A Document Designer Walks Into A Bar. . .

ALERT: The following is a longish essay I wrote for a technical writing course on readership analysis. Continue at your own discretion. There. I've got an audience bridge.

What Technical Communicators – and Comedians – Can Learn Through Audience Feedback

Comedians, like document designers, often work intuitively. A comedian sees a joke, a story, an action, in his mind. As he thinks it out, writes it out, tries it out, he imagines how the audience will react. Based on past audience reaction, most comedians have a pretty good idea whether a joke or routine will work – and what needs to be fixed when they know it’ll bomb. But comedians, like document designers, often see their intuition fail, or decide their creativity and ego are more important than pleasing their intended audience. In their pursuit of the perfect joke, their imagined audience was too forgiving, too tuned to the comedian’s style, too fictionalized to be real. Comedians, like document designers, often look past the flaws – perceived and unperceived – in their work to the audience they imagine will eat their stuff up.

The savvy comedian and document designer, then, know they’ve got to try out their new material and their creative risk-taking on real audiences before they declare success.

“Communicators who have observed someone trying to untie their tortured prose or decipher their ‘way cool’ layered typefaces are more likely to have a better sense of the moments in the creative process when they should resist their writer-centered or graphic designer-centered tendencies,” (161-2) writes Karen Schriver in her book Dynamics in Document Design. Intuitive approaches, Schriver rightly cautions, produce document designers that “ignore the very real fact that what people take away form text depends on their process of interpretation – processes which may differ from those of the document designer” (162). If the audience fails to interpret correctly what the comedian or document designer intends to communicate, the work that went into the routine or the document is wasted, serving perhaps as an example of what not to do in the future. Maybe the communicator viewed that “tortured prose” as a creative risk, a different or entertaining way to convey meaning. But creativity and entertainment cannot ensure the audience will understand the meaning conveyed or agree that the meaning has value.

Take, for example, Winters’ Tales: Stories and Observations for the Unusual, penned in 1987 by comedian Jonathan Winters. Winters, who rose from radio disc jockey jobs in and around Dayton, Ohio, to stardom on television and film in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, is best remembered for his improvisational comedy and off-beat characters like Maude Frickert, an elderly widow as prone to talking about riding motorcycles and blowing up squirrels as she was prone to sitting in a rocking chair to chat about her knitting. Many of the stories in this 216-page book resemble the sketches and comedy afficionados viewed through his appearances on his own television shows, along with those of Jack Paar and Dinah Shore. In many stories, however, it is evident that Winters’ intuition into what his audiences expect and accept from him differ with what audiences (or at least the author of this piece) expect and accept from him. What will follow is not intended as a social or moral critique of Winters’ writing. Certainly his contemporaries skirted with innuendo or addressed fully issues such as sexuality and politics boldly and with great audience acceptance. What will follow, however, will show how Winters’ forays into such delicate areas in Winters’ Tales were ill-considered as far as his specific audience is concerned.

A quick trip through the desert of text readability tests will show that it isn’t Winters’ word choice, style or diction that gets in the way of audience interpretation or acceptance. To test Winters’ readability, I ran a 170-word excerpt from the story “A Well-Kept Secret” through a battery of readability tests, ranging from the Fleisch-Kincaid and Gunning Fog grade level tests to the Flesh reading ease test. The results of those tests are displayed in the table below.

Test
Score
Flesh Reading Ease
100
Flesch-Kincaid
2
Coleman-Liau
2.5
Gunning Fog
6.1
SMOG Index
6.9

A score of 100 on the Flesh Reading Ease Scale, for example, shows that Winters’ prose is easily readable, avoiding complex sentence constructions and long words. The excerpt, in fact, achieves the lowest score possible on the scale. The scores on the Fleisch-Kincaid and Coleman-Liau scales show the words in the excerpt should easily be understandable by the average second grader, while the Gunning Fog and SMOG indexes indicate a higher reading level may be necessary – but not much higher; needing that of only a sixth-grader to be comprehensible.

I have purposely avoided revealing the excerpted material until this point to demonstrate a few things. Firstly, my firm belief that readability tests are extremely limited when it comes to gauging true readability. While the short words and simple sentences in this excerpt may easily be understandable by a second-grader or a sixth-grader, a reading of the text quickly reveals situations that will immediately appear difficult for readers of that ability level to comprehend. Additionally, the audience familiar with Winters’ comedy will find the context to be jarring and out of place in what they anticipate, based on their past experiences with his film and television performances. Finally, my belief that in writing some of the stories included in this book, Winters misjudges his audiences’ potential interpretations through falsely imagining their reactions through an intuitive audience analysis.

