Flowers and pearls: The existentialist limbo for texts

Is anyone actually reading this?

You like to read (!) somewhere that nobody reads anymore. Newsletters, email subject lines, Insta-captions, forewords to annual reports, columns - all classics of the "nobody reads that" literature. But why is all this written anyway? Why and how much energy should be put into texts at all?

Let's try an approach to these questions. Take a text, commit to honesty and perform the "existentialist limbo":

Level 1: the functional purpose

The first question you should ask yourself is: Does the text have a functional purpose? Email subjects, disruptive texts or the foreword to the annual report would probably be surprisingly effective. They are needed, they do something, they are expected. They therefore have a right to exist.

Stage 2: the created purpose

But what about all the newsletters that clog up your mailbox every day, or this column? Their functional purpose is relatively modest. But they can have a purpose in themselves: As long as the column is entertaining or educational, it has a right to exist. As long as the newsletter fulfills a purpose, it has one. To determine this again, we move on to step 3.

Level 3: the actual created purpose

To determine whether the created purpose is really being fulfilled, we ask: Could the text be replaced by dummy text without causing major damage? That would indeed be an interesting experiment, but unfortunately no one ever dares to try it.

Hypothesis: The damage would be quite limited in many cases. If this is the case, then for texts with a purely created purpose, this means that they ultimately do not fulfill this purpose. Probably because too little energy was expended on it or because there was too little skill behind it, or both. In other words, if this column could just as well be dummy text, then it would not be entertaining enough - or educational enough - and would have no reason to exist.

Stage 4: The resources

The question of whether there should be a specific text and under what conditions would thus be roughly clarified. The question remains as to how many resources should be put into it? This can now also be deduced:

• if the text has no relevant purpose = no energy at all
• if the text fulfills a more functional purpose = little energy with a focus on more formal aspects such as text length, spelling, punctuation
• if the text fulfills a self-created purpose:
  • check whether this really, really (really!) applies (blind text test), if no = no energy
  • if yes = as much energy as necessary for this benefit to really, really (really!) materialize.

Everything clear? You're welcome.

Analyzed since 2025 Sarah Pally In her column "Blossoms and Pearls", she uses industry-related terms and comments on them with a personal touch, from a linguistic perspective - as well as with a precise view of developments in the industry. Pally is a partner in the Partner & Partner agency in Winterthur. She has been working in the fields of content marketing, text/concept and storytelling in the communications and marketing sector for 15 years.