people's place in our hearts. However, too often,  our messages end up flat or somewhat unconvincing;  

we say that the dinner was 'wonderful',  the present 'brilliant' and the holiday  

'the best ever', all of which may be true while  failing to get at what truly touched or moved us.  

To render our messages more effective, we  might take a lesson from an unexpected quarter:  

the history of art. Many paintings and poems  are in effect a series of thank you notes to  

parts of the world. They are thank yous for the  sunset in springtime, a river valley at dawn,  

the last days of autumn or the face of a loved  one. What distinguishes great from mediocre art  

is in large measure the level of detail with which  the world has been studied. A talented artist is,  

first and foremost, someone who takes us into  the specifics of the reasons why an experience  

or place felt valuable. They don't merely tell  us that spring is 'nice', they zero in on the  

particular contributing factors to this niceness:  leaves that have the softness of a newborn's  

hands, the contrast between a warm sun and a sharp  breeze, the plaintive cry of baby blackbirds.  

The more the poet moves from generalities  to specifics, the more the scene comes alive  

in our minds. The same holds true in painting. A  great painter goes beneath a general impression  

of pleasure in order to select and emphasise  the truly attractive features of the landscape:  

they show the sunlight filtering through the  leaves of the trees and reflecting off of a pool  

of water in the road; they draw attention  to the craggy upper slopes of a mountain  

or the way a sequence of ridges and valleys open  up in the distance. They've asked themselves with  

unusual rigour what is it that they particularly  appreciated about a scene and faithfully  

transcribed their salient impressions. Some of  the reason why great artists are rare is that  

our minds are not well set up to understand why we  feel as we do. We register our emotions in broad  

strokes and derive an overall sense of our moods  long before we grasp the basis upon which they  

rest. We are bad at travelling upstream from our  impressions to their source, it feels frustrating  

to have to ask too directly what was really  pleasing about a present or why exactly a person  

seemed charming to have dinner with. But we can  be confident that if our minds have been affected,  

the reasons why they have been so will be lodged  somewhere in consciousness as well, waiting to be  

uncovered with deftness and patience. We stand to  realise that it wasn't so much that the food was  

'delicious' but that the potatoes in particular  had an intriguing rosemary and garlic flavour  

to them. A friend wasn't just 'nice'; they  brought a hugely sensitive and generous tone  

to bear in asking us what it had been like for us  in adolescence after our dad died. And the camera  

wasn't just a 'great present'; it has an immensely  satisfying rubbery grip and a reassuringly  

clunky shutter sound that evokes a sturdier,  better older world. The details will be there,  

waiting for us to catch them through our mental  sieve. Praise works best the more specific it can  

be. We know this in love; the more a partner  can say what it is they appreciate about us,  

the more real their affection can feel. It is  when they've studied the shape of our fingers,  

when they've recognised and appreciated the quirks  of our character, when they've clocked the words  

we like or the way we end a phone call that the  praise starts to count. The person who has given a  

dinner party or sent us a present is no different.  They too hunger for praise in its specific rather  

than general forms. We don't have to be great  artists to send effective thank you notes: we  

just need to locate and hold on tightly to two or  three highly detailed reasons for our gratitude.