[Editor’s note: this was originally a YouTube script. That’s why I’m not as mean.]

I remember my first opera audition. It was 2019. I hadn’t sung seriously in nearly seven years, and I had no vocal coach, no accompanist, and only had my own instincts, intuition, and the ability to self-teach. I picked up a songbook I’d used in high school, found the song that had taken me to State Solo & Ensemble, and downloaded the complimentary accompaniment track. Then, I practiced. I made sure I knew Italian diction, I read the words in both languages, made sure I absorbed the meaning of the text, checked my phrasing, made sure I could perform the song in my range without straining or shouting. I felt out the rhythm, the rise and fall of the verses, how enunciation and music interacted, made sure to resonate in the nasal cavity and not the back of my throat, et cetera et cetera et cetera. I taught myself, or at least relearned, how to sing. How to perform. How to take a mess of meaningless symbols and imbue them with creativity, cultivated through skill, practice, knowledge, and intuition. Performing music and reading aloud are two of my favorite modes of performance. Acting is fine, but I’ll admit not to being the best scene partner—I can have trouble finding rhythm. I’ve performed monologues, recited poetry, taken my knowledge and applied it to different forms of recited words. And while the work I interpret has always been quality, that wouldn’t be evident had I not given the pieces the seriousness they deserve. I would be disrespecting the audience, offending those familiar with the work, and misleading those who aren’t. Another level to this is that every performance serves a purpose, whether we realize it or not. And how we communicate that purpose can say a lot about what we think about what we’re performing, and how we view our audience.

Hilary Layne is an author that runs a YouTube channel called The Second Story. Her early work consisted of general writing advice, but she struck paydirt when she explicitly attached herself to right-wing outrage. And I don’t mean this hypothetically or in an exaggerated way. I mean that she literally just peddles right wing talking points, thinly veiled as cultural criticism. It is a channel that has the signifiers and aesthetics of urbanity and cleverness while not understanding the rhetorical requirements to embody them. There’s a silly little skull prop. She takes sips of her tea to punctuate a point. And she speaks in the manner endemic to right-wing accounts: monotoned and confident, with a willingness to say whatever she wants regardless of its factual content, precisely because it is only present to advance her argument. Layne’s work has a lot of stuff in it that deserves a close examination, precisely because it’s just an iteration of reactionary talking points dressed up as “tell it like it is” cultural criticism. There are many, MANY other people on YouTube that handle that side of her work better. My aim is more specific, and a lot simpler: I want to say that she just doesn’t read very well. More specifically, she doesn’t understand prosody, or is intentionally misleading her audience. That matters. She is unable to skillfully read a text out loud to check its aesthetic qualities. Her reading is stilted, arrhythmic, and intentionally bad, solely to make her point. It is a clear example of how a basic understanding of rhythm, meter, punctuation, word choice, and grammar is necessary when criticizing texts. She demonstrates a lack of reading comprehension on par with her imagined enemies supposedly destroying literature. She is unable—or unwilling—to examine the underlying meaning of the text through the choices the author makes, and connect that with how it might affect one’s reading of the passage, and, in turn, how that might affect the speaking of the passage, should one read it aloud. Put simply: Hilary Layne either can’t read, or is pretending to be illiterate to score points against “wokeness” or whatever. It’s extremely easy to single out a short passage of text to illustrate your point. It’s almost like it’s being done intentionally—selected “at random” from a prize list, read without paying attention to anything more than the written words on the page, and then using that poor reading to justify your point—almost as if you worked backwards from a conclusion and contorted the evidence in order to make it make sense. And why am I doing this? Because you should demonstrate proficiency in a subject before you deign to lecture others on it.

