The Sound of Words

Recently, a few email exchanges between myself and a dear friend brought to my attention how often we talk about how a person sounds in their writing when, in fact, whatever sounds we are 'hearing' are solely in our imagination.

Imagination is a powerful thing. We hear sounds that aren't there because we read feeling into words. It's not aways accurate. More than once I have been involved, or witnessed, an email exchange in which one person becomes very angry at an insult the other never intended.

There was a time when letters through the mail were the best way to keep in touch with friends and relatives living at great distances. Then came telephones and letter writing became a thing of the past for many. Now we have email, telephones, twitter, facebook and who knows what else, and we're back to writing.

Except we seldom writing in sentences anymore. Not that I'm the best at sentence structure and spelling, but I remember when I worked in an office and received business correspondence from customers. I was often embarrassed for the people who were sending supposedly professional letters in which spelling errors abounded and sentence structure was non-existent.

The main cause of poor spelling and grammar, I think, is due to the costliness of texting. I have never done texting, but my understanding is that every letter costs something. And so "I Love You" becomes "ILU", and "Talk to you later" becomes "TTYL". You save the cost of seven letters in the first example and 13 in the second. Money becomes the incentive to write poorly. What a shame. And there's nothing to be done about it.


But back to my original thought. Isn't it funny how we just can't read a thing? We have to put sound to words. It comes as naturally as breathing. And when writers talk about their writing, or someone else's, we frequently talk about our "voice". Voice becomes more than just sound. It's also the words we use.