The number one piece of feedback I give new callers is: “don’t say ‘gonna’.”¹

It doesn’t particularly trip me up as a dancer, since I’ve learned to translate past it—but I know that it makes life harder for less experienced folks on the floor, not to mention for the next caller who works with these dancers. And somehow, wildly, almost every new caller falls prey to this insidious phenomenon.

Let’s talk about it.

What are “The ‘Gonnas’”?

“You’re gonna circle left; and you’re gonna swing your partner. Now robins, you’re gonna allemande right…“

The phenomenon I have dubbed “The ‘Gonnas’” is when, during a walkthrough, the caller precedes every instruction with “you’re gonna.” Just to be clear, my gripe isn’t some weird grammatical issue with the word “gonna”—I would be just as skeptical of “you’re going to.” The issue here is the persistent future-tensing of everything in the walkthrough.

So, why is this bad?

Signal to Noise

The most straightforward issue is that it adds two words to every. Single. Instruction.

Think of the number of walkthrough instructions a caller gives over the course of an evening; with two extra words per instruction, that’s a lot of wasted words. The habitual “gonna” adds no actual information to the call: the only difference between “you’re gonna circle left” and “circle left” is the extra verbiage.

The more extraneous stuff you say on the mic, the worse your signal-to-noise ratio, and the more you train the dancers to tune you out. In the macro, a bad signal-to-noise ratio looks like random anecdotes or mumbled tangents, whole sentences that aren’t necessarily relevant to the folks on the floor.² This rule also applies in the micro: if 10% of every sentence doesn’t actually convey information, dancers will pay less attention to what you say.

Therefore, if you’re thoughtful with your words and only say what you need to say, each word will give better bang for your buck, and dancers will pay more attention to you! Hooray!

Flattening of Tense

Of course, it’s hard to say definitively whether dancers are paying 10% less attention when you speak. But my second and more tangible complaint about “The ‘Gonnas’” is that the phrase trains the dancers to ignore the difference between present- and future-tense instructions. Most notably, this absolutely nerfs a caller’s ability to explain and teach “meanwhile” figures.

It’s hard enough to make dancers not move when you give a future tense instruction. This comes up most often for me when teaching box circulates, because I explain the larks’ and robins’ parts separately, but the figure doesn’t work if one role moves before the other. Most often, when I teach a box circulate, it sounds like this:

“Larks, you’re looking at your neighbors back. When I say go, you will walk across and— wait, not yet, I said ‘when I say go’!”

It’s hard enough to get people to let me finish explaining before moving. If I had spent the whole evening prior to that moment teaching them to treat my future tense as a present tense instruction? Forget about it!

There’s also something to be said for consistency between callers. If most callers are “gonna”-ing all over the place, no amount of present-tense rigor from me in a single evening will get the dancers to actually respect the tense of instructions. Removal of “the gonnas” (and the corresponding retraining dancers to observe the tense of instructions) is a goal that can’t be accomplished by a single caller. So show some caller solidarity³ and do your part: your clear, present-tense walkthrough instructions will make things a bit easier for your caller compatriots!

So what’s the solution?

Pretty simply: when teaching, don’t say “you’re gonna.” Or, to phrase it in the positive: your instructions in a walkthrough should be clear, direct, present-tense imperative statements.⁴ E.g.: “circle left”; “face your partner”; “larks, pass left shoulders to start a hey”; etc.

If the work of eliminating your “gonnas” leads to you thinking about the most efficient way to convey meaning on the mic, so much the better! Likewise, if it gives you some more awareness of the tense of your instructions, and when you specifically need to speak in the future tense, that’s awesome too. I know for myself, this tense-awareness helps me remember to emphasize the “don’t move yet” class of instructions, which increases the chances that my dancers follow me: e.g. “you will swing this new neighbor in a second, but first, with your current neighbors, star right all the way.”

You will now notice every single dang time a new caller says “you’re gonna” in a walkthrough. You have eaten from the tree of forbidden knowledge, and cannot un-notice. I apologize for having planted this terrible curse in your brain. So uh, enjoy!