Edward de Bono is famous for a number of things. One of them is the invention of ‘lateral thinking’. If you want to find out more about him or order any of his books, you can have a look at his home page -

One of de Bono’s theories is that we don’t think clearly—and often we don’t enjoy thinking—because we’ve become trapped inside certain thinking methods.

When you study English literature, one of the ‘traps’ is to get stuck in either

liking something

or hating something.

If you don’t enjoy English much, you’ll probably feel that you usually hate the poems or plays or whatever that you’ve studied in class. If you dislike the texts you’ve prepared, it is very hard to give a genuine personal response when you write about them. Your ‘genuine personal response’ might well be: “I hate this book. It is crap.” But as you know, this is not a good way to do well in a Higher English examination.

Even if you liked a text to start with, there is a certain danger that after studying it, writing essays about it etc, you end up never ever wanting to look at it again. If you feel like this, then when you comment that it is a ‘brilliant short story’ or a ‘superb use of imagery’, you tend to sound rather false.

If this applies to you—if you feel you either never had a positive personal reaction—or that you had one once but you lost it, read on to find out about PMI.

PMI is an acronym.

That means the letters stand for other words. These are:

Plus

Minus

Interesting

Edward de Bono calls this an ‘attention-directing tool’.

Here’s how you use it. You need a stop watch or a kitchen ‘pinger’ – or someone to time you. You also need a piece of paper, a pen, and the text you’re working on.

Suppose you take a printed copy of a poem and read through it once or twice before you run the PMI.

When you’re ready, start the timer – give yourself one minute to write down all the PLUS points you can think of about that poem. At the end of the minute you must stop and during that minute you must only write down positive things, as quickly as you can and as naturally as you can. If some of them are rather silly, don’t worry. That won’t matter. The thing is to be honest, open and quick. Here’s an example:

PLUS

  • It’s short.
  • It has bad language.
  • It’s not the sort of thing you usually study in school.
  • You can remember it easily.
  • You can understand it.

When you run out of time, immediately write on your paper MINUS and start another list. Once again, you have only a minute and no more and this time you must write down only negative things about the poem. You may find some things you put under the PLUS column reappear under the MINUS column. Like this:

MINUS

  • My mother wouldn’t like it.
  • It’s rude.
  • It’s too short to find enough to say about it.
  • It sounds too angry.
  • It’s really jingly.
  • It’s incredibly depressing.

Now your minute is up – STOP!

Immediately head up your third list with the word INTERESTING. Start the timer again and list the points of interest, stopping after a minute. Like this (but your list will be different from mine):

INTERESTING

  • It’s rude and poetic at the same time. Weird.
  • It’s not like anything else I’ve ever read.
  • The person in the poem sounds as though he’s angry with his parents but sorry at the same time (‘They may not mean to but they do’)
  • Why did Larkin want to sound like a teenager? Is this what he really felt like himself?
  • Does ‘get out as early as you can’ mean get out of the family home, or get out of life?
  • Does he really mean nobody should have any children? That would be the end of the human race!
  • The poem sounds very jolly in the rhythm and rhyme but the message is so black.
  • You might not agree with what he says, but you’d remember it.

Okay—that’s the end of the PMI.

The list which should help you is neither the PLUS nor the MINUS—it’s the INTERESTING. If you can find a couple of interesting points to follow up, you’re having a genuine personal reaction again. It means you’re thinking for yourself, instead of just copying out notes and ideas you’re sick of. What interests you is never exactly the same as what interests someone else. Try it!