Prosody, basically defined, is six things: phrasing, intonation, stress, rhythm, pauses, and pace. To be a bit more specific, and musical, here’s a more comprehensive breakdown, paraphrased and expanded upon from Voyager Sopris Learning. Phrasing, which is breaking sentences out into more manageable pieces. In vocal performance, this mainly refers to when breaths are taken. Musically, it usually is between 2-4 measures, which is the typical length of a musical idea. Prose is a bit more flexible, but punctuation helps provide a natural rhythm. Intonation, which is how our voices change in pitch, up and down. Pretty self explanatory. Stress is which words are given more emphasis. In music, this is achieved through notation like accents, crescendos, or decrescendos—changes in tempo can also be used to stress words or phrases. Rhythm is the beat of the words, stressed and unstressed syllables. Musically, rhythm is easy to discern, but in prose, and especially poetry, rhythm is a bit less strictly meter-oriented and focused on how words interact, how their pronunciations can aid in the reading of a passage. Pauses are rests, moments of silence. They can be literal notated rests, as in sheet music, or punctuation. Different notated punctuation marks make for different bits of rhythm. Audiobook narrator, and Sci-fi and fantasy author Mary Robinette Kowal makes a simple suggestion: pause for one beat for a comma, two for a period. Pace. Speed. Tempo. How fast or slow a piece moves. Songs typically move in one tempo, usually slowing down or speeding up in certain spots for effect. Spoken words have methods of speeding up or slowing down reading as well, with run-on sentences to indicate speed, or several short or one-sentence paragraphs to generate a slower movement to the text. These all sound pretty easy on their own, right? And we can all read and speak, so just talking will let us read out loud perfectly, right? No. I wish it were that simple, but these concepts are taught to us at a young age to reinforce how important they are, both as single concepts and as a constant interweaving to create compelling, interesting readings. A good text can sound good if you put in the work. An iffy text can sound serviceable if you can figure out how to give it some spark. The trick is to take it seriously, and to give the text the attention it deserves. Any text can sound bad if you perform it poorly. If I did a monotone reading of “To Be Or Not To Be” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and recited the text in an even, metronomic rhythm, that would be a bad performance. You can certainly hear the words and even understand them, but the meaning would be obscured by the distracting nature of the performance, because there’s nothing to latch onto beyond my hack performance. Meaning itself would be hindered because I’m not reading the text very well. This applies to prose, it applies to theatre, and it applies to music. Any performance is hampered or enhanced by the choices made in its performance.

Here is Layne, in her own words (I think close to 40 minutes in):

Rhythm, inflection, etc. while reading, mainly reading aloud if a person had good prosody that means he or she is able to use the rhythm and flow of words to both infer subtler meanings, and convey subtler meanings. … Good prosody means a reader can interpret the flow, rhythm, and meaning of the text. … You’ll be better equipped to build sentences that have good flow and rhythm, and use that flow and rhythm to add subtler meaning to those sentences. … [Listen] Not just to the words (anyone can write words), I want you to listen to the flow and rhythm of the words.

So this is…fine. Incomplete, more than a little self-serving, but it gets the basics down. The issue is that she’s not connecting this to your own reading of a piece, which is extremely convenient. I wonder why that would be such a big deal…

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, used to illustrate the lack of “Prosody”, is a style of argument that works if you don’t understand what is being argued. Someone who was trying to bolster their argument would, even if they didn’t like the text, try to read it in a way that would illustrate its qualities to her audience. If she didn’t want to read it herself, she could have found the audiobook and used that narration to make her point—if she was that secure in what she claimed, she could present a portion of the text performed by a seasoned professional as self-evident proof. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do that. She reads it aloud, herself. It reveals a lot about the deficiencies of the speaker.

Okay, here we go. (45:48 if it doesn’t auto play)

It was a reading! Let’s get into some extra crunchy technical stuff. As I’ve said already, I’m a professional vocalist, I’ve read monologues, and poetry, and I have a good mix of practical experience and formal training. And, just to make sure you know I’m not making stuff up, I’ll once again use the article from SFWA, “Reading Aloud,” by narrator and author Mary Robinette Kowal. From the start, Layne opts for a monotone and bored reading of the text. Kowal: “Droning or speaking in a monotone, sends a signal to the brain of the listener that this is a sound without information.” So, even assuming good faith (which is a stretch), the reading fails on a basic level. Words read blandly will feel bland. Additionally, her vocal intonation doesn’t rise or fall. When we read aloud, we aren’t simply relaying the words, as Layne does here. We’re telling a story. “Use the same animation and pacing that you would use when relating a spoken story when you are reading a written one,” Kowal advises. Layne’s reading has some pitch, but it’s in spots that make no sense and serve no purpose beyond sounding like an irritated partner reading a shopping list. And we can see from the text itself that its lack of punctuation and long paragraphs might lend itself to a different pace, right? Well: she disregards punctuation, which is a key element of interpreting text. If I simply barreled through sentences without pausing for things like commas or periods, it might feel a little weird. What punctuation does exist is sort of forgotten about, so she can show you how right she is. Again, a general rule of thumb: “A period means pause and count to 2. A comma means pause and count to 1.” Lastly on this front, there’s no pace or sense of rhythm. Lynch’s style here has long run-on sentences with little punctuation, and a cold read might naturally tend towards a quickening pace, with sentences getting a bit faster the longer they go on without a break. Nope! The whole thing is read in an arrhythmic, lurching way, limping along word to word, read not to convey meaning or engage, but to prove a point. And if you feel like I’m being harsh: I don’t think so. All of the stuff I’ve listed off comes from my own experience, an experienced practitioner of the form in Kowal, and reputable sources in children’s literacy (they were the only resources I could find that both outlined and explained the concepts in ways that most applied to this essay, okay?). I try not to shoot from the hip.

