It makes you sound very, very old if you complain about PowerPoint and bullet statements and dull charts and stuff, while extolling the virtues of well, you know, talking. And it’s not as if that really flowery presentation by the IT guy on the spiffy new security system would be any better if he was forced to talk, in the absence of 15 bullet points.
In fact, because I’m not old, but youthful and cool, I think PowerPoint and text messaging and all artificial means of pretend-talk are just fine because you can sort of edit what you pretend to say before you actually say it. And, at least in theory, the audience has a better chance of absorbing what they “hear” if they can read it, instead of listen to it.
Sprouts & Sex
Consider the latest in a string of studies that find “abstinence” pledges and classroom curricula just don’t work. That is, the kids who promise, cross their hearts and hope to wear a chastity belt, that they will not have sex before marriage, do, in fact, come together like rabbits in the springtime. The study last month in the journal Pediatrics only reinforces the value of writing things down.
My theory is that the kids are so acclimated to Hollywood stars yelling at them about eating cows and stuff that when they’re told of the virtues of virginity, the message is directed to the same “v” portion of their brain that processes lectures about vegetarianism. When they go out on a date, they eat sprouts, but still have sex.
It’s better to write things down. Colin McEnroe, a Hartford Courant columnist and former WTIC-AM talk-show guy, has been called “John McEnroe” so many times that he wears a tennis-racket necklace, because he can pick up chicks that way. If you wrote down the wrong name, some computer program would leap off the screen and punch you in the face before you misidentified him.
Getting It ‘Write’
And then there is poor Denise Merrill, the Mansfield Democrat who just got elected House Majority Leader. She keeps introducing her new Deputy Majority Leader, Ernie Hewett of New London, as Ernie Newton, a disgraced Bridgeport legislator who is serving time in the federal pokey for corruption. Denise should only communicate to or about her Ernies in print.
Because a really unkind Hartford Business Journal reader once accused me of being a Martian, I had a crisis of confidence and decided to take the American citizenship test, just in case. A question about one important thing that Abe Lincoln did was easy, because I could write it down. He created a snobby American luxury car that was a reasonable alternative to Cadillac. But if it had been an oral exam, I would have gotten all flustered and said that Lincoln never told a lie. That isn’t right. That was some other president.
It’s not just confusion that inspires enthusiasm for writing things down, rather than talking about them out loud. If you’ve been selected by a really mean boss to guest lecture to the local Senior Citizens Club on the shabby state of the stock market, would you rather do a talk on divergences from the average price of the exponential moving average as tracked by the Stochastic Oscillator, or slap up a chart of the Dow Jones average over the past year or so?
Talking is vastly overrated as a means of efficient communication. Read the Cohen column, absorb, and then go about your business. Take the abstinence pledge. Not the sex one. That doesn’t work. Abstain from talking.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
