02.04.09

Does not rhyme with carburetor

Posted in spelling, write tight at 7:44 am by Bill Brohaugh

I direct you to a well-written personality profile in Esquire: Lisa Taddeo’s “The Man Who Made Obama.” This profile of Obama campaign manager David Plouffe features flash snapshot description, adventurous turns of phrases, and a distraction that jars the reader from the usually otherwise adroit writing that precedes and follows it.

It was Plouffe (rhymes with bluff) who gathered the president’s unprecedented thirteen-million-name contact list . . .

The problem lies in the parenthetical—and, more specifically, its placement. Given the unusual name and its spelling (subjects I myself am intimately familiar with), clarifying its pronunciation is necessary. Yet, including the article’s subhead and photo caption, this is the fifteenth reference to Plouffe.

At this point of the story, 19 paragraphs in, the unguided reader has already established a pronunciation—either correct pluff, ploof, or some variation that mildly rhymes with souffle. The readers who didn’t imagine it right will stop reading, glance back at the previous paragraphs, and reconsider at some small but distracting level what they’d encountered before. Some coverage of Rod Blagojevich similarly delayed the needed pronunciation guide until the last name had already been presented multiple times.

In Write Tight, I refer to such instances as addding “mental length” to the manuscript—ballooning the reading experience by forcing the readers to rise out of the story and think about something, in this case a something that could have been clarified much earlier.

And so says I, Bill Brohaugh (does not rhyme with bluff, that royal snitch, or bruhaha).

(Silent gh, for the record. Bro-haw.)

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