Turning writing into a script for presentation. Even though you will rely on some written material, you will need to adapt it for speech. Depending on the assignment, the audience, and your personal preferences, you may even speak from a full script. If so, double- or triple-space it, and use print that is large enough to read. Try to end each page with the end of a sentence so that you won’t have to pause while you turn a page. In addition, you may decide to mark spots where you want to pause and to highlight words you want to emphasize.
Take a look at this paragraph from Shuqiao Song’s formal written essay on Fun Home:
a paragraph from a written essay
student writing
Finally, we can see how image and text function together. On the one hand, image and text support each other in that each highlights the subtleties of the other; but on the other hand, the more interesting interaction comes when there is some degree of distance between what is written and what is depicted. In Fun Home, there is no one-to-one closure that mentally connects text and image. Rather, Bechdel pushes the boundaries of mental closure between image and text. If the words and pictures match exactly, making the same point, the story would read like a children’s book, and that would be too simple for what Bechdel is trying to accomplish. However, text and image can’t be so mismatched that meaning completely eludes the readers. Bechdel crafts her story deliberately, leaving just enough mental space for the reader to solve the rest of the puzzle and resolve the cognitive dissonance. The reader’s mental closure, which brings coherence to the text and images and draws together loose ends, allows for a more complex and sophisticated understanding of the story.
Now look at how she revised that paragraph into a script for oral presentation:
a paragraph revised for a listening audience
student writing
Finally, image and text can work together. They support each other: each highlights the subtleties of the other. But they are even more interesting when there’s a gap—some distance between the story the words tell and the story the pictures tell. In Fun Home, text and image are never perfectly correlated. After all, if the words and pictures matched up exactly, the story would read like a kids’ book. That would be way too simple for Bechdel’s purposes. But we wouldn’t want a complete disconnect between words and images either, since we wouldn’t be able to make sense of them.
Still, Bechdel certainly pushes the boundaries that would allow us to bring closure between image and text. So what’s the take-home point here? That in Bechdel’s Fun Home, image and text are not just supporting actors of each other. Instead, each offers a version of the story. It’s for us—the readers. We take these paired versions and weave them into a really rich understanding of the story.
Note that the revised paragraph presents the same information, but this time it is written to be heard, using helpful signpost language, some repetition, simple syntax, and informal varieties of English.