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Meaningful melodies…

In the introduction to his brilliant translation of Beowulf, Seamus Heaney talks of letting “the natural ‘sound of sense’ prevail” over strict metrical rules. So that the melody of the words takes precedence and is rooted in the meaning, rather than being slapped on later like lipstick on a gorilla or churned out by an unthinking algorithm. When the music comes from the message, the words don’t just sound good, they make sense. They ring true and in turn, stay with you.

At a time when we are surrounded by so much slop signifying nothing, meaningful melodies made by a real human being with a deep love of words are more valuable than ever before.

Looking for a last minute festive gift? I heartily recommend “the first native epic”.

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Words will escape…

Over the years I’ve collected a fair few bookmarks. Best friends of books everywhere, they’re always practical, often beautiful and occasionally enlightening in their own right, too.

Here’s one from the famous San Fran City Lights Bookstore, founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, painter, poet and fierce champion of free speech – Howl and all:

At a time when words are under pressure on a number of fronts – from AI slop to censorship – it is heartening to be reminded of their Houdini powers. Long live words and long may they continue to escape.

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All idiots…

As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly pervades pretty much everything, everywhere, cautionary research comes courtesy of Microsoft. Its study of knowledge workers found that generative AI tools “reduce the perceived effort of critical thinking while also encouraging over-reliance on AI”.

As Sarah O’Connor points out in the FT, this is nothing new. Way back in 1983, long before the advent of AI or indeed the internet, “Lisanne Bainbridge put her finger on the problem in a famous paper called “Ironies of Automation”. She argued that humans asked to be “‘machine-minding’ operators” would find their skills and knowledge would atrophy through lack of regular use, making it harder for them to intervene when they needed to.”

Zoom forward to today, and when one of the key players in AI flags the risks of ceding our minds to the machines, it’s not just another irony of automation – it is a major watch out. In short, unthinking overuse of AI is in danger of shrinking our brains and ultimately making us all idiots (an AI none of us wants).

Better to use the tool with greater judgement and care, and keep training and developing our brains through good old-fashioned means such as reading books, writing and making things ourselves with our own hands and hearts.

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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.

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A world without pictograms…

In the excellent Pictograms exhibition at Japan House, a world without pictograms is explored in order to drive home the power of these universally informative stripped-back symbols. As they say in the exhibition, “Without pictograms, our surroundings would be crowded with text, harder to navigate, and even simple tasks would demand extra attention to absorb details that cannot be grasped at a glance.” Simple tasks like handling a package in the right way:

Those three symbols on the left work way better than all the words on the right, right?

Words are wonderful, but when you need to get key information across to everyone super quickly and easily, pick pictograms.

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Lives are like stories…

From ancient epics to today’s headlines, we all love, live and breathe stories.

In his book Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari draws on a fellow fan of all things narrative to drive this point home: “As Kendall Haven writes [in] Story Proof: the Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, ‘Human minds…rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understanding, making sense of, remembering, and planning our lives… Lives are like stories because we think in story terms.'”

Thinking of your next communication? Think stories.

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Soup, not slop…

“‘Make soup, not slop‘ is the working model right now,” says Darren Aronofsky when asked by the FT about the idea behind his new film company Primordial Soup. “All of us have seen things [generated by AI] that we’ve never seen before, but for some reason they just dissipate and you don’t really quite remember them. I was wondering why that was, and I think what’s missing is storytelling – the emotion to the slop.”

To be sticky, get emotional. To get emotional, tell stories. Make more soup, swerve the slop.

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Curiosity, pen, and paper…

While browsing through the options for Tilburg University’s Liberal Arts and Sciences program, I came across a course on ‘Evil’ with the following recommended prerequisites: ‘Curiosity, pen, and paper’.

In today’s dumbed-down AI-slop-heavy world, it’s a refreshingly old-school, analogue set. One that underlines the enduring value of thinking and writing by hand, or indeed writing as thinking by hand.

Back in its earliest days, Google’s motto was ‘Don’t be evil’. They’ve long since stepped back from this call to good, preferring instead the more mundane ‘Do the right thing’. Bearing in mind this retreat and inspired by the Liberal Arts and Sciences folk at Tilburg University, here’s a rallying cry for us all: ‘Be curious. Put pen to paper. Think, write and make a better future.’

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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

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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.

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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!

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Super selective…

Towards the end of 2024, the FT chose ‘slop’ as a word of the year. A wonderfully unappetising onomatopoeic word redolent of prison gruel, cold gravy, couldn’t carelessness. A word rubbing shoulders with ‘slap-dash’, ‘slip-shod’, ‘slosh-on’, and these days also a word taking on a new meaning for our increasingly digital age: the mass of low-grade AI-generated content clogging up our lives.

Slop champions quantity over quality, volume over value. It’s a watch-out word for storytellers everywhere: AI or no AI, only some stories are worth telling – the ones that really matter. Key stories.

So in a world awash with the sloppy stuff, my new year’s resolution is to be super selective.