If you’ve ever seen a transcript of an extended discourse — a written record of someone’s comments, rather than the prepared script for a speech — you’ll understand how widely spoken and written English can diverge.

Spontaneous speech, at least, is riddled with qualifications and equivocations. It’s easy enough to dispose of “um”s and “uh”s, “well”s and “you know”s when converting a transcript to an essay, but writers should purge their prose of other utterances, words, and phrases as well that add a lot to a word count but little to a description or an argument. (See this post, for instance, for a list of adjectival intensifiers and their adverbial forms to avoid.)

In addition, omit hedging phrases such as “as I see it,” “from my point of view,” “in my opinion,” and “it seems to me.” Search and destroy such pompous filler as “be that as it may” or “other things being equal.” These are all understandable (though not necessarily forgivable) indulgences in spoken English, whether impromptu or rehearsed — at best, they’re nearly meaningless phrases one tosses off while thinking of what to say next, and at worst, they clutter a speech, distracting and discouraging listeners. But readers expect your prose to be direct and dynamic, and there’s no place for such self-gratification in written form.

Comments

grammar for the spoken word, transcription transcript a written record of comments, writing vs speaking

Mr. Lee’s Story, from a WW2 oral history.

My friend and colleague Bitra Nair extracted this story from an oral history. It was a very poignant story and we felt like it had to be retold. Thank you Bitra!

Related by Mr. Lee in his oral history.

Now, one of the other things, as I mentioned to you before about people and friendship. When we were young kids, I had a little classmate. We went to school in second, third, fourth, fifth grade together — and he was a Japanese boy. They lived in a fish pond right next to my home, and so we were close buddies. I remember his name was Toshi Yamamoto. I remember going over to his house, eating, playing games, always there. We were inseparable. We used to do so many mischievous things together. And he was the leader because I think he was a little older than I am, but we were good friends.

Hey, there was a plum tree where we used to play marbles all the time, and I went out there and call Toshi, “Toshi, where are you?” There was no answer. Like we always did before, whenever I called, boy, he would be coming out. He didn’t answer. So I ran to his house. His house was right around the edge of the fish pond where we used to play hide and seek under the house. I ran under the house and called Toshi, “Toshi, where are you?” No, Toshi. Ran upstairs into the house where he used to sleep in the house. The house was empty. “Toshi, where are you?”

I remember when I started going to school, I used to write little notes that I would send to the newspapers and say, “Toshi, where are you? Come see me.” There was never any answer.

To move that story ahead, for 71 years, I did that. I’m not saying every day, not every year, and I really wasn’t worried as to what happened. But there were rumors that their family was spies; the thing is, of course, rumors were that they were spies. This is what we always thought. But yet at the same time, we didn’t know whether they were killed or not. But for 71 years, I did this—trying to find Toshi because I was concerned. Where are you, Toshi? Again, for all of those years, I was hoping that one day, an old man like me would come up and say, I’m Toshi, but it never did happen.

I happened to be on TV, and I happened to get on the radio. Finally, the broadcaster said, “Jimmy, can you tell the story about your friend, Toshi?” So I did. He asked me about this. You know what happened? All of a sudden, there was a phone call to the radio station. That guy told the station that, “Hey, he’s talking about my dad.” When the note came to me, I was speechless. I couldn’t believe that I found him or anything. I still didn’t believe the story. But he called, and I tell you, I was speechless. I couldn’t say any more on the radio. I was crying, speechless, just shocked that somebody would call and say you’re talking about my dad after 71 years.

On December 14, he told me that his dad died several years before. I said, “Oh gee, where in the world was he buried?” He finally told me he is buried up in one of the cemeteries of a certain place. He couldn’t tell me exactly where it is.

I talked to the son, and finally, on December 20, I managed to meet the son. Not only meeting the son, but also the grandkids of Toshi and a cousin. And on December 20, we went back to the old house where the father was born and where I used to play with him.

Now, what happened to them? The thing is, during the war years, many of the Japanese here on the mainland United States were relocated. They had to be relocated and moved away. But in a way, we had about 140,000 Japanese. But the thing is when my friend, Toshi and his family came home that day, they were met by soldiers—soldiers that, what they tell me, aimed the machine guns at them, told them to go home, and remove all your belongings in 20 minutes and get out of here and don’t come back.

