December 2022 – Page 1880 – Homework Handlers

Technical Writing Evaluation Report.

December 4, 2022/in Uncategorized /by SK

RonaldS.BlicqLisaMoretto-Technically-Write-Pearson_PrenticeHall2004.pdf

Home>English homework help>Technical Writing evaluation report. Question is at page no. 118 (Ex-5.1)

Technically-Write!

Ron B l i c q Lisa Moretto RGI International

S ix t h Ed i t i on

Upper Saddle River, New Jersey Columbus, Ohio

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Editor in Chief: Stephen Helba Executive Editor: Gary Bauer Editorial Assistant: Natasha Holden Production Editor: Louise N. Sette Design Coordinator: Diane Ernsberger Cover Designer: Monica Kompter Cover art: Comstock Production Manager: Brian Fox Marketing Manager: Leigh Ann Sims

This book was set by Phyllis Seto. It was printed and bound by Courier Kendallville, Inc. The cover was printed by Phoenix Color Corp.

Copyright © 2004 by Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458. Pearson Prentice Hall. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. For information regarding permission(s), write to: Rights and Permissions Department.

Pearson Prentice Hall™ is a trademark of Pearson Education, Inc. Pearson® is a registered trademark of Pearson plc Prentice Hall® is a registered trademark of Pearson Education, Inc.

Pearson Education Ltd. Pearson Education Singapore Pte. Ltd. Pearson Education Canada, Ltd. Pearson Education—Japan

Pearson Education Australia Pty. Limited Pearson Education North Asia Ltd. Pearson Educación de Mexico, S.A. de C.V. Pearson Education Malaysia Pte. Ltd.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 0-13-114878-8

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Contents

About the Authors xi

Preface xiii

People as “Communicators” xv

Chapter 1 Why Technical People Need to Write Well 1

The First Fifty Years 1 A Change in Style 2

Chapter 2 A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 4

Simplifying the Approach 4 Planning the Writing Task 5 Writing the First Draft 12 Taking a Break 15 Reading with a Plan 16

Checking for Clarity 16 Checking for Correct Tone and Style 18 Checking for Accuracy 21

Revising Your Own Words 21 Assignments 23

Chapter 3 Letters, Memos, and Emails 24

Using the Pyramid 24 Identifying the Main Message 24 Getting Started 25 Avoiding False Starts 27

Planning the Letter 27 Opening Up the Pyramid 29 Writing to Inform 31 Writing to Persuade 32

Creating a Confident Image 37 Be Brief 37 Be Clear 40

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Be Definite 41 Close on a Strong Note 41

Adopting a Pleasant Tone 42 Know Your Reader 42 Be Sincere 43 Be Human 43 Avoid Words That Antagonize 43 Know When to Stop 45

Using a Businesslike Format 45 Letter Styles 46 Interoffice Memo 49 Fax Cover Sheet 50

Writing Electronic Mail 51 Email Netiquette 52 Email Guidelines 54

Assignments 57

Chapter 4 Short Informal Reports 66

Internal Versus External 66 Writing Style 67 Incident Report 68 Trip Report 73

Short Trip Reports 73 Longer Trip Reports 74

Progress or Status Reports 77 Occasional Progress Report 77 Periodic Progress Report 77 Personal Progress Report 83

Project Completion Report 84 Inspection Report 86 Laboratory Report 89 Assignments 93

Chapter 5 Longer Informal and Semiformal Reports 100

Investigation Report 100 Conducting a Comparative Analysis 105 Opening with a Summary Page 107

Evaluation Report/Feasibility Study 109 Assignments 118

vi Contents

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Chapter 6 Formal Reports 124

Major Parts 125 Summary 125 Introduction 127 Discussion 129 Conclusions 134 Recommendations 135 Appendixes 135

Subsidiary Parts 136 Cover 136 Title Page 137 Table of Contents 137 References (Endnotes), Bibliography, and Footnotes 138 Cover Letter 146 Executive Summary 147

The Complete Formal Report 147 The Main Parts 147 Traditional Arrangement of Report Parts 148 Pyramidal Arrangement of Report Parts 153

Assignments 177

Chapter 7 Technical Proposals 186

Overall Writing Plan 187 Short Informal Proposal 188 Longer Informal or Short Semiformal Proposal 188 Student Project Proposal 198 Longer Semiformal Proposal: Single Solution 199 Longer Semiformal Proposal: Multiple Solutions 200 Writing Plan Flexibility 203 The Language of Proposal Writing 203

1. Present Only Essential Information 203 2. Use the Active Voice 203 3. Avoid Wishy-washy Words 204 4. Avoid Giving Opinions 204

Assignments 205

Chapter 8 Other Technical Documents 208

User’s Manual 208 Identify the Audience 208

Contents vii

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Writing Plan 209 Describing the Product 209 Using the Product 210

Technical Instruction 214 Start with a Plan 215 Give Your Reader Confidence 216 Avoid Ambiguity 217 Write Bite-Size Steps 218 Insert Fail-Safe Precautions 220 Insist on an Operational Check 220

Scientific Paper 221 Appearance 221 Writing Style 222 Organization 222

Technical Papers and Articles 226 Assignments 232

Chapter 9 Illustrating Technical Documents 238

Primary Guidelines 238 Computer-Designed Graphs and Charts 239 Graphs 239

Single Curve 240 Multiple Curves 240 Scales 242 Simplicity 245

Charts 246 Bar Charts 246 Histograms 249 Surface Charts 249 Pie Charts 253

Diagrams 253 Photographs 254 Tables 256 Positioning the Illustrations 257 Working with an Illustrator 258 Assignments 260

Chapter 10 Technically-Speak! 262

The Technical Briefing 262

viii Contents

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Establish the Circumstances 262 Find a Pattern 263 Prepare to Speak 264 Now Make Your Presentation 267

The Technical Paper 270 Taking Part in Meetings 272

The Chairperson’s Role 272 The Participants’ Role 275 The Secretary’s Role 276

Assignments 278

Chapter 11 Communicating with Prospective Employers 282

The Employment-Seeking Process 283 Using the Internet in Your Job Search 284 Developing a Personal Data Record 285

Education 286 Work Experience 286 Extracurricular Activities 286 References 287

Preparing a Resume 288 Resume Formats 288

The Traditional Resume 289 The Focused Resume 292 The Functional Resume 294

Electronic Resume Formats 302 Plain Text Resumes 302 Keyword Summary Resumes 304 Scanned Resumes 305 HTML Web Portfolios 305

Writing a Letter of Application 306 The Solicited Application Letter 307 The Unsolicited Application Letter 310

Completing a Company Application Form 310 Attending an Interview 312

Prepare for the Interview 312 Create a Good Initial Impression 314 Participate Throughout the Interview 314

Accepting a Job Offer 316 Assignments 318

Contents ix

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Chapter 12 The Technique of Technical Writing 322

The Whole Document 322 Tone 322 Style 324 Appearance 326 Use Good Language 331

Paragraphs 332 Unity 332 Coherence 333 Adequate Development 335 Correct Length 336

Sentences 337 Unity 337 Coherence 338 Emphasis 339 Completeness 341

Words 343 Words That Tell a Story 344 Combining Words into Compound Terms 345 Long Versus Short Words 346 Low-Information-Content Expressions 346

Some Fine Points 348 Using Parallelism to Good Effect 348 Abbreviating Technical and Nontechnical Terms 352 Writing Numbers in Narrative 353 Writing Metric Units and Symbols (SI) 354 Writing Non-Gender-Specific Language 356

Writing for an International Audience 359 Writing Business Correspondence 360 Revising the Writing Plan 361 Writing Guidelines 362

Assignments 363

Glossary of Technical Usage 374

Index 401

Marking Control Chart 409

x Contents

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

About the Authors

on Blicq and Lisa Moretto are Senior Consultants with RGI International, a consulting company specializing in oral and written communication. They teach workshops, based on the Pyramid

Method of Writing presented in this book, to audiences all over the world. In 2001, they opened a second company—RGI Learning Inc.—specifical- ly to deliver their courses on the Web. Their web site is www.rgilearning. com.

Ron is Senior Consultant at RGI’s Canadian office. He has extensive experience as a technical writer and editor with the Royal Air Force in Britain and CAE Industries Limited in Canada, and taught technical com- munication at Red River College from 1967 to 1990. Ron has authored five books with Pearson Education and has written and produced six edu- cational video programs, such as Sharpening Your Business Communication Skills and So, You Have to Give a Talk? He is a Fellow of both the Society for Technical Communication and the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, and a Life Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. Ron lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Lisa is Senior Consultant at RGI’s United States office. She has expe- rience as an Information Developer for IBM in the US and as a Learning Products Engineer for Hewlett-Packard in the UK. Lisa holds a B.S. in Technical Communication from Clarkson University in New York, and an M.S. in User Interface Design from the London Guildhall University in England. Her specialties include developing online interactive information, designing user interfaces, and writing product documen- tation. She is a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. Lisa lives in Rochester, New York.

(Photo: Mary Lou Stein)

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

xiii

Preface

his book presents all aspects of technical communication that you, as a technician, technologist, engineer, scientist, computer and envi- ronmental specialist, or technical manager, are likely to encounter in

industry. It contains numerous examples of letters, reports, and proposals, all based on the unique “pyramid” method for structuring information, a technique that has helped countless technical people overcome “writer’s block.”

With each previous edition of Technically-Write!, changes were intro- duced to reflect the way technical professionals were currently presenting information in the various industries and in engineering consulting firms. This edition is no exception—in fact we have made more changes than ever before. Here are some of the most noticeable revisions:

● There is a new, opening chapter that traces how, over 100 years ago, the engineering community recognized that more attention needed to be placed on increasing a technical professional’s ability to commu- nicate effectively, and how lecturers at universities and colleges responded.

● Chapter 3 has more information on how to plan and write email messages.

● Chapter 4 now includes a personal progress report which helps keep managers informed of the writer’s activities.

● There is a comprehensive new chapter (Chapter 7) on how to write informal and semiformal proposals.

● The chapter on writing resumes and attending interviews (Chapter 11) has been enlarged to include new techniques for submitting elec- tronic resumes.

● The glossary has been enlarged to include more computer-related terms.

If you have seen previous editions, you will have noticed that the shape of the book has also changed. The shape will seem slimmer because we have reduced the number of pages by about 7%. We did this partly to help reduce the cost for purchasers, and partly to place some of the assign- ments and exercises in an instructor’s manual and for electronic delivery.

Information about the two companies—H. L. Winman and Associates and Macro Engineering Inc.—has been removed, but many of the model let- ters and reports, and end-of-chapter assignments, still retain these two com- panies to provide a logical environment for the documents and exercises.

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

xiv Preface

Along the way, we have very much appreciated the friendly advice and many helpful suggestions from users of the book, both teachers and stu- dents, and the advice of reviewers. In particular, we would like to thank the following reviewers: John Roberts (Mohawk College), Lisa Wolanski- McGirr (Keewatin College), George Scott (Seneca College), Alexa Campbell (Red River College), Elizabeth Smyth and Joe Benge (Camosun College). Their ideas have guided us in preparing this sixth edition. We are also celebrating, for it’s 32 years since the first edition of Technically- Write! was published!

R.B. & L.M.

Supplements The sixth edition of Technically-Write! is supported by a comprehensive supplements package, which includes the following:

● Instructor’s Resource Manual with Transparency Masters ISBN 0-13-117238-7

● Test Item File ISBN 0-13-117237-9 ● Test GenEQ ISBN 0-13-117236-0 ● Text-Enrichment Website ISBN 0-13-117234-4 ● Instructor Resource CD ISBN 0-13-117526-2

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

People as “Communicators”

e are equipped with a highly sophisticated communication sys- tem, yet we consistently fail to use it properly. The system com- prises a transmitter and receiver combined into a single package

controlled by a built-in computer, the brain. It accepts multiple inputs and transmits in three mediums: action, speech, and writing.

We spend many of our waking hours communicating, half the time as a transmitter, half as a receiver. If, as a receiver, we mentally switch off or permit ourselves to change channels while someone else is trans- mitting, we contribute to information loss. Similarly, if as a transmitter we permit our narrative to become disorganized, unconvincing, or sim- ply uninteresting, we encourage frequency drift. Our listeners detune their receivers and let their computers think about the lunch that’s immi- nent, or wonder if they should rent a video tonight.

As long as a person transmits clearly, efficiently, and persuasively, people receiving the message keep their receivers “locked on” to the transmitting frequency (this applies to all written, visual, and spoken transmissions). Such conditions expedite the transfer of information, or “communication.”

In direct contact, in which one person is speaking directly to another, the receiver has the opportunity to ask the transmitter to clarify vaguely presented information. But in more formal speech situations, and in all forms of written and most visual communication, the receiver no longer has this advantage. He or she cannot stop a speaker who mumbles or uses unfamiliar terminology to ask that parts of a talk be repeated or clarified; neither can the receiver easily ask a writer in another city to explain an incoherent passage of a business letter, or the producer of a video program to describe the point the video is trying to make.

The results of failure to communicate efficiently soon become appar- ent. If people fail to make themselves clear in day-to-day communica- tion, the consequences are likely to differ from those they anticipated, as Cam Collins has discovered to his chagrin.

Cam is a junior electrical engineer at Macro Engineering Inc., and his specialty is high-voltage power generation. When he first read about a recent extra-high-voltage (EHV) DC power conference, he wanted urgently to attend. In a memorandum to Fred Stokes, the company’s chief engineer, Cam described the conference in glowing terms that he hoped would convince Fred to approve his request. This is what he wrote:

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Fred

The EHV conference described in the attached brochure is just the thing we

have been looking for. Only last week you and I discussed the shortage of

good technical information in this area, and now here is a conference featur-

ing papers on many of the topics we are interested in. The cost is only $228 for

registration, which includes a visit to the Freeling Rapids Generating Station.

Travel and accommodation will be about $850 extra. I’m informing you of this

early so you can make a decision in time for me to arrange flight bookings

and accommodation.

Cam

Fred Stokes was equally enthusiastic and wrote back: Cam

Thanks for informing me of the EHV DC conference. I certainly don’t want to

miss it. Please make reservations for me as suggested in your memorandum.

Fred

Cam was the victim of his own carelessness: he had failed to com- municate clearly that it was he who wanted to go to Freeling Rapids!

Elizabeth Drew, on the other hand, did not realize she had missed a golden opportunity to be first with an innovative computer technique until it was too late to do anything about it. Her story stems from an incident that occurred several years ago, when she was a recently gradu- ated engineer employed by a manufacturer of agricultural machinery. Elizabeth’s job was to design modifications to the machinery, and then prepare the change procedure documentation for the production depart- ment, service representatives, sales staff, and customers.

“For each modification I had to coordinate three different docu- ments,” she explained to us over lunch. “First, there had to be a design change notice to send out to everyone concerned. And then there had to be an ‘exploded’ isometric drawing showing a clear view of every part, with each part cross-referenced to a parts list. And finally there had to be the parts list itself, with every item labeled fully and accurately.”

Elizabeth found that cross-referencing a drawing to its parts list was a tedious, time-consuming task. The isometric drawing of the part was computer generated by the drafting department. The parts list was also keyed into a computer, but by a separate department. However, because the two computer systems were incompatible, cross-referencing had to be done manually.

“And then I hit on a technique for interfacing the two programs,” Elizabeth explained. “It was simple, really, and I kept wondering why no one else had thought of it!”

Without telling anyone, she modified one of the company’s software programs and tested her idea with five different modification kits. “It worked!” she laughed. “And, best of all, I found that cross-referencing could be done in one-tenth of the time.”

xvi People as ”Communicators”

Cam’s request fails to

convince

Elizabeth has a good

idea…

…it was simple and effi-

cient…

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Elizabeth felt her employer should know about her idea: possibly the company could market the software, or even help her copyright it. So the following day she stopped Mr. Haddon, the Engineering Manager, as they passed in the hallway, and blurted out her suggestion. This is the conversation that ensued:

People as ”Communicators” xvii

Elizabeth Oh! Mr. Haddon! You know how long it takes to do the documenta- tion for a new part…?

The problem is in trying to inter- face between the graphics com- puter and the parts list…

…It has to be done by hand, you see…

Oh, yes! They do. I was just trying to help them…to speed up their work a bit.

Oh, no! It was just an idea I had— to modify the software we use…

No. You didn’t. I was doing it on my own… (She meant she was doing it on her own time.)

Well—uh—no. Not exactly…

(Reluctantly) Uh-huh.

I wanted to try…

Mr. Haddon

Yes..s..s..?

(Mr. Haddon appeared to be lis- tening politely, but internally he was growing impatient.)

Doesn’t the drafting department do all that?

You’re working for the chief draftsman now?

I don’t remember issuing you a work order…

You mean the I.T. people asked you to do it?

But you have been modifying one of our software programs? Without authority?

I thought I had made it quite clear to all the staff: No projects are to be undertaken without my approval! (His tone was cold and abrupt.)

That’s final! (And he turned on his heel and continued down the hall.)

…but Elizabeth didn’t

know how to articulate

her ideas clearly

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Elizabeth’s simple suggestion had become lost in a web of misunder- standing. By the time she was through explaining what she had been doing, she had given up trying to offer her idea to the company. And so her idea lay dormant for two years, until a major software company came out with a comparable program. Elizabeth knew then that perhaps there had been market potential for her design.

If Cam Collins and Elizabeth Drew had paused to consider the needs of the people who were to receive their information, they would never have launched precipitously into discourses that omitted essential facts. Cam had only to start his memorandum with a request (“May I have your approval to attend an EHV DC conference next month?”), and Elizabeth with a statement of purpose (“I have designed a software pro- gram that can save us hundreds of dollars annually. May I have a few moments to describe it to you?”), to command the attention of their department heads. Both Mr. Stokes and Mr. Haddon could then have much more effectively appraised the information.

Such circumstances occur daily. They are frustrating to those who fail to communicate their ideas, and costly when the consequences are carried into business and industry.

Bill Carr recently devised and installed a monitor unit for the remote control panel at the microwave relay station where he is the resident engineering technologist. As his modification greatly improved operating methods, Janet Reid, Manager of Technical Services at head office, asked him to submit an installation drawing and an accompanying description. Here is part of his description:

Some difficulty was experienced in finding a suitable location for the monitor

unit. Eventually it was mounted on a locally manufactured bracket attached to

the left-hand upright of the control panel, as shown on the attached drawing.

On the strength of Bill’s explicit mounting description and detailed list of hardware, Janet instructed project coordinator Phyllis Walters to convert Bill’s description into an installation instruction, purchase mate- rials, assemble 21 modification kits, and ship them to the 21 other relay stations in the microwave link.

Within a week, the 21 resident engineering technologists were reporting to Phyllis that it was impossible to mount the monitor unit as instructed, because of an adjoining control unit. Neither Janet nor Phyllis had remembered that Bill Carr was located at site 22, the last relay station in the microwave link, where there was no need for an additional control unit. Bill had assumed that Janet would be aware that the equipment layout at his station was unique. As he commented after- ward: “I was never told why I had to describe the modification, or what head office planned to do with my description.”

In business and industry we must communicate clearly and under- stand fully the implications of failing to do so. A poorly worded order

xviii People as ”Communicators”

They need to focus their

messages

Good intentions…

…resulting in confusion!

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

that results in the wrong part being supplied to a job site, a weak report that fails to motivate the reader to take the urgent action needed to avert a costly equipment breakdown, and even an inadequate job application that fails to sell an employer on the right person for a prospective job, all increase the cost of doing business. Such mistakes and misunder- standings are wasteful of the country’s labor and resources. Many of them can be prevented by more effective communication—communica- tion that is receiver-oriented rather than transmitter-oriented, and that transmits messages using the most expeditious, economical, and efficient means at our command.

People as ”Communicators” xix

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Chapter 1

Why Technical People Need to Write Well

Over the past four years we have asked numerous technical professionals: “What is the publication date of the earliest book on technical writing that you own?”

Nearly everyone listed books from the 1960s and 1970s. Yet our research shows that the teaching of technical writing in science and engin- eering courses began more than one hundred years ago, in 1901, when the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education (SPEE) published this succinct statement:

The writing skills of engineering students are deplorable and need to be

addressed by engineering colleges.

These words did not go unheeded. Although technical communication was not part of a technical student’s curriculum in those days, and was rarely included even in the range of courses taught by the English depart- ment, some engineering and English professors, both in North America and Great Britain, quietly began teaching the importance of good writing as part of other technical courses. After doing this for many years, some of them published books based on the notes they had typed up for their students. The following is a brief history of those texts.

The First Fifty Years In 1908, T. A. Rickard, an associate of the Royal School of Mines in London, England, published a book titled A Guide to Technical Writing.1

He wrote:

Conscientious writers try to improve their mode of expression by precision of

terms, by careful choice of words, and by the arrangement of them so that they

become efficient carriers of thought from one mind to another.

Rickard titled one of his chapters: “A Plea for Greater Simplicity in the Language of Science,” having noticed that technical people tended to write in a long-winded way that was not easy for anyone outside their dis- cipline to understand.

In 1922, Karl Owen Thompson, who taught English at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, published a book titled Technical

Technical

Communication

Overview

http://saulcarliner.home.

att.net/idbusiness/

historytc.htm

This site includes a brief

history of technical

communication.

In the early 1900s, tech-

nical communication

was taught by engin-

eering professors.

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

2 Chapter 1

Exposition.2 In the introduction to his book he commented on the differ- ences between literary and technical writing:

The study of English at a scientific school has a more directly professional applica-

tion than it has at an academic college. Instead of courses in literature with their

cultural purposes, courses are given that prepare the students for the types of

reading and writing that will be required of them after they are graduated from

college…. English is more than a tool, it is a part of life itself in its many activities.

At the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, J. Raleigh Nelson insisted from 1915 onward that his students write clearly. In 1940 he summed up his thoughts in a book titled Writing the Technical Report,3

in which he wrote:

In report writing, in particular, there is an increasing demand that the first page

or two shall provide a comprehensive idea of the whole report.

This was the first documented reference to what we now refer to as the Executive Summary, which precedes a long report or proposal (see Chapter 6). Reginald Kapp taught electrical engineering at University College in London. Like Nelson, he insisted his students write well. In 1948 he summed up his thoughts in a pocket-sized reference book titled The Presentation of Technical Information,4 in which he particularly drew attention to the importance of identifying the audience before (in those days) putting pen to paper. He wrote:

You must consider carefully the extent of the reader’s knowledge, his range of

interests, and…any peculiarities, whatever they may be, that might influence his

receptivity for the information you have to impart.

Similarly, forty years earlier, T. A. Rickard had written:

If you describe a stamp-mill to an experienced mill-man, a mining student, or a

bishop, you will vary the manner of telling. The most effective will be that which

has a sympathetic appreciation of the other fellow’s receptiveness. Do not plant

carnations in a clay soil, or rice in a sand-heap.5

(These authors were writing books for technical professionals, who were almost entirely male in the early part of the 20th century. They would write very differently today: for example, T. A. Rickard would probably change mill-man to mill worker and other fellow’s to other per- son’s.)

A Change in Style Tyler G. Hicks was a mechanical engineer who taught at Cooper Union School of Engineering. He had written numerous articles and three tech- nical books before turning his attention to engineering writing. In 1959, Hicks wrote Successful Technical Writing,6 a major milepost for books on technical writing because of his refreshing directness and style. Here are three examples:

In today’s global com-

munity, Thompson

would replace “English”

with “Language”

Rickard and Kapp

strongly stressed the

need to identify the

audience before starting

to write

Technical

Communication

Quarterly

www.attw.org/

Technical

Communication

Quarterly is the journal

of the Association for

Teachers of Technical

Writing.

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Technical writing always pays off. You never lose when you write a good technical

piece…. Good writing is a sure road to professional recognition.

Talk directly to the reader. Bring him into the discussion. Use the personal pro-

nouns “we” and “you,” but with discretion.

Choose verbs that create active impressions to the reader, and steer clear of the

passive voice. You thus give life to your style.

The five writers discussed here were very conscious that they were preparing their students to take up important roles in the engineering and technical professions. What they had to say to their students then is just as relevant today.

When, as a newly graduated engineer, engineering technician, or com- puter or environmental specialist, you first become employed in a techni- cal field, you might be surprised to discover that report writing is an inte- gral part of your work. As you advance in your chosen profession, you will also find that you will have to do more and more writing. We hope that Technically-Write! helps prepare you for the many situations you encounter.

Why Technical People Need to Write Well 3

Hicks’s writing still sits

well with today’s readers

Although writing styles

may have changed, the

message remains con-

stant

1. T. A. Rickard, A Guide to Technical Writing (San Francisco: Mining and Scientific Press, 1908) p. 8.

2. Karl Owen Thompson, Technical Exposition (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1922), p. vii.

3. J. Raleigh Nelson, Writing the Technical Report (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1940), p. 39.

4. Reginald O. Kapp, The Presentation of Technical Information (London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1948), p. 20. (Reprinted, with slight revisions, and published by the Institute for Scientific and Technical Communicators, UK, 1998.)

5. Rickard, p. 12.

6. Tyler G. Hicks, Successful Technical Writing (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1959), pp. 1 and 194.

R E F E R E N C E S

In 2003, the Kapp book

was still in print

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Chapter 2

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing

Engineering technician Dan Skinner has a report to write on an investiga- tion he completed seven weeks ago. He has made several half-hearted attempts to get started, but never seemed to find the right moment: maybe he was interrupted to resolve a circuit problem, or it was too near lunchtime, or a meeting was called. And now he is up against the wire.

Unless Dan is one of those unusual people who can produce only when under pressure, he is in danger of writing an inadequate, hastily pre- pared report that does not represent his true abilities. He does not realize that by leaving a writing task until it is too late to do a good job, and then frantically organizing the work, he is probably inhibiting his writing capa- bilities.

If Dan were to relax a little, instead of worrying that he has to organ- ize himself and his writing task, he would find the physical process of writ- ing a much more pleasant experience. But first he must change his approach.

Every technical person, from student technician to potential scientist to practicing engineer, has the ability to write clearly and logically. But this ability has to be developed. Dan Skinner must first learn some basic plan- ning and writing techniques, then practice using them until he has acquired the skill and confidence that are the trademarks of an effective writer.

Simplifying the Approach Throughout this book we will be advising you to tell your readers right away what they most need or want to know. This means structuring your writing so that the first paragraph (in short documents, the first sentence) satisfies their curiosity. Most executives and many technical readers are busy people who only have time to read essential information. By pre- senting the most important items first, you can help them decide whether they want to read the whole document immediately, put it aside to read later, or pass it along to a specialist in their department.

This reader-oriented style of presentation is known as the “pyramid technique.” Imagine every letter, memorandum, or report you write is

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

shaped like a pyramid: there is a small piece of essential information at the top, supported on a broad base of details, facts, and evidence. In most let- ters and short reports the pyramid has only two parts: a brief Summary followed by the Full Development, as shown in Figure 2-1(a). In long reports, an additional part—known as the Essential Details—is inserted between the Summary and the Full Development, as in Figure 2-1(b).

Normally, readers are not aware when a writer has used the pyramid technique. They simply find the letter or report well organized and easy to read. For example, in the opening paragraph of his letter report in Figure 2-2, Wes Hillman summarizes what Tina Mactiere most wants to know (whether the training course was a success and what results were achieved). In the remainder of the letter he fills in background details, states briefly how the course was run, reports on student participation and reaction, and suggests additional topics that could be covered in future courses.

Every document shown in this textbook has been structured using the pyramid technique. The pyramid’s application to letters, memorandums, email messages, reports, proposals, instructions, descriptions, and even resumes and oral presentations is described in Chapters 3 through 8, and 10 and 11. For the moment, just remember that using the pyramid is the simplest, fastest, most effective way to plan and write any document, regardless of its length. If Dan Skinner had known about the pyramid technique, he would have found it much easier to get started.

Planning the Writing Task The word “planning” seems to imply that report writers must start by thoroughly organizing both themselves and their material. We disagree. Organizing too diligently or too early in the writing process inhibits rather

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 5

(a) Letters and Short Reports (b) Long Reports

S = Summary

Full Development

Essential Details

S S

Figure 2-1 The pyramid writing technique.

The writer’s pyramid

helps you focus your

letters and reports

Society for Technical

Communication

Homepage

With more than 20,000

members worldwide,

STC is the largest profes-

sional organization

serving the technical

communication profes-

sion. The society’s

diverse membership

includes writers, editors,

illustrators, printers,

publishers, educators,

students, engineers, and

scientists employed in a

variety of technological

fields.

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

6 Chapter 2

October 16, 2004

Tina R. Mactiere, President

Macro Engineering Inc.

600 Deepdale Drive

Phoenix AZ 85007

Dear Ms. Mactiere,

Results of Pilot Report-Writing Course

The report-writing course we conducted for members of your engineering staff

was completed successfully by 14 of the 16 participants. The average mark

was 63%.

This was a pilot course set up in response to an August 13, 2004, enquiry from

Mr. F. Stokes. At his request, we placed most emphasis on providing your staff

with practical experience in writing business letters and technical reports.

Attendance was voluntary, the 16 participants having been selected at random

from 29 applicants.

Best results were achieved by participants who recognized their writing prob-

lems before they started the course, and willingly became actively involved in

the practical work. A few said they had expected to attend an “information” type

of course, and at first were mildly reluctant to take part in the heavy writing pro-

gram. Our comments on the work done by individual participants are attached.

Course critiques completed by the participants indicate that the course met their

needs from a letter- and report-writing viewpoint, but that they felt more empha-

sis could have been placed on technical proposals and oral reporting. Perhaps

such topics could be covered in a short follow-up course.

We enjoyed developing and teaching this pilot course for your staff, and particu-

larly appreciated their enthusiastic participation.

Sincerely,

Wesley G. Hillman

Course Leader

enc

The Roning Group Inc Communication Consultants

2002 South Main Drive

Montrose OH 45287

Full development (all the

details)

Summary (main message)

Figure 2-2 A letter report written using the pyramid technique.

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

than accelerates writing. The key is to organize your information in a spontaneous, creative manner, allowing your mind to freewheel through the initial planning stages until you have collected, scrutinized, sorted, grouped, and written the topics into a logical outline that will appeal to the reader.

We recommend that Dan Skinner at first neither make an outline nor take any action that resembles organization. Instead, he should work through seven simple planning stages that are less structured and therefore less confining. These stages are shown in Figure 2-3 and described in detail below.

1. Gather Information Dan’s first step should be to assemble all the documents, results of tests, photographs, samples, computer data, specifications, and other support- ing material that he will need to write his report, or that he will insert into it. He must gather everything he will need now, because later he will not want to interrupt his writing to look for additional facts and figures.

2. Define the Reader Next, Dan must clearly identify his audience. This is probably the most important part of his planning, for if he does not, he may write an unfo- cused report that misses its mark. He must conjure up an image of the per- son or people who will read his report by asking himself six questions:

1. Who, specifically, is my reader? If it is someone he knows, his task is simplified. If it is someone he is not acquainted with (such as a cus- tomer in an out-of-town firm), he must imagine a persona.

2. Is he or she a technical person? Dan needs to know whether he can use or must avoid technical terms.

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 7

”Disorganize” the

writing task!

Pay primary attention to

the ultimate reader

Gather Information

NO ORGANIZING

MINOR ORGANIZING

MAJOR ORGANIZING

Define the

Reader

Define the

Purpose

Jot Down Topic Headings (Random Order)

Delete Irrelevant

Topics

Group Related Topics

Arrange Topic

Groups

Figure 2-3 The seven planning stages. In practice, these stages can overlap.

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

3. How much does the reader know about the subject I will be describ- ing? This will give Dan a starting point, since he won’t need to cover information a reader already knows.

4. What does the reader want to know or expect to be told? Dan must be able to anticipate whether the reader will be receptive or hostile to the information he is presenting.

5. Will more than one person read my report? If so, Dan must repeat questions 2 through 4 for additional readers.

6. Who is my primary reader? The primary reader is the person who will make a decision or take action after reading Dan’s report. Often this is the person to whom the report is directed. On occasion it may be one of the secondary readers. For example, a report may be addressed to a department manager, but the person who uses it or does some- thing about it will be an engineer on the manager’s staff.

Dan’s inability to identify his reader was one of the reasons he had diffi- culty getting started on his report-writing task.

3. Define the Purpose Now that he has identified his reader, Dan needs to ask himself one or possibly two more questions:

7. Why am I writing to this person (or these people)? Dan needs to decide whether his objective is to pass along information (to inform the reader about something), or to convince the reader to act or react (to persuade the reader to reply, make a decision, or approve a request).

8. If Dan’s purpose is to persuade, then he also needs to ask: What action do I want the reader to take? This will help him decide what he wants his email, memo, letter, or report to achieve.

