Words Are More Than Letters

I have always been drawn to physical words, and have an abiding love for letters and their arrangement on a page. I love the solitary aspects of writing - the acceleration, the frenzied tenderness, perspicacious sidelong revision, the breathless period - and then I am anonymous and invisible while others read and react to my work, just as you are doing now.

(I write for a living; this pattern is repeated daily for me. The first reactions I get are from peers, then leadership, then, if I'm lucky, the customer. I take care with everything I write, from an email to ad copy to this blog - a writer loves all words, all sounds and combinations, and he treats them all equally.)

But words are more than shapes, they are sounds, and most of what we absorb from them comes from the sounds they make in our heads even when no one is speaking.

Did you know that your glottis moves when you read to yourself? That's right, you read aloud when you read to yourself, you just make no sound.
I talk to myself all the time, mostly in the car. I talk back to the radio, reinvent old conversations, and invent new conversations just in case I encounter a need for them. That used to trouble me because talking to yourself is a sign of dementia. However, with the advent of hands-free cell phone devices and Bluetooth earpieces, appearing to talk to oneself is no longer odd.

Of course, a single presentation may have multiple and unrelated causes. You may shiver because you are coming down with the flu, or you may shiver because you are cold.

Writers hear voices all the time, but they only listen to the good ones.

Shhhh. Did you hear that?

     Hear what?

Precisely.

Started: 2012-06-25