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Stretch: Explore, Explain, Persuade
First Edition
by Randall A. Wells
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Why Write?
Cuban American Single professional, 27, 5'9", 155 lbs, moustache, beard, easygoing, non-smoker, from Dade, seeks adventurous, educated SF to explore South Florida's places and events on Harley-Davidson. Enjoys diving, conversation, playing guitar, reggae, salsa.
In the "Singles Seeking" part of a newspaper, the writer hopes to attract a companion. Using words, he describes his physical attributes of gender, age, height, weight, facial appearance, and tobacco-free status. Each of these attributes, if encountered in person, would be conveyed to the senses, nonverbally. With words and without words: How do these two types of communication differ? What are their unique domains?
Verbal versus Nonverbal Powers
What exactly does verbal mean? In regular usage it indicates that something is spoken as opposed to written--such as an agreement confirmed by a handshake rather than a signature. However, the term also has the special linguistic meaning of communicated by words, whether orally or in writing. (In fact, the word "verbal" comes from the Latin verbum, or "word.") Nonverbal communication works by gestures, facial expressions, physique, skin color or tint, clothing and cosmetics, objects worn or handled (or ridden, like a motorcycle), distance between speakers, and vocal characteristics such as volume, tone, silence, and laughter. (See Figure 1 for a piercing example.) The physical setting, too, influences communication by suggesting what is appropriate or not.
Verbal and nonverbal communication often work together, as when people speak, so the two modes may be hard to differentiate. Here is one way to approach the distinction: Imagine yourself immersed in a rock concert with its rich appeal to the senses. Then, one by one, take away each stimulus that communicates something by means other than the symbolism of the words being sung.
First, remove the crowd. No more pleasurable subordination to the mass--to its motion, body heat, attention-getting dress, noise, and odors of beer, sweat, cigarette smoke, and perfume. Like a warm-up band, these ingredients all enhance the reception of the singers.
Then, remove the stage. Switch off the lighting that flashes from polished instruments and drenches the performers in color. Then unplug the electronic amplification; then stop all the music that vibrates from guitars, bass, drums, keyboard, and voices. Banish the band. Gone are the hairdos, earrings, and costumes; the skin colors or tints; the intense facial expressions; the hand gestures; the gripping, tilting, or waving of the microphone; the locomotion around the stage; the supercharged voices and unusual accents.
Now stand alone in the hall and read the lyrics silently. If you can ignore the imagined sound of your own unique vocal characteristics, you have pretty much reached the bare verbal part of the show. This is the meaning conveyed only by the words themselves: Put-your-hands-together.
Verbal messages are sent by a code. Known as language, its complicated rules of sound, vocabulary, and grammar allow users to manipulate experience symbolically. Language works by abstractions. These are concepts, like "reggae" or even "hair," which have no equivalent in the sensory world. Yes, they may represent physical things (such as hair) but the words are not the actual things. You can't comb the concept "hair."
Although you can ride a particular Harley--598 pounds in weight, patriot red pearl in color, with a 13400 cc. engine, leather saddlebags, 39,043 on the odometer, and a scratch on the back fender--you can't get far on the abstraction Harley-Davidson. It is imaginary. The abstraction is constructed by separating out features common to individual objects--Harleys that a person has encountered as opposed to other motorcycles--and creating an abstract category that does not exist in the sensory world. You cannot see the chrome, hear the rumble, grip the handlebars, smell the leather, or push the heavy weight of such a notion because it exists in the intellect as a symbolic representation.
In speaking, abstract ideas are represented to the ear by sounds. These are vibrations of the air caused by breath modified as it passes through the larynx, throat, mouth cavity, and nasal cavity and is shaped by the teeth and tongue. These vibrations have no intrinsic connection with the idea they represent. Words are not things, any more than the sounds b-r-d can fly. Spoken words--acoustic symbols--can in turn be represented to the eye by written marks. You started learning this visual code in grade school.
You have certain magical areas of your brain, generally in the left hemisphere, that can convert sound waves or visual squiggles to meaningful inner symbols. When you hear the sounds b-r-d or see the letters bird, you convert them to an idea. These neural centers can also generate spoken or written words from inner abstractions. So beginning with the stored concept of a feathered, winged animal, you can express it by the sounds b-r-d or by the marks bird.
Human beings can manipulate these symbols--by interpreting or generating them--like an expert on the abacus whose fingers can flick tokens around quicker than the eye can keep up. We use symbols to organize experience. Symbols, and the concepts they stand for, allow the motorcyclist at the beginning of the chapter to pass the time by remembering, ruminating, and reading signs. In "Dirty Little Faces," Robert D. Peterson may enjoy the Honduran orphans without understanding their Spanish (see Chapter 1), but he needs language to explore his trip's significance for himself as well as to communicate its significance to others.
