Designing Content

Yesterday, I picked up a book by Natalie Goldberg about Haiku. I’d been thinking about the form for months already after falling in love with another form transposed from haiku and made famous by a great teacher of mine, Jack Collom. The lune.

Jack’s lune was structured by word count (3/5/3). I’ve been playing with this form to create full poems. One poem would be around 7-10 lunes in a row.

In fact, I came to be so in love with the form that when I would try to write something else, no form felt nearly as fulfilling.

Now, learning about Haiku from Goldberg, I’ve realized that it’s the essence of the form that speaks to me.

Take this poem from the famous poet, Issa:

Simply, I’m here

simply, snow falls

— Issa

It’s so beautiful, not for its simplicity, but for the fact that it brings you directly into the moment in which Issa existed, penning the words.

There is a greater meaning here, one in which we ask ourselves what it means to be here at all. What is the nature of being? Is it really so simple? Is it really as simple as the falling of the snow?

And to the poem, the questions and the answers don’t matter. That’s not what it’s about. The poem cares only for the fact that the poet is there and the snow is falling. It cares only for the greater truth beyond the realm of our minds ability to conceive of it. And the poem gives it to us as a gift, if we are able to hold it.

Another haiku by Joan Halifax:

Snowstorm at the Refuge

strange joy to see

the world disappear

— Joan Halifax

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When I think about what UX writing and content design have to teach, it’s really about the essence of language. How we can use language to not just explain something, but pass an entire space.

In haiku, I have fallen in love with how sparse the form is. However, it is not sparsity to the end of achieving efficiency. It’s exactly the opposite, it is an imposed limitation to derive a greater meaning, or to pass a fullness to the reader. And that feels counterintuitive, but when you read haiku you understand it’s absolutely not.

And as writers in tech, aren’t we trying to do something similar? Don’t we want our experiences to be both usable and beautiful? I’m of the opinion that we don’t want to strip beauty from the experience, but we also don’t want to inflate it with dense, hard-to-read copy.

The form of UX writing is here to teach us the essence of a word. To help us learn how when we string a few words together, we bring something to the reader. That something can be plain and boring, or it can be beautiful.

If we don’t understand the implications of language, we run the risk of not using it to its fullest capacity. We run the risk of devaluing language to a philosophy of efficiency. Where language no longer serves to illuminate the unknown, or capture essences, but is about performing some mundane task, or checking a to-do list box.

While the two forms are completely different, I think there is something to learn from haiku. A way to honor the language we have and the work we do, perhaps. Or, more simply, a way to study the nature of words, or what it means to read something on a page (if you’re interested in this, I highly recommend this book, “What We See When We Read”).

I’ll leave you with one more haiku from the master himself, Basho, who despite living in the 17th century, still passes something ineffable to us today:

How I long to see

among the morning flowers

the face of God

— Basho