The Voynich manuscript is a potentially obsession creating item. It’s routinely described with phrases like, “the world’s most mysterious book.” For more than a century, nobody could read it or make heads nor tails about what it was about. Debate raged about whether it was coded or just an unreadable hoax.
Until recently.
The book has, apparently, finally yielded to insightful scholarship and has been decoded.
(I)t was more or less clear what the Voynich manuscript is: a reference book of selected remedies lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval period, an instruction manual for the health and wellbeing of the more well to do women in society, which was quite possibly tailored to a single individual.
But what I want to talk about is not the solution, but about writing style and communication.
Here we have a century old mystery, solved. Here’s how I learned about it. A tweet from Benito Cereno that read:
Holy shit holy shit holy shit holy shit
The Voynich manuscript, decoded
You can feel Benito’s excitement in that tweet! This is so exciting, there’s no time for punctuation marks!
Now read Nicholas Gibbs’s first hand account of solving this mystery. Here’s the opening paragraph, which does use a good narrative structure, the ABT (and, but therefore) template (championed by Randy Olson):
For medievalists or anyone with more than a passing interest, the most unusual element of the Voynich manuscript – Beinecke Ms. 408, known to many as “the most mysterious manuscript in the world” – is its handwritten text. (And) Although several of its symbols (especially the ligatures) are recognizable, adopted for the sake of economy by the medieval scribes, the words formed by its neatly grouped characters do not appear to correspond to any known language. (And) It was long believed that the text was a form of code – one which repeated attempts by cryptographers and linguists failed to penetrate. (And) As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin format. But interpretation of such abbreviations depends largely on the context in which they are used. (Therefore) I needed to understand the copious illustrations that accompany the text.
But even with that good narrative structure in place, the opening paragraph shows so many of the problems of this article. Like many academics, Gibbs overloads on facts, with “and, and, and...” before we get to the “but.”
It’s disappointing.
Gibbs completely bypasses the intensity of interest in the strange book, of how many people have tried to crack it. “Repeated attempts” is so weak to describe a century long set of efforts to crack this this. It is such a typically cautious, couched language that is used in academic writing all the time.
And having solved a problem that so many people have brought so much talent and effort to bear upon, you might expect Gibbs to describe opening a bottle of champagne in celebration. Or maybe a beer. Or a description of the satisfaction he had from his insights – the “Aha!” moments, as it were.
Instead, Gibbs treats it with about as much enthusiasm as a walk to from the living room couch to the bathroom.
You want to hear about the feeling of triumph of solving the puzzle, not just the step by step solution to it.
If you want to connect with people, you need the passion. You need the guts. You need the emotions.
Update, 9 September 2017: I’m seeing tweets from people grumbling that the Voynich manuscript probably hasn’t been solved. Nobody that I’ve seen has said why they doubt that the problem is solved. (Update, 10 September 2017: Ah, see here.) Regardless, that doesn’t change the points made here.
Related posts
Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking review
Review: Don’t Be Such a Scientist
External links
Voynich manuscript: the solution
So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”
Picture from here.
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