I have never met Diana Crisman Smith, so
the voice in my head that read her article ("Does It Sound Like You?"
June 2014) was generic. Not even generic female. Nearly everything I read comes
with a voice in my head and when I know – or have heard – the writer, I usually
hear the virtual echo of the actual voice. I don't suppose there is anything
extraordinary about that.
My own writing tends pretty much towards
the same informal style as my speech. Certainly in my blog but also in articles
that I occasionally write for publication. That is the case both in my native
American-English and in Hebrew. And although I like it that way, it is not
deliberate.
Even in the two short paragraphs above, I
have used several sentence fragments, begun a sentence with "and" and
used the informal "pretty much" and "I don't suppose." My
writer-friend Varda, who looks over most of what I write for publication, knows
to leave that kind of thing alone.
The Panel
During the summer, I had a different kind
of challenge. I was a participant in a panel discussion at the International
Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies' annual conference, in Salt Lake
City, on the subject "Internet
Collaboration: How Do We Share Our Family Trees Online?" which was a
polite way of saying "Geni – Yes or No?" I was "No." My
indeterminate cousin Adam Brown was "Yes" and the publisher of the quarterly
Avotaynu, Gary Mokotoff, spoke for "a third way." Sallyann
Sack-Pikus, the editor of Avotaynu, was the moderator.
This panel was the continuation of a
debate that began at last year's conference and continued in the pages of
Avotaynu. To tell the truth, I was not crazy about doing this as I am not fast
on my feet in debate – certainly not at Adam's level. But I had been front and
center in this charge both in Avotaynu and on Facebook, so I hadn't much
choice.
According to the rules Sallyann set, each
of was to speak fifteen minutes from prepared text and then we would challenge
each others' positions, before taking questions from the audience. We would see
each others' remarks in advance in order to prepare our challenge questions.
The Problem
So I finally wrote it up about ten days
before the conference, but when I read it aloud to myself to see how close I
was to the assigned fifteen minutes, it just didn't sound right. It didn't
sound like a speech or a presentation. It sounded like an article.
I have been speaking from notes since I
was a youth leader in high school and have been using Power Point for years. I
know how to do that. I have written letters to editors, op-eds and pieces for
genealogy publications – I know how to do that too. I have never written a
speech and I had just demonstrated to myself that I don't know how.
The sentences were too long, the
structure of the thoughts too complex. In an article, if you don't get it right
away you can reread the paragraph. That doesn't work when you speak from text,
even if the full text is included in the handout
I had written this for readers, not for
listeners.
The problem was that it was Thursday. I
was going to the States on Sunday and would be busy with family matters followed
by a week at GRIP in Pittsburgh before heading to the conference.
The Solution
The solution was in Pittsburgh, my home
town. While attending my GRIP course, I stayed with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken,
one of whom – I forget which – is a sibling of my father. Uncle Ken
has been
retired from his job as a scientist for twenty-five years (do the math!) and
spends one day a week at the University of Pittsburgh mentoring graduate
students, mostly visiting Asians. Much of what he does involves helping them
prepare and present papers.
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| Photo by Hannah Simon Goldman |
He read my speech and asked many
questions about genealogy – both the material itself and the nature of the
research. And we worked on it. We looked at the sentence structure and we
listened. My high school class just had its fiftieth reunion, so I am obviously
not a youngster, but I was delighted to have an older, more experienced person
helping me out, even if it was several hours after his bed-time.
By the time we were finished – by the
time I left Pittsburgh – the words were 95% the same but it was not the same
presentation. It sounded different. It sounded like it was meant to be heard,
not read.
The Result
I was supposed to be showing how my way
of presenting my research was collaborative and online without a
"tree," so I jabbed with a few short sentences like "You can't
say that's not collaborative" and "That's certainly
collaborative." Those sentences get cut by an editor ten times out of ten.
But they work in a speech.
My two-paragraph quote from Randy Seaver
was relegated to the handout, as was my anecdote about the announcement from
Geni that I am someone's "wife's aunt's husband's fourth cousin's wife's
sister's husband's nephew's wife's mother's husband." The person
responsible for that was in the audience and everyone already knew the joke.
The paragraph about my contact with the
great nephew of Cousin Leo the Spy, received a new ending. "Now I have
more. Now he knows more."
I changed my speech pattern a bit, not to
slow it down, but to make it more deliberate. The punch lines punched.
The pro-tree position emphasized
technology, young people and new researchers. I took a whack at that with this:
And an extensive web of DNA matches is about as collaborative as
you can get! Even among the endogamous. Let me say that again for emphasis. An
extensive web of DNA matches is about as collaborative as you can get! That is
where much of my work is concentrated these days. And that is where many of
tomorrow's researchers can be found.
In addition to issues like sentence
length and complexity of thoughts, you can get away with bad syntax, bad
grammar and even repeated words in speech, way more easily than in writing. And
it's not that one is harder and one easier. They are simply different.
http://pikholz.org/34-SLC/Collaborative-Handout.html
