The late Christopher Hitchens (controversial author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic and journalist) is included in a Flavorwire collection of “Helpful Advice from History’s Fastest and Most Prolific Writers,” where he gave the advice: “Write more the way you talk.”
Those words reminded me of advice an editor gave me back in 1962 when I was a newspaper cub reporter painfully struggling to come up with leads for stories that would allow me to transition to a natural fleshing out of the body of the text. Actually, my editor gave his advice to me with a slightly different twist --
"write as if you were having a conversation with someone." To this day, I automatically use that approach with everything I write.
What Hitchens was saying was essentially this: Yes, everyone who can verbally communicate can also communicate in written words. But it is not everyone who can verbally communicate effectively.
Most of the time, we’re not terribly aware of how we sound when we communicate, either in writing or in spoken conversation. I can’t tell you how many incidents of miscommunication occurred because I thought an email was written tersely or someone I was speaking with misinterpreted what I was saying.
We have spats all the time over miscommunication. And yet very few of us are actually aware that we are miscommunicating until someone draws our attention to it by being offended. We get so used to being able to speak easily that we treat it like walking – it just happens, naturally, and we don’t need to think about it anymore. Except we do. When we stop paying attention, we’re more likely to stumble.
Stumbling happens in writing too, particularly on social media. I do it all the time due primarily to my weird sense of humor which is not always understood when seen in print. I really do need to keep that fact foremost in my mind.
So in reality, there is a difference between "writing the way you talk" and "writing as if you were having a conversation with someone."
That being said, I began thinking the other day about things I write on my Wrights Lane blog, subsequently linked to Facebook, and a recent experiment with creating short A/V clips that I entitled
"Passing Thoughts." Long story made short...I hated the sound of my voice in the half dozen audio videos that I produced. "No wonder no one liked, or commented, on my efforts," I rationalized.
My friends can now rest easy...No more A/Vs from me!
THE PHYSICS BEHIND HOW WE HEAR OURSELVES
It turns out that there's a reason why hearing your own voice in a video (or in any recording) feels so strange. It all comes down to a simple fact of physics, but our brains don't let us see it this way. Instead, our brains perceive our recorded voices differently, and for us folks who aren't accustomed to hearing ourselves in videos, it's easy to believe we'd be better off behind the camera than in front of it.
Sound, we are told, comes into your ear canal, vibrates your tympanic membrane (eardrum), which in turn moves the tiniest bones in your body—the malleus, incus, and stapes. These are connected to your cochlea, which is a fluid-filled sac with small "hair cells" inside.
As the bones vibrate, the fluid moves inside the cochlea, moving the hair cells. These cells convert this movement into electrical activity, which your brain perceives as different sounds—barking, laughing, beeping, giraffe greetings.
When you're speaking, you hear some of the sounds the same way. Your voice comes out of your mouth, travels round to your ear, and down your ear canal. But there is another way for the sound of your own voice to reach the cochlea and for you to hear it -- through the bones in your head.
As you speak, your vocal chords are vibrating, which in turn vibrates your entire skull. But different frequencies are transmitted better through dense material such as bone. Higher frequencies are weaker, whereas the lower frequencies in your voice can travel all the way to your temporal bone in which your ear sits.
This is called bone conduction, or otoacoustics. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt and Imperial College London have recently shown that these
temporal bone vibrations can then act on the cochlea directly, not even vibrating the eardrum, increasing the bass component as you speak.
Your skull is effectively a subwoofer for your voice, turning your David Beckham into the low James Earl Jones you know and love. When we first encounter something new, such as our disembodied voice for the first time, the immediate response is one of aversion. It sounds so weird.
It is the familiarity principle at play. Just as you're used to looking at yourself in the mirror, and as a result don't like the way you look un-mirrored, you are used to your otoacoustic voice, so you don't like the un-bassed version. The unfamiliarity is what makes you dislike it, not the voice itself.
Okay. So now I understand why I do not like the sound of my recorded voice playing back to me. As far as I know, there is nothing I can do about it, leaving me to wonder if I sound that bad to other people too.
And, if that is the case, where does that leave the sound of the writing that I try so hard to give a voice to? How am I being heard, or does no one care to listen to what I am saying in print anyway?
If, like with my A/V experiment, I decide to quit writing too, how would I fill the creative void in my life? What would I do with the hundreds of hours of newfound free time?
I guess that I could just start talking to myself...But come to think of it, that's what I've probably been doing all along.
I tell you, if it isn't one thing, it's another!
