If you take 2000 obituaries from the same international newspaper, what do you think the obituaries might tell you about the lives of the deceased? Lux Narayan, CEO and co-founder of Unmetric, a social media intelligence company based in New York and India, asked this very question and by examining these obituaries, he came up with some interesting answers.
Examining the obituaries written between 2015 and 2016, he first threw out the superfluous words (the, a, and, but) in order to focus on the meat of the articles and to capture the achievements of a particular lifetime. After removing the superfluous words he was left with the bare bones, for example:
...an artist who defied genre.
Groundbreaking architect.
Narayan did this for all 2000 obituaries and what emerged as the bare bones were nouns like: singer, author, music, theatre, creator, Director, writer, film, producer, and the verbs create, found, fight, design and save.
It made him wonder why so many parents ask their children to study business, law or engineering to be successful. Other interesting information that his study revealed is that the average age of first success was 37. Furthermore, the most common thread amongst the obituaries was the word "help," which suggests that enabling change and/or improvements and a desire to help others were especially valued.
We writers could learn a lot here for the creation of heroic figures in our books, figures who offer something to, or wish to improve, society.
For those who want to listen to Lux, here is the link to his talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/lux_narayan_what_i_learned_from_2_000_obituaries?language=en
Great idea... and wider research will show that, in some publications, obituary writing has itself almost become an art form... take a look at 'The Economist' or 'The Guardian'. for example...
Posted by: Christopher Anthony GODDARD | 08/29/2020 at 07:13 AM