IT’S CHALLENGING to write about The Rule of Three because it’s such a fundamental part of our culture, so embedded in our way of thinking, that even those who could not tell you precisely what it is already know about it intuitively.
For most of us, it starts in infancy with retellings of Three Blind Mice, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Three Little Pigs. It’s hiding in plain sight in literature, with The Three Musketeers, Three Men in A Boat and Wind in the Willows (featuring Moley, Ratty and Badger). And it’s there on TV in Gordon, Gino and Fred, Grand Tour (Clarkson, Hammond and May) and Last of the Summer Wine (Foggy, Compo and Clegg).
It’s built into our humour with the three line drop gag, like this one from Sara Pascoe: “You can’t lose a homing pigeon. If your homing pigeon doesn’t come home, all of you’ve lost is a pigeon.”
If you’re now getting the idea that it’s all about entertainment, think about advertising - “Snap, Crackle and Pop” - or politics, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (from the American Declaration of Independence). Shakespeare used The Rule of Three in Julius Caesar: “Friends, Romans and Countrymen …” And, of course, many religions, from Wicca to Christianity, Buddhism and Taoism feature trinities, or three stages of being.
So, what’s going on here? Why is the Rule of Three so powerful? Well, it’s all to do with the way the brain works (and if there are any neuroscientists out there reading this, please forgive me for the simplicity of the explanation that follows).
We all experience the world through our senses. Our eyes take in light and channel it to a receptor, the retina, which translates the signal into a series of electrical impulses that are sent to the brain via the optic nerve.
The brain’s job is then to work out what is being ‘seen’. It does this in microseconds by comparing the incoming electrical impulses to impulse patterns it has recorded in the past, making ‘best guesses’ as it goes until it gets a match - and then we can identify a tree, a cow, a girl so rapidly that that’s what we feel we ‘see’, as if our eyes were video cameras (which they aren’t, not even nearly).
As anyone who has been spooked by a snake-like stick or a bin bag flapping in a bush knows, it’s not an entirely faultless system but it usually works pretty well. And it’s an evolutionary development that has turned us into a pattern-seeking species: we look for shapes and listen for sounds that we have experienced before. It’s why we see animals in clouds, or prophets burned into pieces of toast. Or why we think the creak of a house settling at night might just be a burglar. It’s a multi-sensory process because we also learn to recognise patterns in tastes and textures in the same way; we learn what to accept and what to avoid.
So, back to The Rule of Three. A single point drawn on a piece of paper isn’t all that interesting. If you have two points, it’s slightly more interesting because you can draw a line between them. But three points means you can draw three lines to create a triangle. It looks an awful lot like a pyramid, don’t you think? And there it is, right there: the simplest pattern possible, and the foundation of The Rule of Three.
Long before I had read about The Rule of Three in drama (consider the three act play), or in storytelling (situation, complication, resolution), and when I was still a young reporter on a daily newspaper, I had developed a personal mantra that I repeated when scouring my patch for stories: “One’s interesting. Two’s a coincidence. And three’s a definite trend.”
It doesn’t bear much scrutiny - I was ridiculously young - but it helped me look for patterns. Three fatal accidents in the same spot? Death trap. Three off-licences broken into? Crime wave. Three beauty queens from the same family? Fantastic genes - what did grandma look like?
The reason why three-line drop gags work so well, is that they set up the pattern only to distort it at the end. Consider this ancient Les Dawson joke: “I said to the chemist, ‘can I have some sleeping pills for the wife? He said, ‘why?’ I said, ‘she keeps waking up.’” Okay, it’s a gag of its time, but it shows how in breaking the expectation of the third thing it creates tension and humour.
Politicians and CEOs are often reminded of The Rule of Three before they make speeches, presentations or go into TV and radio interviews. Three messages are easier to get across than four, and more memorable than two because three satisfies the pattern-seeking brain in a way that two does not.
As a copywriter - what one friend likes to call a ‘wordslinger’ - I often have to talk clients out of throwing every possible piece of information into a marketing email, press release or brochure. People aren’t that interested in looking for patterns. They won’t fight their way through 1,500 words about your business just for the for fun of it: nobody ever took a corporate brochure to bed thinking ‘this’ll be a good read’ (And if they did, I’d like to meet them.)
Another mantra I had as a young reporter was ‘think of the reader, first, last and always’. That one has stood the test of time.
You may always have known about The Rule of Three - perhaps you did drama at college - or you may simply have been reintroduced to something you already knew intuitively. But I’ll bet for the next three days, you’ll be seeing examples of The Rule everywhere. Just remember: “Look, listen and learn” or, if you live in London, “See it, Say it, Sort it.” (And, yes, I know that the last word is ‘sorted’, but I’ve turned it into an injunction - sort it out!)