25/grammar intentions.

In the last couple of workshop I have facilitated with different clients, I started turning my discourse into a grammar lesson. After using for the nth time the very ‘untoolish’ tool of elevator pitch template (see an example) to drive a synthesis of what a value proposition can be, I realized that every time I was starting explaining its parts I’ve been referring more and more to the function of every word in producing an act. That sentence, given its normative structure (more or less it goes like “ For (target customer) who has (customer need), (product name) is a (market category) that (one key benefit). Unlike (competition), the product (unique differentiator)”), is meant to describe the speaker’s future intention. Intention, as the In scholastic philosophy used it, is a term borrowed from arab neoplatonism and used to designate the “act with which the subject tends towards an object or even the mental representation of the known object in the knowing subject”. So when I pronounce an intentional sentence I am describing what’s coming next. But more than the intentional meaning per se, the structure is what seems to me useful to be understood.

From an organisational perspective grammar is the way we describe intentionally the world, precisely using rules to connects shared meaning (semantics). Therefore what a structure is is what it can be described. That is a confused aphorism to state the urgent need to start a course on grammar as organisation. There’s a huge hole to fill.