Now Dan is ready to develop a focused writing plan.

4. Jot Down Topic Headings Now Dan can start making notes. At this third stage he must “loosen up” enough to generate ideas spontaneously. He needs to brainstorm, so that he comes up with ideas and pieces of information quickly and easily, with- out stopping to question the relevance of that information. That will come later. His role for the moment is purely to collect it.

Normally, at the outlining stage, a technical person will type or write down a set of familiar or arbitrary headings, such as “Introduction,” “Initial Tests,” and “Material Resources,” and arrange them in logical order. But we want our report writer to be different. We want Dan Skinner simply to type the series of topics he plans to discuss, writing only brief headings rather than full sentences. He must do this in random order, making no attempt to force the topics into groups. The topics he knows

8 Chapter 2

Decide: Why am I creat-

ing this message?

Loosen up: Delve deeply

into brainstorming

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

best will spring readily to mind; those he knows less well may take longer to recall.

When he finishes his initial list, he should scroll up the screen and examine each topic to see if it suggests less obvious topics. As additional topics come to mind he must type them in, still in random order, until he finds he is straining to find new ideas.

Dan must not try to decide whether each topic is relevant during this spontaneous brainstorming session. If he does, he will immediately inhibit his creativity because he will become too logical and organized. He must list all topics, regardless of their importance and eventual position in the final report. At the end of this session Dan’s list should look like Figure 2-4.

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 9

Building OK – needs strengthening

Elevators – too slow, too small

Talk with YoYo – elev mfr (10% discount)

Waiting time too long – 70 sec

Shaft too small

How enlarge shaft?

Remove stairs?

Talk with fire inspector

Correspondence – other elev mfrs

Talk with Merrywell – Budget $950,000

Sent out questionnaire

Tenants’ preferences –

Express elev No stop – 2nd flr

Executive elev Faster service

Prestige elev No stop – ground flr

Freight elev

Freight elev – takes up too much space

Shaft only 35 × 8 ft (when modified)

Big freight elev – omit basement

Tenants “OK” small freight elev

(YoYo “C” – 8 ft)

YoYo – has office in Montrose

Basement level has loading dock

Service reputation – YoYo?

– Others?

Figure 2-4 Initial list of topic headings, typed in random order.

Let the initial outline

develop naturally, loosely

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

5. Delete Irrelevant Topics The fifth stage calls for Dan to print a hard copy to work on, then to examine his list of headings with a critical eye, dividing them into those that bear directly on the subject and those that introduce topics of only marginal interest. His knowledge of the reader—identified in stage 2—will help him decide whether each topic is really necessary, so he can delete irrelevant topics as has been done in Figure 2-5.

6. Group Related Topics The headings that remain should be grouped into “topic areas” that will be discussed together. Dan can do this by simply coding related topics with

10 Chapter 2

Start grouping your

topics into compart-

ments

Now start pulling the

pieces together

Figure 2-5 The same list of topic headings, but with irrelevant topics deleted and remaining topics coded into subject groups (A–structural implications; B–elevator manufacturers; C–tenants’ preferences; D–freight elevator).

Building OK – needs strengthening

Elevators – too slow, too small

Talk with YoYo – elev mfr (10% discount)

Waiting time too long – 70 sec

Shaft too small

How enlarge shaft?

Remove stairs?

Talk with fire inspector

Correspondence – other elev mfrs

Talk with Merrywell – Budget $950,000

Sent out questionnaire

Tenants’ preferences –

Express elev No stop – 2nd flr

Executive elev Faster service

Prestige elev No stop – ground flr

Freight elev

Freight elev – takes up too much space

Shaft only 35 × 8 ft (when modified)

Big freight elev – omit basement

Tenants “OK” small freight elev

(YoYo “C” – 8 ft)

YoYo – has office in Montrose

Basement level has loading dock

Service reputation – YoYo?

– Others?

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

the same symbol or letter. In Figure 2-5, letter (A) identifies one group of related topics, letter (B) another group, and so on.

7. Arrange the Topic Groups At this stage we encourage Dan to take his first major organizational step: to arrange the groups of information in the most suitable order. At the same time he needs to sort out the order of the headings within each group. He must consider:

● which order of presentation will be most interesting, ● which will be most logical, and ● which will be simplest to understand.

The result will become his final writing plan or report outline. Figure 2-6 shows Dan’s final writing plan. Depending on how he prefers to work, Dan can use a hard copy of his outline, or work directly onscreen from a word-processing file.

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 11

Let the final outline

evolve from the subject

matter… Building condition:

OK – needs strengthening (shaft area)

Existing elev shaft too small

Remove adjoining staircase

Shaft size now 35 × 8 ft

Tenants’ needs:

Sent out questionnaire

Identified 5 major requests

Requests we must meet:

Cut waiting time: 32 sec (max)

Handle freight up to 7 ft 6 in. long

Requests we should try to meet:

Express elev to top 4 floors

Deluxe models (for prestige)

Private elev (for executives)

Budget: must be within $950,000

Elevator manufacturers:

Researched 3

Only YoYo Co. offers discount

Only YoYo Co. has Montrose office

Figure 2-6 Topic headings arranged into a writing outline.

… rather than force the

subject matter into a

prescribed pattern

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

A final comment about outlining: If you have already developed an outlining method that works well for you, or you are using outlining soft- ware successfully, then we suggest you continue as you have been doing. The outlining method suggested here is for people who are seeking a sim- pler, more creative way to develop outlines than the one they are cur- rently using.

Writing the First Draft As we sit at our desks, with the heading “Writing the First Draft” at the top of Ron’s computer screen and “Focus the Letter” at the top of Lisa’s (Lisa is working on Chapter 3), we find we are experiencing the same problem that every writer encounters from time to time: an inability to find the right words—any words—that can be strung together to make coherent sentences and paragraphs. The ideas are there, circling around inside our skulls, and the outlines are there, so we cannot excuse ourselves by saying we have not prepared adequately. What, then, is wrong?

The answer is simple. Ten minutes ago the telephone rang and Jack, a neighbor, announced he would shortly bring over a “Neighborhood Block Watch” plan for Ron to sign. Ron paused to switch on the coffee, for we know that Jack will expect a cup while we talk, and now we can hear the percolator grumbling away in the distance. We cannot concentrate when we know our continuity of thought is so soon to be broken.

Continuity is the key to getting one’s writing done. In our case, this means writing at fairly long sittings during which we know we will not be disturbed. We must be out of reach of the telephone, visiting friends, and even family, so we can write continuously. Only when we have reached a logical break in the writing, or have temporarily exhausted an easy flow of words, can we afford to stop and enjoy that cup of cappuccino!

It is no easier to find a quiet place to write in the business world. The average technical person who tries to write a report in a large office can- not simply ignore the surroundings. A conversation taking place in an adjacent cubicle will interfere with one’s creative thought processes. And even a co-worker collecting money for the pool on that night’s NHL game between the New York Rangers and the L.A. Kings will interrupt writing continuity.

The problem of finding a quiet place to write can be hard to resolve, particularly now that most people type their reports on a computer, so cannot move away from their desks (unless they are fortunate enough to own a laptop). For technical students, who frequently have to work on a tiny writing space in a crowded classroom, or in a roomful of computer terminals, conditions are even worse. Outlining in the classroom, followed by typing at home or in the seclusion of a library cubicle, is a possible alternative.

12 Chapter 2

Write where you won’t

be disturbed: no tele-

phone, no pager, no

cellphone

Write whatever way

works best for you

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Before you start writing you need to consider the page layout and make decisions like these:

● What font you will use, and whether it should be serif or sans serif. A serif type has tops and tails on its ascenders and descenders (this book is set in Sabon, which is a serif type). A sans serif type is much plainer (Helvetica is a typical sans serif type).

● Whether you will print the report in 10 or 12 point type (i.e. with 10 or 12 characters to the linear inch). Generally, 11 or 12 point is better for serif fonts, and 10 or 11 point is better for sans serif fonts.

● The number of lines you want on a page, and the width of your planned typing lines.

● The width of the margins you want on either side of the text and at the top and bottom of the page.

● Whether you want the right margin to be justified (straight) or ragged. Research shows that paragraphs set with a ragged right margin are easier to read than paragraphs set with a justified right margin.

● Where you want the page numbers to be positioned (top or bottom of the page, and either centered or to one side of the page); on most systems page numbers are printed automatically, but you can select where they are to appear.

● The line spacing you want (single or double), and how many blank lines you want between paragraphs (normally one or one-and-a- half).

● Whether the first line of each paragraph is to be indented or set “flush” with the left margin; and, if indented, how long the indenta- tion is to be.

● For long words at the end of a line, whether you or the computer will decide where the word is to be hyphenated (you can also select no hyphenation).

● The levels of headings you will use, and how you will use different font sizes and boldface type to differentiate between them. (See page 326 and Figure 12-1 of Chapter 12 for guidelines.)

Most popular word-processing programs provide default settings for these options, but you should be aware of them and how to customize the page layout for your particular needs. Every program is different, so consult the documentation that comes with your word-processing software for instructions on how to change an option.

Dan Skinner is ready to start writing, but now he encounters another difficulty. Equipped with his outline and the keyboard in front of him, he finds that he does not know where to begin. Or he may tackle the task enthusiastically, determined to write a really effective introduction, only to find that nothing he writes really says what he wants to say.

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 13

You have to set up page

parameters only once;

the first time

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

We frequently advise technical people who encounter this “no start” block that the best place for them to start writing is at paragraph two, or even somewhere in the middle. For example, if Dan finds that a particular part of his project interests him more than other parts, he should write about that part first. His interest and familiarity with the subject will help him write those few first words, and keep him going once he has started. The most important thing is to start writing, to put any words at all down, even if they are not exactly the right words, and to let them lead natur- ally into the next group of ideas.

This is where continuity becomes essential: don’t interrupt the writing process to correct a minor point of construction, write perfect grammar, find exactly the right word, fiddle with page layout, or construct sentences and paragraphs of just the right length. That can be done later, during revision. The important thing is to keep building on that rough draft, so that when you stop for a break you know you have written something you can work up into a presentable document.

If, as he writes, Dan cannot find exactly the word he wants, he should jot down a similar word and type in a question mark enclosed in paren- theses immediately after it, as a reminder to change the word when the first draft is finished. Similarly, if he is not sure how to spell a certain word, he should resist the temptation to turn to a dictionary, for that will disrupt the nat-ural flow of his writing. Again, he should draw attention to the word as a reminder that he must consult his dictionary later. See Figure 2-7.

We cannot stress this too strongly: writers should not correct their work as they write. Writing and revising are two entirely separate func- tions, and they call for different approaches. They cannot be done simul- taneously. Writing calls for creativity and total immersion in the subject so the words tumble out in a constant flow. Revision calls for lucidity and logic, which force a writer to reason and query the suitability of the words he or she has written. The first requires excluding every thought but the subject; the second demands an objectivity that challenges the material from the reader’s point of view. Writers who try to correct their work as they write soon become frustrated, because creativity and objectivity are constantly fighting for control.

The length of each writing session will vary, depending on the writer’s experience and the complexity of the topic. If a document is short, it should be written all at one sitting. If it is long, it should be divided into several medium-length sessions that suit the writer’s staying power.

In Dan’s case, at the end of each session he should glance back over his work, note the words he has circled or questioned, and make a few necessary changes (Figure 2-7 is a page from a typical first draft). He must not yet attempt to rewrite paragraphs and sentences for better emphasis. He must leave such major changes until later, when enough time has elapsed for him to read his work objectively. Only then can he review his work as a complete document and see the relationship among its parts. Only then can he be completely critical.

14 Chapter 2

Tips for combatting

“writer’s block”

Write without stopping

to revise; that comes

later

Get on a roll…and keep

rolling!

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Taking a Break When Dan has written the final paragraph of his report, he has to resist the temptation to start revising it immediately. He knows some sections are weak, he is not happy about some passages, and the desire to correct them is strong. But it’s too soon. Certainly he can pass the draft through a spell-checker, make a safety copy, and print out the pages (we create a double-spaced draft, so we will have room to write in revisions when we are editing). But then he needs to staple them together and set them aside while he tackles a completely unrelated task.

Reading without a suitable waiting period encourages writers to look at their work through rose-tinted spectacles. Sentences they would normally recognize as weak or too wordy appear to contain words of wisdom. Gross inaccuracies that under other circumstances they would pounce on go unno- ticed. Paragraphs that might not be understood by a reader new to the sub- ject, seem abundantly clear. Their familiarity with their work blinds them to its weaknesses. The remedy is to wait.

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 15

Let time “distance” you

from your writing

Use question marks as a

search tool

Tenants’ Needs

To find out what the building’s tenants most needed in elevator

service, we asked each company to fill out a questionaire (sp?).

From their answers we were able to identify 5 factors needing

consideration:

1. A major problem seems to be the length of time a person

must wait for an elevator. Every tenant said we must cut

out lengthy waits. A survey was carried out to find out

how long people had to wait (during rush hours). This

averaged out at 70 sec, more than twice the 32 sec estab-

lished by Johnson (Ref?), before people get impacient

(sp?). From this we calculated we would need 3 or 4 pas-

senger elevators.

2. At first it seemed we would be forced to include a full-

size freight elevator in our plan. Two companies (which?)

both carry large but light displays up to their floors, but

both later agreed they could hinge them, and if they did

this they would need only 7 ft 6 in. width (maximum).

They also said they did not need a freight elevator all the

Figure 2-7 Part of the author’s first draft. Note that the author has not stopped to hunt up minor details. Several revisions were made between this first draft and the final product (see pages 173 to 176).

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Reading with a Plan Dan Skinner’s first reading should take him straight through the draft without stopping to make corrections, so he can gain an overall impres- sion of his report. Subsequent readings should be slower and more criti- cal, with Dan writing changes in as he goes along. As he reads he should check for clarity, correct tone and style, and technical and grammatical accuracy.

Checking for Clarity Checking for clarity means searching for passages that are vague or ambiguous. If the following paragraph remained uncorrected, it would confuse and annoy a reader:

Muddled When the owners were contacted on April 15, the assistant

Paragraph manager, Mr. Pierson, informed the engineer that they were

thinking of advertising Lot 36 for sale. He has however reiterat-

ed his inability to make a definite decision by requesting his

company to confirm their intentions with regard to buying the

land within two months, when his boss, Mr. Davidson, general

manager of the company, will have come back from a business

tour in Europe. This will be June 8.

The only facts you can be sure about are that the owners of the land were contacted on April 15 and the general manager will be returning on June 8. The important information about the possible sale of Lot 36 is confusing. The writer was probably trying to say something like this:

Revised The engineer spoke to the owners on April 15 to inquire

Paragraph if Lot 36 was for sale. He was informed by Mr. Pierson, the assis-

tant manager, that the company was thinking of selling the lot,

but that no decision would be made until after June 8, when

the general manager returns from a business tour in Europe. Mr.

Pierson suggested that the engineer submit a formal request to

purchase the land by that date.

The more complex the topic, the more important it is to write clear paragraphs. Although the paragraph below is quite technical, it would be generally understood even by nontechnical readers:

Clear A sound survey confirmed that the high noise level was caused

Paragraph mainly by the radar equipment blower motors, with a lesser con-

tribution from the air-conditioning equipment. Tests showed

that with the radar equipment shut down the ambient noise

level at the microphone positions dropped by 10 dB, whereas

with the air-conditioning equipment shut down the noise level

dropped by 2.5 dB. General clatter and impact noise caused by

the movement of furniture and personnel also contributed to

the noisy working conditions, but could not be measured other

than as sudden sporadic peaks of 2 to 5 dB.

16 Chapter 2

Read all the way

through without a pen

in your hand

Confusing!

Clear!

Technical, but still clear

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

This writer has made sure that

● the topic is clearly stated in the first sentence (the topic sentence), ● the topic is developed adequately by the remaining sentences, and ● no sentence contains information that does not substantiate the

topic.

If any paragraph meets these basic requirements, its writer can feel rea- sonably sure the message has been conveyed clearly.

Writers who know their subject thoroughly may find it difficult to identify paragraphs that contain ambiguities. A passage that is clear to them may be meaningless or offer alternative interpretations to a reader unfamiliar with the subject. For example:

Our examination indicates that the receiver requires both repair and recalibration,

whereas the transmitter needs recalibration only, and the modulator requires the

same.

This sentence plants a question in the reader’s mind: Does the modulator require both repair and recalibration, or only recalibration? The techni- cian who wrote it knows, because he has been working on the equipment, but readers will never know unless they write, phone, or email the techni- cian. The technician could have clarified the message by rearranging the information:

Our examination indicates that the receiver requires both repair and recalibration,

whereas the transmitter and modulator need only recalibration.

Sometimes ambiguities are so well buried they are surprisingly diffi- cult to identify, as in this excerpt from a chief draftsperson’s report to a department head:

The drafting section will need three Nabuchi Model 700 CAD computers. The cur-

rent price is $3175 and the supplier has indicated his quotation is “firm” for three

months. We should therefore budget accordingly.

The department head took the message at face value and inserted $3175 for CAD computers into the budget. But two months later the company received an invoice for $9525. Unable by then to return two of the three computers, the department head had to overshoot his budget by $6350. This financial mismanagement was caused by the chief draftsperson, who had omitted to insert the word “each” immediately after “$3175.”

Although many ambiguities can be sorted out by simple deduction, a reader should not have to interpret a writer’s intentions. It’s the writer’s job to make reading a document as easy and stress-free as possible, by eliminating confusing statements and alternative meanings.

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 17

Muddled writing

Clear writing

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Checking for Correct Tone and Style How do you know when your writing has the right tone? One of the most difficult aspects of technical writing is establishing a tone that is correct for the reader, suitable for the subject, and comfortable for you, the writer. If you know your subject well and have thoroughly researched your audi- ence, you will most likely write confidently and will often automatically establish the correct tone. But if you try to set a tone that does not feel nat- ural, or if you are a little uncertain about the subject and the reader, your reader will sense unsureness in your writing. And no matter how skillful- ly you edit your work, that hesitancy will show up in the final sentences and paragraphs.

Finding the Best Writing Level If Dan Skinner is writing on a specific aspect of a very technical topic, and knows that his reader is an engineer with a thorough grounding in the subject, he can use technical terms and abbreviations. Conversely, if he is writing on the same topic for a nontechnical reader who has little or no knowledge of the subject, Dan may have to write a simplified narrative rather than state specific details, explain technical terms, and generally write more informatively.

For example, when engineer Rita Corrigan wrote the following in a modification report, she knew her readers would be electronics techni- cians at radar-equipped airfields:

We modified the MTI by installing a K-59 double-decade circuit. This brightened

moving targets by 12% and reduced ground clutter by 23%.

But when Rita reported on the same subject to the airport manager, she wrote this:

We modified the radar set’s Moving Target Indicator by installing a special circuit

known as the K-59. This increased the brightness of responses from aircraft and

decreased returns from fixed objects on the ground.

For the airport manager Rita included more description and eliminated technical details that might not be meaningful. In their place she made a general statement that aircraft responses were “increased” and ground returns “decreased.” She also knew that the airport manager would be familiar with terms such as Moving Target Indicator, responses, and returns.

Now suppose that Rita also had to write to the local Chamber of Commerce to describe improvements to the airport’s air traffic control system. This time her readers would be entirely nontechnical, so she would have to avoid using any technical terms:

We have modified the airfield radar system to improve its performance, which has

helped us to differentiate more clearly between low-flying aircraft and high

objects on the ground.

18 Chapter 2

Keep coming back to

your readers: plant

yourself in their shoes

Adjust the level of writ-

ing to suit the reader

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Keeping to the Subject Having established that he is writing at the correct level, Dan Skinner must now check that he has kept to the subject. He must take each para- graph and ask: Is this truly relevant? Is it direct? And is it to the point?

If Dan prepared his outline using the method described earlier, and fol- lowed it closely as he wrote his report, he can be reasonably sure that most of his writing is relevant. To check that his subject development follows his planned theme, he should identify the topic sentences of key para- graphs and check them against the headings in his outline. If the topic sen- tences follow the outline, he has kept to the main theme; if they tend to diverge from the outline, or if he has difficulty identifying them, he should read the paragraphs carefully to see whether they need to be rewritten or even eliminated. (For more information about topic sentences, see Chap- ter 12.)

Technical writing should always be as direct and specific as possible. Technical writers should convey just enough information for their readers to understand the subject thoroughly. Technical writing, unlike literary writing, has no room for details that are not essential to the main theme. This is readily apparent in the following descriptions of the same equip- ment.

Literary The new cabinet has a rough-textured dove gray finish that

Description reflects the sun’s rays in varying hues. Contrary to most instru-

ments of this type, its controls are grouped artistically in one

corner, where the deep black of the knobs provides an interest-

ing contrast with the soft gray and white background. A cover

plate, hardly noticeable to the layperson’s inexperienced eye,

conceals a cluster of unsightly adjustment screws that would

otherwise mar the overall appearance of the cabinet and would

nullify the esthetic appeal of its surprisingly effective design.

Technical The gray cabinet is functional, with the operator’s controls

Description grouped at the top right-hand corner where they can be

grasped easily with one hand. Subsidiary controls and adjust-

ment screws used by the maintenance crews are grouped at the

bottom left-hand corner, where they are hidden by a hinged

cover plate.

A technical description concentrates on details that are important to the reader (it tells where the controls are and why they have been so placed), and so maintains an efficient, businesslike tone.

Using Simple Words A writer who uses unnecessary superlatives sets an unnaturally pompous tone. The engineer who writes that a design “contains ultrasophisticated circuitry” seems to be justifying the importance and complexity of his or her work instead of just saying that the design has a very complex circuit. The supervisor who recommends that technician Johannes Schmitt be

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 19

Technical writing is func-

tional writing

Don’t use a 90-cent

word when an equally

suitable 25-cent word

exists

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

“given an increase in remuneration” may be understood by the company controller but will only be considered pompous by Johannes. If the super- visor had written that Johannes should be “given a raise,” both would have understood him. Unnecessary use of big words, when smaller, more generally recognized and equally effective synonyms are available, clouds technical writing and destroys the smooth flow that such writing demands.

Removing “Fat” During the reading stage Dan should be critical of sentences and para- graphs that seem to contain too many words. He should check that he has not inserted words of low information content; that is, phrases and expressions that add little or no information. Their removal, or replace- ment by simpler, more descriptive words, can tighten up a sentence and add to its clarity. Low-information-content words and phrases are often hard to identify because the sentences in which they appear seem to be sat- isfactory. Consider this sentence:

For your information, we have tested your spectrum analyzer and are of the opin-

ion that it needs calibration.

The expressions “for your information” and “are of the opinion that” are words of low information content. The first can be deleted, and the second replaced by “consider,” so that the sentence now reads:

We have tested your spectrum analyzer and consider it needs calibration.

The same applies to this sentence:

If you require further information, please feel free to telephone Mr. Thompson at

489-9039.

The phrase “if you require,” although not wrong, could be replaced by the single word “for”; but “please feel free to” is archaic and should be elim- inated. The result:

For further information please telephone Mr. Thompson at 489-9039.

See Tables 12-2 and 12-3 in Chapter 12, which contain lists of low-infor- mation-content words and wordy expressions.

Inadvertent repetition of information can also contribute to excessive length. For example, Dan may write:

We tested the modem to check its compatibility with the server. After completing

the modem tests we transmitted messages at low, medium, and high baud rates.

The results of the transmission tests showed…

If he deletes the repeated words in sentence 2 (“After completing the modem tests”) and sentence 3 (“…of the transmission tests…”), the result is a much tighter paragraph.

We tested the modem to check its compatibility with the server, and then trans-

mitted messages at low, medium, and high baud rates. The results showed…

20 Chapter 2

Weed out unnecessary

expressions

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Checking for Accuracy Nothing annoys readers more than to discover that they have been given inaccurate information (particularly if they have been using the informa- tion before they discover the error). Readers of Dan’s report assume that he knows his facts and has checked that they have been correctly tran- scribed into the report. Discovering even a single technical error in his report can undermine Dan’s credibility in their minds.

There is no way to prevent some errors from occurring when copying quantities and details from one document to another. Therefore, Dan must carefully check that he copies all facts, figures, equations, quantities, and extracts from other documents correctly.

Checking for accuracy also means ensuring that grammar, punctua- tion, and spelling have not been overlooked. Dan must check spelling with care, because his familiarity with the subject may blind him to obvious errors. (How many of us have inadvertently written “their” when we intended to write “there”? And “too” when we meant “two”?)

Dan has to recognize that spell-check programs are not 100% reliable. He may use a word—particularly a technical word—that is not in the spell-checker’s memory, or he may type in a word inaccurately and inad- vertently form another word that the spell-checker recognizes. For exam- ple, if he typed in “departure” when he meant to type in “department,” the spell-checker would not recognize it as an error. (Neither would it flag “their” and “too” as errors.) A spell-check program can not comprehend the context of the words; it simply examines each word and compares it to its master list. If it finds a “match,” it takes no action; if it does not find a match, it highlights the word and sometimes also emits an audible warning.

Revising Your Own Words We recommend that Dan print out his report and read and revise it on paper rather than on his computer screen. Our experience, and also that of many report writers, is that you catch many more typographical errors that way. We suggest that Dan mark up a hard copy of his report and then, as a separate step, transfer the changes to the online document.

As he reads, Dan should continually ask himself five questions:

1. Can my readers understand me? Will the person I am writing for be able to read my report all the way through without getting lost? What about other readers who might also see my report? Will they understand it?

2. Is the focus right? Is my report reader-oriented? Are the important points clearly visible?

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 21

Maintain top-level

quality control

Be wary when using

spell-check programs

Proofread on hard copy

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Have I summarized the main points in an opening statement that the reader will see right away?

3. Is my information correct? Is it accurate? Is it complete? Is all of it necessary?

4. Is my language good? Is it clear, definite, and unambiguous? Are there any grammatical, punctuation, or spelling errors? Does every paragraph have a topic sentence (preferably at the start of the paragraph)? Have I used any big, “overblown” words where simpler words would do a better job? Are there any low-information-content words and phrases?

5. Have I kept my report as short as possible while still meeting my read- ers’ needs and covering the topic adequately?

By now Dan’s draft should be in good shape and any further reading and revising will be final polishing. The amount will depend on the impor- tance of the report. If his report is for limited or in-company distribution, a standard-quality job will normally suffice. But if the report is to be dis- tributed outside the company, or submitted to an important client, Dan will spend as much time as necessary to ensure that it conveys a good image of both him and his employer.

Dan Skinner will now be able to issue his report with confidence, knowing that he has fashioned a good product. The approach described here will not have made report writing a simple task for him, but it will have helped him through the difficult conceptual stages, and helped him to read and revise more efficiently. When he writes his next report, he will be less likely to put it off until it is so late that he has to do a rush job.

22 Chapter 2

Make yourself a check-

list, then use it!

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

A Technical Person’s Approach to Writing 23

Exercise 2.1

Describe why the “pyramid” method of writing will help you become a better presenter of information.

Exercise 2.2

Which do you feel is the better way for you to develop an outline for a report: the organized method or the “random” method? Explain why.

Exercise 2.3

(a) What are the seven stages advocated for planning a report? (b) Which is the most important stage? Explain why. (c) Must the stages be followed exactly in the sequence listed?

Exercise 2.4

If several people are likely to read a report, how would you identify which one is your primary reader?

Exercise 2.5

Is it better to write a report without stopping to “clean up” the con- struction along the way, or to write a page at a time and edit that page before going on to the next? Explain why.

Exercise 2.6

What two factors will help you write more confidently, and probably help you set the right tone?

Exercise 2.7

From the list of five main questions that you, as a writer, should ask yourself during the revision stage (see the boldface questions on pages 21–22), which do you think is the most important? Explain why.

A S S I G N M E N T S

Be comfortable with

your writing method

Keep referring back to

the reader

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Chapter 3

Letters, Memos, and Emails

When you write a personal letter to a friend or relative, you probably don’t worry whether your letter is too long or contains too much infor- mation. You assume your reader will be pleased to hear from you, so you launch into a general discourse, inserting comments and items of general news without concerning yourself very much about organization.

But when you write a business letter you have to be disciplined. Your readers are busy people who want only the details that concern them. Information they do not need irks them. For these people your letters must be focused, well planned, brief, and clear.

Using the Pyramid Anna King, technical editor at H. L. Winman and Associates, teaches the technical staff at the firm what she refers to as the Pyramid Method of Writing. She finds this technique valuable because it helps the staff visual- ize their documents. Figure 3-1 shows what the basic pyramid looks like. You can see that only so much information can fit into the top part of the pyramid and is followed by the supporting details and facts. The pyramid helps you focus your information so your readers will know right away why you are writing to them.

Identifying the Main Message If you write your letters pyramid-style, you will automatically focus the reader’s attention on your main message. Before you place your fingers on the keyboard, fix clearly in your mind why you are writing and what you most want your reader to know. Then focus on this information by pla- cing it right up front, where it will be seen immediately.

If you begin a letter with background information rather than the main point, your reader will wonder why you are writing until he or she has read well into the letter. Don McKelvey’s letter to Jim Connaught is a typical example of an unfocused letter.

How to Write Business

Letters That Get Results

www.bly.com/

Pages/documents/

File136.doc

Well-known copywriter

Robert W. Bly provides

valuable advice about

writing correspondence.

“Failure to get to the

point, technical jargon,

pompous language, mis-

reading the reader—

these are the poor sty-

listic habits that cause

others to ignore the let-

ters we send.”

Readers want to know

right away what you

most need to tell them

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Dear Mr. Connaught:

I refer to our purchase order No. 21438 dated April 26, 2004, for a Vancourt micro-

copier model 3000, which was installed on May 14. During tests following its installa-

tion your technician discovered that some components had been damaged in transit.

He ordered replacements and in a letter dated May 20 informed me that they would

be shipped to us on May 27 and that he would return here to install them shortly

thereafter.

It is now June 10, and I have neither received the parts nor heard from your techni-

cian. I would like to know when the replacement parts will be installed and when we

can expect to use the microcopier.

Sincerely,

Don McKelvey

Jim had to read more than 70 words before he discovered what Don wanted him to do. If Don had written pyramid-style, starting with a main message, Jim would have known immediately why he was reading the letter:

Dear Mr. Connaught:

We are still unable to use the Vancourt 3000 microcopier we purchased from you on

April 26, 2004. Please inform me when I can expect it to be in service.

And placing the main message up front would have helped Don write a shorter explanation that would have been simpler to follow:

The microcopier was ordered on P.O. 21438 and installed on May 14. During tests,

your technician discovered that some components had been damaged in transit. He

ordered replacements, then in a letter dated May 20 informed me that they would be

shipped to us on May 27, and that he would return here to install them. To date, I

have neither received the parts nor heard from your technician.

Sincerely,

Don McKelvey

Unfortunately, knowing you should open every letter with a main message is not enough. You also need to know how to find exactly the right words to put at the top of the pyramid. And that is where many tech- nical people have trouble.

Getting Started To overcome this block, try using another technique recommended by Anna King. She suggests that when you start a letter, first write these six words:

I want to tell you that…

Letters, Memos, and Emails 25

Readers don’t want to

plough through para-

graphs of background

information before they

encounter your main

message

This proven technique

will never fail you!

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

And then finish the sentence with what you most want to tell your reader. For example:

Dear Ms. Reynaud:

I want to tell you that…the environmental data you submitted to us on October 8 will

have to be substantiated if it is to be included with the Labrador study.

Then, when your sentence is complete, delete the first six words (the I want to tell you that… expression). What you have left will be a focused opening statement:

Dear Ms. Reynaud:

The environmental data you submitted to us on October 8 will have to be substan-

tiated if it is to be included with the Labrador study.

Often you can use an opening statement formed in this way just as it stands when you remove the six “hidden” words. At other times, how- ever, you may feel the opening statement seems a bit abrupt. If so, you can soften it by inserting a few additional words. For example, in the letter to Ms. Reynaud, you might want to add the expression “I regret that…”:

Dear Ms. Reynaud:

I regret that the environmental data you submitted to us on October 8 will have to be

substantiated if it is to be included with the Labrador study.

Figure 3-1 depicts this convenient way of starting a letter and concurrent- ly creating a main message. It also shows that in business letters the main message is more often referred to as the Summary Statement.

26 Chapter 3

I want to tell you that…

Summary Statement (Main Message)

The Full Development

Supporting Details

Figure 3-1 Creating a letter’s summary statement.

The writer’s pyramid

helps draw attention to

the most important

information

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Here are three more examples of properly formed Summary Statements:

Dear Colonel Watson:

We will complete the XRS modification on June 14, eight days earlier than scheduled.

Dear Ms. Mohammed:

Your excellent paper “Export Engineering” arrived just in time to be included in the

program for the Pacific Rim Conference.

