Topic Sentence
We went to see Ira Glass last night. He gave a very interesting talk interspersed with audio fragments from his radio show. Most of his talk was about telling stories. Why it’s such a powerful medium, what he’s learned about doing it well, and why it’s important. He talked about how he discovered the structure he uses for most of the stories on This American Life. It goes:
- this happened …
- and then this happened …
- and then this happened …
- and this is what it means
He contrasted that to the way we’re all taught to write in school, which goes something like this:
- topic sentence
- fact, fact, fact
- topic sentence
- fact, fact, fact
- …
He questioned why we don’t teach kids that first style. He also told a funny story about the moment he realized that he didn’t invent the style himself. He went back home at Rosh Hashanah; they went to synagogue; while listening to the rabbi’s sermon, he realized that it had exactly the same structure. In fact most sermons, and large chunks of the Bible, have exactly this structure. He thinks that when he started in radio, he felt an attraction to stories with this structure because of early memories of sermons.
He also got into politics a bit. He said he thinks that what he calls fact based journalism (as opposed to opinion), has been losing mindshare because of a conscious attempt by its producers to eliminate humor and joy because they aren’t appropriate in serious subjects. He disagrees and thinks that those are exactly the types of stories which need a human element. He also talked about the current attempt to kill public broadcasting. He seems to think that it was caused by the CPB’s handling of the Juan Williams affair. I think it’s more that the anti-NPR crowd learned in the 90’s that they can’t successfully attach public broadcasting straight on, and saw the Juan Williams affair as the ammo they’d been waiting for.
After the talk, the audience had a lot of good questions about how he finds his stories (start with a lot and throw most of them away), how he does the background music (lots of film soundtracks; fade out just as the speaker says the most important thing), and his influences (a mix of pop culture and nonfiction books).
