Any message conveyed to our senses—a sight, a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch—has two components, signal and noise. The signal part is pure, uncorrupted information, devoid of any confusion or interference. The noise part is the opposite: anything that confuses the message or interferes with it. If we want our communications to be clear, it makes sense to try to keep the signal component high and the noise component low. The people responsible for radio and TV broadcasts know this well. They do signal processing to maximize the amount of signal that reaches us.
It’s not just broadcast engineers who should care about eliminating noise. Suppose you’re having company over, and everyone agrees to watch “The Voice.” Up steps a performer with a thrilling voice and, just as she begins, your Uncle Louie decides to make it a duet. Now, unless Uncle Louie has an extraordinary singing voice, you’ll immediately think of him as noise. If you say, “Knock it off, Louie,” you’re doing signal processing, too!
Most of us don’t sing often, but we do a lot of talking. So let’s look at signal and noise in conversation. Imagine that you’ve just returned home after visiting with your neighbors. You spouse says, “Oh, there you are! It’s been found! In a McDonald’s parking lot of all things. I thought you never went there. Well, it was found there by a guy named Greg — or maybe it was George. Some name with G. Whatever. He called just minutes ago. There are credit cards in it but also a few empty slots, so some cards might have been taken. He doesn’t know. And there are several small bills in the billfold. But you might have had big bills in there, too. How would he know? You’ll want to call back. I wrote down his phone number.”
That message is swimming in noise. I won’t dissect it sentence by sentence, but I will offer this alternative message: “Hey, somebody just called and said he has your wallet. I wrote down his name and phone number.” I think you’ll find it has much more signal and much less noise. Is it wrong to be curious about visiting McDonald’s? No, but that’s a different conversation for a different time.
Noise in writing shares, unsurprisingly, many similarities with noise in conversing. A mispronunciation is noise and strikes us much as a misspelling does. When we confuse words that sound alike — that no-good Clarlie just loves to flaunt the law — we make noise in conversing and writing, as we do when we capriciously change subjects. The same is true of logical inconsistencies, excessive embellishments. and grammatical errors — but writers alone contend with punctuation errors.
You might suppose that noise is a much bigger problem in conversing than in writing. You would point out that conversing is, for the most part, spontaneous, a case of speak first, think later. Writing, on the other hand, is a carefully considered think-and-rethink product of our minds. But I’d point out that the give and take of conversation serves as a self-correction mechanism for rooting out noise. As writers, the burden of clear and concise communication falls entirely on us.
Writers, alone with their thoughts, need to proceed methodically, lest their thoughts explode into noise. So we’re taught to write in paragraphs, cohesive groups of sentences that state a topic and support it. In essay writing, we’re supposed to write an introductory paragraph that contains a thesis statement — an assertion, a point of view. The thesis is, in effect, our signal. There follows a number of paragraphs that support the thesis with evidence of its truth. Last is the conclusion, where we assert the thesis is valid and say why that matters.
Journalists have their own methods. Their reportage has a headline, a title that serves as a barebones signal. They amplify the signal by anticipating and answering the readers’ questions: What happened? Who took part? When did it happen? Where did it happen? Why did it happen? Anything else is noise. The concision gratifies the reader and saves expensive print space and air time. (I recommend you stream Teacher’s Pet, an old movie with Clark Gable and Doris Day. It appears to be a romantic comedy, but I maintain it’s all about noise in journalism.)
Narrative stories have the most complex signals. The signal comprises characters who act within a setting to resolve a problem. Along the road to problem resolution, the signal modulates. Minor characters, scene changes, and unexpected hurdles come and go. The plot moves forward with tension and conflict. Every scene, character, and event must be essential to the resolution. Any element that doesn’t serve this purpose is noise.
All these kinds of writers are at war with noise, or should be. How’s the battle going? I’d say, poorly. Our education establishment regularly reports that Johnny can’t write. When I hear that, I ask, why can’t Johnnie learn to control the noise in his prose? When I see the news on TV, I ask, how did journalism get swamped by opinion programming, and how did opinion programming get swamped by noise? Further, how did so much of journalism turn into news about celebrities, all of which I regard as noise? When I sample contemporary fiction and poetry, I often ask, where’s the damn signal?
And when I look at modern art… well, I don’t look at modern art.
The Scratching Post 