Notes of Note

February 17, 2012, 12:01 am

It’s dangerous to post a column on work avoidance. You’re likely to receive e-mails, as I did after my post on Pootwattle, proposing even more ways to fritter away the time you should be spending writing your book or grading your students’ papers. Of all the proposals I received, none has tempted me more than “Letters of Note,” an Internet assemblage of notable epistles from the past six centuries.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a famous person in possession of e-mail should be in want of pen and ink. Though we write letters all the time, really—what are e-mails, texts, and Facebook messages, if not letters?—we regard the loss of the written or typed epistolary record with more than simple nostalgia. The private communications of notable people (and the contemporary forms I’ve listed are never sufficiently private) reveal sides of their personalities and philosophies that the public record often misses or eschews. Just as important, the ordinary letters of an era or a time of crisis (and here electronic communications have some standing) reveal the assumptions, beliefs, and fears of a generation, not to mention the language in which they couch those thoughts.

I’m finding all sorts of pleasure in browsing through letters sorted by era, form, theme, author, and so on. One minor pleasure arises at finding real letters penned since the millennium by folks I had otherwise imagined communicating only via YouTube. In his 2006 response to a young fan, for instance, Tom Waits writes, “Allow me to formally encourage you to write things down, so when you make it you can say, and I can say, I was in your corner all along. … Stay at it Colin. Lots of great people come from Illinois because it’s so flat you have to dream up everything.”

But even more enticing is the letter of a Union soldier, Sullivan Ballou, to his wife, on the eve of a terrible battle that would cost his life. I return to this letter over and over, not because of the situation or Ballou’s eloquence or the prurience of peering into private correspondence that was found on Ballou’s corpse, but because of the letter’s singularly missing quality: irony. In his unmailed note, Ballou holds in tension his devotion to his wife Sarah and his devotion to his country, and without sentimentality or apology he chooses the latter. I hope this brief excerpt will convey what to me is a breathtaking sincerity of tone:

If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my Country, I am ready. … I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. … Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and burns unresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield. The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hope of future years . …

As for my little boys—they will grow up as I have done, and never know a father’s love and care. Little Willie is too young to remember me long, and my blue-eyed Edgar will keep my frolics with him among the deep memories of childhood.

We don’t write this way anymore, obviously. The question is whether we can feel this way anymore—and if we do, whether we possess written language, partaking of our lived experience in a world rife with irony, in which we may express such feeling. Faithful readers, I submit the question to you!

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http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1558697482 Carolyn Roosevelt

We can, but it’s a signal act of courage.
ccchron

can we “feel this way anymore,” or do the ironic conventions of contemporary writing prevent it?

perhaps not, but if we are blocked from feeling patriotism of the destructive and self-annihilating kind expressed in the letter, it may be a good thing, even if there was a noble cause attached to this occasion (I mean ending slavery — which the letter writer notably doesn’t mention, as excerpted here). There are also the writer’s feelings toward “God,” and toward family. Can the capacity or tendency to ironize about these things be considered all under one question? I’m not sure.

seems to me we would also need to think about where the pervasive irony has come from, and then what might lead it to go away.
rmgosselin

I have a four page, hand-written letter from a student that begins: “I pray that when this letter reaches you, it finds you in the best of health and in good spirits. As for me, sadly, I’ve been forced to move to another prison and therefore can not have the pleasure of being in your class this fall semester.”

All the men in that class are good writers–some are superb–and their papers often have the same 19th Century rhetorical quality. But I don’t think a lack of irony is the issue om this case; their lives are full of irony of the severest kind, and they love to dissect it right in front of me. I think it’s because the maximum-security environment is a single text, without exit or hyperlink. Concentration is intense, because it’s vital. This focus on one acute reality provides a rhetorical and emotional link to Sullivan Ballou.
tkassam

To your question “whether we can feel this way anymore” I would add “do we have relationships that foster such feelings – or sensibilities?”
davi9000

