That great big voice in the sky

Oh, it's so bad. I mean, come on, who are we? I did recently see an episode of The Dead Zone where the kid, JJ, changed actors, and no mention was made of it. They just did it, no fanfare, and it was much nicer. But more often than not, you get the big voice in the sky.

So why do we hate that voice so much? I think it's because it's both intrusive and obtrusive. It jumps in and breaks the flow. It pulls us out of the imaginary world, fails to suspend our disbelief, and on and on.

It's also one of the worst things you can possibly do in writing, especially technical writing. There's a very real flow that occurs in any technical book. You're learning, solving problems, surmounting obstacles, and it creates a rhythm. But if you break that rhythm, you do more than just throw the reader off track. You yank them out of a flow-state, a sense of being good at something, at performing and achieving something ... perhaps something the learner didn't even think they were capable of doing.

So it's awful. It's when the author uses "I" after having not used it for 50 pages, or interrupts the learning to explain a long historical point, or even adds a little personal anecdote in just the wrong place.

[Note: all of those things are okay to do -- well, maybe not the historical point in most cases -- if they're done correctly. Unfortunately, it's when something is done abruptly that problems arise.]

So down with the big voice. Get rid of it. Excise it. Refuse to break flow. And what kinds of things do you find that break your flow? Tell us, let us identify more, let us kill them from our books!

Oh, by the way, the part of Brett McLaughlin was played by Alex Power in this blog. Just so you know.