Imagine it’s a saturday afternoon. You take your warm lunch to the living room and turn on your TV. You finger-parkour all over that unnecessarily long remote to find the YouTube app and scroll through the colorful thumbnails fighting for your goldfish attention for way longer than you would like to admit. Finally, since you don’t want your food to turn to snow, you call a truce with the algorithm and click on a midly interesting image of . “Imagine this…,” starts off the video. But… why… should you imagine? What if you don’t want to? Is it your job to imagine things for them, or is it their job to use their words to paint you a mosiac in your mind?
Phrases like “Imagine”, or “Picture This”, or most infamously “You See” are what I call cheap words (perhaps everyone else calls them that too). The writer does not need to include these words in their script; their writing would be perfectly legible had they decided to omit those words after their lousy first drafts. But for some unknown reason, the overbearer in them wants to instruct us to do something that is so natural to us humans that a large portion of the population suffers from it’s access (hint: ant chai tea).
Scrolling through, or closing out on content that use cheap words like this have become second nature for me. The overbearer in me thinks that the use of such cliche shows a lack of respect for the audience. It hints at content that is mass manufactured so people can consume it and forget about it as fast as possible. But what they fail to realize is that by doing so, they are setting themselves up to be forgotten as fast as possible, too.
You see, I cannot comment on whether it is just “red car theory”* or if it is the result of the widespread use of LLM in writing that makes it seem as through every other interner creator has fallen for this sin. Either way, it is the writer’s job to ensure that the audience is treated with respect and deliver quality writing that sits with the audience long after they last interacted with it.
*frequency bias