Uncategorized

Coming soon

Conversation opened. 1 read message.

Skip to content
Using Adept Word Management Mail with screen readers

Search

Active

Compose

Mail

Labels

Inbox117

Drafts72

Spam613

Categories

*MOOD NOTES

1 A Year to Clear340

2020 RECEIPTS4

2021 RECEIPTS

2021–PAYMENTS

2022 PAYMENTS RECEIPTS, TAXES

AA BRAIN HEALTH

AA–MDAH PAYMENT ADVICE-TREASURYSERVICES@MDA

AA-CLOUD DICTATION

ACTION REQUIRED PLEASE117

ADDRESSES

ADVERTISING IDEAS

Alzheimer

Amazon9

APPLE30

Beth FYI65

Boomerang-Returned3

CAPTIONING POSTS

Chartnet2

CodingQualitativeResearch

COMPASS BANK

COMPLIMENTS

Continental General

COPY EDITING1

COURSERA 08.2020 TO 07.202145

ESSENTIAL TREMOR

Excel Tricks

FCCU12

FEDEX PHONE

GENERATOR and FUSE BOX

HARVEY

House-10115 Dorrance2

JUST ENERGY81

LAPTOP

LIBRANDI

MAIL CHIMP26

MEDICARE1

MEDNAX PROBLEMS15

Patient Lists70

SAMS CLUB54

Signature Software3

SOFTWARE3

WEBSITE4

Chat

Spaces

Meet

New meetingMy meetings

More

Listening is Hard Work

Adept Word Management, Inc.

Mon, Feb 28, 12:04 PM (6 days ago)

to me

View this email in your browser

A client of ours, Dr. Thomas Cole, wrote this essay in honor of Black History Month in 2022. It was published in the Houston Chronicle on February 28, 2022.

Essay: Why Houston forgot Eldrewey Stearns. And why we should remember.

Tom Cole Feb. 27, 2022Updated: Feb. 27, 2022 6:57 a.m.08/26/1959 – TSU law student Eldrewey Stearns speaks at Houston City Council Wednesday. He claims two HPD officers beat him after his arrest on traffic charges early Sunday. Houston Chronicle

One morning in 1984, while I was sitting with 30 UTMB medical students in a conference reviewing psychiatric cases, a man was brought down from his room on the locked hospital ward.

He was Black, about 50, wearing painter’s pants, and sporting salt and pepper hair. His name was Eldrewey Stearns. At first glance, Stearns seemed to be a disheveled, vulnerable and angry man whose life had unraveled under the stresses of poverty, racism, alcoholism and mental illness. Yet he sometimes spoke in learned, even eloquent phrases.

A member of the psychiatry faculty interviewed Stearns. For teaching purposes, he checked off the criteria for his diagnoses of bipolar disorder (manic depression) and alcoholism. During the interview, Stearns declared that he was the “original Texas integration leader,” and announced that he was writing his life story. Students rolled their eyes and Stearns was taken back to his room.

“What should we make of the patient’s story, his desire to write an autobiography?” I asked, indignant at the omission of the patient’s point of view. The room was silent, as if I hadn’t asked the question. There was many a day, even years later, when I struggled with that same question to the point of despair. How do we listen and learn from our elders when it’s not easy, when mental illness and painful histories of racism pile on to difficulties we may have communicating? Finding the answer seems so urgent now as the racial reckoning set in motion in 2020, after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and many others, has turned into an entrenched conflict over “critical race theory” and how history is taught. I can tell you the answer isn’t easy.

The day after that conference 25 years ago, I took the elevator up to the locked ward and asked to speak to Stearns. An aide brought him out to the common room, where Stearns looked at me with a fierce gleam in his eye. I introduced myself and said that I appreciated the chance to learn about him in the medical-student case conference. He told me that he had been invited there to lecture.

“It sounds like you have an important story to tell,” I said. “I’d like to help you get it down on paper.”

“I doubt you’re up to it,” he said.

Yet Stearns began coming to my office every week to work together on his autobiography. It soon became apparent that he could not write due to severe tremors, and that he could not formulate an outline or focus of his own. I did some background research and found that from 1960-63, he indeed was the militant student leader of the sit-in movement and a major player in the dismantling of Jim Crow in Houston.

