Reading Aloud

In How to Write Mathematics the author advocated reading your work aloud to see how it sounds. This morning I gave this my best shot on the penultimate draft of my Teaching Philosophy. (These statements are a requirement of all US universities, and are one of nature's most profound sources of bullshit, codspeak, and piffletalk. I hope mine isn't that bad.)

So anyway, there I was nervously sipping tea and declaring my teaching competence and abilities to the wallpaper. It wasn't as "revelatory" as I had been lead to believe, but it certainly did help: there were three or four points where I just had to stop because it sounded so limp. Hopefully it's a little sparkier now.

Last night I refused to do any work, and at glacial speed read my way through a sizeable chunk of On Beauty, the new novel by Zadie Smith. I really like it so far. One of my favourite features of it is that there are many references to current events (well, mostly the war and Bush) and, more importantly, to popular culture and celebrities. So at one point a character in the distance is talking to `a famous black newscaster', and elsewhere someone on the television asks a contestant `how much of a reserve do you want to put on that?' I actually laughed out loud.