Letting ‘Fred’ Do Some of the Proofing

Rhetorical Mastery, , , ,

As the eyes strain with the load, it can be a relief to sit back and let Fred have a go at your mangled prose. 

If you do any amount of writing as a routine part of your work, you might want to check out what I only recently noticed on my home version of Microsoft Word. The program will read back to you what you have written, not with any great finesse, but with a degree of verbal accuracy. And that’s quite a plus.  I’m told that some other programs have this feature as well. And I am surprised at how useful it is.

Most of us aren’t very good proofreaders. If you are like me, your brain fills in missing words as a passage is scanned. It’s a good habit for speedreading, but a bad one for accurate writing. So turning on the “Read Aloud” function available under the “review” heading at the top of Word will put a male or female voice to work reading back exactly what you wrote.  And it turns out that hearing your prose immediately picks up missed and overused words.  My reader, who I call Fred, also will plow on if no punctuation exists: an immediate red flag. To be sure, Fred hasn’t a clue what he is saying.  There is no interpretation of the words, no useful intonation.  Even so, he is good enough at pausing at periods and comas, or reminding me that maybe three adjectives in a row might be too many.  And he will certainly trip over missing articles or–in my case–a whole collection of them that were never deleted as my editing evolved.

Fred can also speed-read, which is good for a laugh. You get to decide the pacing.

I write most days, and sometimes all day.  As the eyes strain with the load, it can be a relief to sit back and let Fred have a go at my mangled prose.  If you try it, you might be pleasantly surprised.  If you are not completely happy with the result, you will still know where your writing needs some work.

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Misophonia

Problem Practices, , , ,

Almost any sound can set off instant aggravation in an individual that a clinician might diagnose as “misophonia.”

Even everyday sounds can cause negative reactions. Sometimes we are the transmitters of audible noise that, while routine, others find obnoxious. A sound can take a listener to the far side of annoyance, creating irritation or the urge to move on. The popular press is full of accounts of individuals who can’t stand to be around certain people because of their loud chewing, endless pen-clicking, throat-clearing, or vocal tics that function like aural red flags. For example, silence-fillers such as “like” or “you know” are nonfluencies that can make it less likely that someone will hear anything else. In theory, almost any sound can set off instant aggravation in an individual that a clinician might diagnose as “misophonia,” the name given to their discomfort with certain everyday sonics.

Humans are generally a noisy lot.

There is no shortage of ways we easily fall into repetitive routines that have their own sound signatures. The person with misophonia who is obsessing over the same auditable triggers is frequently–if accidentally–matched up to an obsessive producer of them. Part of the fun of Neil Simon’s classic play, The Odd Couple (filmed in 1968), is how Felix’s oral tics begin to grate on the laid-back Oscar. Endless throat-clearing is a typical case. Neither of the divorced men sharing an apartment has made a match that is any better than their failed marriages. The annoyances are funny because they would be recognized by any couple living under the same roof.

Imagine the intentional baiting of a sound-sensitive person with the very things that annoy them most. It happens, often as a kind of rhetorical strategy that can be described as a “deliberate misidentification.” The human default in social relations is usually to meet someone halfway: to find common points of identification. By contrast, the intention to annoy is a break from our best selves, a misidentification and a passive-aggressive behavior that provokes someone seen as a deserving victim. For some in the mood for some mischief it may be a barking dog let loose in a backyard as “payback” to a complaining neighbor, or perhaps a music system cranked up to answer the circus of noise that never ceases next door.

It turns out that there is no shortage of online videos and articles on how to fight back against noisy neighbors. It is especially common in buildings housing many families. Audio engineer Brett Houston “solved” the problem of lead feet incessantly moving around in the apartment upstairs. His solution was to put loudspeakers in the ceiling cavities that he had inadvertently opened after pounding on them once too often using the old apartment dweller’s recourse of a broomstick jabbed into the thin drywall. In the hole Houston placed a large speaker between the joists under the neighbor’s floor. He then put microphones at different points along the ceiling, routing the sound through an amplifier, with a short delay. He then fed the sounds back to the speaker under the neighbor’s floor at a 1 to 3 ratio. The “karma” he sought meant that any noise they made was amplified and fed back to them three times.  The neighbors eventually moved.