Another way to think about language is to imagine a political map of the world. It draws arbitrary lines all over the seamless continents and then fills the many irregular shapes with different colors to define countries and states. For example, the country of Honduras is separated from other countries in Central America--Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua--by lines that nature does not know. Although like a jigsaw puzzle on paper, in an aerial photograph the shapes of these countries do not appear. In this rather capricious way language imposes borders on reality, which would otherwise be as undifferentiated as the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Language imposes rules on the way its users see and interpret the world. That is, speakers agree to consider the colored-in shapes as reality. A language organizes experience into innumerable categories, and your map for English is your dictionary. So to a great extent our world is words.
We can sense the human origin of our own symbolic "reality" when we encounter a different map of the same terrain--that is, another language. For example, English speakers will assume that the concept of "liking" something or someone is a reflection of reality; Spanish speakers, however, search their verbal latitudes and longitudes in vain for such a concept. For in Spanish, people don't like something, it pleases them. The whole notion of the person as active agent in such a case does not exist. Conversely, where English stakes out part of the landscape with the single concept bird, Spanish uses two symbols to subdivide that territory into el p‡jaro (an everyday creature) and el ave (a rather scientific and literary one).
During World War II utterly incompatible language systems were put to work over the airwaves when Navajos communicated secret military information simply by speaking their native tongue, for the Japanese could not break this ready-made code.
A warning: Words vary in meaning even among speakers of the same language. Speakers may share only a core of a word's significance while they diverge as to the associations the word evokes. Why? Because of different temperaments, upbringing, and experiences. A tourist at the beach will more likely have positive associations with the word "seagull" than will the owner of an inland parking lot where the birds flock together to scavenge. The more controversial the notion, moreover, the less overlap of meaning among the users of the language. Was the Western Hemisphere "discovered" by Columbus? Does the term "Ireland" mean an island-country? Or an island that comprises two different social and political entities? (For this question, see Martin's paper on the I.R.A., Chapter 7.) What might the concept "baby" mean to those who wish to outlaw induced abortions? To those who wish to keep the procedure legal?
People disagree not only about word-borders but even about the very existence of many a word-place. Is there such a thing as the "master race" so vaunted by the Nazis--that is, an Aryan, non-Semitic, and non-Negroid race? Is there even such a thing as race? (Some recent studies show no genetic basis in traditional distinctions.) Is there really such a thing as attention deficit disorder? As sociobiological behavior (inborn social tendencies that have enabled animal species to survive)? As "hell"?
Words: Ghostly when compared to sensory nonverbal signals, arbitrary as to how they divide up the world, and slippery as to what they mean. Yet despite all these liabilities, verbal communication has clout:
Precision. It can be much more exact than nonverbal. Nonverbal signals can be easily misinterpreted, so the motorcyclist is more likely to be a dentist than a marauder. (In fact, a person's life can depend on misread appearances. See Salomea Kape's true story in the Additional Readings.) And words can handle more complex material: For all their unreliability, verbal abstractions allow the motorcyclist to work out an itinerary with his companion, study the guidelines for a new dental anesthetic, or compose a "singles" ad.
Consciousness. Another strength of the verbal: Words generally have some conscious purpose and can be more tightly controlled, whereas nonverbal signals are often given off unintentionally and are radiated at all times. In the dental office the motorcyclist hopes that his clothing, posture, speech, gestures, and facial expressions help to convey the impression of competence, but he cannot stop his nonverbal behavior or even fully monitor it. When Lacretia stands alone by the fence at recess (see Greene in Additional Readings), she has no choice but to give off nonverbal information about her social status.
Independence. And verbal symbols, unlike nonverbal, don't always depend on a physical context. In Chapter 2 a fellow makes a nonverbal statement that requires makeup, gown, and the presence of an audience. But words can deal with something that is out of sight and with someone who is out of the picture. The motorcyclist can ask directions to Tucson or, when he arrives, send a postcard to a friend, and even direct a "singles" ad to a person he doesn't know.
Complex material sooner or later comes down to those densely packed information-carriers known as words, whether written or spoken. Even videotape productions require a script, and on the Internet, pictures, colors, music, and animated graphics can go only so far.
Writing versus Speaking
Then if words are so powerful, what are the advantages of the written word over the spoken?
For one thing, the writer and reader don't have to be in the same room or on the same telephone line. And the written word usually allows people more time to compose a message than the spoken. Writing "spells it out," literally and figuratively, by organizing ideas, drawing on a wider vocabulary, and using a tighter, more varied grammar. It also uses uniform conventions of grammar to avoid distracting the reader with regional or other variations. And it uses paragraphing to help signal a change of idea.
