If you know the words . . .

The following sentence has a problem:

Very light pressure on the abdomen is advised, if the belly is massaged at all.

Years ago, I had a friend that used to play guitar and sing at coffee houses in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. One night he got up on stage, sat on a stool at the microphone, and said, "I've been busy all week and didn't get a chance to prepare anything for tonight. So we're just going to have 10 minutes of silence." Then he just sat there with his guitar cradled in his arms. There were a few laughs scattered throughout the audience at first, and they began to accumulate the longer he sat there. Then he broke up the room when he said. "That's okay. If you know the words, sing along."

Over the last couple of years, I've been working sporadically on composing a blues opera based on the execution of John the Baptist. Now let me stop right here and say I'm no musician. I took piano lessons for a few years when I was a kid but quit because I wasn't any good. When my own kids were small we bought a piano so they could take piano lessons. (They're all good musicians. My oldest son and my daughter are fantastic pianists and can play just about any instrument you hand them, and my second son plays bass in a band.) So I played around on the piano and taught myself a few songs so that people didn't laugh any more when I sat down at the keyboard.

My first wife got the piano when we divorced, and it wasn't until years later that S and I splurged and got a piano of our own. She had never played and wanted to, so we both signed up for lessons. And that's how I got into composing a blues opera. I had a fantastic teacher who believed in letting me set my own curriculum. He also made what I wrote but couldn't play sound fantastic when he played it.

There is a point to all of this. One of the hardest things for a non musician and novice composer to do is hear the natural interplay of music and words. So one of the mistakes I kept making was throwing away strong emphasis on weak syllables, or in scoring, I wouldn't hear the incomplete measure at the start of a score. That means I would write the music starting with the downbeat rather than holding the down beat for two preliminary beats. Or I'd have the wrong time signature. For instance I'd think I was writing in 4/4, but when my teacher would look at and play the piece, it would be obvious to him I was using 5/4, and so he'd help me figure out how to correctly count the beats and re score the music. My ear got better, but I still have problems with that. And even though I would play the melody line with the proper emphasis in my head, someone else who is a musician would look at the score and play it a different way.

So what's all this have to do with the sentence at the beginning? Here's another one with the same issue.

It can take up to a year for a couple's normal sex life to return in full bloom, given the realities and stresses of early parenthood.

I studied rhetoric in graduate school with Ed Corbet, and he used to say one of the most common mistakes writers make is not reading their writing out loud. That's because, like music, language has natural rhythms. And when a writer disrupts the flow of those rhythms, that writer creates places where a reader is going to stumble. When I missed the upbeat at the start of a score, I created a place where a performer is going to stumble or at least miss the correct emphasis. And that's very much similar to what's happened in the two problem sentences, each of which was written by a different writer. If you read the first sentence out loud --

Very light pressure on the abdomen is advised, if the belly is massaged at all.

you should be able to hear the violated rhythm. Now move the phrase at the end to the beginning:

If the belly is massaged at all, very light pressure on the abdomen is advised.

The "is advised" is awkward and stilted, but at least the sentence flows more naturally. It doesn't cause a reader to stumble, and the writer gets a bonus after making the change. It's easier to see the need to think about changing "is advised" to, perhaps, something like

If the belly is massaged at all, very light pressure on the abdomen should be used. (or "is best" or is required)

Now try doing the same thing to the second problematic sentence.

It can take up to a year for a couple's normal sex life to return in full bloom, given the realities and stresses of early parenthood.

When you know the words, you can sing along; when you hear the beat, you can play the song.

Interactivity

A long time ago, when computers and the Internet were still wedging themselves into our lives, I was amazed at how easy someone had made it for us to simply answer questions and upload information about ourselves online -- and how seemlessly we began doing it. Even just saying "yes" seemed ominous. I remarked to colleagues that somewhere in cyberspace someone was conditioning us to simply type in whatever we were asked to type in. Not that I heeded my own wariness. I was as eager as the next person to type in my name, place an order on line, answer a survey.

Now our Google toolbar will fill in forms for us and hand out credit card information without us even having to open our wallets. How many of us are paying a monthly $7.99 charge or $12.00 charge or. . . on our credit card statements that buys us some service we don't even remember we have? Who did we talk to when we ordered it, and who do we talk to to cancel it? And are we even sure all of those companies that are collecting the money are still in business?

We've given Microsoft free access to our hard drives because it's easier than trying to remember to download updates on our own. We let McAfee or Norton Utilities have free access. Who are they? And why can any of them simply shut down our computer at will to "reconfigure" the updates? Why does Dell want me to upload my hard drive to their server in cyberspace -- so I'll be protected when my system crashes? Do I know anybody at Dell? And why does Quicken check to see if I've got the latest financial tools and urge me to go to their website every time I start the program? For that matter, why do they want to pay my bills for me? Do I know anyone at Quicken?

What prompted this reflection was watching my local morning news today. The price of gas in Atlanta rose 11 cents overnight and another 4 cents in a half hour during the broadcast. It's because of Ike, and I just wish I had filled up yesterday. Wouldn't it be great if I could get some kind of warning? And then they said it. If you want instant alerts on what's happening with gas prices, all you have to do is sign up on 11alive.com and they'll send you an alert when there's going to be a change in the price of gas. I didn't sign up, but I assume they'd send it to my mobile phone if I asked. It seemed like it was the perfect solution to a serious problem. Thank God for the Matrix.