Dear Mr. Voorman:

Seven defective castings were found in shipment No. 308.

(You can check that I want to tell you that… was used to form these three opening sentences by mentally inserting the six hidden words at the start of each sentence.)

Avoiding False Starts If you do not use the six hidden words to start a letter, you may inadver- tently open with an awkwardly constructed sentence that seems to be going nowhere. For example:

Dear Mr. Corvenne:

In answer to your enquiry of December 7 concerning erroneous read-outs you are

experiencing with your Mark 17 Analyzer, and our subsequent telephone conversation

of December 18, during which we tried to pinpoint the fault, we have conducted an

examination into your problem.

Anna King refers to a long, rambling opening like this as “spinning your wheels,” because such a sentence does not come to grips with the topic early enough. She has prepared a list of expressions (see Figure 3-2) that can easily cause you to write complicated, unfocused openings. In their place she recommends starting with the I want to tell you that… expres- sion, which will help you focus your reader’s attention on the main mes- sage. If the letter referring to the Mark 17 Analyzer had started this way, it would have been much more direct:

Dear Mr. Corvenne:

(I want to tell you that…) The problem with your Mark 17 Analyzer seems to be in

the extrapolator circuit. Following your enquiry of December 7 and your subsequent

description of erroneous read-outs, we examined… (etc.).

Planning the Letter Once you have identified and written the main message, your next step is to select, sort, and arrange the remaining information you want to convey

Letters, Memos, and Emails 27

This technique is similar

to the newspaper-style

of writing

A “dragged out” start

A direct start

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

to your reader. This information should amplify the message you have already presented in the Summary Statement and provide evidence of its validity. For example, when Paul Shumeier wrote the following Summary Statement, he realized he would be presenting his reader with costly news:

Dear Mr. Larsen:

Tests of the environmental monitoring station at Wickens Peak show that 60% of the

instruments need to be repaired and recalibrated at a cost of $7265.

He also realized that Mr. Larsen would expect the remainder of the letter to tell him why the repairs were necessary, exactly what needed to be done, and how Paul had derived the total cost. To provide this informa-

28 Chapter 3

When You Write A Letter…

Never start with a word that ends in “ing”:

Referring…

Replying…

Never start with a phrase that ends with the preposition “to”:

With reference to…

In answer to…

Pursuant to…

Due to…

Never start with a redundant expression:

I am writing…

For your information…

This is to inform you…

The purpose of this letter is…

We have received your letter…

Enclosed please find…

Attached herewith…

IN OTHER WORDS…

Don’t Spin Your Wheels!

Figure 3-2 Anna King’s suggestion to H. L. Winman engineers.

Try inserting I want to

tell you that… in front

of these openings: it

doesn’t work!

Strategies for Writing

Persuasive Letters

www.washburn.

edu/services/zzcwwctr/

persuasive_menu.html

This step-by-step guide

covers the purpose of

the persuasive letter,

prewriting questions for

the writer, writing

strategies, and revision

tips.

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

tion, Paul first had to identify which questions would be foremost in Mr. Larsen’s mind after he had read the Summary Statement. This meant ask- ing himself six questions, all based on Who?, Where?, When?, Why?, What? and How?:

Who (was involved)? Where (did this happen)? When (did this happen)? Why (are the repairs necessary)? What (repairs are needed)? How (were the costs calculated)?

To insert the answers to these questions into his letter, Paul now had to open up the lower part of the writer’s pyramid. This becomes the Full Development (or supporting details) shown in Figure 3-1.

Opening Up the Pyramid To help Paul—and you—organize a letter’s Full Development, the lower part of the pyramid is divided into three compartments known as the Background, Facts, and Outcome (see Figure 3-3).

The Background covers what has happened previously, who was involved, where and when the event occurred or the facts were gathered and, sometimes, for whom the work was done. Paul wrote:

Our electronics technicians examined the Wickens Peak Monitoring station on

May 16 and 17, in response to your May 10 request to Patrick Friesen.

Letters, Memos, and Emails 29

Six questions: six

answers. The answers

provide the facts, form

the body of a letter

A well-developed

Background section

leads into direct, uncom-

plicated details

The main message

The circumstances leading up to the situation described in the letter

All the details the reader needs to understand what the letter is about

The main result(s)

Summary Statement

Background

Facts

Outcome

Figure 3-3 Basic writing plan for an informative business letter, interoffice memo, or email.

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

The Facts amplify the main message. They provide specific details the reader needs to fully understand the situation or to be convinced of the need to take further action. Here, Paul wrote:

Most of the damage was caused by a tree northwest of the site that fell onto the

station during a storm on April 23 and damaged parts of the roof and north and

west walls. Instruments along these walls were impact-damaged and then soaked

by rain. Other instruments in the station were affected by moisture.

Major repairs and recalibration are required for the 16 instruments listed in

attachment 1, which describes the damage and estimated repair cost for each

instrument. This work will be done at our Shepperton repair depot for a total cost

of $4485. Minor repairs, which can be performed on site, are necessary for the 27

instruments listed in attachment 2. These on-site repairs will cost $2780.

These two paragraphs clearly answer the Why?, What?, and How? ques- tions. Note that, rather than clutter the middle of his letter with a long list, Paul placed the details in two attachments and summarized only the main points in the body of his letter. (The attachments are not shown here.)

The Outcome describes the result or any effect the facts have had or will have. If the letter is purely informative and the reader is not expected to take any action, the Outcome simply sums up the main result. Paul would have written:

I have obtained Ms. Korton’s approval to perform the repairs and a crew was sent in

on May 23. They should complete their work by May 31.

Sincerely,

Paul Shumeier

30 Chapter 3

Use attachments to sim-

plify a letter

FROM: Kevin Toshak <K.Toshak@macro.com>

TO: Tina Mactiere <T.Mactiere@macro.com>

SENT: Thursday, October 22, 2003

SUBJECT: Monitor Installation at WRC

I have installed a TL-680 monitor unit in room 215 at the Wollaston Research

Center, as instructed in your memorandum of October 15.

The unit was installed without major difficulties, although I had to modify the

equipment rack to accept it as illustrated in the attached sketch. Post-installation

tests showed that the unit was accepting signals from both the control center and

the remote site.

MACRO ENGINEERING INC. 600 Deepdale Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85007

Figure 3-4 An informative email.

Persuasive

Communications: Using

You-Attitude and Reader

Benefit

www.washburn.

edu/services/zzcwwctr/

you-attitude.txt

Receivers of communica-

tions are usually more

concerned about them-

selves than about the

writer or the company

that person represents.

This article describes

how to use the “you-

attitude” and show

reader benefit in your

persuasive communica-

tion.

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

But if the reader is expected to take some action, or approve some- body else taking action (often, the letter writer), then the Outcome becomes a request for action. Because Paul wanted an answer, he wrote:

If these repair costs are acceptable, please telephone, fax, or email your approval so I

can send in our repair crew.

Sincerely,

Paul Shumeier

These three parts can help you arrange the Full Development of any let- ter, memo, or email into a logical, coherent structure. Before starting, how- ever, you have to decide whether you are writing to inform or persuade.

Writing to Inform Normally, letters and memos that purely inform, with no response or action required from the reader, can be organized around the basic Summary Statement-Background-Facts-Outcome writing plan shown in Figure 3-3. Kevin Toshak’s email to Tina Mactiere, in Figure 3-4, falls into this category.

Another example is a confirmation letter, in which the writer confirms previously made arrangements. In the following Macro Engineering Inc. memorandum, general manager Wayne Robertson ensures that he and chief buyer Christine Lamont both understand the arrangements that will evolve from a decision made at a company meeting:

Christine:

Statement I am confirming that you will represent both Macro Engineering

Summary Inc. and H. L. Winman and Associates at the Materials Handling

conference in Houston on May 15 and 16, 2004, as agreed at

Background the Planning Meeting on March 23. At the conference you will

Facts • take part in a panel discussion on packaging electronic

equipment from 10:00 to 11:15 a.m. on May 15, and

• host a wine-and-cheese reception for delegates from 5:00

to 7:00 p.m. on May 16.

Janet Kominsky is making your travel and hotel reservations,

and the catering arrangements for the reception. Anna King will

provide brochures from Cleveland, and my secretary will make

up packages for you to distribute.

Outcome I’ll brief you on other details before you leave.

Wayne

Although the basic writing plan for letters has four compartments (see Figure 3-3), you do not have to write exactly four paragraphs. As both Wayne’s and Kevin’s memos show, you may combine two compartments

Letters, Memos, and Emails 31

Write an Action

Statement if you want

your reader to act or

react

An informative letter

tells the reader what

has been done or what

has to be done…

…it doesn’t expect the

reader to respond

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

into a single paragraph, or let one compartment be represented by several paragraphs. When you first use the Pyramid you’ll find yourself writing separate paragraphs for each compartment, but as you become more com- fortable with this method you’ll understand that keeping the compart- ments in the correct order is the most important concept.

Writing to Persuade In a persuasive letter you expect your reader either to respond to your let- ter or to take some form of action. Consequently, the writing plan’s Outcome compartment is renamed Action, as shown in Figure 3-5, to remind you to end a persuasive letter with an action statement. A request and a complaint are typical examples of persuasive letters, and so is the informal proposal described in Chapter 7.

Making a Request Many technical people claim that placing the message at the start of a let- ter is not a problem until they either have to ask for something or to give the reader bad news. They then tend to lead gently up to the request or unhappy information.

Bill Kostash is no exception. He is service manager for Mechanical Maintenance Systems Inc., and he has to write to customers to ask if they will accept a change in the preventive maintenance contracts his company has with them. He starts by writing to Ms. Bea Nguyen, the contracts administrator for Multiple Industries in St. Cloud, Minnesota:

32 Chapter 3

A persuasive letter sells

the reader to take some

form of action

The main action that needs to be taken, and the primary reason for it

Circumstances leading up to or events affecting the situation

A detailed description of what is being requested or needs to be done

A request for action or approval

Summary Statement

Background

Facts

Outcome/Action

Figure 3-5 Writing plan for a persuasive letter, memo, or email.

Except for the

Outcome/Action com-

partment, tell and sell

writing plans are similar

Many writers hesitate to

open with a request

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

June 18, 2003

Dear Ms. Nguyen:

I am writing with reference to our contract with you for the preventive maintenance

services we provide on your RotoMat extruders and shapers. Under the terms of the

current contract (No. RE208) dated January 2, 2003, we are required to perform

monthly inspection and maintenance “…on the 15th day of each month or, if the

15th falls on a weekend or holiday, on the first working day thereafter.”

(Bill is off to a bad start. Instead of opening with a Summary Statement he has inserted all the background details first, so Bea Nguyen does not yet know why he has written to her. He has also opened with one of the expressions Anna King lists as an awkward start in Figure 3-2. Let’s see how he continues.)

Our problem is that almost all of our clients ask that we perform their maintenance

service between the 5th and 25th of each month, to avoid their end-of-month peak

accounting periods. This in turn created difficulties for us, in that our service techni-

cians experience a peak workload for 20 days and then have virtually no work for 10

days.

(Bea Nguyen still does not know why he is writing.)

Consequently, to even out our workload, I am requesting your approval to shift our

inspection date from the 15th to the 29th of each month. If you agree to my request,

I will send our technician in to service your machine on June 29—a second time this

month—rather than create a six-week period between the June and July inspections.

Could you let me know by June 25 if this change of date is acceptable?

Sincerely,

William J. Kostash

(Now Bea knows why Bill has written to her—but she had to read a long way to find out. And she probably had to reread his letter to fully under- stand the details.)

If Bill had used the writing plan in Figure 3-5 to shape his letter, his request would have been much more effective. The revised letter is shown in Figure 3-6, which

contains his Summary Statement (he states his request and what the effect will be),

contains the Background (the contract details),

contains the Facts (it describes the problem), and

contains the Action statement, in which he mentions two actions: what he wants Bea to do (to call him) and what he will do (schedule a second visit).

Letters, Memos, and Emails 33

An unfocused, meander-

ing request letter

Writing with a plan cre-

ates a coherent request

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Registering a Complaint The approach is the same if you have to write a letter of complaint or ask for an adjustment. The third compartment is relabeled as shown in Figure 3-7.

34 Chapter 3

Mechanical Maintenance Systems Inc. 2120 Cordoba Avenue

St. Paul, Minnesota 55307

June 18, 2004

Ms. Bea Nguyen

Contracts Administrator

Multiple Industries Inc.—Manufacturing Division

18 Commodore Bay

St. Cloud, MN 54018

Dear Ms. Nguyen:

I am requesting your approval to change the date of our monthly preventive

maintenance visits to service your RotoMat extruders and shapers to the

29th of each month. This will help spread my technicians’ workload more

evenly and so provide you with better service.

Our contract with you is No. RE208 dated January 2, 2004, and it requires that

we perform a monthly inspection and maintenance on the 15th day of each

month. Unfortunately, almost all of our clients ask that we perform their

maintenance service between the 5th and the 25th. This creates a problem

for us in that our service technicians experience a peak workload for 20 days

and then have very little work for 10 days.

Could you let me know by June 25 if you can accept the change? Then I will

send a technician to your plant on June 29 for a second visit this month,

rather than create a six-week space between the June and July inspections.

Sincerely,

William J. Kostash

Service Manager

A focused, definite,

direct request

Figure 3-6 A request letter written pyramid-style.

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Letters, Memos, and Emails 35

The parts of the complaint letter shown in Figure 3-7 are identified in Suzanne’s letter in Figure 3-8 on page 36, with circled numbers. The cor- responding comments are listed here:

In the Summary, it is often better to generalize what action is need- ed and then later, in the Action compartment, state exactly what has to be done.

If there are only a few Background facts, you may combine them with either the Summary Statement or the Complaint Details rather than place them in a very short paragraph by themselves.

In the Complaint Details, describe in chronological order what happened so the reader will understand the reason for your com- plaint or request for adjustment.

The Action Statement must be strong and confident and specifically identify what action you want the reader to take, or in some cases, what action you will take.

Responding to a Complaint You may need to answer a complaint someone has written. It is easier when you agree with the complaint and can perform the requested action. This will be a much shorter response than if you don’t agree with the com- plaint, because you don’t have to go into as much detail about why you are agreeing. However, if you disagree with the complaint your response is more difficult to write and you have to be sure to provide a detailed description of why you cannot act as requested. Figure 3-9 shows the pyramid for responding both positively and negatively to complaints.

State the problem and what you want the reader to do about it

Identify the circumstances leading up to the event, quoting specific details of who, where, when, and sometimes why

Describe exactly what happened

Explain what action you want the reader to take or what action you will take

Background

Summary

Complaint Details

Action

Figure 3-7 Writing plan for a complaint letter.

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

36 Chapter 3

Figure 3-8 A complaint letter written pyramid-style.

RGI Video Productions 316 St. Mary’s Road Brighton, NY 14639

November 12, 2003

Mr. Bruyere

Sales Manager

Professional Image Business Equipment

Suite 100

1675 Mattingly Drive

Brighton, NY 14639

Dear Mr. Bruyere:

The Nabuchi 700 portable computer you recently sold me had a defective

lithium-ion battery that had to be replaced while I was in Europe.

Consequently I am requesting reimbursement of the expenses I incurred to

replace the battery.

I bought the computer and a Nabuchi 701PC international power converter

from your Willows Mall store on September 4, 2003. (See attached sales

invoice No. 14206A.)

The computer worked satisfactorily for the first six weeks, but during that

time I had no occasion to use it solely on battery power.

On October 25 I left for Europe, first giving the batteries an 18-hour charge

as recommended in the operating instructions. While using the computer in

flight, after only 35 minutes the low-battery lamp lit up and the screen

warned of imminent failure. I recharged the batteries the following day, in

Rheims, France, but achieved less than 25 minutes of operating time before

the batteries again became fully discharged.

As the Nabuchi line is neither sold nor serviced in France, I had to buy and

install a replacement lithium-ion battery (a Mercurio Z7S), which has since

worked fine. I have enclosed the defective battery, plus a copy of the sales

receipt for the replacement battery I purchased from Lestrange Limitée,

Rheims.

Please send me a check for $244.30, which at the current rate of exchange is

the US equivalent of the 1190 francs shown on the sales receipt.

Sincerely,

Suzanne Dumont, P.E.

enc 3

…offer the

details,…

…and end with a

firm Action

Statement

Set the scene

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Creating a Confident Image Readers react positively to letters, memos, and emails in which the writer conveys an image of a confident person who knows the subject well and has a firm idea of what he or she plans to do, or expects the reader to do. Such an image is conveyed by both the quality of the writing and the phys- ical appearance of the piece of correspondence.

Be Brief For technical business correspondence, brevity means writing short letters, short paragraphs, short sentences, and short words.

Short Letters A business reader will tend to react readily to a short letter, viewing its writer as an efficient provider of information. In contrast, the same reader may view a long letter as “heavy going” (even before reading it) and tend to put it aside to deal with it later. A short letter introduces its topic quickly, discusses it in sufficient depth, and then closes with a con- cluding statement, its length dictated solely by the amount of information that needs to be conveyed.

We know of a company in which the managing director has ruled that no letter or memo may exceed one page. This is an effective way to encourage staff to be brief, and it works well for many people. But for let- ter writers who have more to say than they can squeeze onto a single page, that limitation can prove inhibiting. For them, we suggest borrowing a

Letters, Memos, and Emails 37

Sorry: we cannot agree with your complaint–briefly say why

Background to the complaint

Why we cannot agree with your complaint (a detailed explanation)

What action (if any) you can take

Background

Summary

Reason (Details)

Action Statement

Responding Negatively

Yes: we agree. We will correct the problem

Background to the complaint

Why we are agreeing with your complaint (very brief)

What action we will take

Responding Positively

Figure 3-9 Writing plan for responding to a complaint.

The key word here is

“short”

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

technique from report writing. Instead of placing all their information in the letter, they should change the letter into a semiformal report and then summarize the highlights—particularly the purpose and the outcome— into a one-page letter placed at the front of the report (so that the report becomes an attachment to the letter, as depicted in Figure 3-10).

If you use this device, refer to the attachment in the body of the letter and insert a main conclusion drawn from it, as has been done here:

During the second week we measured sound levels at various locations in the pro-

duction area of the plant, at night, during the day, and on weekends. These read-

ings (see attachment) show that a maximum of 55 dB was recorded on weekdays,

and 49 dB on weekends. In both cases these peaks were recorded between 5 and

6 p.m.

Short Paragraphs Novelists can write long paragraphs because they assume they will have their readers’ attention, and their readers have the time and patience to make their way through leisurely descriptions. But in business and indus- try, readers are working against the clock and so want bite-size paragraphs of easy-to-digest information.

Let the first sentence of each paragraph introduce just one idea, then make sure that subsequent sentences in that paragraph develop the idea adequately and do not introduce any other ideas. In technical business writing the first sentence of each paragraph should be a “topic sentence,” so that the reader immediately knows your main idea. Consequently, a busy reader who skims your document by reading just the first sentence of

38 Chapter 3

Think of a paragraph as

a miniature pyramid

A short cover letter is

like an executive sum-

mary (see page 147)

Main Message (Summary Statement)

Details

AttachmentLetter

3 4

Figure 3-10 A short letter with attachments is an adaptation of the pyramid method of writing. An example can be seen in Figure 5-4 (page 108).

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

every paragraph will still gain a good understanding of the main points. Let the first sentence of each paragraph summarize the paragraph’s con- tents, and the remaining sentences support the first sentence by providing additional information:

We have tested your 15 Vancourt 801 CD-ROM drives and find that 11 require

repair and recalibration. Only minor repairs will be necessary for 6 of these drives,

which will be returned to you next week. Of the 5 remaining drives, 3 require

major repairs which will take approximately 20 days, and 2 are so badly damaged

that repairs will cost $180 each.

If an idea you are developing results in an overly long paragraph, try dividing the information into a short introductory paragraph and a series of subparagraphs, as has been done here:

My inspection of the monitoring station at Freedom Lake Narrows revealed three

areas requiring attention, two immediately and one within three months:

1. The water stage manometer is recording erratic readouts of water levels.

A replacement monitor needs to be flown in immediately so that the

existing unit can be returned to a repair depot for service.

2. The tubing to the bubble orifice is worn in several places and must be

replaced (90 feet of 1⁄2 inch tubing will be required). This work should be

done concurrently with the monitor replacement.

3. The shack’s asphalt roof is wearing and will need resurfacing before

freeze-up.

We are not suggesting that your letters should contain a series of small, evenly sized paragraphs. These would appear dull and stereotyped. Instead, paragraphs should vary from quite short to medium-long to give the reader variety. How you can adjust paragraph and sentence length to suit both reader and topic, and also to place emphasis correctly, is covered in Chapter 12.

Short Sentences If you write short, uncomplicated sentences, you help your readers quickly grasp and understand each thought. Sometimes expert literary writers can successfully build sentences that develop more than one thought, but such sentences are confusing and out of place in the business world. Compare these two examples of the same information:

Complicated There has been intermittent trouble with the vacuum pumps,

although the flow valves and meters seem to be recording nor-

mal output, and the 5 inch pipe to the storage tanks has twice

become clogged, causing backup in the system.

Clear There has been intermittent trouble with the vacuum pumps,

and twice the 5 inch pipe to the storage tank has become

clogged and caused backup in the system. The flow valves and

meters, however, seem to be recording normal output.

Letters, Memos, and Emails 39

Paragraphs that are

longer than eight or

nine printed lines are

too long

Convoluted sentences

create the impression

that their writer is

confused

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

The first example is confusing because it jumps back and forth between what the trouble is and what is working normally. The second example is clear because it uses two sentences to express the two different thoughts.

Short Words Some engineers and engineering technicians feel that the technical environment in which they work and the complex topics they have to write about, demand that they use long, complex words in their corre- spondence. Similarly, some people feel that long words build credibility and respect for their position; the opposite is true. They write “an error of considerable magnitude was perpetrated,” rather than simply “we made a big mistake.” In so doing, they make a reader’s job unnecessarily difficult.

Because the engineering and scientific worlds encompass many long and complex terms that have to be used in their original form, make your correspondence more readable by surrounding such technical terms with simple words. Be aware, too, that in today’s global society, many of your readers may read and write English as a second language. Long words that are not in the average person’s vocabulary may cause confusion and mis- understanding. Chapter 12 has more information about writing for an international audience.

Be Clear A clear letter conveys information simply and effectively, so that the reader readily understands its message. Writing clearly demands ingenuity and attention to detail. As a writer you must consider not only how you write your letters, but also how you present them.

Create a Good Visual Impression The appearance of a letter tells much about the writer and the company he or she represents. If a letter is sloppily arranged or contains strikeovers, vis- ible erasures, or spelling errors, then its readers imagine a careless individ- ual working in a disorganized office. But if readers are presented with a neat letter, placed in the middle of the page and printed by a quality printer, then they imagine a well-organized individual working for a for- ward-thinking company noted for the quality of its service. Most people prefer to deal with the latter company and will read its correspondence first.

Develop the Subject Carefully The key to effective subject development is to present the material logi- cally, progressing gradually from a clear, understood point to one that is more complex. This means developing and consolidating each idea so the

40 Chapter 3

Clarity depends on

appearance as well as

clarity of expression

Short words are

especially important for

readers whose first

language is not English

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

reader can fully understand it before presenting the next idea. The sections on paragraph unity and coherence in Chapter 12 (see pages 332 and 333) provide examples of coherent paragraphs. Using the pyramid technique will also help you structure your information in a logical sequence.

Be Definite People who think better with their fingers on a keyboard or a pen in their hand sometimes make decisions as they write, producing indecisive letters that are irritating to read. These writers seem to examine and discard points without really grappling with the problem. By the time they have finished a letter, they have decided what they want to say, but it has been at the reader’s expense. We call this a “brain dump.”

Decision making does not come easily to many people. Those of us who hesitate before making a decision, who evaluate its implications from all possible angles and weigh its pros and cons, may allow our indecisive- ness to creep into our writing. We hedge a little, explain too much, or try to say how or why we reached a decision before we tell our reader what the decision is. This is particularly true when we have to tell readers some- thing unfavorable or contrary to their expectations.

As before, the key is to use the pyramid:

1. Decide exactly what you want to say (i.e. develop your main message), and then

2. Place the main message right up front (use I want to tell you that… to get started).

If you also write primarily in the active voice, you will sound even more decisive. Active verbs are strong, passive verbs are weak. For example:

For hints on how to use the active voice, see “Emphasis” in Chapter 12 (pages 339 to 341).

Close on a Strong Note You may feel you should always end a letter with a polite closing remark, such as: I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience,

Letters, Memos, and Emails 41

Know clearly what you

want to say before you

start writing

Write directly from per-

son to person, and name

the “doer”

These passive expressions

it was our considered opinion

it is recommended that

an investigation was made

the outage was caused by a defective

transmitter

Should be replaced with

we considered

I recommend

we investigated

a defective transmitter caused the outage

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

or Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation. In contemporary business correspondence—and particularly in technical correspondence— such closing statements are not only outdated but also weaken your impact on the reader. Today, you should close with a strong, definite state- ment.

The Outcome part of the letter provides a natural, positive close, as illustrated by the final sentences in the letter to Ms. Nguyen (Figure 3-6). You should resist the temptation to add a polite but uninformative and ineffective closing remark. Simply sign off with “Regards” or “Sincerely.”

Adopting a Pleasant Tone There is no quick and easy method to make your letters sound sincere, nor is there a checklist to tell you when you have imparted the right tone. Both qualities are extensions of your own personality that cannot be taught. They can only be shaped and sharpened through self-knowledge and which of your attributes you most need to develop.

To achieve the right tone, your correspondence should be simple and dignified, but still friendly. Approach your readers on a person-to-person basis, following the five suggestions below.

Know Your Reader If you have not identified your reader properly, you may have difficulty setting the correct tone. You need to know your reader’s level of technical knowledge and whether he or she is familiar with the topic you are describing. Without this focus you may seem condescending to a knowl- edgeable reader if you explain too much and use overly simple words when the reader clearly expects to read technical terms. Conversely, you may overwhelm a reader who has only limited technical knowledge, if you confront him or her with heavy technical details.

Ideally, you should select just the right terminology to hold the read- er’s interest and perhaps offer a mild challenge. By letting readers feel they are grasping some of the complexities of a subject (often by using analo- gies within their range of knowledge), you can present technical informa- tion to nontechnical readers without confusing or upsetting them.

Sometimes you will know the person you are writing to, and then you will probably find it much easier to adopt a pleasant tone. Be care- ful, though, not to make your correspondence too chatty or informal. In business and technical writing you should consistently sound profes- sional. You can never tell when your letter may be passed on to some- one else!

42 Chapter 3

Reminder: Know who

you are writing to!

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Be Sincere At one time it was considered good manners not to permit one’s person- ality to creep into business correspondence. Today, business letters are much less formal and, as a result, much more effective.

Sincerity is the gift of making your readers feel that you are person- ally interested in them and their problems. You convey this by the words you use and the way you use them. A reader would be unlikely to believe you if you came straight out and said, “I am genuinely interested in your project.” The secret is to be so involved and interested in the subject that you automatically convey the ring of enthusiasm that would appear in your voice if you were talking about it.

Be Human Too many letters lack humanity. They are written from one company to another, without any indication that there is a human being at the sending end and another at the receiving end. The letters might just as well be sent from computer to computer.

Do not be afraid to use the personal pronouns, “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” “we,” and “they.” Let your reader believe you are personally involved by using “I” or “we,” and that you know he or she is there by using “you.” Contrary to what many of us were told in school, letters may be started in the first person. If you know the reader personally, or you have corresponded with each other before, or if your topic is informal, let a personal flavor appear in your letters by using “I” and the reader’s first name:

Dear Ben:

I read your report with interest and agree with all but one of your conclusions.

If you do not know your reader personally and are writing formally as a representative of your company, then use the first person plural and the person’s last name:

Dear Mr. Wicks:

We read your report with interest and agree with all but one of your conclusions.

Avoid Words That Antagonize In writing, you only have one chance to explain your point. If your reader interprets your words differently from the way you had intended, you don’t have the opportunity to rephrase them. You also don’t have the variety of body language, voice inflection, or facial expressions that you do in face-to-face communication.

Letters, Memos, and Emails 43

Care about both your

topic and your reader

Let your presence be

apparent

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

If you use words that imply that the reader is wrong, has not tried to understand, or has failed to make him- or herself understood, you immedi- ately place the reader on the defensive. For example, when field technician Des Tanski omitted sending motel receipts with his expense account, Andy Rittman (his supervisor) had to write to Des and ask for them. Andy wrote:

You have failed to include motel receipts with your expense account.

This antagonized Des, because the words you have failed seemed to imply that he is something of a failure! Andy should have written:

Please send motel receipts to support your expense account.

Other expressions that may annoy readers or put them on the defensive are listed in Table 3-1 below with a suggested way to make them more positive.

When a reader has to be corrected, the words you use should clear the air, not electrify it. Tell readers gently if they are wrong, and demonstrate why; reiterate your point of view in clear terms, to clarify any possibility of misunderstanding; or ask for further explanation of an ambiguous statement, refraining from pointing out that his or her writing is vague.

44 Chapter 3

Sentences containing Much more positive abrasive words sentences

1. Words that make a reader When completing your application you Your tax number needs to be included feel inadequate or guilty: neglected to include your tax number. on your application.

Clearly, you have not understood the Let me explain the implications in more implications. detail. We could not accept your bid because We could not accept your bid because you failed to submit a complete price proposal. it did not include a complete price proposal. You ought to know that staff working after It’s company policy that staff working after 11 p.m. have to be sent home by taxi. 11 p.m. be sent home by taxi. When rejecting the request you Before rejecting the request you needed to overlooked human rights legislation. consider human rights legislation.

2. Words that provoke and I am sure you will agree that our decision Please note that our decision is correct. so create resistance in a is correct. reader: We must insist that you return the form Please return the form by November 30.

by November 30. To ensure prompt payment we demand To ensure prompt payment please file your that you file your invoice within three invoice within three days of job completion. days of job completion. You must bring the application to room 117. Please bring the application to room 117. In your letter you claim that the In your letter you state that the food processor was incorrectly priced. food processor was incorrectly priced.

3. Words that imply the writer is We have to assume that you understand We assume that you understand the “talking down” to the reader: the problem. problem.

Undoubtedly you will be present at the hearings. We request that you attend the hearings. We simply do not understand how you Apparently you misinterpreted our misinterpreted our instructions. instructions. You must understand that we cannot reopen I regret we cannot reopen the file. the file. If you are applying for reassessment, then If you are applying for reassessment, I must request that you attend a preliminary then I request that you attend a hearing on October 5. preliminary hearing on October 5.

Be wary: you may

unknowingly upset or

antagonize your reader

Table 3-1 Expressions that may prove abrasive.

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

When your goal is to achieve some sort of action or response from the reader, using words that may antagonize will hinder communication. You can still be clear and direct without using these words, and you will find that you are more likely to get the result you expect.

Know When to Stop When a letter is short, you may feel it looks too bare and be tempted to add an extra sentence or two to give it greater weight. If you do, you may inad- vertently weaken the point you are trying to make. This is particularly true of short letters in which you have to apologize, to criticize, to say “thank you,” or to pay a compliment (i.e. to “pat the reader on the back”).

In all of these cases the key is to be brief: Know clearly what you want to say, say it, and then close the letter without repeating what you have already said. The following writer clearly did not know when to stop:

Dear Mr. Farjeon:

I want to say how very much we appreciated the kind help you provided in overcom-

ing a transducer problem we experienced last month. We have always received excel-

lent service from your organization in the past, so it was only natural that we should

turn to you again in our hour of need. The assistance you provided in helping us to

identify an improved transducer for phasing in our standby generator was overwhelm-

ing, and we would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to all concerned for their help.

Sincerely,

Paul Marchant

Paul’s letter would have been much more believable if he had simply said “thank you”:

Dear Mr. Farjeon:

Thank you for your prompt assistance last month in identifying an improved

transducer for phasing in our standby generator. Your help was very much appreciated.

Regards,

Paul Marchant

If a writer says too much when saying thank you or apologizing, the reader begins to doubt the writer’s sincerity. You cannot set a realistic tone if you overstate a sentiment or overwhelm your reader with the intensity of your feelings.

Using a Businesslike Format There are many opinions about what comprises the “correct” format for busi- ness correspondence. Most popular word-processing packages include tem- plates for writing business letters, memos, faxes, and proposals. Some are good and easy to use; others are less practicable. The examples illustrated here are those most frequently used by contemporary technical organizations.

