Write for the ear rather than the eye.
– O. C. Edwards
I just finished writing a speech for the head of the organization for which I work. On paper, it is not a pretty sight. It’s full of incomplete sentences and sentences that start with conjunctions (so, but, and). There isn’t a fancy technical tem anywhere to be seen. The text is double spaced and 24-point. I hope the speaker will further deface the thing by highlighting words and phrases he wants to punch, putting slashes in where he wants to pause, and adding phonetic spellings of any words he’s likely to mispronounce.
After all, who cares what it looks like?
As dharma speakers, we’re not scripting ourselves word-for-word and reading our texts to the sangha. (We’re not, are we?) Nonetheless, it pays to remember that we’re writing words and phrases to be heard, not to be read. On the one hand, that means we have to take extra care to write in a conversational tone, and to make sure that we can actually say what we’ve written. On the other, it gives us the license to do anything on our notes that will help our performance, because we’re the only ones who will ever see them.
Because your audience is listening to you rather than reading your text, keep your sentences simple. Listeners don’t have the chance to go back and re-read a sentence or paragraph, so you’ve only got one chance to be understood. That means that a convoluted sentence structure that works well on paper probably isn’t the best choice for speaking. Make sure folks can tell what’s modifying what, what the subject of the sentence really is, and to what your pronouns refer.
Be on guard for a dry or ponderous tone. You aren’t delivering a statistical report. The dharma talk is a conversation with the sangha, even if you’re doing most of the speaking. Likewise, simple sentence structure doesn’t mean a dull delivery. Your talk can still sparkle with sense detail, metaphor, and various well-chosen figures of speech. Be careful of alliteration, however. It can be very effective in written form, but can be difficult to deliver out loud. If you’ve ever found in the middle of a talk that you’ve unwittingly written yourself a tongue-twister, you have vowed to read your text aloud beforehand next time. (It’s one more reason that practicing your talk is a necessary part of preparation.)
For myself, I may completely script a talk, but then reduce it to an outline that retains words or phrases that I’ve particularly chosen and want to be sure to use. Once I’ve committed the outline to paper, I can take a pencil or highlighter and mark it up the way I mark a script I’m going to read in an audio booth when doing a voice-over. That mark-up happens during rehearsal — I can’t know where I’m likely to stumble or where I’m going to want to pause for emphasis until I’ve actually tried delivering the talk. The extra layer of meaning contained in the mark-up only emerges when the words are spoken. Until then, it’s dormant and invisible. Don’t look for it on the untried notes you print for the first time on your way out the door. It’s not there.
