Back in 1980 the International Paper Company had a two-page ad written by Kurt Vonnegut and titled How to Write with Style. You can find a reprint here. It was one of a series of twelve discussed by Chuck Green at ideabook in an article titled One of my all-time favorite advertising campaigns: The Power of the Printed Word. Kurt’s ad had these eight headings:
1] Find a subject you care about.
2] Do not ramble.
3] Keep it simple.
4] Have the guts to cut.
5] Sound like yourself.
6] Say what you mean to say.
7] Pity the readers.
8] For really detailed advice [read The Elements of Style by Strunk and White].
There is an excellent 2019 book by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell titled Pity the Reader: On writing with style which makes the seventh heading singular. You can find a Google Books preview of the first five chapters. Chapter 27 is titled Prose, the Audial. It opens by stating:
“Languid or sharp, voluptuous or minimal: we learn and feel a lot about the time, place, characters, and a sense of a piece of writing by the sound of it.
The fiction writer must also furnish dialogue. There’s a real art to dialogue. Anyone who’s recorded someone speaking and then tried to translate that verbatim into intelligent prose will discover how circular, repetitious, how many hesitations, um’s-ah’s-and-well’s, how dependent on inflection and gesture actual conversation is.
Kurt Vonnegut may have called his Indiana idiom like a ‘band saw cutting galvanized tin.’ But he actually had quite an ear.
You probably do too. Cultivate it.
Vonnegut used to read his prose aloud. His grown children remember hearing him in his study in Barnstable. ‘He rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, muttering whatever he had just written over and over, tilting his head back and forth, gesturing with his hands, changing the pitch and rhythm of the words,’ his son Mark recalls.”
An image of typing came from Wikimedia Commons.
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