Letters, Memos, and Emails 45

Simple words are much

more meaningful than

flowery expressions

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

Letter Styles There are two letter formats: the full block and the modified block (see Figures 3-11 and 3-12). Full block is more widely used and is the format Anna King has adopted for H. L. Winman and Associates’ correspondence (see Figure 5-5 on page 110 and Figure 6-5 on page 154). Anna is also aware that letter styles are continually changing. Some companies now write dates in European style (e.g. day-month-year: “27 January 2004”), omit all punctuation from names and addresses (e.g. “Ms. Jayne K Tooke”), and use interoffice memos and email for informal correspon- dence.

The following comments apply to both the full block format (Figure 3-11) and the modified block format (Figure 3-12):

The Post Office now requests one space between the city and the state, and two spaces between the the state and the zip code. The state is always printed as two capital letters (e.g. “NY” for New York) and the zip code is on the same line as the state.

Today’s trend toward informality encourages writers to use first names in the salutation of the full block format: “Dear Jack.” However, in the more traditional modified block format the last name is often retained in the salutation: “Dear Mr. Sleigh.”

Subject lines should be informative (not just “Production Plan” or “Spectrum Analyzer”); they may be preceded by Subject:, Ref:, or Re:. They should be set in boldface type and not underlined. In the modified block format the subject line is centered.

The differences between the two formats are:

In the full block format every line starts at the left margin. In the modified block format the first word of each paragraph is indented.

In the modified block format, the date is set off to the right if a file number or reference is used. If there is no file number, the date starts at the centerline.

In the modified block format, the signature block starts at the centreline. Notice that in this example, the writer has signed “for” his manager.

46 Chapter 3

Most business letters in

North America are writ-

ten full-block style

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Letters, Memos, and Emails 47

Xxxxxxxx Xxxx Xxxxxx

Figure 3-11 Full block letter format.

May 22, 2004

File: 270/1

Paul J. Griffin, President

Western Engines Company

5721 Cordova Street

Cleveland, OH 44104

Dear Paul:

Repairs to Analyzer HL 340, S/N 4876

We have found xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sincerely,

David R. Halliwell

Calibration Engineering

enc

Company

letterhead

File

reference

(if used)

Salutation

Subject line

(if used), set

in boldface

type

“enc” means

a document is

enclosed with

the letter

Full block conveys a

clean, purposeful, busi-

nesslike image

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

48 Chapter 3

File: 43-M-10 November 27, 2004

Janet M Sleigh, Production Manager

H. D. Hart Inc.

27 Westdale Drive

Cleveland, OH 44104

Dear Ms. Sleigh:

Production Campaign for 2005

The targets predicted xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Regards,

Lynda Westholme

Sales Manager

Figure 3-12 Modified block letter format.

XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX

Company

letterhead

File

reference

(if used)

Salutation

Subject

line

(if used)

Letter

writer’s

signature

Modified block conveys

a more relaxed,

approachable image

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Letters, Memos, and Emails 49

To: A. Rittman From: R. Davis

Date: December 3, 2004 Subject: Early Mailing of Paychecks for

Field Personnel

I need to know who you will have on field assignments during the week

before Christmas so that I can mail their paychecks early. Please provide

me with a list of names, plus their anticipated mailing addresses, by

December 8.

Checks will be mailed on Tuesday, December 14. I suggest you inform your

field staff of the proposed early mailing.

H. L. WINMAN AND ASSOCIATES

Figure 3-13 Interoffice memorandum.

INTER-OFFICE MEMORANDUM

Interoffice Memo The memo is an internal document normally written on a prepared form similar to that shown in Figure 3-13. Formats vary according to the pref- erence of individual companies, although the basic information at the head of the form is generally similar. Examples of memos appear through- out Chapters 3, 4, and 5. The following comments refer to the memo in Figure 3-13.

The informality of an interoffice memorandum means titles of individuals (such as Office Manager and Senior Project Engineer) may be omitted.

No salutation or identification is necessary. The writer can jump straight into the subject.

Paragraphs and sentences are developed properly. The informality of the memo is not an invitation to omit words so that sentences seem like extracts from telegrams.

The subject line should offer the reader some information; a sub- ject entry such as “Paychecks” would be insufficient.

The simplest of report-

ing mediums, the memo

is slowly being replaced

by email

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

The writer’s initials are sufficient to finish the memorandum (although some organizations repeat the name in type beneath the initials). Some people prefer to write their initials beside their name on the “From” line, instead of signing at the foot of the memo.

Fax Cover Sheet Any document sent by facsimile machine is normally preceded by a single- page fax cover sheet that identifies both addressee and sender, and their contact information (see Figure 3-14). The cover sheet usually has a space for the sender to write a short explanatory note. A sender who has only a short message to send may write the message directly onto the fax cover sheet and then transmit just the single page.

50 Chapter 3

A fax cover sheet may

carry a message in addi-

tion to being a transmit-

tal document

John:

Our quotation for videotaping, editing, and dubbing onto vhs 1/2-in. video-

tape follows, as requested in your fax of September 4.

Trish

FAX To: John Reeman

Microprocessor Center Inc.

Fax No: 416-338-2191

From Trish Kaufman

Date: Sept 18, 2004

No. Pages (incl this sheet): 3

RGI Video Productions Division of

The Roning Group Inc. 316 St Mary’s Road

Batavia, NY 14020

USA

Fax: 716-343-7294

Tel: 716-343-6049

email: rgi@mailhub.mts.net

If there are problems with this transmission, call 716-343-6049

Figure 3-14 A cover sheet for facsimile (fax) transmissions.

ISBN :0-536-45204-0

Letters, Memos, and Emails 51

Writing Electronic Mail Electronic mail (email) has become one of the fastest and most widely used means of communication. The criterion for writing email remains the same as for all other forms of written communication: keep the message brief but clear. Never allow an overzealous desire for brevity to cloud your message, because it can cost more to question an obscure communication than it would have cost to write a slightly longer but clearer message in the first place. You want to avoid having your reader make a telephone call or email you to find out exactly what you were trying to say.

When Mike Toller in Columbus, Ohio, opened up a shipment of parts from Carlson Distributors, he found the order was incomplete and con- tained some items he had not ordered. He made a note of the deficiencies, sat at his keyboard, and typed in this message:

The fast new way to

communicate…

A Beginner’s Guide to

Effective Email

www.webfoot.com/

advice/email.top.html

This useful guide

includes an introduction

to email and a discus-

sion about why it differs

from ordinary cor-

respondence.

…needs just as much

care and attention

To: Carlson Distributors, St. Louis:

Your inv 216875 Oct 19, our P.O. W1634. Short-shipped

10 toolsets MKV, 4 801 sockets plus 2 doz mod 280A lathe bits unordered.

Advise.

M. Toller,

Crown Manufacturing, Columbus

In St. Louis, Chantal Goulet puzzled over the message on her com- puter screen, and then typed this brief reply:

To: M. Toller, Crown Manufacturing, Columbus

From: C. Goulet, Carlson Distributors, St. Louis

The message you sent regarding our invoice 216875 and your P.O. W1634

was difficult to understand. Please explain your concerns.

Chantal Goulet

Mike was surprised: he thought his message was crystal clear. So he again sat at his keyboard and wrote:

IS BN

:0 -5

36 -4

52 04

-0

If Mike had been more explicit when he wrote his original message, both he and Chantal would have saved time.

Email Netiquette The word “Netiquette” means “the etiquette of writing electronic mail on the net (the Internet).” There are no established guidelines for Netiquette, but we can give you some suggestions that will help you be an efficient email communicator.

First, email does not give you a license to

● write snippets of disconnected information, ● write incorrectly constructed sentences, ● forget about using proper punctuation, ● ignore misspelled words, or ● be abrupt or impolite.

Neither, however, is it a forum for telling long stories, anecdotes, or jokes.

Adopt the Right Tone Too often, we hear people say “It’s only email. It’s supposed to be casual and quick.” That’s true. With email you can be less formal in tone but you still need to be professional. You still need to address the recipient and you still need to “sign” your name to the message. Even if you have a signature file attached to every message you should still type your name at the end. This helps humanize this very technical mode of communication.

52 Chapter 3

To: Chantal Goulet, Carlson Distributors, St. Louis

From: Mike Toller, Crown Manufacturing, Columbus

My message was quite clear: You short-shipped us 10 toolsets type MKV

and 4 No. 801 sockets. You also shipped 2 dozen model 280A lathe bits we

did not order. Please ship the missing items and advise how you want the

bits returned.

Mike Toller

What Mike Toller should

have written the first

time

Chantal replied in six words:

Mike:

How is the play Antigone related to “hegemonic” or “anti hegemonic”?

December 4, 2022/in Uncategorized /by SK

CLASSICAL GREEK TRAGEDY

Sophocles

ANTIGONE

SOPHOCLES (496?-406 B.C.) Antigone An English Version by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald Person Represented

ANTIGONE ISMENE EURYDICE CREON HAIMON TEIRESIAS A SENTRY A MESSENGER CHORUS

SCENE: Before the Palace of Creon, King of Thebes. A central double door, and two lateral doors. A platform extends the length of the façade, and from this platform three steps lead down into the “orchestra”, or chorus-ground. TIME: Dawn of the day after the repulse of the Argive army from the assault on Thebes.

PROLOGUE

[ANTIGONE and ISMENE enter from the central door of the Palace.]

ANTIGONE: Ismene, dear sister, You would think that we had already suffered enough For the curse on Oedipus:1 I cannot imagine any grief That you and I have not gone through. And now –– 5 Have they told you of the new decree of our King Creon?

ISMENE:

I have heard nothing: I know That two sisters lost two brothers, a double death In a single hour; and I know that the Argive army Fled in the night; but beyond this, nothing. 10

ANTIGONE: I thought so. And that is why I wanted you To come out here with me. There is something we must do.

1 Oedipus, once King of Thebes, was the father of Antigone and Ismene, and of their brothers Polyneices and Eteocles. Oedipus unwittingly killed his father, Laios, and married his own mother, Iocaste. When he learned what he had done, he blinded himself and left Thebes. Eteocles and Polyneices quarreled, Polyneices was driven out but returned to assault Thebes. In the battle each brother killed the other; Creon became king and ordered that Polyneices be left to rot unburied on the battlefield as a traitor. [Editors’ note]

ISMENE: Why do you speak so strangely?

ANTIGONE:

Listen, Ismenê: Creon buried our brother Eteoclês 15 With military honors, gave him a soldier’s funeral, And it was right that he should; but Polyneicês, They fought as bravely and died as miserably,– They say that Creon has sworn No one shall burry him, no one mourn for him, 20 But this body must lie in the fields, a sweet treasure For carrion birds to find as they search for food. That is what they say, and our good Creon is coming here To announce it publicly; and the penalty –– Stoning to death I the public squarel There it is, 25 And now you can prove what you are: A true sister, or a traitor to your family.

ISMENE:

Antigone, you are mad! What could I possibly do? ANTIGONE:

You must decide whether you will help me or not. ISMENE:

I do not understand you. Help you in what? 30

ANTIGONE: Ismene, I am going to bury him. Will you come?

ISMENE:

Bury him! You have just said the new law forbids it. ANTIGONE:

He is my brother. And he is your brother, too.

ISMENE: But think of the danger! Think what Creon will do!

ANTIGONE:

Creon is not enough to stand in my way. 15 ISMENE:

Ah sister! Oedipus died, everyone hating him

For what his own search brought to light, his eyes Ripped out by his own hand; and Iocaste died, His mother and wife at once: she twisted the cords 40 That strangled her life; and our two brothers died, Each killed by the other’s sword. And we are left: But oh, Antigone, Think how much more terrible than these Our own death would be if we should go against Creon 45 And do what he has forbidden! We are only women, We cannot fight with men, Antigone! The law is strong, we must give in to the law In this thing, and in worse. I beg the Dead To forgive me, but I am helpless: I must yield 50 To those in authority. And I think it is dangerous business To be always meddling.

ANTIGONE:

If that is what you think, I should not want you, even if you asked to come. You have made your choice, you can be what you want to be. But I will bury him; and if I must die, 55 I say that this crime is holy: I shall lie down With him in death, and I shall be as dear To him as he to me.

It is the dead Not the living, who make the longest demands: We die for ever…

You may do as you like Since apparently the laws of the god mean nothing to you.

ISMENE:

They mean a great deal to me, but I have no strength To break laws that were made for the public good.

ANTIGONE:

That must be your excuse, I suppose. But as for me, I will bury the brother I love.

ISMENE:

Antigone, I am so afraid for you!

ANTIGONE:

You need not be: You have yourself to consider, after all.

ISMENE: But no one must hear of this, you must tell no one! I will keep it a secret, I promise!

ANTIGONE:

Oh tell it! Tell everyone Think how they’ll hate you when it all comes out 70 If they learn that you knew about it all the time!

ISMENE:

So fiery! You should be cold with fear. ANTIGONE:

Perhaps. But I am doing only what I must. ISMENE:

But can you do it? I say that you cannot. ANTIGONE

Very well: when my strength gives out, I shall do no more. 75

ISMENE: Impossible things should not be tried at all.

ANTIGONE:

Go away, Ismene: I shall be hating you soon, and the dead will too, For your words are hateful. Leave me my foolish plan: I am not afraid of the danger; if it means death, 80 It will not be the worst of deaths ––death without honor.

ISMENE:

Go then, if you feel that you must. You are unwise, But a loyal friend indeed to those who love you. [Exit into the Palace. ANTIGONE goes off, L. Enter the CHORUS.]

PARODOS

CHORUS: Now the long blade of the sun, lying [Strophe 1] 85 Level east to west, touches with glory Thebes of the Seven Gates. Open, unlidded Eye of golden day! O marching light Across the eddy and rush of Dirce’s stream, 2 Striking the white shields of the enemy 90 Thrown headlong backward from the blaze of morning!

2 Dirce: a stream west of Thebes. [Editor’s note]

CHORAGOS: 3 Polyneices their commander Roused them with windy phrases, He the wild eagle screaming Insults above our land, 95 His wings their shields of snow, His crest their marshaled helms.

CHORUS: [Antistrophe 1]

Against our seven gates in a yawning ring The famished spears came onward in the night; But before his jaws were sated with our blood, 100 Or pine fire took the garland of our towers, He was thrown back; and as he turned, great Thebes–– No tender victim for his noisy power–– Rose like a dragon behind him, shouting war.

CHORAGOS:

For God hates utterly 105 The bray of bragging tongues; And when he beheld their smiling, Their swagger of golden helms, The frown of his thunder blasted Their first man from our walls 110

CHORUS: [Strophe 2]

We heard his shout of triumph high in the air Turn to a scream; far out in a flaming are He fell with his windy torch, and the earth struck him. And others storming in fury no less than his Found shock of death in the dusty joy of battle 115

CHORAGOS:

Seven captains at seven gates Yielded their clanging arms to the god That bends the battle-line and breaks it. These two only, brothers in blood, Face to face in matchless rage, 120 Mirroring each the other’s death, Clashed in long combat.

CHORUS: [Antistrophe 2]

But now in the beautiful morning of victory Let Thebes of the many chariots sing for joy! With hearts for dancing we’ll take leave of war: 125 Our temples shall be sweet with hymns of praise,

3 Leader of the Chorus. [Editors’ note]

And the long night shall echo with our chorus. SCENE I

CHORAGUS:

But now at last our new King is coming: Creon of Thebes, Menoikeus’ son. In this auspicious dawn of his reign 130 What are the new complexities That shifting Fate has woven for him? What is his counsel? Why has he summoned The old men to hear him? [Enter CREON from the Palace, C. He addresses the CHORUS from the top step.]

CREON:

Gentlemen: I have the honor to inform you that our Ship of State, which recent storms have threatened to destroy, has come safely to harbor at last, guided by the merciful wisdom of Heaven. I have summoned you here this morning because I know that I can depend upon you: your devotion to King Laios was absolute; you never hesitated in your duty to our late ruler Oedipus; and when Oedipus died, your loyalty was transferred to his children. Unfortunately, as you know, his two sons, the princes Eteocles and Polyneices, have killed each other in battle, and I, as the next in blood, have succeeded to the full power of the throne.

I am aware, of course, that no Ruler can expect complete loyalty from his subjects until he has been tested in office. Nevertheless, I say to you at the very outset that I have nothing but contempt for the kind of Governor who is afraid, for whatever reason, to follow the course that he knows is best for the State; and as for the man who sets private friendship above the public welfare, ––I have no use for him, either. I call God to witness that if I saw my country headed for ruin, I should not be afraid to speak out plainly; and I need hardly remind you that I would never have any dealings with an enemy of the people. No one values friendship more highly than I; but we must remember that friends made at the risk of wrecking our Ship are not real friends at all.

These are my principles, at any rate, and that is why I have made the following decision concerning the sons of Oedipus: Eteocles, who died as a man should die, fighting for his country, is to be buried with full military honors, with all the ceremony that is usual when the greatest heroes die; but his brother Polyneices, who broke his exile to come back with fire and sword against his native city and the shrines of his fathers’ gods, whose one idea was to spill the blood of his blood and sell his own people into slavery–– Polyneices, I say, is to have no burial: no man is to touch him or say the least prayer for

135

140

145

150

155

160

165

170

him; he shall lie on the plain, unburied; and the birds and the scavenging dogs can do with him whatever they like.

This is my command, and you can see the wisdom behind it. As long as I am King, no traitor is going to be honored with the loyal man. But whoever shows by word and deed that he is on the side of the State,––he shall have my respect while he is living and my reverence when he is dead.

175

CHORAGOS:

If that is your will, Creon son of Menoikeus, You have the right to enforce it: we are yours. 180

CREON:

That is my will. Take care that you do your part. CHORAGOS:

We are old men: let the younger ones carry it out. CREON:

I do not mean that: the sentries have been appointed. CHORAGOS:

Then what is t that you would have us do? CREON:

You will give no support to whoever breaks this law. 185 CHORAGOS:

Only a crazy man is in love with death! CREON:

And death it is; yet money talks, and the wisest Have sometimes been known to count a few coins too many. [Enter SENTRY from L.]

SENTRY:

I’ll not say that I’m out of breath from running, King, because every time I stopped to think about what I have to tell you, I felt like going back. And all the time a voice kept saying, “You fool, don’t you know you’re walking straight into trouble?”; and then another voice: “Yes, but if you let somebody else get the news to Creon first, it will be even worse than that for you!” But good sense won out, at least I hope it was good sense, and here I am with a story that makes no sense at all; but I’ll tell it anyhow, because, as they say, what’s going to happen’s going to happen, and––

190

195

CREON: Come to the point. What have you to say?

SENTRY:

I did not it. I did not see who did it. You must not punish me for what someone else has done.

CREON:

A comprehensive defense! More effective, perhaps, If I knew its purpose. Come: what is it?

SENTRY:

A dreadful thing… I don’t know how to put it–– CREON:

Out with it! SENTRY:

Well, then; The dead man–––

Polyneices–– [Pause. The SENTRY is overcome, fumbles for words. CREON waits impassively.]

out there–– someone, –– 205

new dust on the slimy flesh! [Pause. No sign from CREON.] Someone has given it burial that way, and Gone … [Long pause. CREON finally speaks with deadly control.]

CREON:

And the man who dared do this? SENTRY:

I swear I 210 Do not know! You must believe me!

Listen: The ground was dry, not a sign of digging, no, Not a wheel track in the dust, no trace of anyone. It was when they relieved us this morning: and one of them, The corporal, pointed to it. There it was, 215 The strangest–– Look: The body, just mounded over with light dust: you see? Not buried really, but as if they’d covered it

Just enough for the ghost’s peace. And no sign Of dogs or any wild animal that had been there. 220 And then what a scene there was! Every man of us Accusing the other: we all proved the other man did it, We all had proof that we could not have done it. We were ready to take hot iron in our hands, Walk through fire, swear by all the gods, It was not I! 225 I do not know who it was, but it was not I! [CREON’s rage has been mounting steadily, but the SENTRY is too intent upon his story to notice it.] And then, when this came to nothing, someone said A thing that silenced us and made us stare Down at the ground: you had to be told the news, And one of us had to do it! We threw the dice, 230 And the bad luck fell to me. So here I am, No happier to be here than you are to have me: Nobody likes the man who brings bad news.

CHORAGOS:

I have been wondering, King: can it be that the gods have done this? 235 CREON: [Furiously.]

Stop! Must you doddering wrecks Go out of your heads entirely? “The gods!” Intolerable! The gods favor this corpse? Why? How had he served them? 240 Tried to loot their temples, burn their images, Yes, and the whole State, and its laws with it! Is it your senile opinion that the gods love to honor bad men? A pious thought! ––

No, from the every beginning There have been those who have whispered together, 245 Stiff-necked anarchists, putting their heads together, Scheming against me in alleys. These are the men, And they have bribed my own guard to do this thing. Money! [Sententiously.] There’s nothing in the world so demoralizing as money. 250 Find that man, bring him here to me, or your death Will be the least of your problems: I’ll string you up Alive, and there will be certain ways to make you Discover your employer before you die; And the process may teach you e lesson you seem to have missed 260 The dearest profit is sometimes all too dear:

That depends on the source. Do you understand me? A fortune won is often misfortune.

SENTRY:

King, may I speak? CREON:

Your very voice distresses me. SENTRY:

Are you sure that it is my voice, and not your conscience? 265 CREON:

By God, he wants to analyze me now! SENTRY:

It is not what I say, but what has been done, that hurts you. CREON:

You talk too much. SENTRY:

Maybe; but I’ve done nothing. CREON:

Sold your soul for some silver: that’s all you’ve done. SENTRY:

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong! 270 CREON:

Your figures of speech May entertain you now; but unless you bring me the man, You will get little profit from them in the end. [Enter CREON into the Palace.]

SENTRY:

“Bring me the man” ––! I’d like nothing better than bringing him the man! 275 But bring him or not, you have seen the last of me here. At any rate, I am safe! [Exit SENTRY.]

ODE I CHORUS: [Strophe 1]

Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none More wonderful than man; the stormgray sea Yields to his prows, the huge crests bear him high; 280

Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven With shining furrows where his plows have gone Year after year, the timeless labor of stallions. [Antistrope 1] The lightboned birds and beasts that cling to cover, 285 The lithe fish lighting their reaches of dim water, All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind; The lion on the hill, the wild horse windy-maned, Resign to him; and his blunt yoke has broken The sultry shoulders of the mountain bull. [Strophe 2] Words also, ant thought as rapid as air, 290 He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his, And his the skill that deflect the arrows of snow, The spears of winter rain: from every wind He has made himself secure––from all but one: In the late wind of death he cannot stand. [Antistrophe 2] O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure! 295 O fate of man, working both good and evil! When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands! When the laws are broken, what of his city then? Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth, Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts. 330 SCENE II [Re-enter SENTRY leading ANTIGONE.]

CHORAGOS:

What does this mean? Surely this captive woman Is the Princess, Antigone. Why should she be taken?

SENTRY:

Here is the one who did it! We caught her In the very act of burying him. ––Where is Creon?

CHORAGOS:

Just coming from the house. [Enter CREON, C.]

CREON:

What has happened? 305 Why have you come back so soon?

SENTRY: O King,

A man should never be too sure of anything: I would have sworn That you’d not see me here again: your anger Frightened me so, and the things you threatened me with; 310 But how could I tell then That I’d be able to solve the case so soon? No dice-throwing this time: I was only too glad to come! Here is this woman. She is the guilty one: We found her trying to bury him. 315 Take her, then; question her; judge her as you will. I am through with the whole thing now, and glad of it.

CREON:

But this is Antigone! Why have you brought her here? SENTRY:

She was burying him, I tell you! CREON: [Severely.]

Is this the truth? SENTRY:

I saw her with my own eyes. Can I say more? 320 CREON:

The details: come, tell me quickly! SENTRY:

It was like this: After those terrible threats of yours King. We went back and brushed the dust away from the body. The flesh was soft by now, and stinking, 325 So we sat on a hill to windward and kept guard. No napping happened until the white round sun Whirled in the center of the round sky over us: Then, suddenly, A storm of dust roared up from the earth, and the sky 330 Went out, the plain vanished with all its trees In the stinging dark. We closed our eyes and endured it. The whirlwind lasted a long time, but it passed; And then we looked, and there was Antigone! I have seen 335 A mother bird come back to a stripped nest, heard

Her crying bitterly a broken note or two For the young ones stolen. Just so, when this girl Found the bare corpse, and all her love’s work wasted, She wept, and cried on heaven to damn the hands 340 That had done this thing And then she brought more dust And sprinkled wine three times for her brother’s ghost. We ran and took her at once. She was not afraid, Not even when we charged her with what she had done. She denied nothing. And this was a comfort to me, 345 And some uneasiness: for it is a good thing To escape from death, but it is no great pleasure To bring death to a friend. Yet I always say There is nothing so comfortable as your own safe skin!

CREON: {Slowly, dangerously.]

And you, Antigone, 350 You with your head hanging––do you confess this thing?

ANTIGONE:

I do. I deny nothing. CREON: [To SENTRY:]

You may go. {Exit SENTRY. To ANTIGONE:] Tell me, tell me briefly: Had you heard my proclamation touching this matter?

ANTIGONE:

It was public. Could I help hearing it? 355 CREON:

And yet you dared defy the law. ANTIGONE:

I dared. It was not God’s proclamation. That final Justice That rules the world below makes no such laws. Your edict, King, was strong, But all your strength is weakness itself against 360 The immortal unrecorded laws of God. They are not merely now: they were, and shall be, Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.

I knew I must die, even without your decree: I am only mortal. And if I must die 365 Now, before it is my time to die, Surely this is no hardship: can anyone Living, as I live, with evil all about me, Think Death less than a friend? This death of mine Is of no importance; but if I had left my brother 370 Lying in death unburied, I should have suffered. Now I do not. You smile at me. Ah Creon, Think me a fool, if you like; but it may well be That a fool convicts me of folly.

CHORAGOS:

Like father, like daughter: both headstrong, deaf to reason! 375 She has never learned to yield.

She has much to learn. The inflexible heart breaks first, the toughest iron Cracks first, and the wildest horses bend their necks At the pull of the smallest curb. Pride? In a slave? This girl is guilty of a double insolence, 380 Breaking the given laws and boasting of it. Who is the man here, She or I, if this crime goes unpunished? Sister’s child, or more than sister’s child, Or closer yet in blood––she and her sister 385 Win bitter death for this! [To servants:]

Go, some of you, Arrest Ismene. I accuse her equally. Bring her: you will find her sniffling in the house there. Her mind’s a traitor: crimes kept in the dark 390 Cry for light, and the guardian brain shudders: But now much worse than this Is brazen boasting of barefaced anarchy!

ANTIGONE:

Creon, what more do you want than my death? CREON: Nothing.

That gives me everything. ANTIGONE:

Then I beg you: kill me.

This talking is a great weariness: your words 395 Are distasteful to me, and I am sure that mine Seem so to you. And yet they should not seem so: I should have praise and honor for what I have done. All these men here would praise me Were their lips not frozen shut with fear of you. 400 [Bitterly.] Ah the good fortune of kings, Licensed to say and do whatever they please!

CREON:

You are alone here in that opinion. ANTIGONE:

No, they are with me. But they keep their tongues in leash. CREON:

Maybe. But you are guilty, and they are not. 405

ANTIGONE: There is no guilt in reverence for the dead.

CREON:

But Eteocles––was he not your brother too? ANTIGONE:

My brother too. CREON:

And you insult his memory?

ANTIGONE: [Softly.] The dead man would not say that I insult it.

CREON:

He would: for you honor a traitor as much as him. 410

ANTIGONE: His own brother, traitor or not, and equal in blood.

CREON:

He made war on his country. Eteocles defended it. ANTIGONE:

Nevertheless, there are honors due all the dead. CREON:

But not the same for the wicked as for the just. ANTIGONE:

Ah Creon, Creon, 415 Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked?

CREON:

An enemy is an enemy, even dead. ANTIGONE:

It is may nature to join in love, not hate. CREON: {Finally losing patience.]

Go join them, then; if you must have your love, Find it in hell! 420

CHORAGOS:

But see, Ismene comes: [Enter ISMENE, guarded.] Those tears are sisterly, the cloud That shadows her eyes rains down gentle sorrow.

CREON:

You too, Ismene, Snake in my ordered house, sucking my blood 425 Stealthily––and all the time I never knew That these two sisters were aiming at my throne! Ismene, Do you confess your share in this crime, or deny it? Answer me.

ISMENE:

Yes, if she will let me say so. I am guilty. 430

ANTIGONE: [Coldly.] No, Ismene. You have no right to say so. You would not help me, and I will not have you help me.

ISMENE:

But now I know what you meant; and I am here To join you, to take my share of punishment.

ANTIGONE:

The dead man and the gods who rule the dead 435 Know whose act this was. Words are not friends.

ISMENE: Do you refuse me, Antigone? I want to die with you: I too have a duty that I must discharge to the dead.

ANTIGONE:

You shall not lessen my death by sharing it. ISMENE:

What do I care for life when you are dead? 440 ANTIGONE:

Ask Creon. You’re always hanging on his opinions. ISMENE:

You are laughing at me. Why, Antigone? ANTIGONE:

It’s a joyless laughter, Ismene. ISMENE:

But can I do nothing?

ANTIGONE: Yes. Save yourself. I shall not envy you. There are those who will praise you; I shall have honor, too. 445

ISMENE:

But we are equally guilty! ANTIGONE:

No more, Ismene. You are alive, but I belong to Death.

CREON: {To the CHORUS:]

Gentlemen, I beg you to observe these girls: One has just now lost her mind; the other, It seem, has never had a mind at all. 450

ISMENE: Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver, King.

CREON:

Yours certainly did, when you assumed guild with the guilty! ISMENE:

But how could I go on living without her?

CREON: You are. She is already dead.

ISMENE:

But your own son’s bride!

CREON: There are places enough for him to push his plow. 455 I want no wicked women for my sons!

ISMENE:

O dearest Haimon, how your father wrong you! CREON:

I’ve had enough of your childish talk of marriage! CHORAGOS:

Do you really intend to steal this girl from your son? CREON:

No; Death will do that for me. CHORAGOS:

Then she must die? 460 CREON: [Ironically.]

You dazzle me. ––But enough of this talk!

[To GUARDS:] You, there, take them away and guard them well: For they are but women, and even brave men run When they see Death coming. [Exeunt ISMENE, ANTIGONE, and GUARDS.]

ODE II

CHORUS: [Strophe 1] Fortunate is the man who has never tasted God’s vengeance! 465 Where once the anger of heaven has struck, that house is shaken For ever: damnation rises behind each child Like a wave cresting out of the black northeast, When the long darkness under sea roars up And bursts drumming death upon the windwhipped sand. 470

[Antistrophe 1] I have seen this gathering sorrow from time long past Loom upon Oedipus’ children: generation from generation Takes the compulsive rage of the enemy god. So lately this last flower of Oedipus’ line Drank the sunlight! but now a passionate word 475 And a handful of dust have closed up all its beauty What mortal arrogance [Strophe 2] Transcends the wrath of Zeus? Sleep cannot lull him, nor the effortless long months Of the timeless gods: but he is young for ever, 480 And his house is the shining day of high Olympos. All that is and shall be,

And all the past, is his. No pride on earth is free of the curse of heaven. The straying dreams of men [Antistrophe 2] 485 May bring them ghosts of joy: But as they drowse, the waking embers burn them; Or they walk with fixed eyes, as blind men walk. But the ancient wisdom speaks for our own time: Fate works most for woe 490 With Folly’s fairest show. Man’s little pleasure is the spring of sorrow. SCENE III

CHORAGOS:

But here is Haimon, King, the last of all your sons. Is it grief for Antigone, that brings him here, And bitterness at being robbed of his bride? 495 [Enter HAIMON.]

CREON:

We shall soon see, and no need of diviners. ––Son, You have heard my final judgment on that girl: Have you come here hating me, or have you come With deference and with love, whatever I do?

HAIMON:

I am your son, father. You are my guide. 500 You make things clear for me, and I obey you. No marriage means more to me than your continuing wisdom.