Stearns, an Army veteran, was then a law student at Texas Southern University — brilliant, charismatic, erratic, filled with boundless energy and ambition. On March 4, 1960, he gathered about 15 neatly dressed students around the university’s flagpole. They sang the Star-Spangled Banner, marched to nearby Weingarten’s supermarket, sat down at the lunch counter and demanded to be served. So began the first sit-in protest west of the Mississippi.

Although students were trained in nonviolence, they were haunted by fear of white violence. Three days after the first sit-in, a 27-year-old Black man named Felton Turner, was captured near the site of the sit-in by masked whites, beaten and taken to a remote wooded area. They took him to a tree, hung him upside down, and carved two rows of KKK in his abdomen. Police never found his tormentors.

Over the next few months, Stearns and fellow students felt isolated and uncertain. One night Stearns and Curtis Graves called Martin Luther King, Jr. and asked him to come to Houston. King hesitated for a moment. “I’ll tell God about it,” was all he said before he hung up the phone, according to Stearns.

Behind the scenes, however, white and Black businessmen, and some political leaders, were quietly laying the groundwork for maintaining the peace and managing the process of desegregation. After the Felton Turner incident, for example, Chief of Police Carl Shuptrine assured TSU President Sam Nabrit that student protesters would be protected against violence.

The Weingarten’s sit-in marked the beginning of three years of unrelenting student protests against segregation in lunch counters, restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, sports venues, public transportation. White students joined the protests as well. By 1963, after three years of extensive strategizing, planning and protesting, these venues were mostly integrated. And Stearns — already seriously troubled and suffering from bipolar disease and alcoholism — began to unravel. He spent the next 20 years wandering around the country, in and out of jails and psychiatric hospitals, trying to resurrect his political career. But history had moved on.

Eldrewey Stearns was virtually unknown then, and the story of Houston’s desegregation had not been told. For over a year, we tried to piece together an autobiographical narrative of his life. I submitted a draft to the University of Texas Press, which rejected the autobiographical project but said they would publish it if I wrote it as a biography. This put Stearns in a difficult position, because it meant he would have to give me control over writing his life story. Stearns decided that he would have to trust me and gave me permission to write the book — on the conditions that he receive three-fourths of the advance and that I integrate his voice into the text. I agreed but told him that as a historian, I would have to do my own independent research and write about Houston’s desegregation and his role in it — and that I would have to write about his mental illness. He agreed, and so began a difficult journey that culminated in “No Color Is My Kind: Eldrewey Stearns and the Desegregation of Houston,” originally published in 1997 and recently released in a new edition in 2021.

For over a decade, I worked with Stearns, interviewing and trying to understand him, grasp his point of view, and piece the story of his life together. Ours was a confusing, tumultuous and emotionally difficult relationship, vastly complicated by issues of mental illness and race. At the outset, he refused to take his medication or return to see a psychiatrist. Yet he came to my office without fail every week. “I look forward to seeing you every Monday almost as the flowers want for rain,” he said in a hopeful moment. Yet after long experience working with him at moments of manic swings and psychotic breaks, I realized that I had to tell the story as I saw it, integrating his voice into the narrative, while using my own judgment and integrity as a historian, medical humanist, and writer.

My research into the civil rights movement in Houston was initially difficult as well. When I sought to interview former protesters and some members of the NAACP, I was told that this was not my story to tell, being white and from the Northeast. White businessmen, politicians and journalists were skeptical as well. But I gradually earned the trust of both Blacks and whites, who spoke freely with me.

But racial identity is complicated. Stearns and I were not simply “Black” and “white.” The title “No Color Is My Kind” is Stearns’ phrase and reflects the knowledge that he is descended from a multiracial ancestry — African slaves, Indigenous Americans, an Irish plantation owner and a German Jew. Nor did he see me as simply “white.” One afternoon, while driving to lunch with Greg Curtis, editor of Texas Monthly, I asked Stearns what he thought of a white man writing a book about a Black man. “You’re not white,” he answered. “You’re a Jew.”

