Illuminating our manuscripts
On Bluetooth geeks, pilcrows, and the problem with thinking that AI is a silver bullet that can ease every possible endeavor
Anytime a new technology breaks through to the mainstream, there are bound to be adopters who will waste no time in taking it too far. Social media broke through to the public consciousness and promptly we were awash in “social media consultants”. Cell phones added Bluetooth connections and soon airports and conference centers everywhere were full of people physically (and almost surgically) attached to their earpieces. Now, we have artificial intelligence and a host of people all too eager to take it too far just the same.
■ A writer at Axios has taken to extolling the virtues of AI as a “reading buddy” that makes it easier to process “the way many of us actually read books”. Behold, says the writer: AI can “keep track of plots and characters”.
■ The overreaching for meaning is painful. Sure, you can ask AI to generate a cast of characters or a plot summary -- but for most widely-read books, one already exists on Wikipedia or in another reference somewhere. The Book of Ecclesiastes gets it right: “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!”
■ The Axios way of reporting -- what they have trademarked as “Smart Brevity” -- both attempts to make these old practices sound new and offers a prime example of the error itself. It is nothing new to suggest that writers ought to get to the point: Clear, crisp, memorable writing has been celebrated since long before Ben Franklin started printing punchy aphorisms.
■ Nor is the value of good layout anything new. Axios really just follows two classic rules. Rule #1: Keep columns of text narrow and space the lines generously. Newspapers and magazines have followed these principles for many, many decades. Line spacing even has the lovely trade jargon “leading”, based on the strips of lead once used to separate lines of type.
■ Rule #2: Give the eye convenient anchoring points. (This is why people like bullet lists!) There’s nothing new about this, either: Old books are full of initials, pilcrows, numbered paragraphs, and other eye-catching wayfinding marks.
■ If you’re finding it hard to read a book, especially if it’s a well-regarded piece of time-honored literature, then there’s a non-zero chance that it’s the fault of sloppy layout or lazy typography. None of this is new and none of it is solved by adopting an AI reading buddy. It’s solved by attention to detail and perhaps a dose of reader self-discipline.