Your Ethos Emerges From Your Style
Jolliffe, David

>>DAVID: This is one of my favorite writing stories that I like to tell about myself and I tell this to my students all the time because they need to realize what power writing has and how writing works. I was 23 years old and I had my very first job out of undergrad in school and I was a reporter for a daily newspaper and also I wouldn't become a teacher because my mother had been a teacher and I saw how she had homework every night and I didn't want to do that. So I got his job as a reporter for a daily paper and because I had done a lot of acting and directing in college, the newspaper asked me if I wanted to write theater reviews. I said, "Oh heck yeah, I'd love to write theater reviews." So I was in this small area around Northern West Virginia and I had good community theater that I'd been around and seen plays, but there was this one actress who I fell absolutely in love with. I had never met her before and I wasn't married so I kept watching her and I went to see her and she was just this wonderful actress. So I wrote reviews about her and obviously every time I wrote reviews about her I wrote glowing reviews. So after about the sixth time seeing her I got up my nerve and said that I'm going to go meet her. So I did the kind of characteristic thing, I stood by the stage door and saw her come out and my heart skipped a beat and I walked up to her and held out my hand and I said, "Hello, I'm David Jolliffe." She said, "Oh no you're not." I said, "Yes, I am. I am David Jolliffe." She said, "Oh no, that's impossible. You can't be David Jolliffe." I said, "Well, tell me why I can't be David Jolliffe." She said, "Well because David Jolliffe is old and stuffy and boring." I said, "Oh," I was telling the story to my students and I say, "How did she know me?" Well the only way she knew me was through my writing and I had been writing these reviews where I was obviously very full of myself and perhaps sounding old and stuffy and boring. So I said, "Let this be a lesson to you. When you write and you're trying to make an impression on someone in any way at all you need to think about the fact that your words are what represent you." I discovered in that case that the way to this woman's heart at least was not through the old, stuffy, boring words that I was writing as I was writing theater reviews. That's my story.