For more on the contrast between speaking and writing, please read the sidebar.
Another advantage of writing: It tends to make greater use of imaginative imagery than does speaking, which tolerates cliches like "the whole ball of wax" and "To make a long story short." And writing stays safely on the page, in the filing cabinet, on the bulletin board, on the disk or hard drive, or on the marble monument, when the sound waves produced by the voice have long since faded away like last year's fireworks.
A reader, furthermore, unlike a listener, can set his or her own pace so as to speed up or poke along. As you know from studying textbooks, a reader can also go back over material and even highlight or annotate it. No rewinding necessary.
Finally, for you as a writer, the keyboard or pen can go beyond the mere recording of thought to the generating of thought. This power is magnified by research and revision.
Granted, writing can be tedious. This second code--invented not for the ear but for the eye, like the grids and circles of a musical score--requires that you master a whole set of visual conventions: letters, spelling, punctuation, mechanics, and paragraphing.
But suppose you look at writing in another way. It allows you to fashion marks that stand for speech, without a sound and even without the presence of a sender. It is almost occult in its power. Existing for only about 8,000 years, writing is fairly new to homo sapiens, the only species able to use it. Even now millions of people around the world, far from being able to create these meaningful scribbles, look on them with no more comprehension than the blind.
So with its power to generate and articulate thought, its range of vocabulary, grammar, and imagery, its convenience and endurance, what can really rock-'n'-roll but the written word.
Here is an excerpt from a tape-recorded interview that has been transcribed. The subject is an eighty-five-year-old former nurse and midwife, Ms. Janie Johnson, who was born in 1906. Answering a question, she speaks with admiration about her father, a successful African-American farmer. Notice how her everyday speech--like everybody's--is spontaneous, tentative, and loosely connected:
He would cook his feed that he would feed his hogs with. He would cook his--put sweet potatoes, corn, and peas together. And then he would put so much syrup in. He'd put it in a big containerlike--barrel, and he would feed his hogs like--he would feed 'em through the year. Then at a certain time, be November, maybe, or first of December, he would kill his hogs for, you know, meat for the next year. A cow was the same way. And I know the time that he would butcher cows, and you could hang 'em up in the smokehouse and dry it. But you hang up somethin' now...
Notice that Ms. Johnson relies heavily on coordination--sentences that repeat the same subject ("He. . . . He") as well as clauses connected by the conjunction "and." Speakers tend to favor this principle more than writers, who use more frequent subordination to help to indicate logical relationships.
And everyday speech tends to overlook fuzzy connections between pronouns and what they stand for, as in the phrases "put it" (sentence 4) and "dry it" (next-to-last sentence), where the word it has vague antecedents.
To illustrate another quality of the spoken word: The last sentence relies on the intonation of voice as much as its verbal content to get its implication across.
Here is a version of Ms. Johnson's response that is meant to be read. Tightened up in various ways, it shifts emphasis from her authentic, impromptu way of speaking to her historical information:
He would cook the feed that he gave to his hogs. To make it he would combine sweet potatoes, corn, and peas, then add a certain amount of syrup. He'd put the mixture in a large barrel from which he would feed his hogs throughout the year.
Then at a certain time, perhaps November or the first of December, he would kill his hogs for the next year's meat. He did the same with his cows. In those days, when you butchered cows, you could hang the meat up in the smokehouse to dry. But if you were to do so now, you might get into trouble with the law.
Although some of the charm has disappeared from the original, there are no distractions from the remembered information. Writing is a promise to be more careful than speaking. Unlike speech, which must have some human spontaneity, writing can sound like a book. It can please by making departures from everyday speech: its grammar artfully varied for emphasis and variety, its vocabulary right from the SAT practice guide, its thought more studied than spontaneous. Here, for example, is a more highly crafted version of Ms. Johnson's account:
He would cook a feed for his hogs made from sweet potatoes, corn, peas--and just so much syrup. This concoction he would put in a large barrel from which he would supply the animals, vegetarians all, throughout the year. Then in late November or early December he would slaughter his hogs, along with his cows, for the next year's meat. In those days a person could hang the meat up in the smokehouse to dry; today, such a practice would be regarded with a jaundiced eye by the health inspector.
A footnote: Writing can often please with speechlike echoes, such as asking questions, addressing the reader, moving to a new paragraph by a surprising association of ideas, and using a zingy sentence fragment.
Work Cited
Johnson, Janie B. Interview. Bayboro, SC, 25 October 1991. Horry County Oral History Project.
Work Consulted
Knapp, Mark L. Essentials of Nonverbal Communication. New York: Holt, 1980.
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