CREON:

Good. That is the way to behave: subordinate Everything else, my son, to your father’s will This is what a man prays for, that he may get 505 Sons attentive and dutiful in his house, Each one hating his father’s enemies, Honoring his father’s friends. But if his sons Fail him, if they turn out unprofitably, What has he fathered but trouble for himself 510 And amusement for the malicious? So you are right Not to lose your head over this woman. Your pleasure with her would soon, grow cold, Haimon, And then you’d have a hellcat in bed and elsewhere. Let her find her husband in Hell! 515 Of all the people in this city, only she Has had contempt for my law and broken it. Do you want me to show myself weak before the people? Or to break my sworn word? No, and I will not. The woman dies. 520 I suppose she’ll plead “family ties.” Well, let her. If I permit my own family to rebel, How shall I earn the world’s obedience? Show me the man who keeps his house in hand, He’s fit for public authority. I’ll have no dealings 525 With law-breakers, critics of the government: Whoever is chosen to govern should be obeyed–– Must be obeyed, in all things, great and small, Just and unjust! O Haimon, The man who knows how to obey, and that man only, 530 Knows how to give commands when the time comes. You can depend on him, no matter how fast The spears come: he’s a good soldier, he’ll stick it out. Anarchy, anarchy! Show me a greater evil! This is why cities tumble and the great houses rain down, 535 This is what scatters armies! No, no: good lives are made so by discipline. We keep the laws then, and the lawmakers, And no woman shall seduce us. If we must lose, Let’s lose to a man, at least! Is a woman stronger than we? 540

CHORAGOS:

Unless time has rusted my wits, What you say, King, is said with point and dignity.

HAIMON: [Boyishly earnest.] Father: Reason is God’s crowing gift to man, and you are right To warn me against losing mine. I cannot say–– I hope that I shall never want to say! ––that you 545 Have reasoned badly. Yet there are other men Who can reason, too; and their opinions might be helpful. You are not in a position to know everything That people say or do, or what they feel: Your temper terrifies them––everyone 550 Will tell you only what you like to hear. But I, at any rate, can listen; and I have heard them Muttering and whispering in the dark abut this girl. They say no woman has ever, so unreasonably, Died so shameful a death for a generous act: 555 “She covered her brother’s body. Is this indecent? She kept him from dogs and vultures. Is this a crime? Death? ––She should have all the honor that we can give her!” This is the way they talk out there in the city. You must believe me: 560 Nothing is closer to me than your happiness. What could be closer? Must not any son Value his father’s fortune as his father does his? I beg you, do not be unchangeable: Do not believe that you alone can be right. 565 The man who thinks that, The man who maintains that only he has the power To reason correctly, the gift to speak, to soul–– A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty. It is not reason never to yield to reason! 570 In flood time you can see how some trees bend, And because they bend, even their twigs are safe, While stubborn trees are torn up, roots and all. And the same thing happens in sailing: Make your sheet fast, never slacken,––and over you go, 575 Head over heels and under: and there’s your voyage. Forget you are angry! Let yourself be moved! I know I am young; but please let me say this: The ideal condition Would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct; 580 But since we are all too likely to go astray, The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.

CHORAGOS: You will do well to listen to him, King, If what he says is sensible. And you, Haimon, Must listen to your father. ––Both speak well. 585

CREON:

You consider it right for a man of my years and experience To go to school to a boy?

HAIMON:

It is not right If I am wrong. But if I am young, and right, What does my age matter?

CREON:

You think it right to stand up for an anarchist? 590

HAIMON: Not at all. I pay no respect to criminals.

CREON:

Then she is not a criminal? HAIMON:

The City proposes to teach me how to rule? CREON:

And the City proposes to teach me how to rule? HAIMON:

Ah. Who is it that’s talking like a boy now? 595 CREON:

My voice is the one voice giving orders in this City! HAIMON:

It is no City if it takes orders from one voice. CREON:

The State is the King! HAIMON:

Yes, if the State is a desert. [Pause.]

CREON:

This boy, it seems, has sold out to w woman.

HAIMON: If you are a woman: my concern is only for you. 600

CREON:

So? Your “concern”! In a public brawl with your father! HAIMON:

How about you, in a public brawl with justice? CREON:

With justice, when all that I do is within my rights? HAIMON:

You have no right to trample on God’s right. CREON: [Completely out of control.]

Fool, adolescent fool! Taken in by a woman! 605 HAIMON:

You’ll never see me taken in by anything vile. CREON:

Every word you say is for her! HAIMON: [Quietly, darkly.]

And for you. And for me. And for the gods under the earth.

CREON:

You’ll never marry her while she lives. HAIMON:

Then she must die. ––But her death will cause another. 610 CREON:

Another? Have you lost your senses? Is this an open threat?

HAIMON:

There is no threat in speaking to emptiness. CREON:

I swear you’ll regret this superior tone of yours! You are the empty one!

HAIMON:

If you were not my father, 615

I’d say you were perverse. CREON:

You girlstruck fool, don’t play at words with me! HAIMON:

I am sorry. You prefer silence. CREON:

Now, by God––! I swear, by all the gods in heaven above us, You’ll watch it, I swear you shall [To the SERVANTS:] Bring her out! 620 Bring the woman out! Let her die before his eyes! Here, this instant, with her bridegroom beside her!

HAIMON:

Not here, no; she will not die here, King. And you will never see my face again. Go on raving as long as you’ve a friend to endure you. 625 [Exit HAIMON.]

CHORAGOS: Gone, gone. Creon, a young man in a rage is dangerous!

CREON:

Let him do, or dream to do, more than a man can. He shall not save these girls from death.

CHORAGOS:

These girls? You have sentenced them both?

CREON:

No, you are right 630 I will not kill the one whose hands are clean.

CHORAGOS:

But Antigone? CREON: [Somberly.]

I will carry her far away Out there in the wilderness, and lock her Living in a vault of stone. She shall have food, As the custom is, to absolve the State of her death. 635 And there let her pray to the gods of hell:

They are her only gods: Perhaps they will show her an escape from death, Or she may learn, though late, That piety shown the dead is pity in vain. 640 [Exit CREON.]

ODE III

CHORUS:

Love, unconquerable [Strophe] Waster of rich men, keeper Of warm lights and all-night vigil In the soft face of a girl: Sea-wanderer, forest-visitor! Even the pure Immortals cannot escape you, And mortal man, in his one day’s dusk, Trembles before your glory. Surely you swerve upon ruin [Antistrope] The just man’s consenting heart, 650 As here you have made bright anger Strike between father and son–– And none has conquered but Love! A girl’s glance working the will of heaven: Pleasure to her alone who mock us, 655 Merciless Aphrodite.4 SCENE IV

CHORAGOS: [As ANTIGONE enter guarded.]

But I can no longer stand in awe of this, Nor, seeing what I see, keep back my tears. Here is Antigone, passing to that chamber Where all find sleep at last 660

ANTIGONE:

Look upon me, friends, and pity me [Strophe 1] Turning back at the night’s edge to say Good-by to the sun that shines for me no longer; Now sleepy Death Summons me down to Acheron,5 that cold shore: 665 There is no bridesong there, nor any music.

4 Goddess of Love. [Editors’ note] 5 A river of the underworld, which was ruled by Hades. [Editors’ note]

CHORUS: Yet not unpraised, not without a kind of honor, You walk at last into the underworld; Untouched by sickness, broken by no sword. What woman has ever found your way to death? 670

ANTIGONE:

[Antistrophe 1] How often I have heard the store of Niobe,6 Tantalos’ wretched daughter, how the stone Clung fast about her, ivy-close: and they say The rain falls endlessly And rifting soft snow; her tears are never done. 675 I feel the loneliness of her death in mine.

CHORUS:

But she was born of heaven, and you Are woman, woman-born. If her death is yours, A mortal woman’s, is this not for you Glory in our world and in the world beyond? 680

ANTIGONE:

You laugh at me. Ah, friends, friends, [Strophe2] Can you not wait until I am dead? O Thebes, O men many-charioted, in love with Fortune, Dear spring of Dirce, sacred Theban grove, Be witnesses for me, denied all pity, 685 Unjustly judge! and think a word of love For her whose path turns Under dark earth, where there are no more tears.

CHORUS:

You have passed beyond human daring and come at last Into a place of stone where Justice sits 690 I cannot tell What shape of your father’s guilt appears in this.

ANTIGONE:

[Antistrophe 2] You have touched it at last: that bridal bed Unspeakable, horror of son an mother mingling: 695 Their crime, infection of all our family! O Oedipus, father and brother! Your marriage strikes from the grave to murder mine. I have been a stranger here in my own land:

6 Niobe boasted of her numerous children, provoking Leto, the mother of Apollo, to destroy them. Niobe wept profusely, and finally was turned into a stone on Mount Sipylus, whose streams are her tears. [Editors’ note]

All my life The blasphemy of my birth has followed me. 700

CHORUS:

Reverence is a virtue, but strength Lives in established law: that must prevail. You have made your choice, Your death is the doing of your conscious hand.

ANTIGONE:

[Epode] Then let me go, since all your words are bitter, 705 And the very light of the sun is cold to me. Lead me to my vigil, where I must have Neither love nor lamentation; no song, but silence. [CREON interrupts impatiently.]

CREON: If dirges and planned lamentations could put of death, Men would be singing for ever. [To the SERVANTS:] Take her, go! 710 You know your orders: take her to the vault And leave her alone there. And if she lives or dies, That’s her affair, not ours: our hands are clean.

ANTIGONE:

O tomb, vaulted bride-bed in eternal rock, Soon I shall be with my own again 715 Where Persephone 7 welcome the thin ghost underground: And I shall see my father again, and you, mother, And dearest Polyneices–– dearest indeed To me, since it was my hand That washed him clean and poured the ritual wine: 720 And my reward is death before my time! And yet, as men’s hearts know, I have done no wrong, I have not sinned before God. Or if I have, I shall know the truth in death. But if the guilt Lies upon Creon who judged me, then, I pray, 725 May his punishment equal my own.

CHORAGOS:

O passionate heart, Unyielding, tormented still by the same winds!

7 Queen of the underworld. [Editors’ note]

CREON: Her guards shall have good cause to regret their delaying.

ANTIGONE:

Ah! That voice you no reason to think voice of death! CREON:

I can give you no reason to think you are mistaken. 730 ANTIGONE:

Thebes, and you my fathers’ gods, And rulers of Thebes, you see me now, the last Unhappy daughter of a line of kings, Your kings, led away to death. You will remember What things I suffer, and at what men’s hands, 735 Because I would not transgress the laws of heaven. [To the GUARDS, simply:] Come: let us wait no longer. [Exit ANTIGONE, L., guarded.]

ODE IV

CHORUS:

All Danae’s beauty was locked away {Strophe 1] In a brazen cell where the sunlight could not come: A small room, still as any grave, enclosed her. 740 Yet she was a princess too, And Zeus in a rain of gold poured love upon her. O child, child, No power in wealth or war Or tough sea-blackened ships 745 Can prevail against untiring Destiny! {Antistrophe 1] And Dryas’ son 8 also, that furious king, Bore the god’s prisoning anger for his pride: Sealed up by Dionysos in deaf stone, His madness died among echoes. 750 So at the last he learned what dreadful power His tongue had mocked: For he had profaned the revels, And fired the wrath of the nine Implacable Sisters9 that love the sound of the flute. 755

8 Drays’ son: Lycurgus, King of Thrace. [Editors’ note] 9 The Muses. [Editors’ note]

[Strophe 2] And old men tell a half-remembered tale Of horror done where a dark ledge splits the sea And a double surf beats on the gray shores: How a king’s new woman, 10 sick With hatred for the queen he had imprisoned, 760 Ripped out his two son’s eyes with her bloody hands While grinning Ares 11 watched the shuttle plunge Four times: four blind wounds crying for revenge, [Antistrophe 2] Crying, tears and blood mingled, ––Piteously born, Those sons whose mother was of heavenly birth! 765 Her father was the god of the North Wind And she was cradled by gales, She raced with young colts on the glittering hills And walked untrammeled in the open light: But in her marriage deathless Fate found means 770 To build a tomb like yours for all her joy. SCENE V [Enter blind TEIRESIAS, led by a boy. The opening speeches of TEIRESIAS should be in singsong contrast to the realistic lines of CREON.]

TEIRESIAS:

This is the way the blind man comes, Princes, Princes, Lock-step, two heads lit by the eyes of one.

CREON:

What new thing have you tell us, old Teiresias? TEIRESIAS:

I have much to tell you: listen to the prophet, Creon. 775 CREON:

I admit my debt to you. But what have you to say? TEIRESIAS:

Listen, Creon: I was sitting in my chair of augury, at the place Where the birds gather about me. They were all a-chatter, As is their habit, when suddenly I heard A strange note in their jangling, a scream, a 785

10 Eidothea, second wife of King Phineus, blinded her stepsons. (Their mother, Cleopatra, had been imprisoned in a cave.).Phineus was the son of a king, and Cleopatra, his first wife, was the daughter of Boreas, the North Wind; but this illustrious ancestry could not protect his sons from violence and darkness. [Editors’ note] 11 God of war. [Editors’ note]

Whirring fury; I knew that they were fighting, Tearing each other, dying In a whirlwind of wings clashing. And I was afraid. I began the rites of burnt-offering at the altar, But Hephaistos 12 failed me: instead of bright flame, 790 There was only the sputtering slime of the fat thigh-flesh Melting: the entrails dissolved in gray smoke, The bare bone burst from the welter. And no blaze! This was a sign from heaven. My boy described it, Seeing for me as I see for others. 795 I tell you, Creon, you yourself have brought This new calamity upon us. Our hearths and altars Are stained with the corruption of dogs and carrion birds That glut themselves on the corpse of Oedipus’ son. The gods are deaf when we pray to them, their fire 800 Recoils from our offering, their birds of omen Have no cry of comfort, for they are gorged With the thick blood of the dead. O my son, These are no trifles! Think: all men make mistakes, But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, 805 And repairs the evil. The only crime is pride. Give in to the dead man, then: do not fight with a corpse–– What glory is it to kill a man who is dead? Think, I beg you: It is for your own good that I speak as I do. 810 You should be able to yield for your own good.

CREON:

It seems that prophets have made me their especial province. All my life long I have been a kind of butt for dull arrows Of doddering fortune-tellers! No, Teiresias: 815 If your birds––if the great eagles of God himself Should carry him stinking bit by bit to heaven, I would not yield. I am not afraid of pollution: No man can defile the gods. Do what you will, Go into business, make money, speculate 820 In India gold or that synthetic gold from Sardis, Get rich otherwise than by my consent to bury him. Teiresias, it is a sorry thing when a wise man

12 God of fire. [Editors’ note]

Sells his wisdom, lets out his words for hire! TEIRESIAS:

Ah Creon! Is there no man left in the world–– 825 CREON:

To do what? ––Come, let’s have the aphorism! TEIRESIAS:

No man who knows that wisdom outweighs any wealth? CREON:

As surely as bribes are baser than any baseness. TEIRESIAS:

You are sick, Creon! You are deathly sick! CREON:

As you say: it is not my place to challenge a prophet. 830 TEIRESIAS:

Yet you have said my prophecy is for sale. CREON:

The generation of prophets has always loved gold. TEIRESIAS:

The generation of kings has always loved brass. CREON:

You forget yourself! You are speaking to your King. TEIRESIAS:

I know it. You are a king because of me. 835 CREON:

You have a certain skill; but you have sold out. TEIRESIAS:

King, you will drive me to words that–– CREON:

Say them, say them! Only remember: I will not pay you for them.

TEIRESIAS:

No, you will find them too costly.

No doubt. Speak: Whatever you say, you will not change my will.

TEIRESIAS:

Then take this, and take it to heart! The time is not far off when you shall pay back Corpse for corpse, flesh of your own flesh. You have thrust the child of this world into living night, You have kept from the gods below the child that is theirs: 845 The one on a grave before her death, the other, Dead, denied the grave. This is your crime: And the Furies and the dark gods of Hell Are swift with terrible punishment for you. Do you want to buy me now, Creon? Not many days, 850 And your house will be full of men and women weeping, And curses will be hurled at you from far Cities grieving for sons unburied, left to rot Before the walls of Thebes. These are my arrows, Creon: they are all for you. 855 [To BOY:] But come, child: lead me home. Let him waste his fine anger upon younger men. Maybe he will learn at last To control a wiser tongue in a better head. [Exit TEIRESIAS.]

CHORAGOS:

The old man has gone, King, but his words 860 Remain to plague us. I am old, too, But I cannot remember that he was ever false.

CREON:

That is true… . It troubles me. Oh it is hard to give in! but it is worse To risk everything for stubborn pride. 865

CHORAGOS:

Creon: take my advice. CREON:

What shall I do?

CHORAGOS: Go quickly: free Antigone from her vault And build a tomb for the body of Polyneices.

CREON:

You would have me do this? CHORAGOS:

Creon, yes! And it must be done at once: God moves 870 Swiftly to cancel the folly of stubborn men.

CREON:

It is hard to deny the heart! But i Will do it: I will not fight with destiny.

CHORAGOS:

You must go yourself, you cannot leave it to others. CREON:

I will go. ––Bring axes, servants: 875 Come with me to the tomb. I buried her, i Will set her free. Oh quickly! My mind misgives–– The laws of the gods are mighty, and a man must serve them To the last day of his life! 880 [Exit CREON.]

PAEN 13

CHORAGOS:

God of many names [Strophe 1] CHORUS:

O Iacchos son of Kadmeian Semele O born of the Thunder! Guardian of the West Regent of Eleusis’ plain

O Prince of maenad Thebes 13 A hymn here dedicated to Iacchos (also called Dionysos). His father was Zeus, his mother was Semele, daughter of Kadmos. Iacchos’ worshippers were the Maenads, whose cry was “Evohe evohe.’ [Editors’ note]

and the Dragon Field by rippling Ismenos:14 885 CHORAGOS:

God of many names [Antistrophe 1] CHORUS:

the flame of torches flares on our hills

the nymphs of Iacchos dance at the spring of Castalia: 15 from the vine-close mountain come ah come in ivy: Evohe evohe! Sings through the streets of Thebes 890

CHORAGOS: God of many names [Strophe 2]

CHORUS:

Iacchos of Thebes heavenly Child

of Semele bride of the Thunderer! The shadow of plague is upon us: come with clement feet

oh come from Parnasos down the long slopes

across the lamenting water 895 CHORAGOS: [Antistrophe 2] Io Fire! Chorister of the throbbing stars! O purest among the voices of the night! Thou son of God, blaze for us!

CHORUS:

Come with choric rapture of circling Maenads Who cry Io Iacche! 900

God of many names!

EXODOS [Enter MESSENGER, L.]

14 A river east of Thebes. From a dragon’s teeth (sown near the river) there sprang men who became the ancestors of the Theban nobility. [Editors’ note] 15 A spring on Mountain Parnasos. [Editors’ note]

MESSENGER: Men of the line of Kadmos 16you who live Near Amphion’s citadel:

I cannot say Of any condition of human life “This is fixed, This is clearly good, or bad.” Fate raises up, And Fate casts down the happy and unhappy alike: 905 No man can foretell his Fate.

Take the case of Creon: Creon was happy once, as I count happiness: Victorious in battle, sole governor of the land, Fortunate father of children nobly born. And now it has all gone from him! Who can say 910 That a man is still alive when his life’s joy fails? He is a walking dead man. Grant him rich, Let him live like a king in his great house: If his pleasure is gone, is would not give So much as the shadow of smoke for all he owns. 915

CHORAGOS:

Your words hint at sorrow: what is your news for us? MESSENGER:

They are dead. The living are guilt of their death. CHORAGOS:

Who is guilty? Who is dead? Speak! MESSENGER:

Haimon. Haimon is dead; and the land that killed him Is his own hand.

CHORAGOS:

His father’s? or his own? 920 MESSENGER:

His own, driven mad by the murder his father had done. CHORAGOS:

Teiresias, Teiresias, how clearly you saw it all! MESSENGER:

This is my news: you must draw what conclusions you can from it. 16 Kadmos, who sowed the dragon’s teeth, was the founder of Thebes; Amphion played so sweetly on his lyre that he charmed stones to form a wall around. [Editors’ note]

CHORAGOS: But look: Eurydice, our Queen: Has she overheard us? 925 [Enter UERYDICE from the Palace, C.]

EURIDICE:

I have heard something, friends: As I was unlocking the gate of Pallas’ 17 shrine, For I needed her help today, I heard a voice Telling of some new sorrow. And I fainted There at the temple with all my maidens about me. 930 But speak again: whatever it is, I can bear it: Grief and I are no strangers.

MESSENGER:

Dearest Lady, I will tell you plainly all that I have seen. I shall not try to comfort you: what is the use, Since comfort could lie only in what is not true? 935 The truth is always best.

I went with Creon To the outer plain where Polyneices was lying, No friend to pity him, his body shredded by dogs. We made our prayers in that place to Hecate And Pluto, 18 that they would be merciful. And we bathed 940 The corpse with holy water, and we brought Fresh-broken branches to burn what was left of it, And upon the urn we heaped up a towering barrow Of the earth of his own land.

When we are done, we ran To the vault where Antigone lay on her couch of stone. 945 One of the servants had gone ahead, And while he was yet far off he heard a voice Grieving within the chamber, and he came back And told Creon. And as the King went closer, 950 The air was full of wailing, the words lost, And he begged us to make all haste. “Am I a prophet?” He said, weeping, “And must I walk this road, The saddest of all that I have gone before? My son’s voice calls me on. Oh quickly, quickly! Look through the crevice there, and tell me 955 If it is Haimon, or some deception of the gods!” We obeyed; and in the cavern’s farthest corner We saw her lying:

17 Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom. [Editors’ note] 18 Hecate and Pluto (also known as Hades) were deities of the underworld. [Editors’ note]

She had made a noose of her fine linen veil And hanged herself. Haimon lay beside hers, 960 His arms about her waist, lamenting her, His love lost under ground, crying out That his father has stolen her away from him. When Creon saw him the tears rushed to his eyes And he called to him: “What have you done, child? Speak to me. 965 What are you thinking that makes your eyes so stranger? O my son, my son, I come to you on my knees!” But Haimon spat in his face. He said not a word, Staring–– And suddenly drew his sword And lunged. Creon shrank back, the blade missed; and the boy, 970 Desperate against himself , drove it half its length Into his own side, and fell. And as he died He gathered Antigone close in his arms again. Choking, his blood bright red on her white cheek. And now he lies dead with the dead, and she is his 975 At last, his bride in the houses of the dead. [Exit EURDICE into the Palace.]

CHORAGOS:

She has left us without a word. What can this mean? MESSENGER:

It troubles me, too; yet she knows what is best, Her grief is too great for public lamentation, And doubtless she has gone to her chamber to weep 980 For dead son, leading her maidens in his dirge.

CHORAGOS:

It may be so: but I fear this deep silence. MESSENGER: [Pause.]

I will see what she is doing. I will go in. [Exit MESSENGER into the Palace.] [Enter CREON with attendants, bearing HAIMON’S body.]

CHORAGOS:

But here is the King himself: oh look at him, Bearing his own damnation in his arms. 985

CREON:

Nothing you say can touch me any more.

My own blind heart has brought me From darkness to final darkness. Here you see The father murdering, the murdered son–– And all my civic wisdom! 990 Haimon my son, so young, so young to die, I was the fool, not you; and you died for me.

CHORAGOS:

That is the truth; but you were late in learning it. CREON:

This truth is hard to bear. Surely a god Has crushed me beneath the hugest weight of heaven, 995 And driven me headlong a barbaric way To trample out the thing I held most dear. The pains that men will take to come to pain! [Enter MESSENGER from the Palace.]

MESSENGER:

The burden you carry in your hands is heavy, But it is not all: you will find more in your house. 1000

CREON:

What burden worse than this shall I find there? MESSENGER:

The Queen is dead. CREON:

O port of death, deaf world, Is there no pity for me? And you, Angel of evil, I was dead, and your words are death again. Is it true, boy? Can it be true? 1005 Is my wife dead? Has death bred death?

MESSENGER:

You can see for yourself. [The doors are opened, and the body of EURDICE is disclosed within.]

CREON:

Oh pity! All true, all true, and more than I can bear! 1010 O my wife, my son!

MESSENGER: She stood before the altar, and her heart Welcome the knife her own hand guided. And a great cry burst from her lips for Megareus 19 dead, And for Haimon dead, her sons; and her last breath 1015 Was a curse for their father, the murdered of her sons. And she fell, and the dark flowed in through her closing eyes.

CREON:

O God, I am sick with fear. Are there no swords here? Has no one a blow for me?

MESSENGER:

Her curse is upon you for the deaths of both. 1020 CREON:

It is right that it should be. I alone am guilty. I know it, and I say it. Lead me in, Quickly, friends. I have neither life nor substance. Lead me in.

CHORAGOS:

You are right, if there can be right in so much wrong. 1025 The briefest way is best in a world of sorrow.

CREON:

Let it come, Let death come quickly, and be kind to me. I would not ever see the sun again.

CHORAGOS:

All that will come when it will; but we, meanwhile, 1030 Have much to do. Leave the future to itself.

CREON:

All my heart was in that prayer! CHORAGOS:

Then do not pray any more: the sky is deal CREON:

Lead me away. I have been rash and foolish. I have killed my son and my wife. 1035 I look for comfort; my comfort lies here dead. Whatever my hands have touched has come to nothing. Fate has brought all my pride to a thought of dust.

19 Megareus, brothe of Haimon, had died in the assault on Thebes. [Editors’ note]

[As CREON is being led into the house, the CHORAGOS advances and speaks directly to the audience.]

CHORAGOS:

There is no happiness where there is no wisdom; No wisdom but in submission to the gods. 1040 Big words are always punished, And proud men in old age learn to be wise.

Literary Genres

December 4, 2022/in Uncategorized /by SK

Having an understanding of various types of literary texts and genres of literature is crucial in order to know how to integrate them into English language arts lessons in an elementary classroom.

Part 1: Matrix

For this assignment, you will complete the “Literary Genre Matrix” to describe different types of literary texts and how each can be implemented in the classroom.

Below are examples of fiction and nonfiction genre.

Fiction. Drama, fable, fairy tale, fantasy, folklore, historical fiction, horror, humor, legend, mystery, mythology, poetry, realistic fiction, science fiction, short story, tall tale, etc.
Nonfiction. Biography, essay, narrative nonfiction, speech, etc.

Choose two examples of fiction genre and two examples of nonfiction genre and address the following in the “Literary Genre Matrix.”

Definition of each form of chosen fiction and nonfiction genre.
Two examples of grade cluster appropriate texts for grades K-2, 3-5, and 6-8.
Two strategies to integrate each text selected into reading, writing, and listening instruction.
Two strategies to integrate chosen forms of fiction and nonfiction genre using a technology application.
Provide the name of the technology.

Part 2: Reflection

In 250-500 words, summarize and reflect on the different literary genre and how each can be implemented in your future classroom. Explain the strategies for student comprehension in reading. What strategies do you use to choose appropriate texts/genres for grade level strands? How does selecting the appropriate text support a positive attitude toward reading and comprehension skills?

Support your findings with at least two scholarly resources.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide,

Literary Genre Matrix

Part 1: Matrix

	Fiction	Non-fiction
Definition:	1. 2.	1. 2.
Examples:	K-2 1. 2. 3-5 1. 2. 6-8 1. 2.	K-2 1. 2. 3-5 1. 2. 6-8 1. 2.
Text Integration Strategies:	1. 2.	1. 2.
Technology Application Strategies:	1. 2.	1. 2.
Technology Tools:

Part 2: Reflection

Identify and introduce your favorite musician, band, or type of music.

December 4, 2022/in Uncategorized /by SK

PowerPoint presentation based on a type of music, singer, or band of your own choosing. Illustrate and explain that music or band’s role in reflecting or influencing American culture. You must evaluate the music beyond its entertainment value. The assignment allows you to expand your views on music, as well as allowing you to build on your previous writing and presentation skills.

Resource: Read Chapter 3 and 4 of Media and Culture.
Create Five (5) to Eight (8) slides of PowerPoint
Presentation provides illustration of the following:
In what ways have music and radio shaped American culture its value?
Identify and introduce your favorite musician, band, or type of music.
Explain how American culture and social behavior have been shaped by music you listen to.
Content is comprehensive, accurate, and persuasive.
Presentation includes visual aids and elegant graphics
Text line Limit is FIVE LINES or FIVE Words per bulleted item
Utilize appropriate font sizes.
The content is comprehensive, accurate, and persuasive
Presentation links theory to relevant examples of current experience and industry practice and uses of the vocabulary of the theory correctly.
Conclusion summarizing audio media and how it either influences or reflects social behaviors and attitudes.
Conclusion is logical, and reviews the major points.
Major points are stated clearly and supported with examples.
The paper MUST have APA (citations-in the body and references-at the bottom) style of formatting.
Please comply with the rules of grammar (correct spelling, punctuation, sentences are clear, complete, and concise).
Sentence transitions are present and maintain the flow of thought.
Post your paper as PowerPoint Presentation (slides) attachment only.

COLON CANCER – write a 500- to 750-word summary that includes the following:

· Description of the disease

· Risk factors for the disease

· Lifestyle choices you can make in your life to decrease your modifiable risk factors for this disease

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��71

SOUNDS AND IMAGES

73 The Development of Sound Recording

81 U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock

88 A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music

95 The Business of Sound Recording

103 Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy

Sound Recording and Popular Music For years, the recording industry has been pan- icking about file swappers who illegally down- load songs and thereby decrease recorded music sales. So it struck many in the industry as unusual when the Grammy Award–winning Brit- ish alternative rock group Radiohead decided to sell its 2007 album In Rainbows on the Internet (www.inrainbows.com) for whatever price fans wished to pay, including nothing at all.

Radiohead was able to try this business model because its contract with the record corporation EMI had expired after its previous album, 2003’s Hail to the Thief. Knowing it had millions of fans around the world, the group turned down multi- million-dollar offers to sign a new contract with major labels, and instead decided to experiment by offering its seventh studio album online with a “pay what you wish” approach. “It’s not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a re- sponse to a situation,” Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, said. “We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.”1

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

72��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

Radiohead didn’t disclose the sales rev- enue or numbers of the downloads, but one source claimed at least 1.2 million copies of the album were downloaded in the first two days.2 In an interview with an Australian newspaper, Yorke mentioned that about 50 percent of the downloaders took the album for free.3 But a study conservatively estimated that Radiohead made an average of $2.26 on each album download. If that’s the case, Radiohead may have made more money per recording than the tra- ditional royalties the group might have earned with a release by a major label.4

Although Radiohead’s Thom Yorke said the online album release experiment was not supposed to be a model for anyone else, it ended up being just that. Hip-hop artist Saul Williams released digital downloads of The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust (saulwilliams.com) for $5, with a “free” option to the first hundred thousand customers. Williams’s recording was produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. In March 2008, Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I–IV, a four-album recording with thirty-six songs, at ghosts.nin.com. Ghost I, the package of the first nine songs, was available as a free download, with the rest avail- able for purchase. Coldplay boosted the release of its 2008 recording Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends by giving away free downloads of its single “Violet Hill” for a week.

Another alternate avenue music artists are exploring for promoting their music is posting their music videos on the Internet. As MTV’s programming turned away from videos, video-hosting Web sites like YouTube, Dailymotion,

and Vevo have become a way to get less expensive (free) and much wider music video distribution. In 2006, the band OK Go gained enormous attention by posting its treadmill dancing video for its song “Here It Goes Again” on You- Tube. The video went viral and made OK Go a profitable act for EMI. Yet EMI later prohibited OK Go’s videos from being embedded on any site but You- Tube, since only YouTube paid royalties to EMI for views on its site. Immediately, views of the group’s videos dropped by 90 percent, and OK Go lost one of its best methods of promotion. In March 2010, OK Go parted ways with EMI and released an imaginative Rube Gold- berg machine video for “This Too Shall Pass” that, absent EMI’s constraints on distribution, became another viral music video. Without a major label, the band creatively financed the video with sup- port from State Farm Insurance (whose logo appears a few times in the video)— an approach that demonstrates, as OK Go frontman Damian Kulash says, “We’re trying to be a DIY [do-it-yourself] band in a post–major label world.”5

“For years, the recording industry has been panicking about file swappers who illegally download songs and thereby decrease recorded music sales.”

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��73

THE MEDIUM OF SOUND RECORDING has had an immense impact on our culture. The music that helps shape our identities and comfort us during the transition from childhood to adulthood resonates throughout our lives, and it often stirs debate among parents and teenagers, teachers and students, and politicians and performers, many times leading to social change.

Throughout its history, popular music has been banned by parents, school officials, and even governments under the guise of protecting young people from corrupting influences. As far back as the late 1700s, authorities in Europe, thinking that it was immoral for young people to dance close together, outlawed waltz music as “savagery.” A hundred years later, the Argentinean upper class tried to suppress tango music because the roots of this sexualized dancing style could be traced to the bars and bordellos of Buenos Aires. When its popularity migrated to Paris in the early twentieth century, tango was condemned by the clergy for its allegedly negative impact on French youth. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, jazz music was criticized for its unbridled and sometimes free-form sound and the unrestrained dance crazes (such as the Charleston and the jitterbug) it inspired. Rock and roll from the 1950s onward and hip-hop from the 1980s to today have also added their own chapters to the age-old musical battle between generations.

