Verbal Portrait No. 2
Tom White's February 2020 White Noise essay — the second in his 'Verbal Portrait' series — contains two distinct pieces. First, a fully-rendered portrait of a writer sitting alone in a bar at midday, nursing a beer and narrating his own greatness while the liquid "sloshing" inside him is supposed to ignite creative maelstrom. Second, a sidebar contrasting free prose ("show, don't tell") with corporate writing ("tell, don't show"), arguing that the latter optimises for immediacy at the cost of deeper second-order thinking, and that Amazon's six-pager is one rare corporate form that demands the former.
Opens on www.whitenoise.email · Curated by GlobeRead
GlobeRead's Take
Tom White's Verbal Portrait series is one of the more interesting formal experiments in personal Substack writing — he set himself the challenge of producing what he calls "a coherent verbal image" from hyper-specific, pointillist observation, and it reads more like applied Seurat than journalism. The second instalment is interesting because it contains two things that most readers would not expect to occupy the same document: a precise small fiction and an organisational-behaviour argument.nnThe portrait itself is worth studying as a piece of writing instruction. White plants you at midday in a bar and makes you see the waxed wood, the "scarred battlefield" of the counter, the denim-coated man "suckling from his beer bottle as he would a teat." The writer he's portraying then silently congratulates himself on his description, orders a second drink, and hopes the alcohol will ignite "a chaotic maelstrom" of creativity. The portrait functions on two levels simultaneously: it is the thing it describes, and it quietly undercuts the person doing the describing. Very few writers land that particular combination in a single short sketch.nnThe sidebar on free prose versus corporate language is where White makes his larger argument. The binary is obvious; the application is not. He notices that directives like "leverage" and "synergy" work precisely because they tell you what to conclude without requiring anyone to have done the slower, more difficult work of showing you how they got there. That shortcut, he argues, compounds — first-order communication produces second and third-order problems that no one anticipated because the communication never forced anyone to think past the surface. Amazon's six-pager is his sole corporate counterexample: it forces narrative, which forces the writer to discover what they actually know.nnWe picked this because it is a quiet argument about a large problem — whether the way we communicate at work is making us dumber — dressed in the clothes of a bar vignette. The question worth sitting with is what your last memo actually forced you to think through.
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