Here is the excerpt:

And now I was Lilly! How long was I kidding the old man is anybody's guess. Suddenly I got up. “Forgive me, Wells, I must visit the powder room.” I came out a moment later wearing just a robe; I stood there looking at the old man. How much I loved my grandfather over the years. And now it had come down to this. Should I tell him the truth? Lay it all out there? It would break the old man's heart. I kept saying over and over to myself: “Why, in God's name did I ever send for this wonderful old man? What the hell did I have in mind. Son of a bitch.”
The old man turned around and gave an unusual look to Lilly. “You know, my dear,” Wells said, “in all my eighty-five years I've kissed a lot of women, you're the best! I mean that. Damn it to hell, I wish I was sixty-five again -- I'd show you one hell of a good time” (Winters, 24).


On the surface, this appears to be vintage Winters, right down to the swear words, which occasionally slipped into his films, but rarely into his improvisational or television comedy. A reading in context, however, shows that in this story in particular, Winters misreads his audiences’ expectations and potential interpretations. The character Lilly is Edward Wellington Marsh, a former Navy man turned homosexual and transvestite living in San Francisco. Wells is Wellington Gaines Marsh, Edward/Lilly’s grandfather. The excerpt comes just after Lilly and Wells have had a sexual encounter and just before Wells dies of a heart attack after he sees his conquest is, indeed, a man.

To this reader, it is unclear what interpretation Winters intends with this story. Does the grandfather’s death result from the revelation that his conquest was a man – without grandfather knowing the man is his grandson? It’s unclear – even after Winters reveals the grandfather has a picture in his wallet of his grandson in a Navy WAVE (a Navy female auxiliary) uniform, sent to him by one of Edward/Lilly’s “gay friends.” Or does grandfather die of shame, knowing full well he’s just had sexual intercourse with his own grandson? Where, the reader may well ask after reading this story, is the humor? I admit I expected to read something along the lines of Winters’ classic bits of “A Man Under Pressure,” but I expected it to be similar to his schtick of imbibing airline pilots or trigger-happy policemen, comical caricatures, as opposed to a man pondering the death of his grandfather after a sexual encounter.

Winters has approached the topic of homosexuality in his comedy before. A quick perusal of Jonathan Winters: The Madman of Comedy, an hour-long video of Winters’ sketch comedy produced in 1994, shows no fewer than three clear references to homosexuality, ranging from a caricature (an effeminate high school football coach who’d rather draw pictures of duckies and bunnies on the chalkboard than diagram plays) to an improvisational bit with Art Carney, in which the pair take turns donning hats and playing with props to inspire their comedy:

Winters: Have you ever seen the Queen? What is she like?
Carney (wearing a monocle and speaking in a British accent): She’s a Queen.
Winters: Gives Carney an odd look, amid growing audience laughter.
Carney: Why is everyone laughing so? I don’t think it’s particularly funny.
Winters: Being a queen? (Goodtimes)

It’s clear in listening to the audience reaction that they understand the innuendoes in these situations. It’s clear by their laughter that they get Winters’ comedy and understand perfectly well the interpretation he intends to get across; the lower-case “Q” in Winters’ final response is clearly understood. Winters obviously sees a comedic opening when the audience begins to laugh at Carney’s “She’s a Queen.” He has instant feedback that his interpretation is exactly that of his audience.

Then the same audience turns to Winters’ Tales. They may well expect to find, in a book Winters wrote, that their expectations on such comedic innuendo will be met. Instead, the innuendo is dropped in favor of a rather explicit, painful story of a homosexual encounter between grandson and grandfather. While the audience easily accepts the innuendo in his sketch comedy, I’m doubtful a rendition of this story on stage would elicit the same audience response. I admit here that I am imagining to some extent the audiences’ reaction to Winters’ written story. On an individual basis, I’m sure, there are members of the Winters audience who fully accept Winters’ Tales as an extension of Winters’ comedy. It is telling, however, that Winters never attempted such a story in his sketch comedy. He knew his audience – be it from network censors to the “live studio audience” – would not accept such a story from the progenitor of Maude Frickert. Telling such a story in a written book, then, is a creative risk Winters was willing to take. In taking that risk, however, Winters misses the mark of his intended audience.

I believe this is more than a mater of opinion or a prudish rejection of homosexuality. Where the clash in the communicator’s intent and the audience’s interpretation lies in this situation is in expectations. Perception, writes Frank Smith in Understanding Reading, is a decision-making process. Smith adds: “the category system that is part of our theory of the world in our heads is essential for making sense of the world. Anything we do that we cannot relate to a category will not make sense; we shall be bewildered. Our categories, in other words, are the basis of our perception of the world” (Smith, 57). My Theory of Jonathan Winters includes innuendoes on homosexuality. But “A Well-Kept Secret” is bewildering because it does not fit into any Jonathan Winters Theory category that I have previously prepared. Smith cautions that our theories of the world are ever-changing, and that we need to either fix our theory as new information becomes available or reject/become bewildered by the information received. My Theory of Jonathan Winters includes categories for improvisational comedy, character comedy and amusing innuendo. I am unwilling to alter it to include a dumbfounding, humorless, and straightforward story of a homosexual encounter.