In this chapter, we will place the impact of popular music in context and:

• Investigate the origins of recording’s technological “hardware,” from Thomas Edison’s early phonograph to Emile Berliner’s invention of the flat disk record and the development of audiotape, compact discs, and MP3s

• Explore the impact of the Internet on music, including the effects of online piracy and how the industry is adapting to the new era of convergence with new models for distributing and promoting music

• Study radio’s early threat to sound recording and the subsequent alliance between the two media when television arrived in the 1950s

• Examine the content and culture of the music industry, focusing on the predominant role of rock music and its extraordinary impact on mass media forms and a diverse array of cultures, both American and international

• Explore the economic and democratic issues facing the recording industry

As you consider these topics, think about your own relationship with popular music and sound recordings. Who was your first favorite group or singer? How old were you, and what was important to you about this music? How has the way you listen to music changed in the past five years? For more questions to help you think through the role of music in our lives, see “Ques- tioning the Media” on page 105 in the Chapter Review.

“If people knew what this stuff was about, we’d probably all get arrested.”

BOB DYLAN, 1966, TALKING ABOUT ROCK AND ROLL

The Development of Sound Recording

New mass media have often been defined in terms of the communication technologies that preceded them. For example, movies were initially called motion pictures, a term that derived from photography; radio was referred to as wireless telegraphy, referring back to telegraphs; and television was often called picture radio. Likewise, sound recording instruments were initially described as talking machines and later as phonographs, indicating the existing innovations, the telephone and the telegraph. This early blending of technology foreshadowed our contemporary era, in which media as diverse as newspapers and movies converge on the Internet. Long before the Internet, however, the first major media convergence involved the relationship between the sound recording and radio industries.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

74��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

From Cylinders to Disks: Sound Recording Becomes a Mass Medium In the 1850s, the French printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville conducted the first experi- ments with sound recording. Using a hog’s hair bristle as a needle, he tied one end to a thin membrane stretched over the narrow part of a funnel. When the inventor spoke into the funnel,

the membrane vibrated and the free end of the bristle made grooves on a revolving cylinder coated with a thick liquid called lamp black. De Martinville noticed that different sounds

made different trails in the lamp black, but he could not figure out how to play back the sound. However, his experiments did usher in the development stage of sound record- ing as a mass medium. In 2008, audio researchers using high-resolution scans of the recordings and a digital stylus were able to finally play back some of de Martinville’s recordings for the first time.6

In 1877, Thomas Edison had success playing back sound. He recorded his own voice by using a needle to press his voice’s sound waves onto tinfoil wrapped around

a metal cylinder about the size of a cardboard toilet-paper roll. After recording his voice, Edison played it back by repositioning the needle to retrace the grooves in the

foil. The machine that played these cylinders became known as the phonograph, derived from the Greek terms for “sound” and “writing.”

Thomas Edison was more than an inventor—he was also able to envision the practical uses of his inventions and ways to market them. Moving sound recording into its entrepreneurial stage, Edison patented his phonograph in 1878 as a kind of answering machine. He thought the phonograph would be used as a “telephone repeater” that would “provide invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.”7 Edison’s phono- graph patent was specifically for a device that recorded and played back foil cylinders. Because of this limitation, in 1886 Chichester Bell (cousin of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell) and Charles Sumner Tainter were able to further sound recording by patenting an improvement on the phonograph. Their sound recording device, known as the graphophone, played back more durable wax cylinders.8 Both Edison’s phonograph and Bell and Tainter’s graphophone

Sound Recording and Popular Music

Victrolas Around 1910, music players enter living rooms as elaborate furniture centerpieces, replacing pianos as musical entertainment (p. 75).

Radio Threatens the Sound Re- cording Industry By 1925, “free” music can be heard over the airwaves (p. 80).

Audiotape Developed in Germany in the early 1940s, audiotape enables multitrack recording. Taping technology comes to the United States after WWII (p. 76).

1850 1880 1890 1910 1920 1930 19401900

Phonograph In 1877, Edison invents and figures out how to play back sound, thinking this invention would make a good answering machine (p. 74).

Flat Disk Berliner invents the flat disk in 1887 and develops the gramo- phone to play it. The disks are easily mass-produced, a labeling system is introduced, and sound recording becomes a mass medium (p. 75).

de Martinville The first experiments with sound are con- ducted in the 1850s us- ing a hog’s hair bristle as a needle; de Martinville can record sound, but he can’t play it back (p. 74).

THOMAS EDISON In addition to the phonograph, Edison (1847–1931) ran an industrial research lab that is credited with inventing the motion picture camera and the first commercially successful light bulb, and a system for distributing electricity.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��75

had only marginal success as voice-recording office machines. Eventually, both sets of inventors began to produce cylinders with prerecorded music, which proved to be more popular but dif- ficult to mass-produce and not very durable for repeated plays.

Using ideas from Edison, Bell, and Tainter, Emile Berliner, a German engineer who had im- migrated to America, developed a better machine that played round, flat disks, or records. Made of zinc and coated with beeswax, these records played on a turntable, which Berliner called a gramophone and patented in 1887. Berliner also developed a technique that enabled him to mass- produce his round records, bringing sound recording into its mass medium stage. Previously, using Edison’s cylinder, performers had to play or sing into the speaker for each separate record- ing. Berliner’s technique featured a master recording from which copies could be easily dupli- cated in mass quantities. In addition, Berliner’s records could be stamped with labels, allowing the music to be differentiated by title, performer, and songwriter. This led to the development of a “star system,” because fans could identify and choose their favorite sounds and artists.

By the early 1900s, record-playing phonographs were widely available for home use. In 1906, the Victor Talking Machine Company placed the hardware, or “guts,” of the record player inside a piece of furniture. These early record players, known as Victrolas, were mechanical and had to be primed with a crank handle. The introduction of electric record players, first available in 1925, gradually replaced Victrolas as more homes were wired for electricity; this led to the gramophone becoming an essential appliance in most American homes.

The appeal of recorded music was limited at first because of sound quality. While the original wax records were replaced by shellac discs, shellac records were also very fragile and didn’t improve the sound quality much. By the 1930s, in part because of the advent of radio and in part because of the Great Depression, record and phonograph sales declined dramatically. However, in the early 1940s shellac was needed for World War II munitions production, so the record industry turned to manufacturing polyvinyl plastic records instead. The vinyl recordings turned out to be more durable than shellac records and less noisy, paving the way for a renewed consumer desire to buy recorded music.

In 1948, CBS Records introduced the 33⅓-rpm (revolutions-per-minute) long-playing record (LP), with about twenty minutes of music on each side of the record, creating a market for

MP3 A new format com- pressing music into digi- tal files shakes up the music industry in 1999, as millions of Internet users share music files on Napster (p. 77).

Music in the Cloud and on the Go Streaming services such as MOG and Rhapsody launch apps for the iPhone and Android, making it possible to stream music anytime, any- where (p. 79).

Radio Turns to Music Industry As television threatens radio, radio turns to the music industry in the 1950s for salvation. Ra- dio becomes a marketing arm for the sound record- ing industry (p. 80).

Hip-Hop This major musical art form emerges in the late 1970s (pp. 93–94).

A Sound Recording Standard In 1953, this is established at 33�1 3 rpm for long-playing albums (LPs), 45 rpm for two-sided singles (pp. 75–76).

Rock and Roll A new music form arises in the mid- 1950s, challenging class, gender, race, geographic, and religious norms in the United States (p. 82).

Cassettes This new format appears in the mid-1960s; making music portable, it gains popularity (p. 76).

CDs The first format to incorporate digital tech- nology hits the market in 1983 (p. 77).

1950

Online Music Stores In 2008, iTunes becomes the No.1 retailer of music in the United States (p. 78).

iTunes In 2010, iTunes sells its ten billionth download (p. 79).

1960 1970 1990 2000 2010 20201980

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

76��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

multisong albums and classical music. This was an improvement over the three to four minutes of music contained on the existing 78-rpm records. The next year, RCA developed a competing 45-rpm record that featured a quarter-size hole (best for jukeboxes) and invigorated the sales of songs heard on jukeboxes throughout the country. Unfortunately, the two new record standards were not technically compatible, meaning they could not be played on each other’s machines. A five-year marketing battle ensued, similar to the Macintosh vs. Windows battle over computer- operating-system standards in the 1980s and 1990s or the mid-2000s battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD. In 1953, CBS and RCA compromised. The LP became the standard for long-playing albums, the 45 became the standard for singles, and record players were designed to accommo- date 45s, LPs, and, for a while, 78s.

From Phonographs to CDs: Analog Goes Digital The invention of the phonograph and the record were the key sound recording advancements until the advent of magnetic audiotape and tape players in the 1940s. Magnetic tape sound recording was first developed as early as 1929 and further refined in the 1930s, but it didn’t catch on initially because the first machines were bulky reel-to-reel devices, the amount of tape required to make a recording was unwieldy, and the tape itself broke or damaged easily. How- ever, owing largely to improvements by German engineers who developed plastic magnetic tape during World War II, audiotape eventually found its place.

Audiotape’s lightweight magnetized strands finally made possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing, in which instrumentals or vocals could be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in another studio. This led to a vast improvement of studio recordings and subsequent increases in sales, although the recordings continued to be sold pri- marily in vinyl format rather than on reel-to-reel tape. By the mid-1960s, engineers had placed miniaturized reel-to-reel audiotape inside small plastic cassettes and had developed portable cassette players, permitting listeners to bring recorded music anywhere and creating a market for prerecorded cassettes. Audiotape also permitted “home dubbing”: Consumers could copy their favorite records onto tape or record songs from the radio. This practice denied sales to the recording industry, resulting in a drop in record sales, the doubling of blank audiotape sales during a period in the 1970s, and the later rise of the Sony Walkman, a portable cassette player that foreshadowed the release of the iPod two decades later.

Some thought the portability, superior sound, and recording capabilities of audiotape would mean the demise of records. Although records had retained essentially the same format since the advent of vinyl, the popularity of records continued, in part due to the improved sound fidelity that came with stereophonic sound. Invented in 1931 by engineer Alan Blumlein, but not put to commercial use until 1958, stereo permitted the recording of two separate chan- nels, or tracks, of sound. Recording-studio engineers, using audiotape, could now record many instrumental or vocal tracks, which they “mixed down” to two stereo tracks. When played back through two loudspeakers, stereo creates a more natural sound distribution. By 1971, stereo sound had been advanced into quadrophonic, or four-track, sound, but that never caught on commercially.

The biggest recording advancement came in the 1970s, when electrical engineer Thomas Stockham made the first digital audio recordings on standard computer equipment. Although the digital recorder was invented in 1967, Stockham was the first to put it to practical use. In contrast to analog recording, which captures the fluctuations of sound waves and stores those signals in a record’s grooves or a tape’s continuous stream of magnetized particles, digital recording translates sound waves into binary on-off pulses and stores that information as numerical code. When a digital recording is played back, a microprocessor translates these numerical codes back into sounds and sends them to loudspeakers. By the late 1970s, Sony

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��77

and Philips were jointly working on a way to design a digitally recorded disc and player to take advantage of this new technology, which could be produced at a lower cost than either vinyl records or audiocassettes. As a result of their efforts, digitally recorded compact discs (CDs) hit the market in 1983.

By 1987, CD sales were double the amount of LP record album sales (see Figure 3.1). By 2000, CDs rendered records and audiocassettes nearly obsolete, except for DJs and record enthusiasts who continue to play and collect vinyl LPs. In an effort to create new product lines and maintain consumer sales, the music industry promoted two advanced digital disc for- mats in the late 1990s, which it hoped would eventually replace standard CDs. However, the introduction of these formats was ill-timed for the industry, because the biggest development in music formatting was already on the horizon—the MP3.

Convergence: Sound Recording in the Internet Age Music, perhaps more so than any other mass medium, is bound up in the social fabric of our lives. Ever since the introduction of the tape recorder and the heyday of homemade mixtapes, music has been something that we have shared eagerly with friends.

It is not surprising then that the Internet, a mass medium that links individuals and com- munities together like no other medium, became a hub for sharing music. In fact, the reason college student Shawn Fanning said he developed the groundbreaking file-sharing site Napster in 1999 was “to build communities around different types of music.”9

Music’s convergence with radio saved the radio industry in the 1950s. But music’s convergence with the Internet began to unravel the music industry in the 2000s, and it became the precedent for upheavals in every other media industry as more content—movies, TV shows, books—found distri- bution over the Internet. The changes in the music industry were set in motion about two decades ago with the proliferation of Internet use and the development of a new digital file format.

MP3s and File Sharing The MP3 file format, developed in 1992, enables digital recordings to be compressed into smaller, more manageable files. With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s,

S a

le s

in M

il li

o n

s o

f D

o ll

a rs

Year

14,000

12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980

Compact Discs

Vinyl LP/EP

Mobile

Tapes Digital (legal)

1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

FIGURE 3.1 ANNUAL VINYL, TAPE, CD, MOBILE, AND DIGITAL SALES Source: Recording Industry Association of America, 2009 year-end statistics.

Note: “Digital” includes singles, albums, music videos, and kiosk sales. Cassette tapes fell under $1 million in sales in 2008.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

78��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

computer users began swapping MP3 music files online because they could be uploaded or downloaded in a fraction of the time it took to exchange noncompressed music and because they use up less memory.

By 1999, the year Napster’s now infamous free file-sharing service brought the MP3 format to popular attention, music files were widely available on the Internet—some for sale, some legally available for free downloading, and many traded in violation of copyright laws. Despite the higher quality of industry-manufactured CDs, music fans enjoyed the convenience of downloading and burning MP3 files to CD. Some listeners skipped CDs altogether, storing their music on hard drives and essentially using their computers as stereo systems. Losing countless music sales to illegal downloading, the music industry fought the proliferation of the MP3 format with an array of law- suits (aimed at file-sharing companies and at individual downloaders), but the popularity of MP3s continued to increase (see “Tracking Technology: Digital Downloading and the Future of Online Music” on page 79).

In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the music industry and against Napster, declaring free music file-swapping illegal and in violation of music copyrights held by recording labels and artists. It was relatively easy for the music industry to shut down Napster (which later relaunched as a legal service), because it required users to log into a centralized system. However, the music industry’s elimination of illegal file-sharing was not complete, as decentralized peer-to- peer (P2P) systems, such as Grokster, Limewire, Morpheus, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, and BitTor- rent, once again enabled online free music file-sharing.

The recording industry fought back in 2002 by increasing the distribution of copy– protected CDs, which could not be uploaded or burned. But the copy-protected CDs created controversy, because they also prevented consumers from legally copying their CDs for their own personal use, such as uploading tracks to their iPods or other digital players. In 2005, P2P service Grokster shut down after it was fined $50 million by U.S. federal courts and, in upholding the lower court rulings, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the music industry could pursue legal action against any P2P service that encouraged its users to illegally share music or other media. In 2006, eDonkey settled with the music industry and went out of business, while Kazaa settled a lawsuit with the music industry and became a legal service. Morpheus went bankrupt in 2008, and a federal court ruled against Limewire in 2010. More- over, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed thousands of lawsuits, with many of its legal efforts targeting university computer network users for copyright infringement.

At the same time, the music industry realized that it would have to somehow adapt its business to the digital format and embraced services like iTunes (launched by Apple in 2003, to accompany the iPod), which has become the model for legal online distribution. By 2010, iTunes had sold more than ten billion songs. It became the No. 1 music retailer in the United States in 2008, surpassing Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Even with the success of Apple’s

iTunes and other online music stores, illegal music file- sharing still far outpaces legal downloading by a ratio of at least 10 to 1.10

In some cases, unauthorized file-sharing may actually boost legitimate music sales. Since 2002, BigChampagne.com has tracked the world’s most popu- lar download communities and compiled weekly lists of the most popular file-shared songs for clients like the radio industry. Radio stations, in turn, may adjust their play-lists to incorporate this information and, ironically, spur legitimate music sales.

“Today’s Internet landscape— with millions of consumers downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store, watching videos on YouTube or Hulu and networking on social media sites like Facebook—can be traced back to the day in early June of 1999 when [eighteen- year-old inventor Shawn] Fanning made Napster available for wider distribution.”

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 2009

APPLE’S iPOD, the leading portable music and video player, began a revolution in digital music.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��79

I t is a success story that could only have happened in the hyperspeed of the digital age. Since its debut in April 2003, iTunes has gone from an intriguing concept to the world’s No. 1 music retailer, accounting for 70 percent of global online digital music sales. Recently celebrating the occasion of its ten billionth download (by seventy- one-year-old Louie Slucer), iTunes has conclusively proven that consumers, irre- spective of age, have readily and happily adapted to downloading, preferring it to purchasing CDs. Frustrated by escalat- ing CD prices and convinced that most releases contain only a few good songs and too much filler—not to mention the physical clutter created by CDs—digital music sites offer consumers an à la carte menu where they can cherry-pick their favorite tracks and build a music library that is easily stored on a hard drive and transferable to an MP3 player.

Digital downloading has also forever altered locating and accessing non- mainstream music and recordings by unsigned bands. If iTunes resembles a traditional retailer with a deep cata- logue, then a competitor such as eMusic (which Rolling Stone dubbed “iTunes’ cheaper, cooler cousin”) is the online equivalent of a specialty record store, designed for connoisseurs who are uninterested in mass-marketed pop. The success of social networking sites such as Facebook (400 million active users) and, to a lesser extent MySpace, has made them important gathering places for virtual communities of fans for thousands of bands in dozens of genres. By capitalizing on the Internet’s ability to “marginalize the traditional bodies of mediation between those who make music and those who listen to it,”1 social networking sites make

Digital Downloading and the Future of Online Music by John Dougan

searching for new music and performers much easier. Similarly, the Internet radio service Pandora (available online and in mobile versions for smartphones) allows its forty-eight million listeners to access nearly one million tracks in its library link- ing listeners’ requests with other songs or artists in its library deemed musically similar. Pandora also connects directly to iTunes and Amazon.com, so listeners can purchase the tracks they enjoy.

The Internet is chang- ing not only how consumers are exposed to music but how record label A&R (Artist & Repertoire) departments scout talent. A&R reps, who no longer travel as much to locate talent, are searching for acts who do their own marketing and come with a built-in community of fans. While MySpace’s attempt at a major label supported music site (MySpace Music) has underperformed, YouTube has become a particularly powerful player in turning unknown performers into international phenom- ena. One such example is middle-aged Scottish singer Susan Boyle, whose performance on Britain’s Got Talent in 2009 went viral on YouTube and, in the past year, has racked up nearly forty- three million views. Her debut album went on to sell an astonishing eight million copies in six weeks.

Despite Susan Boyle’s success, the digital age has made the album-length

CD increasingly obsolete. While digital downloading allows consumers greater and more immediate access to music, aesthetically it harkens back to the late 1950s and early 1960s when the 45-rpm single was dominant and the most reliable indicator of whether a song was a hit. Downloading a variety of tracks means that consumers build their own collection of virtual 45s that, when taken as a whole, become a personalized greatest hits collection. Increasingly, art-

ists are imagining a future where they no longer release album-

length CDs, but rather a series of individual tracks

that consumers can piece together however they please.

But if the death knell has been sounded for the

compact disc, what of the digital download? There

are those who claim that, after only seven years, iTunes

is showing its age and will face a stiff challenge from Google’s Android mobile operating system. With Android, users will be able to purchase music from any computer and have the files appear instantly on their phones. Users will also be able to send the music on their hard drive to the Internet, so they can access it on their phone as long as they have an Internet connection (unlike iTunes’ syncing system, which requires plugging your MP3 player into your computer). With Apple said to be de- veloping a Web-based iTunes, perhaps the future means accessing music from anywhere at any time.2

John Dougan is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University.

TRACKING TECHNOLOGY

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

80��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

The Future: Music in the Stream, Music in the Cloud If the history of recorded music tells us anything, it’s that over time tastes change and formats change. While artists take care of the musical possibilities, technology companies are develop- ing formats for the future. One potential successor to the MP3 is called MusicDNA, an enhanced MP3 file that would contain images, lyrics, and news updates embedded into the file. The mak- ers of MusicDNA are hoping that this will discourage piracy since only legal downloads of the MusicDNA would contain the additional content.

Alternate music distribution channels could eliminate downloads entirely. Existing services like Pandora stream user-formatted Internet music radio channels for free, with financial sup- port from advertising and data mining. Other streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG, Deezer, and Spotify have monthly subscriptions, but they enable listeners to play songs on-demand and create playlists. These streaming services can be accessed via the Internet or a smartphone device, but listeners don’t “own” physical copies of the music (though some link to outside sources where listeners can purchase the music). Another system being tested by FreeAllMusic .com would let consumers download songs for free, but only after watching an advertisement or “liking” a company on Facebook. Finally, some companies (perhaps even Apple, with its recent purchase of Lala.com) envision music to be purchased but not downloaded onto an MP3 player. Instead, one’s music would reside “in the cloud” of the Internet—meaning that songs would never have to be downloaded or synchronized between mobile devices and computer, but instead would always be available to stream on any Internet-connected device.11

The Rocky Relationship between Records and Radio The recording industry and radio have always been closely linked. Although they work almost in unison now, in the beginning they had a tumultuous relationship. Radio’s very existence sparked the first battle. By 1915, the phonograph had become a popular form of entertainment. The recording industry sold thirty million records that year, and by the end of the decade sales more than tripled each year. In 1924, though, record sales dropped to only half of what they had been the previous year. Why? Because radio had arrived as a com- peting mass medium, providing free entertainment over the airwaves, independent of the recording industry.

The battle heated up when, to the alarm of the recording industry, radio stations began broadcasting recorded music without compensating the music industry. The American Soci- ety of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), founded in 1914 to collect copyright fees for music publishers and writers, charged that radio was contributing to plummeting sales of records and sheet music. By 1925, ASCAP established music rights fees for radio, charging sta- tions between $250 and $2,500 a week to play recorded music—and causing many stations to leave the air.

But other stations countered by establishing their own live, in-house orchestras, dissemi- nating “free” music to listeners. This time, the recording industry could do nothing, as original radio music did not infringe on any copyrights. Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, record and phonograph sales continued to fall, although the recording industry got a small boost when Prohibition ended in 1933 and record-playing jukeboxes became the standard musical entertain- ment in neighborhood taverns.

The recording and radio industries only began to cooperate with each other after television became popular in the early 1950s. Television pilfered radio’s variety shows, crime dramas, and comedy programs and, along with those formats, much of its advertising revenue and audi- ence. Seeking to reinvent itself, radio turned to the record industry, and this time both indus- tries greatly benefited from radio’s new “hit songs” format. The alliance between the recording

“The one good thing I can say about file-sharing is it affords us a chance to get our music heard without the label incurring crazy marketing expenses.”

GERARD COSLEY, COPRESIDENT OF THE INDIE RECORD LABEL MATADOR, 2003

“Music should never be harmless.”

ROBBIE ROBERTSON, THE BAND

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��81

industry and radio was aided enormously by rock and roll music, which was just emerging in the 1950s. Rock created an enduring consumer youth market for sound recordings and provid- ed much-needed new content for radio precisely when television made it seem like an obsolete medium. In 2010, though, the music industry—seeking to improve its revenues—was proposing to charge radio broadcast performance royalty fees for playing music on the air, something radio stations opposed.

U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock

Popular or pop music is music that appeals either to a wide cross section of the public or to sizable subdivisions within the larger public based on age, region, or ethnic background (e.g., teenagers, southerners, Mexican Americans). U.S. pop music today encompasses styles as diverse as blues, country, Tejano, salsa, jazz, rock, reggae, punk, hip-hop, and dance. The word pop has also been used to distinguish popular music from classical music, which is written primarily for ballet, opera, ensemble, or symphony. As various subcultures have intersected, U.S. popular music has developed organically, constantly creating new forms and reinvigorating older musical styles.

The Rise of Pop Music Although it is commonly assumed that pop music developed simultaneously with the phono- graph and radio, it actually existed prior to these media. In the late nineteenth century, the sale of sheet music for piano and other instruments sprang from a section of Broadway in Manhattan known as Tin Pan Alley, a derisive term used to describe the way that these quickly produced tunes supposedly sounded like cheap pans clanging together. Tin Pan Alley’s tradition of song publishing began in the late 1880s with music like the marches of John Philip Sousa and the ragtime piano pieces of Scott Joplin. It continued through the first half of the twentieth century with the show tunes and vocal ballads of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter; and into the 1950s and 1960s with such rock-and-roll writing teams as Jerry Leiber–Mike Stoller and Carole King–Gerry Goffin.

At the turn of the twentieth century, with the newfound ability of song publishers to mass- produce sheet music for a growing middle class, popular songs moved from being a novelty to being a major business enterprise. With the emergence of the phonograph, song publishers also discovered that recorded tunes boosted interest in and sales of sheet music. Although the popu- larity of sheet music would decline rapidly with the introduction of radio in the 1920s, songwrit- ing along Tin Pan Alley played a key role in transforming popular music into a mass medium.

As sheet music grew in popularity, jazz developed in New Orleans. An improvisational and mostly instrumental musical form, jazz absorbed and integrated a diverse body of musical styles, including African rhythms, blues, and gospel. Jazz influenced many bandleaders through- out the 1930s and 1940s. Groups led by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller were among the most popular of the “swing” jazz bands, whose rhythmic music also dominated radio, recording, and dance halls in their day.

The first pop vocalists of the twentieth century were products of the vaudeville circuit, which radio, movies, and the Depression would bring to an end in the 1930s. In the 1920s, Eddie Cantor, Belle Baker, Sophie Tucker, and Al Jolson were all extremely popular. By the

SCOTT JOPLIN (1868– 1917) published more than fifty compositions during his life, including “Maple Leaf Rag”—arguably his most famous piece.

“Frank Sinatra was categorized in 1943 as ‘the glorification of ignorance and musical illiteracy.’�”

DICK CLARK, THE FIRST 25 YEARS OF ROCK & ROLL

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

82��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

ROBERT JOHNSON (1911– 1938), who ranks among the most influential and innovative American guitarists, played the Mississippi delta blues and was a major influence on early rock and rollers, especially the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. His intense slide-guitar and finger- style playing also inspired generations of blues artists, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bonnie Raitt, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. To get a sense of his style, visit The Robert Johnson Notebooks, http://xroads .virginia.edu/~MUSIC/ rjhome.html.

1930s, Rudy Vallée and Bing Crosby had established themselves as the first “crooners,” or sing- ers of pop standards. Bing Crosby also popularized Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” one of the most covered songs in recording history. (A song recorded or performed by another artist is known as cover music.) Meanwhile, the bluesy harmonies of a New Orleans vocal trio, the Boswell Sisters, influenced the Andrews Sisters, whose boogie-woogie style helped them sell more than sixty million records in the late 1930s and 1940s. In one of the first mutually ben- eficial alliances between sound recording and radio, many early pop vocalists had their own

network of regional radio programs, which vastly increased their exposure. Frank Sinatra arrived in the 1940s, and his romantic ballads foreshadowed

the teen love songs of rock and roll’s early years. Nicknamed “The Voice” early in his career, Sinatra, like Crosby, parlayed his music and radio exposure into movie stardom. (Both singers made more than fifty films apiece.) Helped by radio, pop vo- calists like Sinatra—and many others, including Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Judy Garland, and Sarah Vaughan—were among the first vocalists to become popular with a large national teen audience. Their record sales helped stabilize the industry, and in the early 1940s Sinatra’s concerts caused the kind of audience riots that would later characterize rock-and- roll performances.

Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay The cultural storm called rock and roll hit in the mid-1950s. As with the term jazz, rock and roll was a blues slang term for “sex,” lending it instant controversy. Early rock and roll combined the vocal and instrumental traditions of pop with the rhythm-and-blues sounds of Memphis and the country twang of Nashville. It was considered the first “integrationist music,” merging the black sounds of rhythm and blues, gospel, and Robert Johnson’s screeching blues guitar with the white influences of country, folk, and pop vocals.12 From a cultural perspective, only a few musical forms have ever sprung from such a diverse set of influences, and no new style of music has ever had such a widespread impact on so many different cultures as rock and roll. From an economic perspective, no single musical form prior to rock and roll had ever simultaneously transformed the structure of two mass media industries: sound recording and radio. Rock’s development set the stage for how music is produced, distributed, and performed today. Many social,

cultural, economic, and political factors leading up to the 1950s contributed to the growth of rock and roll, including black migration, the growth of youth culture, and the beginnings of racial integration.

Blues and R&B: The Foundation of Rock and Roll The migration of southern blacks to northern cities in search of better jobs during the first half of the twentieth century had helped spread different popular music styles. In particular, blues music, the foundation of rock and roll, came to the North. Influenced by African American spiri- tuals, ballads, and work songs from the rural South, blues music was exemplified in the work of Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Son House, Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, and others. The introduc- tion in the 1930s of the electric guitar—a major contribution to rock music—made it easier for musicians “to cut through the noise in ghetto taverns” and gave southern blues its urban style, popularized in the work of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, and Buddy Guy.13

During this time, blues-based urban black music began to be marketed under the name rhythm and blues, or R&B. Featuring “huge rhythm units smashing away behind screaming

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��83

blues singers,” R&B appealed to young listeners fascinated by the explicit (and forbidden) sexual lyrics in songs like “Annie Had a Baby,” “Sexy Ways,” and “Wild Wild Young Men.”14 Although it was banned on some stations, by 1953 R&B continued to gain airtime. In those days, black and white musical forms were segregated: Trade magazines tracked R&B record sales on “race” charts, which were kept separate from white record sales tracked on “pop” charts.

Youth Culture Cements Rock and Roll’s Place Another reason for the growth of rock and roll can be found in the repressive and uneasy atmo- sphere of the 1950s. To cope with the threat of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and communist witch-hunts, young people sought escape from the menacing world created by adults. Teens have always sought out music that has a beat— music they can dance to. In Europe in the late 1700s, they popularized the waltz; and in America during the 1890s, they danced the cakewalk to music that inspired marches and ragtime. The trend continued during the 1920s with the Charleston, in the 1930s and 1940s with the jazz swing bands and the jitterbug, in the 1970s with disco, and in the 1980s and 1990s with hip-hop. Each of these twentieth-century musical forms began as dance and party music before its growing popularity eventually energized both record sales and radio formats.

Racial Integration Expands Rock and Roll Perhaps the most significant factor in the growth of rock and roll was the beginning of the integration of white and black cultures. In addition to increased exposure of black literature, art, and music, several key historical events in the 1950s broke down the borders between black and white cultures. In the early 1950s, President Truman signed an executive order integrating the armed forces, bringing young men from very different ethnic and economic backgrounds together. Even more significant was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Edu- cation decision in 1954. With this ruling, “separate but equal” laws, which had kept white and black schools, hotels, restaurants, restrooms, and drinking fountains segregated for decades, were declared unconstitutional. Thus mainstream America began to wrestle seriously with the legacy of slavery and the unequal treatment of its African American citizens. A cultural reflection of the times, rock and roll would burst forth from the midst of these social and political tensions.

Rock Muddies the Waters In the 1950s, legal integration accompanied a cultural shift, and the music industry’s race and pop charts blurred. White deejay Alan Freed had been playing black music for his young audi- ences in Cleveland and New York since the early 1950s, and such white performers as Johnnie Ray and Bill Haley had crossed over to the race charts to score R&B hits. Meanwhile, black artists like Chuck Berry were performing country songs, and for a time Ray Charles even played in an otherwise all-white country band. Although continuing the work of breaking down racial borders was one of rock and roll’s most important contributions, it also blurred other long- standing boundaries. Rock and roll exploded old distinctions between high and low culture, masculinity and femininity, the country and the city, the North and the South, and the sacred and the secular.

High and Low Culture In 1956, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” merged rock and roll, considered low culture by many, with high culture, thus forever blurring the traditional boundary between them with lyrics like: “You know my temperature’s risin’ / the jukebox is blowin’ a fuse . . . Roll over

BESSIE SMITH (1895– 1937) is considered the best female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. Mentored by the famous Ma Rainey, Smith’s hits include “Down Hearted Blues” and “Gulf Coast Blues.” She also appeared in the 1929 film St. Louis Blues.

“The songs of Muddy Waters impelled me to deliver the down- home blues in the language they came from, Negro dialect. When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so that it was harder and whiter. All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and white clientele.”

CHUCK BERRY, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1987

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

84��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

Beethoven / and tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Although such early rock-and-roll lyr- ics seem tame by today’s standards, at the time they sounded like sacrilege. Rock and rollers also challenged music decorum and the rules governing how musicians should behave or misbehave: Berry’s “duck walk” across the stage, Elvis Presley’s pegged pants and gyrating hips, and Bo Diddley’s use of the guitar as a phallic symbol were an affront to the norms of well-behaved, culturally elite audiences. Such antics would be imitated endlessly throughout rock’s history. In fact, rock and roll’s live shows and the legends surrounding them became key ingredients in promoting record sales.