As far as extra-textual work goes, she didn’t research the book. If one would do the most basic search for the novel, one would find that the book is deliberately written without paragraph breaks, with run on sentences, and dialogue without quotation marks. All qualities that would affect our reading of the text, and all qualities that would contribute to our understanding of how prosody in the prose is generated and interpreted. It begins in motion, providing several different sensory imputs to generate a feeling of overwhelm, the camera frantically panning to different pieces of a scene, immediately placing us in the middle of the action. The rhythm of the prose is propulsive, with loping sentences and clauses not hemmed in by punctuation. Run-on sentences create a sense of breathless movement across the page, replicated in speech by not pausing between words, even if it would feel logical. Take this passage:

“she is moving through traffic sensing her own exhausted emotion, her motions automatic…”

And Layne’s incredulous reaction to the passage:

Which does her no favors. But back to the text itself. Notice how the lack of punctuation adds to a sense of breathless overwhelm, where your eye or your voice continues to pronounce words at an ever-quickening pace because the writing itself gives you no chance to breathe. The construction of a sentence, especially its adherence (or not) to certain grammatical rules aids in how we experience and interpret the text. Imagine that. One can also feel the rhythm in the language itself, if one were actually attempting to read the text in good faith, rather than blandly pronouncing words in sequence to prove a point. There is a meter here, a kind of pulsing beat, almost iambic in its delivery.

“She is |mo-ving |through traf-fic |sen-sing |her own| exh-au-sted |e-mo-tion |her mo-tions |au-to-ma-tic |”

This is my own interpretation of the rhythm, your own may vary, but we can see that words and their syllables are chosen carefully to give the text a certain tactile and sonic feel. See the rhyme within the line, see how they complement each other in a sense, how exhaustion can lead to something becoming automatic? The lack of punctuation—again, remember, an intentional choice—does work here, creating run-on sentences that feel confusing during a cold read, which encourages you to reread the text to grasp the meaning, with each conjunction moving to a new thought but not allowing us to stop in our reading, propelling us to the next comma, to the next clause, and finally to the en-dash—where the mood shifts from a sensory experience of the present moment to an exploration of interiority, a reflection on how her occupation has degraded, and how far afield she has strayed from her original, idealistic purpose. This is a dense bit of text, moving with purpose from a starting to an end point, via a constant sense of forward movement, minimal punctuation, and a loping rhythm that forces a breathless, frantic reading. That’s not what Layne provides.

So let’s pull back and speak about pedagogy, because this is where her dishonesty is at its most blatant. As part of my research, I came across a useful article on how to prepare for a live reading for educators. I imagine this advice would be useful to YouTubers making videos purporting to be cultural criticism attempting to score easy dunks by reading books while disregarding their own guidelines for literacy. An article from Stories by Storie, entitled “How to Prepare for Your Read Aloud,” states: “The very first thing you need to do is select a book.” Great. Layne obviously did that. Yay! Slay queen. She continues: “You should consider your audience, student interests, teaching themes, and academic standards when making this decision.” Hm. If I were attempting to criticize a text on the merits by reading it aloud…well, I don’t have anything pithy to say here. She’s just plainly incompetent. Her audience is credulous and most likely doesn’t care about the text itself, they just want to see someone say a text is bad “cuz of woke” or something. Still, the article cautions us, “The last thing you want to do is get caught off guard with an unnecessary surprise. Always preview the books you plan to share with students.” Did Layne do this? I’m not sure. But based on her reading of the text, she didn’t particularly care about doing it right. Low-effort, lazy, and obvious—it’s a tired bit, red meat for people primed to agree. The last part I want to share says this: “Think about why you want to share this particular book with students. Will this book be a mentor text for writing, used to model a reading strategy, to help build schema, or something else?” Well, Layne is spot on there. She read it just to make the Jim Face after stumbling through her reading like a kid in need of tutoring, smug and self-satisfied, like we’re supposed to think her take is axiomatically correct because she can’t read. It’s pitiful. It’s annoying. It’s poorly done. And honestly? It’s not even entertaining enough to laugh at. Her weakness is an obvious one, the secret fear of all creative people, the bane of our existence, the one word that everyone hopes no one ever tags them with: Boring.

