The language of things taking longer than expected
Eight openings. Match each to the move it makes in a story.
Somebody telling it properly
Five months, and it was not the builders
So we bought it in the January and we could not move in until the June, and everybody assumes that was the builders being slow. It was not. Three of those five months were us waiting for other people to answer emails.
First off we had a full structural survey done, which is not the cheap one, and it came back with a note about the rear wall that the estate agent had somehow never mentioned. So then we had to get a structural engineer to look at it, and he could not come out for four weeks. While that was going on we had the electrics tested, because we already knew they were old. They were worse than old.
Halfway through, the engineer finally came, spent ninety minutes in the house, and said the wall was fine and had been fine for about eighty years. Four weeks of waiting and three hundred pounds to be told that nothing was wrong. I do not regret a penny of it.
By the time the builders actually started in April we had had the survey, the engineer, the electrics and a damp report, and every single one of those was a person somebody had to chase. Mostly me.
In the end the building work took six weeks. The paperwork took four months. If I did it again I would start chasing people in the first week rather than the third, and I would have the electrics tested before the survey rather than after, because the survey tells you to do it anyway.
Three questions.
1. What caused most of the five months?
2. Why does the speaker not regret paying an engineer to find nothing?
3. What does the last paragraph add that a list of events would not?
The four moves
1 · Name the span and the surprise. Five months, and it was not the builders. The listener now knows what the story is for.
2 · Sequence with markers, not with and then. First off · while that was going on · halfway through · by the time · in the end.
3 · Say who you had to chase. The people are the plot. An arrangement with no people in it is a list of dates.
4 · Finish with the comparison and the revision. Six weeks against four months — and what I would do differently.
Six lines of one arrangement, out of order. Put them into the order in which they happened.
- While that was going on I had my fingerprints taken at a police station forty minutes away.
- In the end the visa was issued in nine days, which nobody had warned me was possible.
- First off I had my birth certificate translated, because nothing is accepted in English.
- By the time the interview came round I had had every document in the file checked twice.
- Then I had to get a notary to certify the translation, which took two appointments.
- Halfway through, it turned out the photographs were four millimetres too tall.
Two minutes of assembly
Rewrite each sentence using the word given, so that it sounds like somebody telling a story rather than filling in a form.
A surveyor inspected the house for us at the start of the process. HAD
It was difficult to persuade the engineer to come out, and he took four weeks. GET
At the same time, an electrician was testing the wiring. WHILE
Everything on the list was finished before the builders started. TIME
Somebody stole the tools from the van in the middle of all this. HAD
Next time I would arrange the electrical test before the survey rather than after it. HAVE
Three questions.
1. What goes in your first sentence?
2. What makes a timeline drawable by somebody listening?
3. What does your last sentence do?
One arrangement, told properly
How the twenty-six minutes run. Six alone to plan, fourteen in threes to tell and be questioned, six to redraw. The test at the end is not whether it was interesting; it is whether the listener can draw your timeline without asking you anything.
Stage 1 · Alone · 6 minutes · Plan
One complicated arrangement from your own life: a renovation, a move, a visa, a wedding, a car that kept failing, a course of dental work, a legal process, a business registration.
Six lines, in the order you will say them. Do not write sentences; write the spine.
- The span and the surprise: how long it took, and what everybody assumes wrongly about why.
- Four to six events, each with the person who did it — surveyor, notary, landlord, engineer, dentist.
- One thing that happened inside another thing. Mark where the two overlap.
- One complication halfway through, and whether it turned out to matter.
- The comparison at the end: two numbers that sit badly next to each other.
- What you would do differently, in one sentence, starting next time I would have…
Stage 2 · Threes · 14 minutes · Tell it
Four minutes each to tell it, and one minute each for the listeners to interrogate the timeline.
Speaker talks. Listener A draws. Listener B counts.
- Speaker: four minutes, no notes in your hand after the first thirty seconds.
- Listener A: draw the timeline as you hear it — a line, events on it, overlaps shown as brackets. Do not ask anything until the four minutes are up.
- Listener B: count two things — how many people appear in the story, and how many times the speaker says and then.
- One minute of questions: A shows the drawing and asks about anything they had to guess. Those guesses are the gaps.
Stage 3 · Threes · 6 minutes · Redraw
Two minutes each to tell the ninety-second version, fixing only what the drawing got wrong.
Same story, ninety seconds, and this time the drawing should come out right.
- Keep the span-and-surprise opening and the comparison at the end. Cut everything in the middle that did not appear on the drawing.
- Replace every and then your listener counted with a marker that says where the event sits.
- Name every person. If a trade will do, a trade is enough.
- Listener A draws again. If the second drawing is right, you have the shape you need for the written piece in Lesson 7.
What the drawing showed
Two questions.
1. What did the first drawing get wrong?
2. How many people were in your story?
Drawable, or not
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. What is the test of a well-told arrangement?
2. What replaces and then?
Next. The errors this area produces — including the two that stack the same auxiliary twice, and the one that sounds perfect and describes the wrong person.