The blurring of cultures works both ways. Since the advent of rock and roll, musicians performing in traditionally high culture genres such as classical have even adopted some of rock and roll’s ideas in an effort to boost sales and popular- ity. Some virtuosos like violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Matt Haimovitz (who does his own version of Jimi Hendrix’s famous improvisation of the national anthem) have performed in jeans and in untraditional venues like bars and subway stations to reinterpret the presentation of classical music.

Masculinity and Femininity Rock and roll was also the first popular music genre to overtly confuse issues of sexual identity and orientation. Although early rock and roll largely attracted males as performers, the most fascinating feature of Elvis Presley, according to the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, was his androgynous appearance.15 During this early period, though, the most sexually outrageous rock-and-roll performer was Little Richard (Penniman), who influenced a generation of extravagant rock stars.

Wearing a pompadour hairdo and assaulting his Steinway piano, Little Richard was consid- ered rock and roll’s first drag queen, blurring the boundary between masculinity and feminin- ity (although his act had been influenced by a flamboyant 6½-foot-tall gay piano player named Esquerita, who hosted drag-queen shows in New Orleans in the 1940s).16 Little Richard has said that given the reality of American racism, he blurred gender and sexuality lines because he feared the consequences of becoming a sex symbol for white girls: “I decided that my image should be crazy and way out so that adults would think I was harmless. I’d appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and in the next as the pope.”17 Although white parents in the 1950s may not have been concerned about their daughters falling for Little Richard, many saw him as a threat to traditional gender roles and viewed his sexual identity and possible sexual orientation as anything but harmless. Little Richard’s playful blurring of gender identity and sexual orientation paved the way for performers like David Bowie, Elton John, Boy George, An- nie Lennox, Prince, Grace Jones, Marilyn Manson, and Adam Lambert.

The Country and the City Rock and roll also blurred geographic borders between country and city, between the black ur- ban rhythms of Memphis and the white country & western music of Nashville. Early white rock- ers such as Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins combined country or hillbilly music, southern gospel, and Mississippi delta blues to create a sound called rockabilly. Raised on bluegrass music and radio’s Grand Ole Opry, Perkins (a sharecropper’s son from Tennessee) mixed these influences with music he heard from black cotton-field workers and blues singers like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, both of whom used electric guitars in their performances.

Conversely, rhythm and blues spilled into rock and roll. The urban R&B influences on early rock came from Fats Domino (“Blueberry Hill”), Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton (“Hound Dog”), and Big Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”). Many of these songs, first popular on R&B

ROCK AND ROLL PIONEER A major influence on early rock and roll, Chuck Berry, born in 1926, scored major hits between 1955 and 1958, writing “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Day,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Johnny B. Goode.” At the time, he was criticized by some black artists for sounding white and by conservative critics for his popularity among white teenagers. Today, young guitar players routinely imitate his style.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��85

labels, crossed over to the pop charts during the mid- to late 1950s (although many were performed by more widely known white artists). Chuck Berry bor- rowed from white country & western music (an old country song called “Ida Red”) and combined it with R&B to write “Maybellene.” His first hit, the song was No. 1 on the R&B chart in July 1955 and crossed over to the pop charts the next month.

Although rock lyrics in the 1950s may not have been especially provoca- tive or overtly political, soaring record sales and the crossover appeal of the music itself represented an enormous threat to long-standing racial and class boundaries. In 1956, the secretary of the North Alabama White Citizens Council bluntly spelled out the racism and white fear concerning the new blending of urban/black and rural/white culture: “Rock and roll is a means of pulling the white man down to the level of the Negro. It is part of a plot to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation.”18 These days, distinctions between traditionally rural music and urban music continue to blur, with older hybrids such as country rock (think of the Eagles) and newer forms like “alternative country,” with performers like Ryan Adams, Steve Earle, Wilco, and Kings of Leon.

The North and the South Not only did rock and roll muddy the urban and rural terrain, it also combined northern and southern influences. In fact, with so much blues, R&B, and rock and roll rising from the South in the 1950s, this region regained some of its cultural flavor, which (along with a sizable portion of the population) had migrated to the North after the Civil War and during the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, musicians and audiences in the North had absorbed blues music as their own, eliminating the understanding of blues as specifically a southern style. Like the many white teens today who are fascinated by hip-hop (buying the majority of hip-hop CDs on the commercial market), Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly—all from the rural South— were fascinated with and influenced by the black urban styles they had heard on the radio or seen in nightclubs. These artists in turn brought southern culture to northern listeners.

But the key to record sales and the spread of rock and roll, according to famed record producer Sam Phillips of Sun Records, was to find a white man who sounded black. Phillips found that man in Elvis Presley. Commenting on Presley’s cultural importance, one critic wrote: “White rockabillies like Elvis took poor white southern mannerisms of speech and behavior deeper into mainstream culture than they had ever been taken.”19

The Sacred and the Secular Although many mainstream adults in the 1950s complained that rock and roll’s sexuality and questioning of moral norms constituted an offense against God, in fact many early rock figures had close ties to religion. As a boy, Elvis Presley dreamed of joining the Blackwoods, one of country-gospel’s most influential groups; Jerry Lee Lewis attended a Bible institute in Texas (although he was eventually thrown out); Ray Charles converted an old gospel tune he had first heard in church as a youth into “I Got a Woman,” one of his signature songs; and many other artists transformed gospel songs into rock and roll.

Still, many people did not appreciate the blurring of boundaries between the sacred and the secular. In the late 1950s, public outrage over rock and roll was so great that even Little Rich- ard and Jerry Lee Lewis, both sons of southern preachers, became convinced that they were playing the “devil’s music.” By 1959, Little Richard had left rock and roll to become a minister. Lewis, too, feared that rock was no way to salvation. He had to be coerced into recording “Great Balls of Fire,” a song by Otis Blackwell that turned an apocalyptic biblical phrase into a highly

ADAM LAMBERT Like Little Richard, David Bowie, and Prince before him, Lambert is the most recent popular artist to push the boundaries between traditional gender roles. As a contestant on American Idol, he became known for his music as much as for his glam-rock leather outfits and consistent use of makeup and “guyliner.”

“[Elvis Presley’s] kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac.”

FRANK SINATRA, 1956

“There have been many accolades uttered about [Presley’s] talent and performan- ces through the years, all of which I agree with wholeheartedly.”

FRANK SINATRA, 1977

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

86��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

charged sexual teen love song that was banned by many radio stations, but nevertheless climbed to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1957. Throughout the rock and roll era to today, the bound- aries between sacred and secular music and religious and secular concerns continue to blur, with some churches using rock and roll to appeal to youth, and some Christian-themed rock groups recording music as seemingly incongruous as heavy metal.

Battles in Rock and Roll The blurring of racial lines and the breakdown of other con- ventional boundaries meant that performers and producers were forced to play a tricky game to get rock and roll accepted by the masses. Two prominent white disc jockeys used differ- ent methods. Cleveland deejay Alan Freed, credited with popu- larizing the term rock and roll, played original R&B recordings from the race charts and black versions of early rock and roll on his program. In contrast, Philadelphia deejay Dick Clark be- lieved that making black music acceptable to white audiences

required cover versions by white artists. By the mid-1950s, rock and roll was gaining acceptance with the masses, but rock and roll artists and promoters still faced further obstacles: Black artists found that they were often undermined by white cover versions; the payola scandals portrayed rock and roll as a corrupt industry; and fears of rock and roll as a contributing factor in juvenile delinquency resulted in censorship.

White Cover Music Undermines Black Artists By the mid-1960s, black and white artists routinely recorded and performed one another’s original tunes. For example, established black R&B artist Otis Redding covered the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Jimi Hendrix covered Bob Dylan’s “All along the Watchtower,” while just about every white rock and roll band established its career by covering R&B classics. Most notably, the Beatles covered “Twist and Shout” and “Money” and the Rolling Stones—whose name came from a Muddy Waters song—covered numerous Robert Johnson songs and other blues staples.

Although today we take such rerecordings for granted, in the 1950s the covering of black artists’ songs by white musicians was almost always an attempt to capitalize on popular songs from the R&B “race” charts and transform them into hits on the white pop charts. Often, white producers would not only give co-writing credit to white performers like Elvis Presley (who never wrote songs himself ) for the tunes they only covered, but they would also buy the rights to potential hits from black songwriters who seldom saw a penny in royalties or received song- writing credit.

During this period, black R&B artists, working for small record labels, saw many of their popular songs covered by white artists working for major labels. These cover records, boosted by better marketing and ties to white deejays, usually outsold the original black versions. For instance, the 1954 R&B song “Sh-Boom,” by the Chords on Atlantic’s Cat label, was immediately covered by a white group, the Crew Cuts, for the major Mercury label. Record sales declined for the Chords, although jukebox and R&B radio play remained strong for their original version. By 1955, R&B hits regularly crossed over to the pop charts, but inevitably the cover music versions were more successful. Pat Boone’s cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” went to No. 1 and stayed on the Top 40’s pop chart for twenty weeks, whereas Domino’s original made it only

ELVIS PRESLEY Although his unofficial title, “King of Rock and Roll,” has been challenged by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley remains the most popular solo artist of all time. From 1956 to 1962, he recorded seventeen No. 1 hits, from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Good Luck Charm.” According to Little Richard, Presley’s main legacy was that he opened doors for many young performers and made black music popular in mainstream America.

“Consistently through history it’s been black American music that’s been at the cutting edge of technology.”

MARK COLEMAN, MUSIC HISTORIAN, 2004

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��87

to No. 10. During this time, Pat Boone ranked as the king of cover music, with thirty- eight Top 40 songs between 1955 and 1962. His records were second in sales only to Presley’s. Slowly, however, the cover situation changed. After watching Boone outsell his song “Tutti-Frutti” in 1956, Little Richard wrote “Long Tall Sally,” which included lyrics written and delivered in such a way that he believed Boone would not be able to adequately replicate them. “Long Tall Sally” went to No. 6 for Little Richard and charted for twelve weeks; Boone’s version got to No. 8 and stayed there for nine weeks.

Overt racism lingered in the music business well into the 1960s. When the Mar- velettes scored a No. 1 hit with “Please Mr. Postman” in 1961, their Tamla/Motown label had to substitute a cartoon album cover because many record-store owners feared customers would not buy a recording that pictured four black women. A turning point, however, came in 1962, the last year that Pat Boone, then age twenty- eight, ever had a Top 40 rock-and-roll hit. That year, Ray Charles covered “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” a 1958 country song by the Grand Ole Opry’s Don Gibson. This marked the first time that a black artist, covering a white artist’s song, had notched a No. 1 pop hit. With Charles’s cover, the rock-and-roll merger between gospel and R&B, on one hand, and white country and pop, on the other, was complete. In fact, the relative acceptance of black crossover music provided a more favorable cultural context for the political activism that spurred important Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s.

Payola Scandals Tarnish Rock and Roll The payola scandals of the 1950s were another cloud over rock and roll music and its artists. In the music industry, payola is the practice of record promoters paying deejays or radio program- mers to play particular songs. As recorded rock and roll became central to commercial radio’s success in the 1950s and the demand for airplay grew enormous, independent promoters hired by record labels used payola to pressure deejays into playing songs by the artists they repre- sented.

Although payola was considered a form of bribery, no laws prohibited its practice. How- ever, following closely on the heels of television’s quiz-show scandals (see Chapter 5), congres- sional hearings on radio payola began in December 1959. After a November announcement of the upcoming hearings, stations across the country fired deejays, and many others resigned. The hearings were partly a response to generally fraudulent business practices, but they were also an opportunity to blame deejays and radio for rock and roll’s negative impact on teens by portraying it as a corrupt industry.

The payola scandals threatened, ended, or damaged the careers of a number of rock and roll deejays and undermined rock and roll’s credibility for a number of years. In 1959, shortly before the hearings, Chicago deejay Phil Lind decided to clear the air. He broadcast secretly taped discussions in which a representative of a small independent record label acknowledged that it had paid $22,000 to ensure that a record would get airplay. Lind received calls threaten- ing his life and had to have police protection. At the hearings in 1960, Alan Freed admitted to participating in payola, although he said he did not believe there was anything illegal about such deals, and his career soon ended. Dick Clark, then an influential deejay and the host of TV’s American Bandstand, would not admit to participating in payola. But the hearings committee chastised Clark and alleged that some of his complicated business deals were ethically question- able, a censure that hung over him for years.

Congress eventually added a law concerning payola to the Federal Communications Act, pre- scribing a $10,000 fine and/or a year in jail for each violation. But given both the interdependence

MUSIC INDUSTRY RACISM manifested in many ways. Despite The Marvelettes’ song “Please Mr. Postman” reaching No. 1 in 1961, fear that customers might not buy an album that pictured black women caused the record label to substitute their images with a cartoon.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

88��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

between radio and recording and the high stakes involved in creating a hit, the practice of payola persists. In 2005, for example, Sony BMG and Warner Music paid millions to settle payola cases brought by New York State (see Chapter 4).

Fears of Corruption Lead to Censorship Since rock and roll’s inception, one of the uphill battles it faced was the perception that it was a cause of juvenile delinquency. In truth, juvenile delinquency was statistically on the rise in the 1950s. Looking for an easy culprit rather than considering contributing factors such as neglect, the rising consumer culture, or the growing youth population, many assigned blame to rock and roll. The view that rock and roll corrupted youth was widely accepted by social authorities, and rock and roll music was often censored, eventually even by the industry itself.

By late 1959, many key figures in rock and roll had been tamed. Jerry Lee Lewis was exiled from the industry, labeled southern “white trash” for marrying his thirteen-year-old third cous- in; Elvis Presley, having already been censored on television, was drafted into the army; Chuck Berry was run out of Mississippi and eventually jailed for gun possession and transporting a mi- nor across state lines; and Little Richard felt forced to tone down his image and leave rock and roll to sing gospel music. A tragic accident led to the final taming of rock and roll’s first frontline. In February 1959, Buddy Holly (“Peggy Sue”), Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”), and the Big Bopper (“Chantilly Lace”) all died in an Iowa plane crash—a tragedy mourned in Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie” as “the day the music died.”

Although rock and roll did not die in the late 1950s, the U.S. recording industry decided that it needed a makeover. To protect the enormous profits the new music had been generating, record companies began to discipline some of rock and roll’s rebellious impulses. In the early 1960s, the industry introduced a new generation of clean-cut white singers, like Frankie Avalon, Connie Francis, Ricky Nelson, Lesley Gore, and Fabian. Rock and roll’s explosive violations of racial, class, and other boundaries were transformed into simpler generation gap problems, and the music developed a milder reputation.

A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music

As the 1960s began, rock and roll was tamer and “safer,” as reflected in the surf and road music of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, but it was also beginning to branch out. For instance, the success of producer Phil Spector’s “girl groups,” such as the Crystals (“He’s a Rebel”) and the Ronettes (“Be My Baby”), and other all-female groups, such as the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”) and the Angels (“My Boyfriend’s Back”), challenged the male-dominated world of early rock and roll. In addition, rock and roll music and other popular styles went through cultural reformations that significantly changed the industry, including the international appeal of the “British invasion”; the development of soul and Motown; the political impact of folk-rock; the experimentalism of psychedelic music; the rejection of music’s mainstream by punk, grunge, and alternative rock movements; and the reassertion of black urban style in hip-hop.

The British Are Coming! Rock recordings today remain among America’s largest economic exports, bringing in billions of dollars a year from abroad. In cultural terms, the global trade of rock and roll is even more

“Hard rock was rock’s blues base electrified and upped in volume . . . heavy metal wanted to be the rock music equiv- alent of a horror movie—loud, exaggerated, rude, out for thrills only.”

KEN TUCKER, ROCK OF AGES, 1986

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��89

evident in exchanges of rhythms, beats, vocal styles, and musical instruments to and from the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. The origin of rock’s global impact can be traced to England in the late 1950s, when the young Rolling Stones listened to the urban blues of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and the young Beatles tried to imitate Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Until 1964, rock-and-roll recordings had traveled on a one-way ticket to Europe. Even though American artists regularly reached the top of the charts overseas, no British performers had yet appeared on any Top 10 pop lists in the States. This changed almost overnight. In 1964, the Beatles invaded America with their mop haircuts and pop reinterpretations of American blues and rock and roll. Within the next few years, more British bands as diverse as the Kinks, the Zombies, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, the Who, the Yardbirds, Them, and the Troggs had hit the American Top 40 charts.

Ed Sullivan, who booked the Beatles several times on his TV variety show in 1964, helped promote their early success. Sullivan, though, reacted differently to the Rolling Stones, who were always perceived by Sullivan and many others as the “bad boys” of rock and roll in con- trast to the “good” Beatles. The Stones performed black-influenced music without “whitening” the sound and exuded a palpable aura of sexuality, particularly frontman Mick Jagger. Although the Stones appeared on his program as early as 1964 and returned on several occasions, Sul- livan remained wary and forced them to change the lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” for a 1967 broadcast. The band complied, but it had no effect on their “dangerous” reputation.

With the British invasion, “rock and roll” unofficially became “rock,” sending popular mu- sic and the industry in two directions. On the one hand, the Stones would influence generations of musicians emphasizing gritty, chord-driven, high-volume rock, including bands in the glam rock, hard rock, punk, heavy metal, and grunge genres. On the other hand, the Beatles would influence countless artists interested in a more accessible, melodic, and softer sound, in genres such as pop-rock, power-pop, new wave, and alternative rock. In the end, the British invasion verified what Chuck Berry and Little Richard had already demonstrated—that rock-and-roll

BRITISH ROCK GROUPS like the Beatles (above, left) and the Rolling Stones (above) first invaded American pop charts in the 1960s. When the Beatles broke up in 1970, each member went on to work on solo projects. The Stones are still together and touring over forty years later.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

90��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

performers could write and produce popular songs as well as Tin Pan Alley had. The success of British groups helped change an industry arrangement in which most pop music was produced by songwriting teams hired by major labels and matched with selected performers. Even more important, the British invasion showed the recording industry how older American musical forms, especially blues and R&B, could be repackaged as rock and exported around the world.

Motor City Music: Detroit Gives America Soul Ironically, the British invasion, which drew much of its inspiration from black influences, drew many white listeners away from a new generation of black performers. Gradually, however, throughout the 1960s, black singers like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Ike and Tina Turner, and Wilson Pickett found large and diverse audiences. Transforming the rhythms and melodies of older R&B, pop, and early rock and roll into what became labeled as soul, they countered the British invaders with powerful vocal performances. Mixing gospel and blues with emotion and lyrics drawn from the American black experience, soul contrasted sharply with the emphasis on loud, fast instrumentals and lighter lyrical concerns that characterized much of rock music.20

The most prominent independent label that nourished soul and black popular music was Motown, started in 1959 by former Detroit autoworker and songwriter Berry Gordy with a $700 investment and named after Detroit’s “Motor City” nickname. Beginning with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Shop Around,” which hit No. 2 in 1960, Motown enjoyed a long string of hit records that rivaled the pop success of British bands throughout the decade. Motown’s many successful artists included the Temptations (“My Girl”), Mary Wells (“My Guy”), the Four Tops (“I Can’t Help Myself ”), Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave”), Marvin Gaye (“I Heard It through the Grapevine”), and, in the early 1970s, the Jackson 5 (“ABC”). But the label’s most suc- cessful group was the Supremes, featuring Diana Ross, who scored twelve No. 1 singles between 1964 and 1969 (“Where Did Our Love Go,” “Stop! In the Name of Love”). The Motown groups had a more stylized, softer sound than the grittier southern soul (later known as funk) of Brown

THE SUPREMES One of the most successful groups in rock-and–roll history, the Supremes started out as the Primettes in Detroit in 1959. They signed with Motown’s Tamla label in 1960 and changed their name in 1961. Between 1964 and 1969 they recorded twelve No. 1 hits, including “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See about Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and “Someday We’ll Be Together.” Lead singer Diana Ross (center) left the group in 1969 for a solo career. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��91

and Pickett. Motown producers realized at the outset that by cultivating romance and dance over rebellion and politics, black music could attract a young, white audience.

Folk and Psychedelic Music Reflect the Times Popular music has always been a product of its time, so the social upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the Vietnam War naturally brought social concerns into the music of the 1960s and early 1970s. Even Motown acts sounded edgy, with hits like Edwin Starr’s “War” (1970) and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” (1971). By the late 1960s, the Beatles had transformed themselves from a relatively lightweight pop band to one that spoke for the social and political concerns of their generation, and many other groups followed the same trajectory.

Folk Inspires Protest The musical genre that most clearly responded to the political happenings of the time was folk music, which had long been the sound of social activism. In its broadest sense, folk music in any culture refers to songs performed by untrained musicians and passed down mainly through oral traditions, from the banjo and fiddle tunes of Appalachia to the accordion-led zydeco of Louisiana and the folk-blues of the legend- ary Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter). During the 1930s, folk was defined by the music of Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”), who not only brought folk to the city but also was extremely active in social reforms. Groups such as the Weavers, featuring labor activist and songwriter Pete Seeger, carried on Guthrie’s legacy and inspired a new generation of singer-songwriters, including Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Phil Ochs; and—perhaps the most influential—Bob Dylan. Dylan’s career as a folk artist began with acoustic performances in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961, and his notoriety was spurred by his measured nonchalance and unique nasal voice. Significantly influenced by the blues, Dylan identified folk as “finger pointin’” music that addressed current social circumstances. At a key moment in popular mu- sic’s history, Dylan walked onstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival fronting a full, electric rock band. He was booed and cursed by traditional “folkies,” who saw amplified music as a sellout to the commercial recording industry. However, Dylan’s move to rock was aimed at reaching a broader and younger constituency, and in doing so he inspired the formation of folk- rock artists like the Byrds, who had a No. 1 hit with a cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and led millions to protest during the turbulent 1960s.

Rock Turns Psychedelic Alcohol and drugs have long been associated with the private lives of blues, jazz, country, and rock musicians. These links, however, became much more public in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when authorities busted members of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. With the increas- ing role of drugs in youth culture and the availability of LSD (not illegal until the mid-1960s), more and more rock musicians experimented with and sang about drugs in what were frequently labeled rock’s psychedelic years. Many groups and performers of the psychedelic era (named for the mind-altering effects of LSD and other drugs) like the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin), the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, and the Grateful Dead (as well as established artists like the Beatles and the Stones) believed that artistic expression could be enhanced by mind-altering drugs. The 1960s drug explorations coincided with the free-speech movement, in which many artists and followers saw experimenting with drugs as a form of personal expression and a response to the failure of traditional institutions

BOB DYLAN Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota, Bob Dylan took his stage name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He led a folk music movement in the early 1960s with engaging, socially provocative lyrics. He also was an astute media critic, as is evident in the seminal documentary Don’t Look Back (1967).

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

92��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

to deal with social and political problems such as racism and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. But after a surge of optimism that culminated in the historic Woodstock concert in August 1969, the psychedelic movement was quickly overshadowed. In 1970, a similar con- cert at the Altamont racetrack in California started in chaos and ended in tragedy when one of the Hell’s Angels hired as a bodyguard for the show murdered a concertgoer. Around the same time, the shocking multiple murders committed by the Charles Manson “family” cast a negative light on hippies, drug use, and psychedelic culture. Then, in quick succession, a number of the psychedelic movement’s greatest stars died from drug overdoses, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison of the Doors.

Punk, Grunge, and Alternative Respond to Mainstream Rock Considered a major part of the rebel counterculture in the 1960s, rock music in the 1970s was increasingly viewed as just another part of mainstream consumer culture. With major music acts earning huge profits, rock soon became another product line for manufacturers and retail- ers to promote, package, and sell. Although some rock musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Elton John; glam artists like David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop; and soul artists like Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye continued to explore the social possibilities of rock or at least keep its legacy of outrageousness alive, the radio and sound recording businesses had returned to

marketing music primarily to middle-class white male teens. According to critic Ken Tucker, this situation gave rise to “faceless rock—crisply recorded, eminently catchy,” featuring anonymous hits by bands with “no established individual per- sonalities outside their own large but essentially discrete audi- ences” of young white males.21 Challenging artists, for the most part, didn’t sell records anymore. They had been replaced by “faceless” supergroups like REO Speedwagon, Styx, Boston, and Kansas that could fill up stadiums and entertain the largest number of people with the least amount of controversy. By the late 1970s, rock could only seem to define itself by saying what it wasn’t; “Disco Sucks” became a standard rock slogan against the popular dance music of the era.

Punk Revives Rock’s Rebelliousness After a few years, punk rock rose in the late 1970s to challenge the orthodoxy and commercialism of the record business. By

this time, the glory days of rock’s competitive independent labels had ended, and rock music was controlled by just a half-dozen major companies. By avoiding rock’s consumer popular- ity, punk attempted to return to the basics of rock and roll: simple chord structures, catchy melodies, and politically or socially challenging lyrics. The premise was “do it yourself”: Any teenager with a few weeks of guitar practice could learn the sound and make music that was both more democratic and more provocative than commercial rock.

The punk movement took root in the small dive bar CBGB in New York City around bands such as the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads. (The roots of punk essentially lay in four pre-punk groups from the late 1960s and early 1970s—the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, and the MC5—none of whom experienced commercial success in their day.) Punk quickly spread to England, where a soaring unemployment rate and growing class inequality ensured the success of socially critical rock. Groups like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks, and Siouxsie and the Banshees sprang up and even scored Top 40 hits on the U.K.

“Through their raw, nihilistic singles and violent performances, the [Sex Pistols] revolutionized the idea of what rock and roll could be.”

STEPHEN THOMAS ERLEWINE, ALL-MUSIC GUIDE, 1996

THE TALKING HEADS’ first gig was opening for the Ramones at the infamous New York City punk club CBGB. Over a two decade- plus career, the band become music legends with songs like “Psycho Killer,” “Life during Wartime,” and “Burning Down the House.” Known for their artistic style, the original three band members (David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth) all went to the Rhode Island School of Design together.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��93

charts. Despite their popularity, the Sex Pistols, one of the most controversial groups in rock history, was eventually banned for offending British decorum.

Punk, which condemned the mainstream music industry, was not a com- mercial success in the United States, where (not surprisingly) it was shunned by radio. However, punk’s contributions continue to be felt. Punk broke down the “boy’s club” mentality of rock, launching unapologetic and unadorned front women like Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, and Chrissie Hynde; and it introduced all-women bands (writing and performing their own music) like the Go Go’s into the mainstream. It also reopened the door to rock experimen- tation at a time when the industry had turned music into a purely commercial enterprise. The influence of experimental, or post-punk, is still felt today in popular bands such as Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Franz Ferdinand.

Grunge and Alternative Reinterpret Rock Taking the spirit of punk and updating it, the grunge scene represented a significant development in rock in the 1990s. Getting its name from its often messy guitar sound and the anti-fashion torn jeans and flannel shirt appear- ance of its musicians and fans, grunge’s lineage can be traced back to 1980s bands like Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, and Hüsker Dü. In 1992, after years of limited commercial success, the younger cousin of punk finally broke into the American mainstream with the success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the album Nevermind. Led by enigmatic singer Kurt Cobain—who committed suicide in 1994—Nirvana produced songs that one critic described as “stunning, concise bursts of melody and rage that occasionally spilled over into haunting, folk-styled acoustic ballad.”22 Nirvana opened up the floodgates to bands such as Green Day, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, the Breeders, Hole, Nine Inch Nails, and many others.

In some critical circles, both punk and grunge are considered subcategories or fringe movements of alternative rock, even though grunge was far more commercially successful than punk. This vague label describes many types of experimental rock music that offered a departure from the theatrics and staged extravaganzas of 1970s glam rock, which showcased such performers as David Bowie and Kiss. Appealing chiefly to college students and twenty- somethings, alternative rock has traditionally opposed the sounds of Top 40 and commercial FM radio. In the 1980s and 1990s, U2 and R.E.M. emerged as successful groups often associ- ated with alternative rock. A key dilemma for successful alternative performers, however, is that their popularity results in commercial success, ironically a situation that their music often criticizes. While alternative rock music has more variety than ever, it is also not produc- ing new mega-groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Green Day. Still, alternative groups like Friendly Fires, Vampire Weekend, and MGMT have launched successful recording careers the old-school way, but with a twist: starting out on independent labels, playing small concerts, and growing popular quickly with alternative music audiences through the immediate buzz of the Internet.

Hip-Hop Redraws Musical Lines With the growing segregation of radio formats and the dominance of mainstream rock by white male performers, the place of black artists in the rock world diminished from the late 1970s onward. By the 1980s, few popular black successors to Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix had emerged in rock, though Michael Jackson and Prince were extremely popular exceptions. These trends, combined with the rise of “safe” dance disco by white bands (the Bee Gees), black artists

NIRVANA’S lead singer, Kurt Cobain, during his brief career in the early 1990s. The release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in September 1991 bumped Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the top of the charts and signaled a new direction in popular music. Other grunge bands soon followed Nirvana onto the charts, including Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

94��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

(Donna Summer), and integrated groups (the Village People), created a space for a new sound to emerge: hip-hop, a term for the urban culture that includes rapping, cutting (or sampling) by deejays, breakdancing, street clothing, poetry slams, and graffiti art.

Similar to punk’s opposition to commercial rock, hip-hop music stood in direct opposi- tion to the polished, professional, and often less political world of soul. Its combination of social politics, swagger, and confrontational lyrics carried forward long-standing traditions in blues, R&B, soul, and rock and roll. Like punk, hip-hop was driven by a democratic, nonpro- fessional spirit—accessible to anyone who could rap or cut records on a turntable. Deejays, like the pioneering Jamaica émigré Clive Campbell (a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc), emerged first in New York, scratching and re-cueing old reggae, disco, soul, and rock albums. These deejays, or MCs (masters of ceremony), used humor, boasts, and “trash talking” to entertain and keep the peace at parties.

Not knowing about the long-standing party tradition, the music industry initially saw hip-hop as a novelty, despite the enormous success of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 (which sampled the bass beat of a disco hit from the same year, Chic’s “Good Times”). Then, in 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released “The Message” and forever infused hip-hop with a political take on ghetto life, a tradition continued by artists like Public Enemy and Ice-T. By 1985, hip-hop exploded as a popular genre with the commercial successes of groups like Run-DMC, the Fat Boys, and LL Cool J. That year, Run-DMC’s album Raising Hell became a major crossover hit, the first No. 1 hip-hop album on the popular charts (thanks in part to a collaboration with Aerosmith on a rap version of the group’s 1976 hit “Walk This Way”). Like punk and early rock and roll, hip-hop was cheap to produce, requiring only a few mikes, speakers, amps, turntables, and vinyl record albums. Because most major labels and many black radio stations rejected the rawness of hip-hop, the music spawned hundreds of new independent labels. Although initially dominated by male performers, hip-hop was open to women, and some—Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah among them—quickly became major players. Soon, white groups like the Beastie Boys, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock were combining hip-hop and punk rock in a commercially successful way, while Eminem found enormous success emu- lating black rap artists.

On the one hand, the conversational style of rap makes it a forum in which performers can debate issues of gender, class, sexuality, violence, and drugs. On the other hand, hip-hop, like punk, has often drawn criticism for lyrics that degrade women, espouse homophobia,

THE BUSINESS OF HIP-HOP Jay-Z and Beyoncé are two of the most recognizable faces in hip-hop and R&B. With his 1998 album Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life, Jay-Z became one of the most critically and commercially successful hip-hop artists of the decade, parlaying his musical career into several successful business ventures. After launching her solo career with Dangerously in Love in 2003, Beyoncé expanded her empire through her acting career (Dreamgirls, Cadillac Records), clothing line, and endorsement deals. With their combined earning power and media influence, the pair was recognized as Forbes magazine’s top “power couple” in 2008.

“We’re like report- ers. We give them [our listeners] the truth. People where we come from hear so many lies the truth stands out like a sore thumb.”

EAZY-E, N.W.A., 1989

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��95

and applaud violence. Although hip-hop encompasses many different styles, including various Latin and Asian offshoots, its most controversial subgenre is probably gangster rap, which, in seeking to tell the truth about gang violence in American culture, has been accused of creating violence. Gangster rap drew national attention in 1996 with the shooting death of Tupac Shakur, who lived the violent life he rapped about on albums like Thug Life. Then, in 1997, Notori- ous B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls), whose followers were prominent suspects in Shakur’s death, was shot to death in Hollywood. The result was a change in the hip-hop industry. Most prominently, Sean “Diddy” Combs led Bad Boy Entertainment (former home of Notorious B.I.G.) away from gangster rap to a more danceable hip-hop that combined singing and rapping with musical elements of rock and soul. Today, hip-hop’s stars in- clude artists such as 50 Cent, who emulates the gangster genre, and artists like will.i.am, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli, who bring an old-school social consciousness to their performances.

