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Last Tuesday at around 3pm, at a travel oasis in Dallas, my manager – let’s call him Bob – explained to me what the Doppler effect is. Now, if I were incompetent in technical subjects, I would have appreciated his dedication to my learning. However, the bulk of my higher education has dealt with signals, systems and waves. Bob’s brief explanation of the oh-so-hard-to-understand Doppler effect really irked me. I wonder if he even read my resumé when he hired me.

My predecessor – let’s call her Mitsy – said that Bob was the best manager that she ever had. I believed her the first time she said that and subsequently signed on to work at Cannon. When she asked me to nominate Bob for the Outstanding Manager award, she echoed the praise she gave to him before. I was reluctant to support this nomination after just one month of working with Bob. He seemed disinterested in me professionally, and I did not receive any guidance from him. At least, not the quality of guidance which seemed to have impacted Mitsy so much. Despite my conscience, I submitted my nomination, thinking that it was more valuable for me to stay in my own colleague’s favor than to stick with my belief. This was the wrong thing to do.

via Magnum

This past Friday, I finally met Nancy. Nancy is the Director of Ideation and Innovation of our business unit. ‘What is that?’ you might be wondering. For this, I have no professional answer, but I can speculate that the president of the aforementioned entity simply wanted to work with an attractive “cougar”, the term which a good college friend of mine likes to use to describe those women whom most guys describe as MILF’s. I mean, she may or may not have graduate from a certain University with a bachelor’s degree in marketing; does this give her the credibility to make high-level decisions for a multi-national organization? Coming into this first meeting with her, holding this general opinion of her and Bob, she goes ahead and says, “You couldn’t ask for a better guy to work with”, when I told her for whom I worked. Well, that was the icing on the cake! Right after I replied, “Yeah, he’s great!”, I could not figure out what the big deal about Bob is. What is the big deal about him?!

In middle school, my language arts teacher, Ms. Smith, taught my class what the difference is between ‘tone’ and ‘mood’, within literature circles. I left eight grade ingrained with the knowledge that: “The tone is the feeling that the author wants to give to the reader”, and, “The mood is the feeling the reader gets from the author.” On random afternoons every few weeks during the third and fourth quarters of the academic school year, my class and I would say these two phrases in unison, as though us retaining this information would be the deciding criterion of our value to society. Ms. Smith had us memorize these sentences with such desparation that once, I actually felt fear that I wasn’t going to able to follow along with the rest of the class, mid-chorus.

Having retained the two terms, ‘tone’ and ‘mood’, for nine years, I understand why they are so important to appreciating good writing. When you start reading an article in the New York Times versus the St. Paul Downtown Voice, you will always read the NY Times article in-full and leave the last 99 percent of the Voice’s story unread. Case-in-point: I always force myself to read the Star Tribune every weekend because I subscribe to it. There are some articles that I read beginning-to-end, as though a current were pushing me along, with my head constantly above water. I always take note of those special contributors who author the feature articles that unexpectedly keep my interest, and nine-times-out-of-ten, they are writers from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Washington Post. Maybe non-fiction is not the best example for my point.

Let’s consider “The Office”, the best thing I’ve come across since David Byrne several years ago. Now, this is completely subjective. The writers of The Office set a “funny” tone, so the viewer receives a “funny” mood. This is the type of media that I am drawn to: fun.

I have always thought that if I were to write something, it would be a brutally honest and depressing view of the shortcomings in my upbringing. Now, I realize that I enjoy funny things mostly, and it’s kind of funny that I have to pick this realization apart like it’s a lab practical. I find it a better fit for me to write things with a “funny” tone since this is the media that I relate best to. Right?

I had meant to relate ‘tone’ to ‘voice’ in this post, but now that I’ve pretty much dissected the evolution of me watching “The Office” and realizing that I should write with a specific tone, finding the connection between tone and voice seems like an insurmountable task. Maybe more time would answer that one?