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What You Hear

Like a slap, I felt the sting in my cheek, my ears ringing.

One word.

Can.

She added it after I took it out. Arriving in the city, you can see Islam everywhere. Against my version. You see Islam everywhere. One word. Three letters. And one sentence lost its power. From an iron fist of Mike Tyson delivering a knockout punch to a half-hearted, open-handed slap by Sheldon Cooper. Without realizing it, her three letter correction took out the power.

She wasn’t an editor. She was proofreading. Checking for errors. That was her unwritten assignment as a second set of eyes. I had the authority to craft and develop the stories, choosing what worked best in the final draft. Somehow, the rest of the team took it upon themselves to override my authority, thinking themselves more versed in storytelling than I.

I thought about explaining it. I even tried to, a few emails back and forth over a couple of hours, me saying the word slowed down what was supposed to hit the reader clean and fast. Without it, the sentence worked beautifully. With it? It landed like a wimpy slap, and everything that followed landed way softer than it should have.

The email thread grew. Me. Her. And the recording team manager. I’d write back explaining the rhythm and pacing. She’d write back about proper English. He’d write back, siding with her. No one agreed with me, trading what they felt was proper English for the organization’s voice. The voice I’d built. That’s the voice donors were actively responding to.

And it wasn’t the first time. It happened regularly enough that I’d already pushed back, more than once, saying my abilities as a storyteller should have earned some authority by now. And still, almost every time, a word like can went back in. Or another softener. Some other hedge. One or two small words doing the same job as can in this piece.

She wasn’t my supervisor. We were peers, but she was older, more experienced in mission work and ministry. She’d filed more reports than I had. Written more donor letters. Sent more prayer updates. In her mind, volume was credibility. And maybe in some rooms it was. But donors tell you, with their dollars, whether your sentence and story landed. More volume tells you the number of sentences you’ve written. Not the number of gifts you’ve received.

The tricky part was not being in the field for this recording. My information came secondhand from a coworker who was. He described his trip during a detailed, lengthy phone conversation.

Muslims everywhere, he said. Like sand on the Indian Ocean shoreline. Hundreds of women. Veiled and covered from head to foot. I took what he described, crafting it into a narrative every donor could feel. That was my job. Not to report on the what. But how it felt. Put the reader in the middle of the street, sandwiched in between hundreds of Muslim women, helping you feel it.

When she added can back in, she changed more than one word. She put our donors into a glass cage, trapping them between what my coworker felt and how it looked. She turned an eyewitness testimony into a magnifying-glass moment. You could see it, but not feel it. Only if you chose to look. That’s not what he described. You didn’t choose. You were there. The sentence put you there. There was no choosing.

One word changed everything. Can. Without realizing it, you stretch the distance between the audience and the moment. It grinds the action to a standstill, shifting it, breaking the rhythm established by the previous sentences. Can is a conditional that hedges, softens. It says maybe instead of being confident and saying absolutely. And in a piece where you want your audience, namely major donors, to see what’s happening, you do not want a maybe.

So I pulled Mark in. My supervisor. The one person on the org chart whose authority outranked theirs.

It took him two hours. Then he wrote back, late Thursday, with a Friday deadline staring us down. He agreed with me. He said the same thing I’d been saying for four days. Different words, his words. And that time, the team heard it.

Can came out. The report went out clean.

Same argument. Different mouth. Different answer.

But here’s what I learned in that thread, watching them dig in over three letters: it wasn’t about proper English. It was about fear. The report was part of the collateral going to the Jesus Film Project. A one-page snapshot for major donors, though we’d never call them that out loud. The whole point of the form was to show the donor something true and trust the truth to do the work.

Can broke that trust. Can gave the donor an out. Can let the donor decide whether to look. And if the donor decided not to look, no one on our end had to feel responsible for what they’d been shown.

That’s what they were protecting. Not the sentence. Not proper English. The flinch. The donor’s flinch, and their own. And the right to be the ones who decided whose flinch counted.

And here’s what I was protecting: the small, stubborn hope that being right would matter. That if I made the case clearly enough, if I held the line on one word in one sentence in one report, someone would see it. Someone would say, “He’s right, take it out.” I wasn’t afraid of losing the fight. I was afraid of winning it and finding out it didn’t change anything. That the next report would come back with another can. Another softener. Another small word does the same job.

And it would.

And it did.

But it wasn’t always a fight.

When I co-authored a Telly Award-winning script, my writing partner wrote beautiful prose. Genuinely beautiful. I read her sentences and felt them. On the page. Then I read them aloud, and they fell completely flat. Four lines in a Word document, one sentence, no air anywhere inside it.

I didn’t change a word. I told her. You’re right. These sentences are beautiful. If someone’s going to read this out of a book. But this is a video script. It has to work in the ear, not just on the page.

Then I asked her to read one sentence aloud. She didn’t make it past the first line.

She admitted it. Yeah, that doesn’t work.

So I added three periods. That’s all. Three periods break one long sentence into three short ones. I asked her to read it again.

She did. And she got it immediately. We just write differently. She writes for the page. I write for the ear. Neither one of us was wrong.

My Telly partner heard it when I read it aloud.

The team I worked with wouldn’t.