Mindful Words

I love words. I always have. When I was very young my Grandmother gave me a copy of The Oxford Book of Poetry. I didn't understand most of it, but I loved the way the words sounded and flowed together. Carefully considered words put into a sentence can convey something magical, heartbreaking or joyful.

I will admit that when we are in a hurry, typing an email for example, the result may not exactly resemble the prose of Hemingway, but when trying to communicate with someone, we should do our best to be clear, concise, and to the point.

I was recently invited by a friend to attend an awards banquet. As part of the program, various people were reporting to the assemblage on the progress they had made in the past several months on various projects that each had taken on. Each summary was read aloud but the copy was also on a big screen for all to see, and hard copies had been handed out.

I was sitting and politely listening like everyone else. It wasn't until the third one that I suddenly thought to myself, this sounds a lot like the previous two. And then the next one was read and was also very similar. Given the nature of the projects, it was not impossible that the reports would be similar, but the wording seemed to be very close. If I was a high school teacher I would be getting a strong plagiarism vibe, I thought.

I decided to try something. I did my best to tune out the reading of the next report and went back to the hard copy of a previous one and read it to myself. Then I read another one. I realized that not only were they all very similar, but they didn't actually really say anything. There were a lot of very nice buzz words and each was well written grammatically, but nothing much was actually communicated.

I don't know if these reports were written using AI, but that was certainly the impression I was left with. I know many people use it. I have heard many say that they use it to make their own wording sound more professional. I would just caution that "professional sounding" doesn't mean much if the meaning is lost entirely.