Perrin’s sixth-grade class – much to my friends’ annoyance – but my best linguistic training came on the streets of Chicago’s South Side in the early 1990s. I was the kid who reveled in the craft of diagramming sentences on the chalkboard in Mrs.
Without mathematical order, without clarity and simplicity, my readers or listeners – whoever they were – would never see the moments that I had seen. I realized in that moment the importance of the language that swirled in my brain. I gripped the stick shift and listened somewhat horrified, waiting for the ill-placed pronoun or misconstrued detail. I had reported that night’s story the best that I could.Īs I settled into my 1981 Honda, ready to drive back to the Englewood Police Department for my next assignment, I heard the words I had just recited to my editor emerging from Chicago’s WGN Radio. The nouns and verbs lined up in my brain in orderly patterns, and by the time I hung up the phone and relaxed my foot, I was confident that I had listed every fact, every nuance, every witness account. I focused hard on the scrawled notes before me, trying to remember the fire chief’s words as he threw the charred space heater through the heat-exploded second floor window of Chicago’s Cabrini Green. The scraggly-haired man half a block south looked high on something, and I didn’t want him barging into the booth while I was running my story. I pressed my boot against the metal frame of the phone booth’s folding door, praying that I could keep it securely closed as I squeezed the receiver to my ear with my shoulder and gripped pepper spray in my right hand and my reporter’s notebook in my left. I realized the importance of the language that swirled in my brain. Once you learn to spot the building blocks, you can be confident that your audience will focus on your content rather than your mechanics. The goal of this book is to help you recognize the simple math of effective writing. Some of us anticipate the equation consciously and some of us subconsciously, but we all recognize when a piece is missing and the language on the page or on the screen just doesn’t seem right. Linguists will tell you that our brains are wired for language. Just as 1 + 1 = 2, we all naturally anticipate the math equation of a complete sentence, of a well-written paragraph, and of a satisfying essay. Andragogy & Rule Changes If you train your brain to spot the basic structure of language, writing will come as easily as speaking.
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