#5 Audio-visual Communication

Salutations, you fabulous individuals! Today we have a science-fiction piece by Ezekiel Stephens on Writing.com titled Audio-Visual communication.

Paragraph 1

Calibri gazed over hundreds of faces. This was his job – monitoring faces for the government. Row upon row of screens displaying beautiful images of people. The mouths of the faces opened and closed. A draft blew a strand of hair. Sometimes a hand would rise up onto a screen in a motion. Every face was perfect, a flawless countenance: sparkling eyes; blushing cheeks; smooth skin; hair full-bodied and radiant with color. There was hair as dark as night and hair as bright as flame, men with beards and men without. Laughter revealed straight white teeth, but the expressions of the less eccentric were just as handsome. Every face was different but all were equally beautiful. The images had reached a height of perfection; they were like angels. Real people, yes. Real faces? Maybe not.

Let’s begin with the first three sentences, which to varying degrees all discuss the same detail but add a tidbit of new information. This is inefficient for one, but also repetitive, forcing the readers to wade through the reiteration of something they grasped immediately. The trick to this is combining the new information elegantly while excising the repetition. There are some easy refinements we can make, riding ‘gazed over’ to a single word like ‘surveyed’ or ‘watched’ and recognizing that once combined ‘row upon row of’ become obsolete if you tie both the screen and faces to ‘hundreds of.’ Something to the effect of —Calibri surveyed hundreds of screens with the faces of beautiful people.—(I cut ‘Images’ because I felt it disagreed with the author’s intent, implying the concept of a scene rather than just a profile which the rest of the paragraph seems to indicate. If they are scenes, the wording would be changed the other way, removing ‘faces’ here and letting the paragraph expand upon the topic.) This reads off, from a rhythm standpoint, however, and it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly is off, though I think it’s the lack of texture or maybe an echo of the INGs. Let’s try—Calibri surveyed hundreds of screens in neat rows, each displaying a beautiful face.—(You shouldn’t have to specify they’re human faces as that will be the natural assumption, and will be confirmed naturally as the paragraph progress.) I prefer this, and ‘rows of’ because more a physical description of his environment rather than numbering the screens. Just mentioning that conveys the image of a dark room and a man highlighted in screen lights.

This leaves the sentences mentioning his job, which I don’t like here. It disrupts the paragraph’s narrative flow. The first sentence introduces the face, and the rest of the paragraph describes them, but in between those two parts we have this comment about his job. I want the mention of the faces to flow into their description, maintaining the concept’s momentum and building its (potentially) voyeuristic undertones. Mentioning this as his occupation has merit, just not here where it interrupts.

For the fourth sentence, just some refinement for now. The phrase ‘the mouths of the face’ can be reduced to ‘their mouths,’ and the phrase ‘opened and closed’ is a little awkward. This is in part due to the imagery it conjures (for me a dying fish) their mouths opening and closing without purpose as they stand there trying to talk. That’s what it needs, an action like speech or laughter (though the author mentions them smiling below so that’s not really an option) to define their movement so it’s remains aesthetically pleasing. It should also be noted that the brevity of the fourth and fifth sentences hurt them. They are flat, disconnected statements dropped into the paragraph and thus disrupt its flow. Because of that, I want to combine them, but they deal with completely different subjects (which is part of the reason why they {and the job mention above} are so disruptive.) The question is how, and first we should try just combining them. —Their mouth’s moved in conversation, wind occasionally tossing locks of their hair.—This flows fairly well in my opinion, both in of itself and from the previous sentence, but it may also give the impression that they’re in the same location. I think it’s all right, though.

This brings us to the sixth sentence “Sometimes a hand would rise up onto a screen in a motion,”which I would delete. The ‘motion’ it mentions is vague, making the hand gesture technically purposeless, but the intrusion of the hands also adversely affects the imagined beauty of the screens, interposing between our imaginary eyes and the beautiful face. The reason it’s adverse is because the hands are neither described in such a way to convey the impression of beauty, no performing an act we would find aesthetically or conceptually pleasing, such as brushing a lock of hair aside or a loving caress. With all this in mind, I would delete. The only thing its inclusion does, in my opinion, is confirm they have hands, which doesn’t improve the story.

Seventh Sentence “Every face was perfect, a flawless countenance: sparkling eyes; blushing cheeks; smooth skin; hair full-bodied and radiant with color.”Here, ‘perfect’ and ‘countenance flawless’ say the same thing. I would do ‘Every countenance was flawless’ as I think those words are stronger than their counterparts. I would also delete ‘with color,’ as that is implied in ‘radiant’ and discussed in the next sentence.

Eighth Sentence “There was hair as dark as night and hair as bright as flame, men with beards and men without.” Just refinements here. I would cut the first ‘as’ and second ‘hair as’ but leave the ‘and men without’ because the alliteration (? I don’t think I’m using that word entirely right) helps disguise the fact you’re not really saying anything. I would say replace the ‘without’ with something more relevant, but men really only have or don’t have a beard (excluding the meaningless specification of scruff and whatnot, which are not thematically pleasing in this instance) and for this part to make sense it would have to be a male-only facial feature (though ‘men with beards and women without’ is technically accurate, it is also treading into satirically pedantic territory.)

Ninth sentence. “Laughter revealed straight white teeth, but the expressions of the less eccentric were just as handsome.”More refinement and a word choice. The second half of this sentence is a little inefficient, I would reorder it to something more like —but the less genial expressions were equally attractive.— I swapped to genial because I felt ‘eccentric’ didn’t fit, ‘eccentric’ is someone, something, or some behavior that is weird and distant from social norms, these people are smiling, and the sentence is commenting on the fact that smiling people are generally found more attractive. I also swapped ‘handsome’ because it is generally considered a male-only compliment (in this tenebrous, and unenlightened day and age.) There are many potential substitutions, so just pick your preferred.

Tenth Sentence. “The images had reached a height of perfection; they were like angels. Real people, yes. Real faces? Maybe not.”Here I would delete ‘a height of’ as perfection generally is the height of anything, and ‘the images’ to ‘they’. I would also exchange ‘they were like angels’ to ‘becoming almost angelic’ and combine with a comma instead. I prefer this because it’s slightly more active, and it combines the two elements into one thought rather than two. On a personal level, I would also swap ‘reached’ for ‘attained’, both because I think it reads better, and because ‘attained’ has a sharper, colder sound which I believe fits better here.

This is where I would add in the mention of his occupation, after you have finished describing the faces and imagery, where its fall neatly in the paragraph’s attenuation.

(All my edits applied.)

Calibri surveyed hundreds of screens in neat rows, each displaying a beautiful face. Their mouth’s moved in speech, wind occasionally tossing locks of their hair. Every countenance was flawless: sparkling eyes, blushing cheeks, hair full-bodied and radiant. There was hair dark as night and bright as fire, men with beards and men without. Laughter revealed straight white teeth, but the less genial expressions were equally attractive. They had attained perfection, becoming almost angelic. Real people? Yes. Real faces? Maybe not.

This was his job, monitoring people for the government.

This still isn’t quite right. I not entirely sure ‘hair full bodied and radiant’ doesn’t echo with ‘there was hair.’ And I would consider starting a new paragraph with ‘Real people.’ The rhythm also isn’t entirely there. The phrase ‘tossing locks of their hair’ is a little awkward, and might benefit from being changed to “wind occasionally locks of hair into the screen,” but it’s hard to say. Finally I’m not sure about ‘They had attained perfection, becoming almost angelic,’ the flow into it might be a little bit awkward, and it might benefit from a more straightforward rhythm “They had attained perfection and become almost angelic.”

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