The Reemergence of Pop After waves of punk, grunge, alternative, and hip-hop, the decline of Top 40 radio, and the demise of MTV’s Total Request Live countdown show, it seemed like pop music and the era of big pop stars was waning. But, pop music has endured, and even flourished in recent years, with American Idol spawning a few genuine pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Un- derwood. More recently, the television show Glee has given a second life to older hits like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” on the pop charts. But perhaps the biggest purveyor of pop is iTunes, which is also the biggest single seller of recorded music. As iTunes celebrated its ten billionth download in 2010, it listed its all-time top songs—all by leading pop artists like Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Jason Mraz, Rihanna, Leona Lewis, Miley Cyrus, P!nk, Katy Perry, and Beyoncé.

The Business of Sound Recording

For many in the recording industry, the relationship between music’s business and artistic elements is an uneasy one. The lyrics of hip-hop or alternative rock, for example, often ques- tion the commercial value of popular music. Both genres are built on the assumption that mu- sical integrity requires a complete separation between business and art. But, in fact, the line between commercial success and artistic expression is hazier than simply arguing that the business side is driven by commercialism and the artistic side is free of commercial concerns. The truth, in most cases, is that the business needs artists who are provocative, original, and appealing to the public; and the artists need the expertise of the industry’s marketers, promoters, and producers to hone their sound and reach the public. And both sides stand to make a lot of money from the relationship. But such factors as the enormity of the major labels and the complexities of making, selling, and profiting from music affect the business of sound recording.

LADY GAGA is currently leading the pack of artists reclaiming the pop/dance music scene. With four No. 1 hits in 2009 and multiple Billboard, Grammy, and MTV Music Video awards, Gaga was an instant media sensation for her unique fashion choices, artistic and edgy videos, and catchy pop songs.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

96��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

Sony Music Entertainment

28.5%

Warner Music Group

Universal Music Group

30.2%

Independents

EMI Music

11.6%

9.2%

20.5%

Music Labels Influence the Industry After several years of steady growth, revenues for the recording industry experienced significant losses beginning in 2000 as file- sharing began to undercut CD sales. By 2009, U.S. music sales fell to $7.7 billion, down from a peak of $14.5 billion in 1999. The U.S. market accounts for about one-third of global sales, followed by Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada. Despite the losses, the U.S. and global music business still consti- tutes a powerful oligopoly: a business situation in which a few firms control most of an industry’s production and distribution resources. This global reach gives these firms enormous influ- ence over what types of music gain worldwide distribution and popular acceptance. (See “What Sony Owns” on page 97.)

Fewer Major Labels Control More Music From the 1950s through the 1980s, the music industry, though powerful, consisted of a large num- ber of competing major labels, along with numerous independent labels. Over time, the major la- bels began swallowing up the independents and then buying one another. By 1998, only six major labels remained—Universal, Warner, Sony, BMG, EMI, and Polygram. That year, Universal acquired Polygram, and in 2003 BMG and Sony merged. (BMG left the partnership in 2008.) Today, only four major music corporations remain: Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, EMI, and Warner Music Group. Together, the four companies control more than 85 percent of the re- cording industry market in the United States (see Figure 3.2). By 2010, EMI experienced continued financial difficulties, and its possible sale threatened to bring more consolidation to the industry.

The Indies Spot the Trends In contrast to the four global players, some five thousand large and small independent produc- tion houses—or indies—record less commercially viable music, or music they hope will become commercially viable. Producing between 11 and 15 percent of America’s music, indies often enter into deals with majors to gain wider distribution for their artists. The Internet has also become a low-cost distribution outlet for independent labels, which sell recordings and merchandise and list tour schedules online. (See “Alternative Voices” on page 101.)

The majors frequently rely on indies to discover and initiate distinctive musical trends that first appear on a local level. For instance, indies such as Sugarhill, Tommy Boy, and Uptown emerged in the 1980s to produce regional hip-hop. In the early 2000s, bands of the “indie-rock” movement, such as Yo La Tengo and Arcade Fire, found their home on indie labels Matador and Merge. Once indies become successful, the financial inducement to sell out to a major label is enormous. Seattle indie Sub Pop (Nirvana’s initial recording label) sold 49 percent of its stock to Time Warner for $20 million in 1994. However, the punk label Epitaph rejected takeover offers as high as $50 million in the 1990s and remains independent. All four major labels look for and swal- low up independent labels that have successfully developed artists with national or global appeal.

Making, Selling, and Profiting from Music Like most mass media, the music business is divided into several areas, each working in a dif- ferent capacity. In the music industry, those areas are making the music (signing, developing, and recording the artist), selling the music (selling, distributing, advertising, and promoting the music), and sharing the profits. All of these areas are essential to the industry but have always shared in the conflict between business concerns and artistic concerns.

FIGURE 3.2 U.S. MARKET SHARE OF THE MAJOR LABELS IN THE RECORDING INDUSTRY, 2009 Source: Nielsen SoundScan, 2010

“We’re on the threshold of a whole new system. The time where accountants decide what music people hear is coming to an end. Accountants may be good at numbers, but they have terrible taste in music.”

ROLLING STONES GUITARIST KEITH RICHARDS, 2002

Making the Music Labels are driven by A&R (artist & repertoire) agents, the talent scouts of the music business, who discover, develop, and sometimes manage artists. A&R executives scan online music sites and listen to demonstration tapes, or demos, from new artists and decide whom to sign and which songs to record. A&R executives naturally look for artists who they think will sell, and they are often forced to avoid artists with limited commercial possibilities or to tailor artists to make them viable for the recording studio.

A typical recording session is a complex process that involves the artist, the producer, the session engineer, and audio technicians. In charge of the overall recording process, the producer handles most nontechnical elements of the session, including reserving studio space, hiring session musicians (if necessary), and making final decisions about the sound of the recording. The session engineer oversees the technical aspects of the recording session, everything from choosing recording equipment to managing the audio technicians. Most popular records are recorded part by part. Using separate microphones, the vocalists, guitarists, drummers, and other musical sections are digitally recorded onto separate audio tracks, which are edited and remixed during postproduction and ultimately mixed down to a two-track stereo master copy for reproduction to CD or online digital distribution.

Selling the Music Selling and distributing music is a tricky part of the business. For years, the primary sales out- lets for music were direct-retail record stores (independents or chains such as Sam Goody) and general retail outlets like Walmart, Best Buy, and Target. Such direct retailers could specialize in music, carefully monitoring new releases and keeping large, varied inventories. But as digital sales have climbed, CD sales have fallen, hurting direct retail sales considerably. In 2006, Tower Records declared bankruptcy, closed its retail locations, and became an online-only retailer. Sam Goody stores were shuttered in 2008, and Virgin closed its last U.S. megastore in 2009. Meanwhile, other independent record stores either went out of business or experienced great losses, and general retail outlets began to offer considerably less variety, stocking only top- selling CDs.

At the same time, in just a decade digital sales have grown to capture about 40 percent of the U.S. market and 27 percent of the global market. Apple opened iTunes, the first successful digital music store, in 2003 and now sells songs at prices ranging from $0.69 to $1.49. It has be- come the leading music retailer, selling 28 percent of all music purchased in the United States.23 Amazon.com, which sells digital downloads and physical CDs at its online store, and Walmart, which also sells digital downloads online and CDs at its traditional store locations, are tied for second, with each accounting for 12 percent of U.S. music sales. In just CD sales, Walmart leads with a 17 percent share, with Best Buy at 14 percent, and Amazon at 11 percent of the market. (To explore how personal taste influences music choices, see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Music Preferences across Generations” on page 99.)

As noted earlier, some established rock acts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are tak- ing the “alternative” approach to their business model, shunning major labels and using the Internet to directly reach their fans. By selling music online at their own Web sites or CDs at live concerts, music acts generally do better, cutting out the retailer and keeping more of the revenue themselves.

Despite the growing success of legitimate online music sales (there are now more than four hundred legal online music services worldwide), overall music sales globally declined for the tenth year in a row in 2009, much of it because of online piracy—unauthorized online file- sharing.24 Other unauthorized recordings, which skirt official copyright permissions, include counterfeiting—illegal reissues of out-of-print recordings and the unauthorized duplication

WHAT SONY OWNS Consider how Sony connects to your life; then turn the page for the bigger picture.

MUSIC • Sony Music Entertainment

– Arista, Arista Nashville, Columbia, Epic, Jive, RCA, RCA Victor, Sony Masterworks

• Sony/ATV Music Publishing (50% ownership)

MOVIES • Sony Pictures

Entertainment Inc. • Columbia TriStar Motion

Picture Group – Columbia Pictures, Sony

Pictures Classics. Screen Gems, TriStar Pictures

• Sony Pictures Studios • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Studios • Sony Pictures Home

Entertainment

TELEVISION • Sony Pictures Television

– Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, The Young and the Restless, Breaking Bad, Seinfeld, The Big C

• Crackle • Game Show Network (GSN)

ELECTRONICS • Sony Electronics Inc.

– DVD and Blu-Ray Disc players

– Bravia HDTVs and projectors

– VAIO computers – Handycam Camcorders – Cyber-shot Digital Cameras – Walkman Video MP3

players – Sony Reader Digital Book

SOFTWARE • Sony Creative Software:

Vegas, ACID Pro, and Sound Forge software

DIGITAL GAMES • Sony Computer

Entertainment America Inc. – PlayStation (PS2 and

PS3) – PlayStation Portable

(PSP) – PlayStation Games

MOBILE PHONES • Sony Ericsson Mobile

Communications (50% ownership)

Turn page for more

of manufacturer recordings sold on the black market at cut-rate prices; and bootlegging—the unauthorized videotaping or audiotaping of live performances, which are then sold illegally for profit.

Dividing the Profits The upheaval in the music industry in recent years has shaken up the once predictable (and high) cost of CDs. But for the sake of example, we will look at the various costs and profits from a typical CD that retails at $16.98. The wholesale price for that CD is about $10.70, leav- ing the remainder as retail profit. Discount retailers like Walmart and Best Buy sell closer to the wholesale price to lure customers to buy other things (even if they make less profit on the CD itself ). The wholesale price represents the actual cost of producing and promoting the recording, plus the recording label’s profits. The record company reaps the highest profit (close to $5.50 on a typical CD) but, along with the artist, bears the bulk of the expenses: manufacturing costs, packaging and CD design, advertising and promotion, and artists’ royalties (see Figure 3.3). The physical product of the CD itself costs less than a quarter to manufacture.

New artists usually negotiate a royalty rate of between 8 and 12 percent on the retail price of a CD, while more established performers might negotiate for 15 percent or higher. An artist who has negotiated a typical 11 percent royalty rate would earn about $1.80 per CD whose sug- gested retail price is $16.98. So a CD that “goes gold”—that is, sells 500,000 units—would net the artist around $900,000. But out of this amount, artists must repay the record company the money they have been advanced (from $100,000 to $500,000). And after band members, managers, and attorneys are paid with the remaining money, it’s quite possible that an artist will end up with almost nothing—even after a certified gold CD. (See “Case Study: In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory” on page 100.)

The profits are divided somewhat differently in digital download sales. A $0.99 iTunes download generates about $0.33 for iTunes and a standard $0.09 mechanical royalty for the song

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Sony’s unique blend of content and hardware means that it owns what you watch and what you watch it on.

• Revenue: Electronics and videogames make up two- thirds of Sony’s revenue,1 which was $78 billion in 2009.2 That’s almost twice as much as the Homeland Security Office budget.

• Innovations: Codeveloped the CD, DVD, Super Audio CD, and Blu-ray Disc 3

• Major Artists: Recording artists include Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, Dixie Chicks, Carrie Underwood, Britney Spears, and Shakira.

• Music Copyrights: Co- owns or administers music copyrights by artists like the Beatles, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and Hank Williams.

• Movies: Releases about 25 films per year, including Salt, The Green Hornet, The Smurfs, and Priest in 2010 and 2011.

• Content Library: Owns more than 3,500 feature films, 500 television series, and 150,000 television episodes.4

• 3D: Sony is the only global company that is fully immersed in every link of the 3-D value chain. Sony controls the content creation, production, distribution, and presentation in theaters and our homes with its new line of 3-D TVs.

• Synergy: Sony has 1,006 consolidated subsidiaries worldwide, including bank and life insurance companies in Japan, and divisions in countries ranging from India, Indonesia, and Malaysia to New Zealand, Panama, and South Africa.

$5–5.50 Recording

label profits

$3–4 Wholesale

distributors and retail store

profits

50¢–$2 Artist’s royalty

$1–2 $1–2

Recording and studio

costs

$1–2 Design

and packaging

$1–2

Miscellaneous: shipping, musicians’ fees, trust fundPromotion

and advertising

Where Artist’s Royalty Goes on a Gold Record

(500,000 copies)

$250,000– 550,000

Profit*

$150,000 Reserve account

$100,000– 500,000 Payback advance

*(before additional expenses that may result in little net profit)

FIGURE 3.3 WHERE MONEY GOES ON A $16.98 CD

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��99

publisher and writer, leaving about $0.57 for the record company25 (see Figure 3.4 on page 101). With no CD printing and packaging costs, record companies can retain more of the revenue on download sales. Some record companies retain this entire amount for recordings in which artists have no provisions for digital download royalties in their contract. For more recent contracts, artists typically get royalties for downloads, but the percentage depends on how online sales are defined—artists and recording labels don’t often see eye to eye on this issue. A federal district court in Los Angeles resolved one such dispute in 2009. In the case, producers of Eminem’s music argued for a 50 percent royalty rate for digital downloads, stating that digital downloads should be treated as licensed use, like the music used in a television commercial. But the jury came down on the side of the recording label and ruled that digital downloads should be treated the same as in-store retail sales and that artists should be compensated at the same 12 percent royalty rate.

Artist compensation can vary widely depending on the distribution method. For example, for solo artists to earn a minimum monthly wage of $1,160, they would have to sell: 143 self-published

Music Preferences across Generations We make judgments about music all the time. Older generations don’t like some of the music younger people prefer, and young people often dismiss some of the music of previous generations. Even among our peers, we have different tastes in music and often reject certain kinds of music that have become too popular or that don’t conform to our own preferences. The following exercise aims to un- derstand musical tastes beyond our own individual choices. Always include yourself in this project.

1 DESCRIPTION. Arrange to interview four to eight friends or relatives of different ages about their musical tastes and influences. Devise questions about what music they listen to and have listened to at different stages of their lives. What music do they buy or collect? What’s the first album (or single) they acquired? What’s the latest album? What stories or vivid memories do they relate to particular songs or art- ists? Collect demographic and consumer information: age, gender, occupation, educational background, place of birth, and current place of residence.

2 ANALYSIS. Chart and organize your results. Do you recognize any patterns emerging from the data or stories? What kinds of music did your in- terview subjects listen to when they were younger? What kinds of music do they listen to now? What formed/influenced their musical interests? If their musical interests changed, what happened? (If they stopped listening to music, note that and find out why.) Do they have any associations between music and their everyday lives? Are these music associa- tions and lifetime interactions with songs and artists important to them?

Media Literacy and the Critical Process

3 INTERPRETATION. Based on what you have discovered and the patterns you have charted, deter- mine what the patterns mean. Does age, gender, geographic location, or educa- tion matter in musical tastes? Over time, are the changes in musical tastes and buying habits significant? Why or why not? What kind of music is most impor- tant to your subjects? Finally, and most important, why do you think their music preferences developed as they did?

4 EVALUATION. Determine how your interview subjects came to like particular kinds of music. What constitutes “good” and “bad” music for them? Did their ideas change over time? How? Are they open- or closed-minded about music? How do they form judg- ments about music? What criteria did

your interview subjects offer for making judgments about music? Do you think their criteria are a valid way to judge music?

5 ENGAGEMENT. To expand on your findings and see how they match up with industry practices, contact music professionals. Track down record label representatives from a small indie label and a large mainstream label, and ask them whom they are trying to target with their music. How do they find out about the musical tastes of their con- sumers? Share your findings with them, and discuss whether these match their practices. Speculate whether the music industry is serving the needs and tastes of you and your interview subjects. If not, what might be done to change the current system?

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

100��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

A s Solomon Linda first recorded it in 1939, it was a tender melody, almost childish in its simplicity—three chords, a couple of words and some baritones chanting in the background.

But the saga of the song now known worldwide as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is anything but a lullaby. It is fraught with racism and exploitation and, in the end, 40-plus years after his death, brings a measure of justice. Were he still alive, Solomon Linda might turn it into one heck of a ballad. Born in 1909 in the Zulu heartland of South Africa, Mr. Linda never learned to read or write, but in song he was supremely eloquent. After moving to Johannes- burg in his midtwenties, he quickly conquered the weekend music scene at the township beer halls and squalid hostels that housed much of the city’s black labor force.

He sang soprano over a four-part harmony, a vocal style that was soon widely imitated. By 1939, a talent scout had ushered Mr. Linda’s group, the Original Evening Birds, into a recording studio where they produced a startling hit called “Mbube,” Zulu for “The Lion.” Elizabeth Nsele, Mr. Linda’s youngest surviving daughter, said it had been inspired by her father’s child- hood as a herder protecting cattle in the untamed hinterlands.

From there, it took flight worldwide. In the early fifties, Pete Seeger recorded it with his group, the Weavers. His ver- sion differed from the original mainly in his misinterpretation of the word “mbube” (pronounced “EEM-boo-beh”). Mr. Seeger sang it as “wimoweh,” and turned it into a folk music staple.

There followed a jazz version, a night- club version, another folk version by the Kingston Trio, a pop version and finally, in 1961, a reworking of the song by an American songwriter, George Weiss. Mr. Weiss took the last 20 improvised seconds of Mr. Linda’s recording and transformed it into the melody. He added lyrics beginning “In the jungle, the mighty jungle.” A teen group called the Tokens sang it with a doo-wop beat—and it topped charts worldwide. Some 150 artists eventually recorded the song. It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese. It had a role in more than 13 movies. By all rights, Mr. Linda should have been a rich man.

Instead, he lived in Soweto with barely a stick of furniture, sleeping on a dirt floor carpeted with cow dung. Mr. Linda received 10 shillings—about 87 cents today—when he signed over the copy- right of “Mbube” in 1952 to Gallo Stu- dios, the company that produced his record. When Mr. Linda died in 1962, at 53, with the modern equivalent of $22 in his bank account, his widow had no money for a gravestone.

How much he should have collected is in dispute. Over the years, he and his family have received royalties for “Wimoweh” from the Richmond Organi- zation, the publishing house that holds the rights to that song, though not as much as they should have, Mr. Seeger said. But where Mr. Linda’s family really lost out, his lawyers claim, was in “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a megahit. From 1991 to 2000, the years when “The Lion King” began enthralling audiences in movie theaters and on Broadway, Mr. Linda’s survivors received a total of perhaps $17,000 in royalties, according to Hanro Friedrich, the family’s lawyer.

The Lindas filed suit in 2004, demanding $1.5 million in damages, but their case was no slam-dunk. Not only had Mr. Linda signed away his copyright to Gallo in 1952, Mr. Dean said, but his wife, who was also illiterate, signed them away again in 1982, followed by his daughters several years later. In their lawsuit, the Lindas invoked an obscure 1911 law under which the song’s copyright reverted to Mr. Linda’s estate 25 years after his death. On a separate front, they criticized the Walt Disney Company, whose 1994 hit movie “The Lion King” featured a meerkat and warthog singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Disney argued that it had paid Abilene Music for permission to use the song, without knowing its origins.

In February 2006, Abilene agreed to pay Mr. Linda’s family royalties from 1987 onward, ending the suit. No amount has been disclosed, but the family’s lawyers say their clients should be quite comfortable. Source: Excerpted from Sharon Lafraniere, “In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory,” New York Times, March 22, 2006, p. A1.

In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory by Sharon Lafraniere

CASE STUDY

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��101

$0.09

$0.33

$0.57 Full record

company share

From record company share: Artist royalty

if a “retail sale”

From record company share:

Artist royalty if a “licensing

deal”

($0.29)

($0.12)

$0.33 – iTunes retains $0.09 – Mechanical royalty to publisher/writer $0.57 – Net money to record company

CDs (gaining about $8 for each CD sold), about 1,160 retail CDs (with a high-end royalty contract that earns them about 10 percent, or $1 a CD), about 12,399 single digital track downloads at iTunes or Amazon (which earn about $0.09 each), or about 849,817 streams on Rhapsody (which generates $0.0022 per stream).26

In addition to sales royalties, there are performance and mechanical royalties. A performance royalty is paid when the song is played on the radio, on television, in a film, in a public space, and so on. Performance royalties are collected and paid to artists and publishers by the three major music performance rights organizations: the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP); the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC); and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). These groups keep track of recording rights, collect copyright fees, and license music for use in commercials and films; on radio, television, and the Internet; and in public places. For example, commercial radio stations pay licensing fees of between 1.5 and 2 percent of their gross annual revenues, and they generally play only licensed music. Large restaurants and offices pay from a few hundred to several thou- sand dollars annually to play licensed background music.

Songwriters protect their work by obtaining an exclusive copyright on each song, ensuring that it will not be copied or performed without permission. Then they receive a mechanical royalty each time a recording of their song is sold. The mechanical royalty is usually split between the music publisher and the songwriter. However, songwriters sometimes sell their copyrights to music publishers for a short-term profit and forgo the long- term royalties they could receive if they retained the copyright.

Alternative Voices A vast network of independent (indie) labels, distributors, stores, publications, and Internet sites devoted to music outside of the major label system has existed since the early days of rock and roll. Although not as lucrative as the major label music industry, the indie industry

FIGURE 3.4 WHERE MONEY GOES ON A $0.99 iTUNES DOWNLOAD

INDIE LABELS often find and sign new musicians or bands with a distinctive sound. Such was the case with neo-psychedelic band MGMT and their first label, Cantora Records. After releasing a successful EP with the indie Cantora, the band was signed to Columbia Records in 2006, where they released the full-length albums Oracular Spectacular and Congratulations.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

102��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

nonetheless continues to thrive, providing music fans access to all styles of music, including some of the world’s most respected artists.

Independent Record Labels The rise of rock and roll in the 1950s and early 1960s showcased a rich diversity of independent labels, all vying for a share of the new music. These labels included Sun, Stax, Chess, and Motown. As discussed above, most of the original indies have folded or have been bought by the major labels. Often struggling enterprises, indies require only a handful of people to operate them. They identify and reissue forgotten older artists and record new innovative performers. To keep costs down, indies usu- ally depend on wholesale distributors to promote and sell their music. Indies may also entrust their own recordings or contracts to independent distributors, who ship new recordings to retail outlets and radio stations. Indies play a major role as the music industry’s risk-takers, since major labels are reluctant to invest in commercially unproven artists.

The Internet and Promoting Music Independent labels have become even more viable by using the Internet as a low-cost distribution and promotional outlet for CD and merchan- dise sales, fan discussion groups, regular e-mail updates of tour sched- ules, promotion of new releases, and music downloads. Consequently, bands that in previous years would have signed to a major label have found another path to success in the independent music industry, with labels like Rounder (Alison Krauss, Sondre Lerche), Matador (Yo La Ten- go, Sonic Youth, Pavement), Saddle Creek (Bright Eyes, the Mynabirds, Land of Talk) and Epitaph (Bad Religion, Alkaline Trio, Frank Turner).

Unlike an artist on a major label needing to sell 500,000 copies or more in order to recoup expenses and make a profit, indie artists “can turn a profit after selling roughly 25,000 copies of an album.”27 Some musical artists also self-publish CDs and sell them at concerts or use popular online services like CD Baby, the largest online distributer of independent music, where artists can earn $6 to $12 per CD.

In addition to signing with indies, unsigned artists and bands now build online communi- ties around their personal Web sites—a key self-promotional tool—listing shows, news, tours, photos, downloadable songs, and locations where fans can buy albums. But the biggest new players in the online music scene are social networking sites like MySpace—“the prime con- vergence point for bands and fans.”28 MySpace and other social media sites like Facebook, Friendster, and MOG, and video sites like YouTube and Vevo, have created spaces for bands to promote their music and themselves. Currently, more than three million bands and individual artists use MySpace “to upload songs and videos, announce shows, promote albums and inter- act with fans.” 29 With millions of active users, MySpace also has the power to launch new artists. For example, when she was just sixteen years old, a friend of British soul music singer-songwriter Adele set up a MySpace page to feature her music. The page attracted fans, and two years later independent label XL Recordings (home of Thom Yorke, The White Stripes, Vampire Weekend, Beck, and others) contacted her. “The A&R guy emailed me and I was ignoring it. . . . I didn’t realize they did all these amazing names,” Adele said.30 In 2009, she won Grammy Awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

JUSTIN BIEBER began posting videos of himself singing on YouTube when he was only twelve. By the time he was fifteen, his YouTube channel had over a million views and he caught the attention of a music executive. Signed to a major label (Island Records) in 2008, Bieber is now a certified teen sensation, with multiple hit songs and legions of teenage female fans that have caused at least three stampedes at various appearances.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��103

Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy

From sound recording’s earliest stages as a mass medium, when the music industry began stamping out flat records, to the breakthrough of MP3s and Internet-based music services, fans have been sharing music and pushing culture in unpredictable directions. Sound record- ings allowed for the formation of rock and roll, a genre drawing from such a diverse range of musical styles that its impact on culture is unprecedented: Low culture challenged high-brow propriety; black culture spilled into white; southern culture infused the North; masculine and feminine stereotypes broke down; rural and urban styles came together; and artists mixed the sacred and the profane. Attempts to tame music were met by new affronts, including the British invasion, the growth of soul, and the political force of folk and psychedelic music. The gradual mainstreaming of rock led to the establishment of other culture-shaking genres, including punk, grunge, alternative, and hip-hop.

The battle over rock’s controversial aspects speaks to the heart of democratic expression. Nevertheless, rock and other popular recordings—like other art forms—also have a history of reproducing old stereotypes: limiting women’s access as performers, fostering racist or homo- phobic attitudes, and celebrating violence and misogyny.

Popular musical forms that test cultural boundaries face a dilemma: how to uphold a legacy of free expression while resisting giant companies bent on consolidating independents and maximizing profits. Since the 1950s, forms of rock music have been breaking boundaries, then becoming commercial, then reemerging as rebellious, and then repeating the pattern. The con- gressional payola hearings of 1959 and the Senate hearings of the mid-1980s triggered by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center (which led to music advisory labels) are a few of the many attempts to rein in popular music, whereas the infamous antics of performers from Elvis Presley onward, the blunt lyrics of artists from rock and roll and rap, and the independent paths of the many garage bands and cult bands of the early rock-and-roll era through the present are among those actions that pushed popular music’s boundaries.

Still, this dynamic between popular music’s clever innovations and capitalism’s voracious appetite is crucial to sound recording’s constant innovation and mass appeal. The major labels need resourceful independents to develop new talent. So, ironically, successful commerce requires periodic infusions of the diverse sounds that come from ethnic communities, backyard garages, dance parties, and neighborhood clubs. At the same time, nearly all musicians need the major labels if they want wide distribution or national popularity. Such an interdependent pattern is common in contemporary media economics.

No matter how it is produced and distributed, popular music endures because it speaks to both individual and universal themes, from a teenager’s first romantic adventure to a nation’s outrage over social injustice. Music often reflects the personal or political anxieties of a society. It also breaks down artificial or hurtful barriers better than many government programs do. Despite its tribulations, music at its best continues to champion a democratic spirit. Writer and free-speech advocate Nat Hentoff addressed this issue in the 1970s when he wrote, “Popular mu- sic always speaks, among other things, of dreams—which change with the times.”31 The record- ing industry continues to capitalize on and spread those dreams globally, but in each generation musicians and their fans keep imagining new ones.

“People seem to need their peers to validate their musical tastes, making the Internet a perfect medium for the intersection of MP3s and mob psychology.”

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, 2008

“The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content.”

“The subscription model is the only way to save the music business.”

DAVID GEFFEN, MUSIC MOGUL, 2007

104��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

COMMON THREADS

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod in 2001, he said that it would enable you to listen to your music “wherever you go” and that “listening to music will never be the same again.” Although iPod users have more recorded music available at their fingertips than ever before, the idea of taking your music “wherever you go” is not a new one. A generation earlier, in the 1980s and 1990s, people used Sony Walkmans and Discmans on their commutes and workouts. Others toted boom box stereos (the bigger, the better) that pumped out the heavy bass lines of hip-hop or rock. In the 1950s, music was made portable with the transistor radio. You didn’t have your own music per se, but you did have powerful Top 40 stations, which played the music that mattered. And since Motorola’s first car radio in the 1930s, cars have had built-in music. (Car stereo systems today can communicate the deep thump of subwoofers from more than a block away.)

What does it mean to take our music with us, playing it directly to our ears with conspicuous devices, or play- ing it loud enough that everyone in earshot is aware of our

presence and music? Why is it that we need our music with us? Are we connecting ourselves to, or disassociating ourselves from, others?

Portable media do not end with sound. In the 1980s, Sony gave the world the Watchman, a handheld television. Today, iPods and smartphones can store and play movies and TV shows on demand. Satellite television companies offer portable satellite TV dish systems, usable almost anywhere. Cheap, portable DVD players have flooded the market, and a laptop computer or iPad connected with Wi-Fi can connect to anything on the Internet.

Which brings us to newspapers, magazines, and the book, the original portable medium. As Chapter 9 explains, since the development of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 1450s, “people could learn for themselves . . . they could differentiate themselves as individuals; their social identi- ties were no longer solely dependent on what their leaders told them or on the habits of their families, communities, or social class.” Is this what the iPod revolution is all about?

One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the commercial nature of mass media. This includes the idea of portability—being able to take your media content with you wherever you go. Media technologies have evolved to become increasingly small and portable. But what do portable media mean in terms of cultural expression?

CHAPTER REVIEW

audiotape, 76 stereo, 76 analog recording, 76 digital recording, 76 compact discs (CDs), 77 MP3, 77 pop music, 81 jazz, 81 cover music, 82 rock and roll, 82

blues, 82 rhythm and blues (or R&B), 82 rockabilly, 84 payola, 87 soul, 90 folk music, 91 folk-rock, 91 punk rock, 92 grunge, 93 alternative rock, 93

hip-hop, 94 gangster rap, 95 oligopoly, 96 indies, 96 A&R (artist & repertoire) agents, 97 online piracy, 97 counterfeiting, 97 bootlegging, 98

KEY TERMS The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��105

1. If you ran a noncommercial campus radio station, what kind of music would you play and why?

2. Think about the role of the 1960s drug culture in rock’s history. How are drugs and alcohol treated in contempo- rary and alternative forms of rock and hip-hop today?

3. Is it healthy for, or detrimental to, the music business that so much of the recording industry is controlled by four large international companies? Explain.

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA 4. Do you think the Internet as a technology helps or hurts

musical artists? Why do so many contemporary musical performers differ in their opinions about the Internet?

5. How has the Internet changed your musical tastes? Has it exposed you to more global music? Do you listen to a wider range of music because of the Internet?

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.

The Development of Sound Recording

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. The technological configuration of a particular medium sometimes elevates it to mass market status. Why did Emile Berliner’s flat disk replace the wax cylinder, and why did this reconfiguration of records matter in the history of the mass media? Can you think of other mass media examples in which the size and shape of the tech- nology have made a difference?

2. How did sound recording survive the advent of radio? 3. How did the music industry attempt to curb illegal down-

loading and file sharing? U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock

4. How did rock and roll significantly influence two mass media industries?

5. Although many rock-and-roll lyrics from the 1950s are tame by today’s standards, this new musical develop- ment represented a threat to many parents and adults at that time. Why?

6. What moral and cultural boundaries were blurred by rock and roll in the 1950s?

7. Why did cover music figure so prominently in the devel- opment of rock and roll and the record industry in the 1950s?

A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music

8. Explain the British invasion. What was its impact on the recording industry?

9. What were the major influences of folk music on the recording industry?

10. Why did hip-hop and punk rock emerge as significant musical forms in the late 1970s and 1980s? What do their developments have in common, and how are they different?

11. Why does pop music continue to remain powerful today? The Business of Sound Recording

12. What companies control the bulk of worldwide music production and distribution?

13. Why are independent labels so important to the music industry?

14. What are the three types of unauthorized recordings that plague the recording business?

15. Who are the major parties who receive profits when a digital download, music stream, or physical CD is sold?

Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy

16. Why is it ironic that so many forms of alternative music become commercially successful?

Technical Writing Evaluation Report.

How is the play Antigone related to “hegemonic” or “anti hegemonic”?

Literary Genres

Identify and introduce your favorite musician, band, or type of music.

Experience

Our mission

Latest Posts

Talk to us...