What can my experience telling Stearns’s story teach us about the seemingly intractable problems we face today, not just in addressing injustices, but in our ability to even talk about them? Listening is hard work. It may take years. You may feel more wounded than healed. You may come away wiser, but the transcendent moment may elude you. Above all, you must listen with an open heart and be willing to push back against stereotypes of your racial identity as well as the identities of others.

Adept doesn’t have a YouTube page in the usual sense of the word. But we do host a video about Mr. Stearns. We welcome your comments and reactions.

Copyright © 2022 Adept Word Management, Inc., All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you are a current or past client of Adept Word Management and provided your email address to us. If you do not wish to receive further email communications from us, please click the link below to unsubscribe.

Our mailing address is:
Adept Word Management, Inc.10116 Brighton LaneHouston, TX 77031
Add us to your address book

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Eldrewey Stearns – Fox New Interview 2012

Eldrewey Stearns – Fox New Interview 2012

ReplyForward

26.83 GB of 30 GB (89%) used

Program PoliciesPowered by Google

Last account activity: 1 minute ago

Details

Subscribe now

Uncategorized

HOW TO TALK ABOUT NATIVE NATIONS: A GUIDE

We’re transcribing some oral histories about Native Americans and the interviewer is using a term that is outdated now. She says she’s collecting interviews with Indians. Since that’s at least a misnomer from the days when the Spanish and Portuguese explorers thought they were finding a shorter route to “the Indies,” I thought I’d do some research. This link caught my eye in an initial google search: From the Native Governance Center: A Guide Native Governance Center hosted “Language Matters: How to Talk about Native Nations” on May 12, 2021. The event featured moderator Dr. Twyla Baker and panelists Wizipan Little Elk, Bryan Pollard, and Margaret Yellow Bird. Watch the recording from this event in our Resources library.

The introduction talks about the importance of language, and calling people by their preferred name.

Using appropriate terminology to talk about Native nations shows respect for nations’ sovereignty. It also contributes toward Native narrative change. Because language is so important (and we’ve received so many great questions about it from our community over the years), we decided to create an online guide.

Language is sacred. Wizipan Little Elk explains, “In every culture in the world, you get a name. You’re called something. Your people are called something. Your identity is tied up in whatever that name is. Names have the power to create life.” Conversations about terminology and language deserve deep thought and attention; take the process seriously.

I also double checked The Chicago Manual of Style, our preferred style guide.

8.38: Ethnic and national groups and associated adjectives

Chapter Contents / Ethnic, Socioeconomic, and Other Groups

Names of ethnic and national groups are capitalized. Adjectives associated with these names are also capitalized.

At the bottom of a list of examples, CMOS says, “Many among those who trace their roots to the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas prefer American Indians to Native Americans, and in certain historical works Indians may be more appropriate. Canadians often speak of First Peoples (and of First Nations) when not referring to specific groups by name.”

These interviews were done a long time ago, and I do want to preserve the interviewer’s speech as well, so I’ve decided to use Indians [sic].

Anybody have any ideas?

Uncategorized

WAS and WILL

Just two words capture the horror in Ukraine, and their hope for an independent future.

Nikolay Nikolov @Nikolay_Nikolov

So compelling from Zelensky

Uncategorized

Catherine O’Hara on a postage stamp.

Not much makes sense to me these days but at least Catherine O’Hara has her own Canadian postage stamp.

@BrianStack153

Writer, @ColbertLateShow Formerly at “Conan”, @TheSecondCity B.A. @IUBloomington M.A. @UWMadison

Uncategorized

Write How You Write, Not How You Speak-from Daily Writing Tips

“If you’ve ever seen a transcript of an extended discourse — a written record of someone’s comments, rather than the prepared script for a speech — you’ll understand how widely spoken and written English can diverge.” DailyWritingTips.com

Mr. Lee’s Story, from a WW2 oral history.

Coming soon

Search

Labels

Listening is Hard Work

Adept Word Management, Inc.

A client of ours, Dr. Thomas Cole, wrote this essay in honor of Black History Month in 2022. It was published in the Houston Chronicle on February 28, 2022.

Essay: Why Houston forgot Eldrewey Stearns. And why we should remember.

HOW TO TALK ABOUT NATIVE NATIONS: A GUIDE

WAS and WILL

Catherine O’Hara on a postage stamp.

UPLOAD FILES HERE