Project Bloodhound: Write with a reader in mind — but write to that reader’s mind

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dan Green is a great believer in the power of the media to promote a business, where I am quite a bit more skeptical. He asked me once about the commercial value of my column in the Arizona Republic. Quoting former Vice President John Nance Garner on the value of that elective office, I said, “It’s not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Dan loves the mot juste — and I will promise you that, in reality, Garner was more redolent in his retort. But: We just did the math lately and it turns out I’m wrong. The Republic column is worth $1,800 an hour — while I’m writing it.

The essence of good writing — the gist of the mot juste — is to sweep the reader along with you as you go. The corpus of writing is enshrouded in rules, but the rules don’t mean anything if the reader doesn’t care enough to participate. It’s a tragedy to be ignored entirely, but it seems to me still worse to be missed — to be skimmed and scanned and dismissed without ever having been read. I play the way I do, when I write — not as prose, not even as poetry, but as a kind of scat music where the sounds and the meanings of the words play off of each other like kittens and a butterfly on opposite sides of a window — I play this way both to reward attention and to penalize inattention. If you don’t read me with your whole mind, you won’t get it — and that’s the idea.

This is writing about writing, the most perfectly human action there is, and this is the one place you can turn to in the RE.net where the minds are serious enough to write about writing. Teri Lussier was talking about our archives, and I wish we had some organization to them. I wish I could send you off just to all of the many posts we have written about writing — some our own work, some extended quotations from giants of English literature.

There’s this, at least, target=”_blank”>an exposition I wrote almost a year ago:

The point is to think in active, expressive verbs, and particular — granular — nouns and adjectives, using images and metaphors to connect ideas. To write not as discourse but as exposition — the creation of that fascinating dream-like state of hyper-reality in the reader’s mind. It is so easy to drift into the hazy world of adverbial passivity, that formless space without subjects, without objects, without actors or events. This is not reality. The object of good writing is to create a reality so real as to be undeniable — the reality of sight and sense, but also the reality where sensations translate to and inform metaphors, and where metaphors persuade not because they are palpably true — not because they are palatably true — not even jarringly or shockingly or startlingly true — but because they course through the veins and nerves and solar plexus like the thrill of free fall on a roller coaster.

Sean Purcell is beating me up about thoughtless errors in English, and he’s probably right. I tend to think of both grammar and the definitions of English words in Latin, translating back into English as I go. That might seem odd to you, but to attempt to distinguish “affect” from “effect” or “amend” from “emend” in English seems to me to be as wasteful as attempting to do long division in Roman as against decimal numerals. Latin is a much better notation system — for me at least — for understanding English words and English grammar.

That’s as may be. The point is not to induce you to think in Latin but simply to think about the words you choose and the way you put them together as you write. And I set all this up because I want to point out an example.

Search for the word “apprehending” in BloodhoundBlog. It’s me, it’s always me, and I’m always using that word in a context where most people would use “comprehending.” What’s the difference? If we assigned the words a mathematical value, we could say apprehending = comprehending = understanding.

But that would be an error. Here’s why. In Latin, ad + pre + hendo implies a snatching or a grabbing, where con + pre + hendo implies a state of being bound together with something else. They’re both accusative, and they’re both present active indicative in that form, but apprehending in English implies an immediacy in time, where the act of comprehending comes with a fuzzy time scale — yesterday, today, tomorrow, from now on. We speak of comprehension — con + pre + hensum — a perfect past participle.

Comprehending is knowing, but apprehending is discovering. Apprehending is fiercely active and immediate, where comprehending is vague and passive, almost prostrate. Apprehending is something that I am doing right now and all the time. Comprehending is one short step away from wool-gathering.

Chloe is running. Chloe runs. Chloe ran. Chloe had run. Running had been done by Chloe. Those are all mathematically equivalent statements, but the farther we get from the present active indicative voice, the less likely our words are to be read — or to deserve to be read.

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing