Cutting the Parts That Sound Like a Webinar (Module: Making It Sound Like a Person)
okay so. last lesson was the read-aloud test, and if you did it, you probably found at least one sentence that made you wince a little. good. that wince is useful. this lesson is about what you actually do with it.
here's the thing. a lot of first drafts of family history read like a work newsletter. "she was a dedicated homemaker who valued family and hard work." that sentence could describe eleven thousand women. it's not wrong, it's just not anybody.
i call this webinar language. it's polished, it's vague, and it could be read aloud by a stock photo. it shows up when we're nervous about the writing part and start reaching for the kind of phrases that sound official. i do it too, especially in a first pass. the fix isn't to write better sentences. it's to notice the pattern and swap it out.
what webinar language actually sounds like
a few signs to watch for in your own draft:
- summary words instead of specific ones. "she worked hard." "he loved his family." "they had a difficult life." these are conclusions, not scenes. they tell me what to think instead of showing me anything.
- resume language. "she was known for her dedication to..." nobody talks like this at the dinner table. if you wouldn't say it out loud to a cousin, it doesn't belong on the page.
- the passive fog. "mistakes were made," "the family was affected by," "changes occurred." nobody's doing anything in these sentences. real life has people doing things.
- starting with the birth and death dates. i've said this before and i'll keep saying it: the dates are bookends, not the story. leading with them is how you end up writing a spreadsheet with feelings pretending to be a person.
how to actually cut it
- find the summary sentence. it's usually the one that sounds the most "finished," the one you're a little proud of. that's often the tell.
- ask "what's the actual example?" if you wrote "she was generous," what's the thing she did. did she always have gum in her purse for the grandkids. did she slip you twenty bucks at the gas station and pretend it wasn't a big deal. that's the sentence you want.
- swap the abstract noun for a specific noun. "hard work" becomes "she canned four hundred quarts of peaches one september and didn't stop until midnight." "family values" becomes whatever it actually looked like on a tuesday.
- delete the sentence that's just there to sound respectful. you don't need "she will be remembered as a woman of great faith and dedication" if you've already shown me the woman. the summary sentence at the end is often just throat-clearing. cut it and see if the piece is stronger without it.
- read it again out loud. if it still sounds like something you'd hear at an awards banquet, it's not done yet.
the pancakes story again, sort of
i've told you about asking my spouse nichole to write down a memory of her own mother. she said yes right away and then didn't do it for eight months. every time i brought it up as An Assignment, it stalled out.
what finally worked was not asking for a memory. it was a random saturday, we were making pancakes, and i just said "did your mom always burn the first pancake too, or was that just my family." and nichole said "oh, she'd throw the first one out, every time, said it was the pan's fault." that was it. that was the whole memory. no dedication-to-family language anywhere near it. burnt pancake, blamed the pan, done.
if she'd sat down to write "a tribute to her mother's cooking," it would've come out sounding like a webinar. because that's what happens when you write toward an occasion instead of toward a moment. the casual version was true and specific and took four seconds to tell.
so when you're cutting the polished-sounding stuff out of your own draft, it can help to ask yourself: would i say this at pancakes, or am i writing this for an audience i'm imagining is judging me. usually it's the second one. cut toward the pancakes version.
a caution here
don't over-correct into cruelty. cutting the summary language doesn't mean you have to include every unflattering detail you know. you can leave things out. you can be specific and still be kind. "he had a temper" doesn't need three paragraphs of evidence if that's not the story you're trying to tell. specific isn't the same as exposing. you're the one who decides what belongs.
before next time
pick one paragraph you've already written and find the most "finished-sounding" sentence in it, the one that feels the most like a conclusion. cross it out and see what's underneath.