Lucy, I am new to this blog of Lingua Franca in Academe of The Chronicle of Higher Learning. I just registered and signed in after coming across The Chronicle website; so what I’m going to say will be “brief” because I hope to add an extended comment later. Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife is very touching. Yes, it is without irony and without any sentimentality. This excerpt of the letter you have quoted tells me quite a bit about this man: he was honourable, faithful, committed to and, therefore, unflinching in the cause of fighting for his country and what he considered to be his and the people’s identity with the evolving qualities and character of the life and the promise of a fledgling “American Civilization” which, I think he must have felt, was very hard in its coming and realization. (The irony is in our own minds and hearts in our own time because America’s essential identity, which is one of oneness, wholeness, or unity, is still in the throes of realization.) I think he was so, as well, with his undying love for his wife and his children. I think he did not just choose his country: I think he really chose both – his devotion to his wife and family AND his country, for without his country as he saw it his wife and family would be in danger, bereft of protection. The vision this man had for his country included the ensuring continuance of the life of his wife and children he dearly loved. This was his sacrifice as he knew he was facing death on the battlefield. His heart was sure and clear and for this he was and is to be praised. He was an articulate, knowing and intelligent man.

So: to your question. The answer, I think, is embedded in what you have said and quoted. Like so much else in the collective life of our tattered time, language is a casualty: it has suffered greatly from the forces of disintegration and disunity. This shows in our communication with one another and in the writing arts – I particularly see it in fiction. What has gone out of language in our time – in the way we use language – is what could be called the spiritual energy – we have lost our heart or soul connection with it – with which language has always been endowed. Language has both an inner spirit or reality and an external or outer surface manifestation and it is the same with our own reality. Susanne K. Langer related this in her book, Feeling and Form. Unity of language and expression (feeling) is surely a deep loss: we have forgotten the inner significance of the values or meanings of words (language) and this relates to the clouding of our own inner reality in meaning o significance.

Cursive writing. We use keyboards/computers, we have the Internet and Facebook and Twitter. This electronic media are extensions as tools of our hands, but this can and does take away the immediacy of long hand writing with ink on paper – it takes us away from the organic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Readers here may disagree, but I think what matters is our own hearts – faithfulness, honesty, sincerity, and commitment to our own identity which is in our hearts, but many of us don’t know what that identity is.

What happened to “brief”?

David Erickson
susanda

I think the area “in between sexual consent and sexual harassment”, as you describe it, is a terrific way of putting something I have long thought about. We’re always trapped between the poles. I had read a review of the Alford book, and it sounds like a fascinating account of a particular class and generation of women.

She certainly does *not* make JFK sound sexy. I mean, all I can say is ugh.

historiann

UGH and eeeewwwwwww, I would add. So much for the conservative fantasy that “hookup culture” is a result of the feminist movement and only started happening in 1992.

physioprof

”In all our time together,” Alford writes, “it never once occurred to me
to call him Jack. Even in our most intimate moments I called him Mr.
President….To do otherwise would seem inappropriate.”

Whoah.

http://twitter.com/TenuredRadical Claire Potter

I know. It’s a very sad moment in the book. Also the part about how he never kissed her.

northernbarbarian

Just caught up with this post-grading. Some interesting ideas to chew over. One issue I wonder about is whether the technology is yet able to enable a good-quality classroom exchange via this “narrowcast” (much less to 500+ people)! At my SLAC I do a good deal of lecturing, but since classes are small I regularly ask the students questions and invite questions, can respond when I see that they are confused, or can tell a joke to wake them up when they are drifting. I could still do all this while students at other institutions are watching, but I think that would create yet another track of those in the room with me and those outside. The idea of broader consortia is well worth pondering, however.
qizhenkim

Very good, this let me benefit a lot from it.
http://www.woodplasticcompositedeck.com
anharrington

Using technology to mix people from different cultural backgrounds is great. You analysis about the current model emphasizing class distinctions is right on. However, your solution of mixing the inexpensive and expensive universities does not make economic sense. The expensive universities pay for faculty that can either wow a big class or strongly and individually engage a small class. How do they finance their high salaries or spread their time with this model? If the US government decided that this was worthwhile, and wanted to make Pell grants much bigger and available to a much wider group, you would have financing, but I certainly do not see that coming any time soon.

Maybe you could talk this up enough that some courses at elite universities were available for some “experience of diversity”, but I do not see it happening generally.

In the end you give one more highlight of the power of money in our social, business, and political culture. And the importance does not go away with your talk.
bwogilvie

I haven’t listened to your talk, but I have noticed that I’m much more aware of the ums, pauses, and errors in my own recorded talks than in those by others, probably because I already know the content, and thus I concentrate on the form.

