When I first read David Antin’s “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto,” I saw the distinct spacing between words as a visual representation of the “hills and valleys” of Antin’s lumpy mattress, the central vehicle of his manifesto. I saw the words as high points, coils jabbing into your back, and the blanks between them as crevices you learn to settle into.

But then, in keeping with my current exploration of the audio essay, I started to treat the spaces as pauses—more conversational than calculated—and I started to read the piece aloud, pausing longer at larger blank spaces and not pausing at all for sentences that run together. Though it’s likely to be read this way, even silently, the conversational cadence of the piece becomes even more pronounced when read aloud.

Jonathan Kern, author of Sound Reporting, touches on this distinction between conversation on the page and conversation aloud through his many rules of writing for radio—helpful rules that allow us to appreciate the notable differences between written word and spoken word, at least in terms of radio broadcasting. Along with several examples of things that just won’t work for radio, Kern provides helpful tips on things that do, adding particular value and emphasis to the way “real people” talk: 

“…real people don’t talk the way newspaper reporters write… We use sentence fragments… We add force to what we’re saying by speaking in short, repetitive sentences… We begin sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’… We don’t do this consciously; it’s just how people talk.” (29)

And there are additional trends and habits of talking that can be seen throughout Antin’s piece too: we don’t capitalize words when we speak, we don’t punctuate, we don’t insert quotation marks around quoted speech (aside from occasional air quotes for emphasis), and we don’t announce transitions through clean paragraph breaks. We do, however, pause. 

With Sound Reporting in mind, Antin seems to be employing the rules of radio in a textual setting, but what does he accomplish by making his essay conversational in this way? Kern might suggest that Antin is fulfilling one of the fundamental tenets of good radio: addressing a single listener, or in this case, a single reader:

“[W]e have to learn to write as if we were talking not to thousands or millions of people, but to one person; we should communicate to that archetypal listener much the way we actually talk to our friends or family.” (27)

It’s not just any single listener or reader to keep in mind—it’s a familiar listener, a listener we hope will begin to have a conversation with us through our writing.