Where to put the emphasis

18 August 2026

1. The glitch

Watch this YouTube short by Robert Miles. It’s a gloriously pedantic critique about a throwaway line in The Matrix. But its also about an important communication skill: deciding where to put the emphasis.

For a voice-over artist, like Robert, if you put the emphasis in the wrong place then the message gets mangled. Putting it in the right place requires understanding the underlying meaning.

2. “I didn’t say we should kill him”

My son just told me [h]is favourite sentence is: “I didn’t say we should kill him” because if you emphasise each different word it changes the entire meaning

– Felicity Hannah on BlueSky

3. The emphasis was not my emphasis

This post by Benn Gooch, a primary-care doctor in the UK, describes why he has stopped using AI scribes to record clinical notes during patient consultations, despite being an enthusiastic early adopter.

I sat down to review a patient I had seen six weeks previously. I read the note. It was accurate. It was comprehensive. It contained no factual errors that I could identify. And I did not recognise it.

The voice in the note was not my voice. The emphasis was not my emphasis. The clinical narrative — the selective, interpretive story that a GP constructs to capture not just what was said but what mattered, what worried them, what they decided to watch and why — was absent. In its place was a faithful transcription of everything spoken, organised by structure rather than by clinical significance.

I had not written that note. An algorithm had written it, in response to sounds it had heard, and I had approved it, hurriedly, at the end of a session. Now, six weeks later, I was reading someone else’s account of a consultation I had conducted — and I couldn’t recall the patient clearly enough to reconstruct what had been left out.

– Dr Benn Gooch, I Was an Enthusiastic Early Adopter of AI Scribes. Here’s Why I Stopped

The whole essay is worth reading.

4. Writing is thinking. Presenting is Deciding.

Russell Davies extends the idea that “writing is thinking” in this video:

Presentations and presentation software (like strategy) are good because they’re constrained. You have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of space. So you have to make decisions. You have to decide what comes first. You have to decide what gets left out. You have to prioritise.

– Russell Davies, Writing is thinking, presenting is deciding