So let’s set some parameters. If you understood what the text was attempting to convey, your reading, provided you were adequately literate and were thinking critically about the text, would at least approach something similar to the visual presentation of the text. You would recognize where the art is, and, even if you don’t necessarily vibe with it, could reasonably say that it does what it sets out to do. Badness is something that any work can have, for any reason. To riff on a saying: “Wack” is a complete sentence. But. If you were not literate, or worse still, were reading intentionally poorly to prove a point, you would generate a reading similar to the stilted, monotone, arrhythmic one Layne provides. So. Am I saying Hilary Layne is illiterate? No. That would be in bad faith, and that’s a lower blow than I’m willing to make. Am I saying that the argument she makes, and its overall framing, via her reading only makes sense if you are illiterate, or reading intentionally poorly? Precisely. And it’s an important distinction, because I, unlike Layne, am not making an ideological point by looking laconic and jaded and rolling my eyes at “critical literacy” (her mangling of The Reading Wars, and her dog whistling invocation “critical literacy”, is another point that smarter people have criticized). I am using my own knowledge and experience, combined with materials gathered from reputable sources, to advance an argument that, while informed by ideology, can factually exist apart from it. The core of what I believe is rooted in empathy and compassion, both of which are necessary in calling out dishonesty and rooting out ignorant or malicious arguments. My personal politics influence how I approach my argument, and how I go about making my point, but I’m not speculating. I’m leveling an assertion, supporting it with factual information, and pointing out the flaws in her observations and rhetoric, showing that Layne demonstrated poor reading comprehension and literacy via her reading and judgement of the provided text while operating on the assumption that she is someone with an above average level of literacy. And let’s be honest: nothing we say, especially when it comes to the production and consumption of art and entertainment, exists in a realm separate from politics. We bring ourselves to the things we take in, and that affects how we see the world and how we interpret the text. We have to be careful that our politics inform our arguments, not mangle our arguments in order to further our argument. I know this was a lot for a small bit of a long video. But it was important, because it shows that Layne engaged in plainly manipulative and dishonest performance to prove a point. And what’s worse, she seemed to know what she was doing—which is giving her a huge benefit of the doubt, but like I’ve said repeatedly already, I won’t operate in too-bad faith. But what really got to me was her blatant contempt for Lynch’s prose, and her audience. Layne shows that some work isn’t meant to be taken seriously, and her inability to read what is a gorgeous piece of kinetic prose makes it obvious. She picked a work that had the ability to stand on its own (I’m not one to put too much stock in awards, but they do have some pull in basic aesthetic terms), whiffed a reading so bad it made me question her literacy, and was sure enough in herself and her performance as to present it as self-evidently bad. When in reality, all she did was not rise to the work’s level. Part of making art, of loving art, is caring enough to take it seriously, and to try and be responsible when someone doesn’t. Hilary Layne doesn’t care about art, not really. She cares about being right, and will resort to dishonest ends in order to do so. Art asks us to work with it in performance. We do ourselves, our audience, and the creative labor of the author a disservice when we engage in ignorance or bad faith. Meet the text halfway or shut the fuck up.

SOURCES

All About Prosody: What It Is, Why It's Important - Reading Ranch Tutorial Centers

Last week we discussed what reading fluency means in reading and how we measure fluency. This week's post will take a deeper look into prosody. What is prosody? Why do we need to focus on it when teaching reading to students?

8 Elements of Reading & Literacy Instruction | HMH

These eight elements of reading and literacy instruction can serve as the foundation of an effective literacy program.

3 Simple Steps to Perfect Your Oral Exam Reading Performance

Master oral exam reading with 3 proven techniques. Learn pronunciation pacing and expression tips to excel in PSLE & O-Level speaking tests.

How to Prepare for Your Read Aloud

Reading aloud to a classroom full of students may come naturally to some teachers, but others need more guidance. It isn't always as easy as selecting a book and beginning to read out loud, especially if you are using the book to introduce a strategy or skill. Here are several tips on how to prepare for your read aloud to maximize your time.

Reading Aloud - SFWA - The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association

There are few things that can destroy a good story faster than a bad reading. At the same time, a really good reading can make an audience excited and drive sales. Short of a background in theater, how can authors improve their reading skills?