Starry nights and sunflowers…

Hooking the audience, setting the scene, getting the story started and encouraging people to stay with it – all in a few carefully chosen words – intros are key.

So what’s the secret of a great intro? “Go straight for the main point,” says Melvyn Bragg, whose openers for 1,000+ episodes of In Our Time over the past 26 years are standout examples of how to get it right. Here he his at the outset of the episode on Vincent Van Gogh:

“Hello. Starry nights and sunflowers, self-portraits and simple chairs. These are images known the world over and Vincent Van Gogh painted them and around 900 others in the last decade of his short, brilliant life. And famously, by the time he’d killed himself when he was only 37, he’d only sold one. Yet within a few decades after his death, these extraordinary works, with all their colour and life, became the most desirable of all modern art, propelled, in part, by the story of this artist’s struggle with mental health.”

So much poured so lyrically into half a minute or so of outstanding intro. Thanks Melvyn, and wishing you all the best as you move on from In Our Time.

Great minds…

Back in December last year, I touched on the power of appealing to the heart. So I was tickled pink (or should that be red…) to see this:

Great minds think (and write) alike x

Abandon darkness…

Love them or loathe them, company taglines continue to be a thing.

At their best, they compress a whole heap of sense and sensibility into as few words as possible, typically just two or three. But the cream of the crop have something more than brilliant brevity. They possess an instantly getable yet surprising just-rightness that arrests and remains with you. Which is why, for me, they’re akin to corporate poetry. Take, for example:

This short-form beauty graced the delivery note for a no-quibble, free-of-charge new base to repair a much-loved design classic.

The company and its communication singing as one – abandon darkness indeed.

Sea like a mirror…

Created by Francis Beaufort in 1806 to provide a standard measure of wind force related to conditions on land and sea, the Beaufort Scale runs from 0 to 12:

But the full impact comes from the words accompanying the numbers. So alongside the wind speed and wave height for 0 Calm, we have ‘Sea like a mirror’ and ‘Smoke rises vertically’; for 6 Strong Breeze, there’s ‘Large branches in motion; whistling heard in telegraph wires; umbrellas used with difficulty’; and for 12 Hurrricane, the one-word-punch of ‘Devastation’.

From “Sea like a mirror’ through ‘Umbrellas used with difficulty’ to ‘Devastation’, the Beaufort Scale illustrates beautifully the power of putting a few well-chosen words together to convey rich and deep meaning. It just goes to show, there is poetry in every subject matter – from the driest to the windiest!