Connect The Dots 04

Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam, ala rasulillah. Assalamu alaykum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh, your brother Boehner Mohammed here, continuing with connecting the dots, we're still talking about writing. And an important part before you begin writing. Still, we're still now we haven't even put our pens on the pad as of yet. But still, we're thinking about this process. And one thing you need to do mentally before you even start writing, is think about who your audience is going to be. Because that actually will dictate a lot of what happens next. So if for instance, you're going to be speaking to a room of 10 year olds, if your poem is geared towards you know, an

Islamic school kids assembly, then you obviously are going to start thinking about things in a completely different way, you're going to start using examples and ideas that are more relevant to that particular audience. If you're going to be speaking to an audience of your peers, people that are your age, or from your particular social economic status, then you're going to be using words that appeal to that particular audience. If you're speaking to a room of academics, then of course, you're going to try and up the ante a little bit and you know, use some bigger words, make them feel a little bit more impressed, right, whatever the case may be, knowing your audience is very

important, because it actually helps you in the process of choosing your words correctly. Now, why is this so important? Because we pick our words, subconsciously, even according to the people we're speaking with. So for example, when I speak to my children, I have two kids, my daughter is three, my son is one shala. When I speak to them, I speak to them like children, right? I don't speak to them the same way I speak to my wife using you know, bigger words, maybe words that are more syllables, or more complex meanings or understandings, I speak to them at their level. And in fact, this was from the son of the Prophet sub alojarse. And that he would speak to people according to

their level, even he would take it a step further. And he would speak to people in their own accents, can you imagine that there will be people who come to him speaking a different kind of Arabic dialect or different accent, and he would speak to them in a way that made them comfortable. So you have to know your audience in order to choose your words, so that you can actually address your audience correctly. So we do this subconsciously, all the time. For example, you do not speak to your mother, the same way you speak to your friends, right. Or if you do, you're going to get a, you get a special surprise, right. But for most of us, we speak to our parents in a certain way,

right, we use certain terminology, we speak to them in a way that you know, is more encompassing of respect, love, compassion we have towards them. Whereas when we when you're with your friends, maybe use some slang, maybe you're more chilled out, and they don't say, Oh, they start dragging your words on, because they're your friends. And they understand that culture and how you sound and where it's coming from. So pick your words wisely, by first of all, knowing who you're speaking to. And I'll give you another tip, a good rule of thumb is to use language that is very general. So theoretically speaking, you want your message to be felt by the most amount of people possible. In

that case, you don't have to dumb it down. But you don't have to use words that are obviously you know, meant for kind of PhD candidates, right? You want to speak to people in a way that they can understand what you're saying, because at the end of the day, if you're speaking, and they're not understanding, then you've lost this link to communication and your communication is not effective at all. So you need to first of all speak to people in a way that they can understand. Meaning that you will use the mass majority of people as your base audience, this can be very difficult sometimes, and this actually can be sometimes very, you know, disheartening. As an artist, you know,

you want to be able to express yourself in a certain way, I fall into this trap some trap sometimes, because in a lot of my poems, sometimes I use slang, I use words that are, you know, different. And maybe they have different meanings. And it's part of a subculture, a genre, maybe that I'm more familiar with, and sometimes Auntie's will come up to me like, Brother, what was that word? And I'm like, oh, man, sorry, like I you know, I forgot, I'm just talking to everybody, right. And that's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a thing to keep in mind. So you want to speak to people. This actually is a premise that I learned from dub poetry, which is, you know, a poetry

genre of poetry that comes from Jamaica. And it's one of the teachers that I had in this particular genre showed us that one of the principles of dub poetry is that you want to speak to the masses, you want people to be able to, you know, comprehend your message, and you don't want to feel like you're speaking down to people at the same time. But you also want to enlighten the general public, because those are the people that you know, obviously in show they're gonna get the most reward for if you're able to, you know, help the most amount of people not to say you can't speak about things and maybe just particularly speak to one particular genre people, you're just speaking to, you know,

women from East Africa between this age and that age, that's fine if that's the approach you want to take. But generally speaking, you want to keep things open through your language so that the most amount of people can benefit from what it is you have to say. And because we're in the business of words, this is our you know, Arsenal one of our tool sets in spoken word poetry is words in and of themselves. So when we are using words, we want to also be as specific as possible. It's very important I said this before, that we use words exactly as they are meant to be used.

So for example, if you are angry, you want to express in this poem that I am angry, you could say, I was angry. Or you can say, I was enraged with rage, almost the raise was nice. So I'm onto something here, you know, say, but you need to use words that are going to express in detail what it is you're feeling that detail will really help connect with your audience. And again, going back to what I said earlier, using the senses, what did things smell? What was the what what did it smell? Like? What did anger smell? Like? If you could describe that, to me? What the smell was of your anger? That would be fantastic. I'm able to relate to that so much better. What sounds Did you hear when

you were angry? You know, what did you see? Maybe your eyes went blank or your everything around you was read? You know, what did you touch? What was that feeling like? So using the senses, to help really enlighten and enhance the the feeling you have and enlighten your audience as to what actually you are trying to say. So being specific, using specific words and understanding that your audience needs to connect with, with what it is you're saying. And obviously, the only way they're gonna be able to do that is by using the right words at the right time. Now, we're still on the concept of choosing specific words. Think about love poems, there have probably been about 68

billion love poems written in the last week alone. Everybody loves writing love poems, and you go online, there's a gazillion love poems. But how can you approach the concept of love differently than anybody else. So I've written love poems. In the past, I've written poems in my wife, you know, the private homes I share with my family. And I actually wrote a poem, that was a love poem, how much I loved my daughter, it was all about how much I love my daughter, it's online, if you can show you check it out. It's called letter to my daughter. And the poems general thesis is how much I love my daughter. And I could talk about a lot of things in that poem I could speak about and which I did

speak about was the love that I have for my daughter, the ambitions that I have for her what the things that you know, the things that I want her to achieve and succeed in life with, I could also talk to her about role models she should take, which I did in the poem, I included, you know, famous companions and righteous women who've come over, you know, history and how she could be like them, and, and, you know, even if I might not be here forever, then she can still remember that I loved her right. These are all the general themes that I kind of, you know, skip together. But that was the general premise. Now, you can approach love very differently. For example, you could be writing

a love poem, about a mother and a daughter, you know how much a daughter loves her mother, you can even get more specific, and you can write about the love a mother feels for her daughter at the time of birth, know that very intimate process of giving birth to a human being, right, the love and connection a mother feels at that exact moment, that in and of itself can spark 1000 new words 1000 conversations 1000 thoughts and feelings. So getting into the specific feelings of what it is you're seeing what it is you're feeling, what it is you're enacting, is very important, because again, it helps us sympathize and empathize with the argument you're putting forth because that's really what

your poem is, right? Your poem is an argument it's a thesis centered around a particular thought or idea that you are trying to convince your audience of. So the more you can do that with evidences, and we're using now you know, the emotional kind of evidences, you can kind of emotionally blackmail into feeling what you feel, the more effective your poem will be in achieving the end result of having people feel the emotion you want them to feel with from the very beginning. Okay, I hope that was clearly understood. I know I use a lot of words there, go back, rewind and watch it again, if you need to inshallah, or you can continue and watch the next video and we can follow along and talk

more about writing in sha Allah I don't even think we've spoken about writing as of yet really, but inshallah you're benefiting. Stay tuned for the next episode, because I can look at for watching us and I want to lie about our catch.