Reading is a Different World

I performed a quiet little experiment during one writing workshop (that none of the participants were ever aware of as far as I know). I set my phone to record the meeting - just the voices - then let it get transcribed, word-for-word, to a document. Now - keeping in mind that I was there and speaking as well - when I read the discussions in written form, they were barely decipherable. I mean, I knew the content and context, but reading it off the page was absolutely brutal. Why? Well, they were talking, not writing, but their spoken voice was on the page.

You might be asking yourself whether it really makes that much of a difference between something someone said and writing something that was said. The difference is amazing, though probably not all that surprising. The difference, surprisingly, has very little to do with what they say as much as how they say it. More to the point, it has to do with the fact that "natural" speaking might sound fine but it reads very unnaturally. 

Think of it this way. I am a fan of the Law & Order franchise and its billion spin-offs. Every week, I get to see a nice legal procedural, watch the prosecution and defense have their back and forth, and usually a dramatic twist is thrown in as well. It's entertaining television. However, if you have ever seen a real trial, or compromised and seen a real crime documentary, you realize nothing is really that clean-cut. The legal counsels is full of average people, as are the defendant, the prosecution witnesses, the judge, the jury - every single person is just... a person. They do not have polished appearances, well-scripted dialogue, or magnetic presences. Basically, they are just like you and me - real people - and not the well-lit, properly made-up people on television.

Now, I am not downplaying real people or saying that television performances are better than reality television or documentaries - they just have their place. In my little workshop experiment, I noted how about one-half of everyone's sentences were run-ons, fragmented, used bad grammar, and/or were stuffed with "uh," "well," and "like" (including my own sentences). I understood every one of these lines as spoken at the time because they were filled with facial gestures, tonal inflections, and so on that filled in the cracks and made it a complete experience. In the written world, we lose that advantage and have to depend on clean dialogue so people don't get lost by reading all the "...well, um, it's like, y'know..." and trying to parse out the meaning.

This doesn't mean we can't give speeches a little variability - throw in some "ain't" or "y'all" to mix it up a little - but we should recognize that the written conversation should not sound similar to how we really speak. In a perfect piece of writing, a conversation should sound like how we think we heard everything afterward, with our brain editing out the stuttering, stammering, excessive words, and so on. Let it be clean in that regard, and save "real dialogue" for the documentaries.

And yes, it's okay to use the passive voice within dialogue. Just keep it inside the quotes.