One a related note, I realizes some years ago that lecturing in rooms that seat 120-150 (and sometimes 250) has led me to adopt a kind of booming voice delivery that reaches everyone but cuts out a lot of the variety of which my voice is capable. I’ve considered emulating Spalding Gray’s delivery, which would require a mike in big classrooms, but would give me a much broader palette with which to work.
sherbygirl

I give my students a lecture every semester about eliminating “punctuation words” from their essays (the so’s, well’s, likes, and, I swear, one students even had an um in his paper once). My worst habit is turning my sentences into questions by ending them with, right? I get painfully self-conscious whenever I do this lecture because I become acutely aware of how bad my speech patterns really are. But it’s only when I lecture; when I present, they seem to lesson (but not disappear).

kimpetorin

lessen

physioprof

Amateur public speakers–and I include academics in this category–almost always speak way too fast. Listen to a really good political speechmaker, and if you pay attention to the cadence, you’ll be shocked at how slow they are speaking. The ums and ahs and whatnot are effective because they force you to slow down and give the audience time to catch up. If you speak slowly enough, you don’t need them.
aeonelpis

I teach public speaking and communication, and I do notice when people fill their pauses up with disfluencies (or vocalized fillers). The pauses need to stay in place, but you can ditch the um, uh, and ah for other, more productive, pauses.

Pausing for the audience to catch up matters. On the whole, people struggle to retain information they only hear, so having a moment to pause and take stock helps people to integrate the new information into the big picture. It’s like the old Mario Brothers games — you finish a level (a section or point of the speech) and you pop back up to the big map, showing you where you stand in the big picture. Audiences need these pauses and moments of reflection. The disfluencies can go away, but you need to keep the pausing.
Audiences respond best to people they perceive as genuine, another reason I suspect that people responded to the disfluencies in this study. The vocalized fillers make the address seem less memorized and rehearsed. In the trade, we call this extemporaneous delivery. It’s prepared, practiced some (I recommend 8-12 times), but you don’t have it all scripted or memorized. Speaking from notes almost always results in a speech that connects better with the audience.

If you want to cut out the fillers, try cutting them down by halves. The first step is awareness. Try to sort out what leads you to fill the pauses. Are you trying to think of what to say next? Pause and look at your cards instead. Are you nervous? Take a drink of water to ease the symptoms. Do you have a lot of energy and the words are coming too quickly so the um, uh, and ah make their way into the stream? Move around and gesture (it will absorb the hormones and help you calm down). If you cut half out each time you speak, you’ll form new habits that replace the filled pauses.
studentteacher

Thank you so much for the original talk and passing along “Don’t Ditch the Ums.” I like ums so much better than the aggressive punctuations “look” and “listen,” and better than “right,” especially when said without the rise at the end. I have tried to leave the space and do a silent “um.” Perhaps an “um drum” we could hit each time we get to that moment would work.

I’m terribly conflicted about recording my voice for students and “memorialization.” A colleague of mind recently died and her online recordings have become problematic for her family and friends…perhaps with time.
studentteacher

Thank you so much for the original talk and passing along “Don’t Ditch the Ums.” I like ums so much better than the aggressive punctuations “look” and “listen,” and better than “right,” especially when said without the rise at the end. I have tried to leave the space and do a silent “um.” Perhaps an “um drum” we could hit each time we get to that moment would work.

I’m terribly conflicted about recording my voice for students and “memorialization.” A colleague of mind recently died and her online recordings have become problematic for her family and friends…perhaps with time.
mcmacdonald

Scott Fraundorf and Duane Watson’s research undoubtedly explains something that may have been omitted from the press release: pauses are the speaker’s (largely unconsious) strategy to allow extra planning time for the next chunk of material to be said. Therefore, as several comments here note, the more you practice and also learn to slow down, the less you umm. Since the pausing and similar strategies like adding filler words (like, um, you know, sort of) are an unconscious and natural consequence of the way unpracticed language production works, practicing the material is a better strategy for getting rid of these things than consciously trying to eliminate them.
henrycalphinjr

I don’t see why there is a link in the picture and headline between stuttering and speech quirks. Both stutterers and non-stutterers use filler words, but stuttering is a bit more than a quirk. I figured that it need not be said that one is a disability and the other a temporary roadblock, but the picture and headline tell me otherwise.