One might assume my bewilderment by “A Well-Kept Secret” is an isolated incident as far as the whole of Winters’ Tales goes; in other words, have I judged the 216 pages of the entire book by the 12 pages of this story? I have. That judgement, as explained earlier, comes from expectations. On the whole, Smith suggests that our ability to read any form of written communication is made easier when we can predict what comes next. That goes beyond anticipating what letters or words come next in a sentence to the overall tone and subject matter of a piece of writing. I set out reading Winters Tales predicting I would find more evidence of Winters’ oddball characters and silly sense of humor. That I found something different in some of the stories was bewildering.

I have evidence that this reaction is not steeped only in morals, but mainly in expectations. In reading James Elkins’ The Object Stares Back just prior to re-reading Winters’ Tales, I had fewer expectations outside of a notion that Elkins, as an art professor, likely was as odd as the art professors I recall from my college days. Because of limited expectations, Elkins’ many inferences to Freudian sexual intonations and the inclusion of two vivid photographs of female sexual anatomy though shocking, were not entirely unexpected. My theory of the world of art allows for the occasional nude image.

This brings us back to feedback-driven audience analysis versus intuition-driven audience analysis. While intuition does and can serve comedians and document designers well, it’s an ill-advised strategy to rely solely on intuition when one wishes to communicate effectively with an audience. “The key difference between intuition-driven models and feedback-driven models lies in how the image of the reader is built, on where ideas about the reader come from,” Schriver writes. “Intuitive models of readers spring from the document designer’s imagination, while feedback-based models derive from representations of real people” (161). As a comedian, Winters has easy access to feedback-driven audience analysis. He knows instantly if a joke, gesture, character or voice works as a comedic element, and knows when, on stage or in film, to tone back his creative risk-taking for the sake of keeping his audience. In a different genre of communication – a collection of written vignettes, that ability is muted, either in favor of the creative risk or through a flawed intuitive audience analysis in which Winters figures flights of creative fancy will be accepted by his audience.

Writers are allowed – and ought to be encouraged – to take creative risks. That axiom applies even in the world of technical communication, where one would expect that creativity would be only a small part of a genre more concerned with facts and clarity than anything else. A writer who can find a way to remain connected with his or her audience while taking those risks is a writer who guards the technical communicator’s exemplar: Audience first. The secret lies in finding balance between creativity and communication. “The writer frequently takes too much for granted, assuming that merely by speaking his mind he can change the readers,” write R.E. Young, A.L. Becker and K.L Pike in their essay Rhetoric: Discovery and change, as quoted in Schriver’s text. They continue: “If [the writer] fails, however, to utilize available bridges or to create new ones, his writing will not be effective. Thus it is not enough that bridges exist; they must be used – and therein lies much of the art of rhetoric” (163).

Elkins finds bridges – creating effective warnings in his text to alert the more sensitive reader that potentially offensive material will soon be in the offing. For example:

A painting by Gustave Courbert called The Origin of the World is a brightly lit scene of a woman’s crotch with her legs spread and one breast visible. There is a tangle of black hair and a small stripe of red labia (Elkins, 105).

The description Elkins offers is vivid and blunt. It serves various rhetorical functions. First, it allows Elkins simply to offer a description of the picture. Secondly, since this description appears with a parenthetic reference to the reproduction – which appears on the next page in the book – it offers readers a rhetorical bridge they may choose not to cross. Those who know they do not want to see the image can, for example, cover the image on the next page with a hand as they read the text on the next page. Those who want to see the image may see it. But Elkins offers a rhetorical bridge, as Young, Becker and Pike recommend, that allows readers to consider Elkins’ effective writing without being offended by the reproduction. A comedian like Jonathan Winters, expert in his genre of rhetoric, would have done well to consider offering such rhetorical bridges to his audience as he took creative risks in Winters’ Tales. Alas, he does not.

For the document designer, these examples communicate the necessity to pay special attention to rhetoric in achieving and retaining contact with the audience. Obtaining feedback from an audience actively participating in the document will afford communicators the opportunity to find out where additional rhetorical bridges are needed to keep the audience. Listening to an audience “caught in the act,” of reading a document, as Schriver describes it, is paramount for communicators who want to keep their audiences’ attention. No readability formula or intuitive reasoning can more effectively bridge the rhetorical gap between audience and communicator than communications with the audience.

Works Cited:

Schriver, Karen A., Dynamics in Document Design, 1997, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Winters, Jonathan, Winters Tales: Stories and Observations for the Unusual,” 1987, Random House, New York.
– Jonathan Winters: The Madman of Comedy, 1994, Goodtimes Home Video, New York.
Smith, Frank, Understanding Reading, 1982, CBS College Publishing, New York.
Elkins, James, The Object Stares Back: On the nature of seeing, 1996, Simon & Schuster, New York.