I have reported on the "Voice Project" before. Actually, I have mentioned it a couple of times. If you click this link, you will be transported to an earlier blog posting that references another blog posting - and it is that "other one" that will give you the best idea of what the "Voice Project" was all about - or, at least, what I think it was all about.
The "Voice Project" was a special program at Stanford University, designed for English/Writing majors, and was inaugurated during my very early undergraduate days at Stanford. While I was never able to take part in the program, I did get what I assume was the basic idea. In essence, at least as I have hypothesized it, the "Voice Project" asserted that a person could improve his or her writing by consistently reading, out loud, what she or he had written, making amendments as might seem appropriate.
I use this "Voice Project" approach in everything I write, from entries made to this blog to legal briefs - and including letters sent to my friends and children. I endorse this methodology!
Given my personal writing habits, and my commitment to what I think of as the "Voice Project" approach to writing, I was fascinated by a column by Sarah Bahr in the Sunday, December 11, 2022 edition of The New York Times.
Bahr's column was titled, "How the Spoken Word Shapes the Written Word." It's a full-on endorsement of the "Voice Project" method. I am reproducing it below, in its entirety, with the thought that this will be helpful to all who might want to be better writers. I have a feeling that I am going to be providing a link to my students in those Legal Studies "Senior Capstone" courses I teach at UCSC!
oooOOOooo
Times Insider
How the Spoken Word Shapes the Written Word
Whether
it’s to themselves, their spouse or their dog, reading aloud is
essential to the writing process for these Times reporters.
Julia Jacobs, a general assignment reporter for The New York Times’s Culture desk, was working on a profile of Julie Benko,
who temporarily took over the role of Fanny Brice in the Broadway
musical “Funny Girl” earlier this year, and she wanted the introduction
to sound, well, musical.
But simply
quoting the lyrics from a line in Fanny’s big number, “I’m the Greatest
Star,” was falling flat. She read it aloud and immediately realized what
was missing: The instrumental riffs.
“Early
on in the musical ‘Funny Girl,’” her published article reads, “a young
and determined Fanny Brice sings a line that anyone even slightly
acquainted with the show will be familiar with: ‘I’m … (deedle-dee deedle-dee) the greatest star … (deedle-dee deedle-dee).’”
Ms.
Jacobs is one of several New York Times journalists who read their
drafts out loud as part of their writing process. Whether it’s parsing
tricky passages or checking for overall flow, they all agree: Hearing
their words makes their writing stronger.
“I like that it
forces me to slow down for a minute,” said Ms. Jacobs, 26, who began
reading aloud while working for her high school paper. “It’s a way to
focus my brain very quickly when I have a million people pinging,
calling, emailing me.” She said that reading aloud also helps her
untangle a sentence: She knows it’s too long when she starts to run out
of breath.
Ms. Jacobs often writes
short breaking news articles, usually in an hour or less. But even on a
tight deadline, she said, she makes time to read problematic lines out
loud (often to her dog, Harley).
For
Dan Barry, 64, a longtime Times reporter and columnist known for his
narrative features, which are sometimes 2,000 words or more, reading
aloud is a matter of practicality.
He’d long asked his wife, Mary Trinity, to
read typewritten copies of his articles before he filed them to his
editor. But when he began writing the About New York column in 2003, he
had to file it each night by 6 — when she’d be in a parking lot waiting
for their daughter to finish ballet class.
So
he’d read his columns to her over the phone. “Even with the pressure of
deadline, I needed my wife’s OK that I wasn’t going to embarrass myself
or be unfair to anyone,” he said.
Hearing
his words, Mr. Barry says, allows him to immediately spot an overworked
alliteration, dropped articles, gaps in logic — and to nail the rhythm
of an article.
“When you’re reading
aloud to someone else and know the material, you will hear falseness,”
Mr. Barry said, “where you failed to properly reflect another side of
the issue or described someone in a manner that might be perceived as
demeaning or unkind that wasn’t your intention when writing.”
Alissa
J. Rubin, 60, The Times’s Baghdad bureau chief, said she began reading
her writing aloud in college. She also found it helpful in her previous
career as a fiction writer, when she needed to determine if her
characters’ dialogue sounded realistic.
Reading
her articles aloud, Ms. Rubin said, helps her cut superfluous adverbs
like “very” and “really” — or break up long paragraphs that provide
context but can quickly become unwieldy. It also helps her reframe
portions of a piece that might be confusing. Reading aloud, she said,
“heightens your acuity as an editor.”
Ms.
Rubin, Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Barry like to read their drafts out loud when
they are close to final, they said, as a last backstop to catching
errors like missing first references or inconsistent spellings of
people’s names.
“It allows me to get
out of my head and imagine how the reader takes in information,” Ms.
Jacobs said. “A lot of times I get so caught up in the minutiae of a
story that I forget how it sounds to a person who doesn’t know anything
about what I’m talking about.”
Listening
to their own voices can be uncomfortable, the reporters said. (“I don’t
particularly enjoy the cacophony that is my Long Island accent,” Mr.
Barry noted.) At times, it can also be awkward: Ms. Rubin said she has
been in the New York Times newsroom, reading the same lines over and
over again, when she has noticed other journalists staring at her in
confusion.
Still, the reporters find
the practice to be a key part of their writing processes. Ms. Jacobs
notes that it’s important not to mumble, slur or race through an
article: “Use your whole voice, at a normal pace,” she said. “You will
cringe. And then you will fix what made you cringe.”
Image Credit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/insider/how-the-spoken-word-shapes-the-written-word.html
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