Write Lightning is a blog from writer Deb Thompson.
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Tue, Jan 28 2014
What's really going on with the State of the Union
When writers listen to US presidents deliver their respective State of the Union addresses we tend to think of sentence structure and grammar. It might help to think of these speeches more the way we would think of a query to an editors or a pitch to a filmmaker.
Some of what we hear will be a series of statistics on how things have been going for the past year. Some of what we hear will be observation and an interpretation of what things are like now. Some of what we hear will be justification for whatever President Obama hopes to see happen in the next year or two. (This would be true of anyone holding the office.) Facts, interpretation of history and present conditions, idealism and thinking habits are interwoven into a speech that reflects the deliverer's social, political and personal background.
You could make the speech more interesting and personal this evening by imagining how you would deliver the review and projection, based on your own observations, or even from the point-of-view of your son, daughter, worst enemy or best friend. All these speeches are stories of a sort and each speech tells us something about who the speaker is. Our own filters, as we listen, tell us more about who we are. It's a good exercise in how speaker and listener, or author and reader, work together to make the speech into a dynamic piece of literature that will be catalogued as part of history.
posted at: 09:49 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
When writers listen to US presidents deliver their respective State of the Union addresses we tend to think of sentence structure and grammar. It might help to think of these speeches more the way we would think of a query to an editors or a pitch to a filmmaker.
Some of what we hear will be a series of statistics on how things have been going for the past year. Some of what we hear will be observation and an interpretation of what things are like now. Some of what we hear will be justification for whatever President Obama hopes to see happen in the next year or two. (This would be true of anyone holding the office.) Facts, interpretation of history and present conditions, idealism and thinking habits are interwoven into a speech that reflects the deliverer's social, political and personal background.
You could make the speech more interesting and personal this evening by imagining how you would deliver the review and projection, based on your own observations, or even from the point-of-view of your son, daughter, worst enemy or best friend. All these speeches are stories of a sort and each speech tells us something about who the speaker is. Our own filters, as we listen, tell us more about who we are. It's a good exercise in how speaker and listener, or author and reader, work together to make the speech into a dynamic piece of literature that will be catalogued as part of history.
posted at: 09:49 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