Tenured_Radical

While people who are distressed by their own, and others’, stuttering may disagree, I’m not altogether sure that the distinction is that clear cut, except that the two are subject to different forms of stigma. The link was intentional. It was intended to make readers think about listening, patterns of speech that are perhaps wrongly viewed as shameful and disfunctional, and the dominant assumption that disfluent speech patterns indicate disorganized thought and a lack of will. I know several academics who stutter and the corollary to this research would be that they are extraordinarily popular teachers from whom students claim to learn in distinctive ways. I am also using the word “quirk” deliberately, since it is exactly employed that way in Looney Tunes. If you notice, Porky Pig usually has something extraordinarily important to say, and he makes you wait for it. Daffy Duck, however, is elegantly verbose and says almost nothing of any substance.

henrycalphinjr

Thank you for the reply. Your thoughts here would have been better served in the article, though. Stuttering is not mentioned within the text of the article, while the headline and picture place it at the forefront of the reader’s thought on the matter.

From the view of the listener, stuttering and filler words may be similar as potential disfluency, or as you mention, perceived lack of will, but that’s an entirely different article. To posit that a fluent speaker’s filler words are akin to stuttering in any manner just seems off. If a listener cannot tell the difference between a stutterer and a few ums, then the listener is not empathetic and/or the stuttering is quite mild.

jjdeal

I was broken of “ums” and “ahs” in high school by a history teacher and his “Ahh Meter.” Students would be given a photo from that day’s newspaper and asked to speak extemporaneously for three minutes. Said teacher would sit in the back of the room with a 3 lb coffee can and a handful of huge nuts and bolts. Upon the first “ah” or “um” – WHAM…the bolts and nuts hit the can with the most awful racket. Cured every single one of us of that habit….To this day, I do not punctuate my speeches or lectures with “ums” or “ahs,” and I find it most distracting to listen to someone who does. Thank you Larry Marzulli!!!!
susanda

Years ago I heard a piece on NPR about how they edit. (I think it was on “On the Media”.) They don’t sound mellifluous and fluent right off the bat, trust me.
v8573254

B/c I watched the TED after reading this, I noticed “um.” No real distraction.
A/b content — K-12 schools could do likewise, and some may do that already when distance or course offerings are big factors.
proftowanda

Ummmm, don’t worry a bit about it. I “hear” your voice in your written work, such as an article of yours that I just cited in my work in progress . . . and you sound brilliant in your article. (More fun, when I found your article and found it to be spot-on for my needs, was realizing that the author is aka Tenured Radical, so that I could picture your visage while I “heard” your voice in your work.)
godard

i, too, notice the “ahs.” they are as obnoxious as the “like.” signifiers without signifieds that make the speaker sound illiterate.
timothyquigley

Great presentation Claire. I didn’t notice the “disfluencies” either. But I’m with you on the search for more felicitous ways to fill those gaps. Most of us are uncomfortable with “dead air space” when speaking, but I’m coming to feel that simply pausing and allowing listeners in meetings, lecture halls, conversations, etc. to “see me thinking” may be just fine.

Of course, this also means they have to be patient. But maybe that’s okay, too?
aephirah

My son took a course with a professor whose “ums” were incredibly distracting. Since I know this instructor, I am aware that he routinely inserts as many as 5 “ums” per sentence even when he is READING a presentation. (The fact that I have frequently begun to count them also means that I am no longer listening to content.) Normal, natural disfluencies are not a distraction, but exaggerated and persistent ones can be disastrous –especially for someone whose entire career is built around speaking in public.
graddirector

I teach an oral presentation class for science grad students. I would disagree about the Ums, Ahs, etc. They should be ditched whenever possible since they are very distracting to the audience and make the speaker sound very uncertain about their topic. However, I would agree with others about cadence. Most nervous speakers go way too fast when over rehearsed. The key is to just stop talking when thinking about what to say next without putting in an UM. However, it can be weird and distracting to take that too far as well. Once I had a student who would pause 15 seconds between slides….
urbanexile

As your putative publicist, I would like to see half the ums and few more dramatic silences accompanied by intense gazes into the audience. It was, however, a very good talk.
baruch2

Depending on the number of “um”s and how jarringly they’re said, I can sometimes find myself focusing more on them than on the presentation content. Generally, it seems that heavy reliance on “um”s means the speaker should slow down, not necessarily polish their presentation to the point of being robotic.
historiann

I found out about that one on my own yesterday, coincidentally. Arrghhhh. . .