- Nov 2021
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www.writersdigest.com www.writersdigest.com
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I had never written a full-length book before, and at first I decided I would treat each chapter as if it were a magazine article—because I had done that before. So I would set an artificial deadline, and 1'd make myself meet it. And I did that for three chapters. But, as in the case of most magazine pieces that I've written. I usually ended up staying up all night one or two nights in the last week that I wrote. It's horrible.The WD Interview: Author George Saunders Talks Structure, Outlining and Lincoln in the BardoOh, that is horrible. And as you get older, it's more horrible. After you finish, you're wiped out for a week almost, because your system just can't take it. I know mine can't. But if you're writing an article, as far as you're concerned that's the only thing you're ever going to write. You're writing that article and it absorbs your whole attention, and you can do that sort of thing and survive. But after I had done this three times and then I looked ahead and I saw that there were 25 more times I was going to have to do this, I couldn't face it anymore. I said, "I cannot do this, even one more time, because there's no end to it." So I completely changed my system, and I set up a quota for myself—of 10 typewritten pages a day. At 200 words a page that's 2,000 words, which is not, you know, an overwhelming amount. It's a good clip, but it's not overwhelming. And I found this worked much better. I had my outline done, and sometimes 10 pages would get me hardly an eighth-of-an-inch along the outline. It didn't bother me. Just like working in a factory—end of 10 pages I'd close my lunch pail.
tom wolfe on enforcing minimum word quotas everyday
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www.theparisreview.org www.theparisreview.org
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I now know what writer’s block is. It’s the fear you cannot do what you’ve announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn’t worth doing. That’s a rarer form. In this case I suddenly realized I’d never written a magazine article before and I just felt I couldn’t do it. Well, Dobell somehow shamed me into writing down the notes that I had taken in my reporting on the car customizers so that some competent writer could convert them into a magazine piece. I sat down one night and started writing a memorandum to him as fast as I could, just to get the ordeal over with. It became very much like a letter that you would write to a friend in which you’re not thinking about style, you’re just pouring it all out, and I churned it out all night long, forty typewritten, triple-spaced pages. I turned it in in the morning to Byron at Esquire, and then I went home to sleep. About four that afternoon I got a call from him telling me, Well, we’re knocking the “Dear Byron” off the top of your memo, and we’re running the piece. That was a tremendous release for me. I think there are not many editors who would have done that, but Esquire at that time was a very experimental magazine. Byron Dobell was and remains a brilliant editor, and it worked out
on writer's block
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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I know I know with the Paris is it is a stone. And people used to write on stone in Egypt. And that’s where they would create their hieroglyphic alphabet.
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www.canopycanopycanopy.com www.canopycanopycanopy.com
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Bad art and academic writing on parade
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docs.google.com docs.google.com
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"The Zettelkasten takes more of my time than the writing of books." —Niklas Luhmann (via vimeo.com/173128404)
Some people complain about the amount of time that working in their zettelkasten or notes may take, and it may take a while, but it is exactly the actual work of creation that takes the longest. The rest of the process is just the copying over and editing.
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- Oct 2021
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it is already clear in this case that the plan will spring from the materials, not the materials from the plan.
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sometimes you de- yelop a whole passage, not with the intention of completing it, but because it comes of itself and because inspiration is like grace, which passes by and does not come back.
So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.
I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.
These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.
Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.
Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.
This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.
Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.
I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.
With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.
With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.
I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.
I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.
We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?
How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?
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www.heise.de www.heise.de
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Ein Beispiel: Seit Beginn des Projektes wurden bis heute von den Editoren bereits gut 2800 bibliographische Datensätze zu Literatur angelegt, mit der Luhmann gearbeitet hat. Dazu kommen die gut 2100 Publikationen von Luhmann selbst. Und wir sind erst mittendrin.
Machine translation:
An example: since the beginning of the project, the editors have already created a good 2,800 bibliographical records on literature that Luhmann has worked with. Then there are the 2100 publications by Luhmann himself. And we are only in the middle of it.
I wonder what this ratio looks like for other writers and researchers? I'd suspect Niklas Luhmann to be several standard deviations above the average.
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www.jesperjuul.net www.jesperjuul.net
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A paper as a game!
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perell.com perell.com
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if you don’t write about an idea, you’ll never have a three-dimensional perspective on it
One of several recurring claims that make me feel like an alien. Do so many people really think this? It sure does end up getting said a lot.
I'm comfortable using text to communicate, but I hardly ever write in the sense people mean when they speak of it.
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www.jeyamohan.in www.jeyamohan.in
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சமணர்கள் இப்பிரபஞ்சம், இந்த பூமி, தேவர்கள், தெய்வங்கள், உயிர்க்குலங்கள், மனிதர்கள் ஆகியவற்றை பல்வேறு வளையங்களாக உருவகிக்கிறார்கள். அதன் மையம் மேரு என்னும் பொன்மலை. அங்கே ஆதிநாதர் அமர்ந்திருக்கிறார்.
- info about jainism philosophy on universe
- my fiction work Meru notes
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Ruthlessly seek negative feedback. When getting feedback, @tferriss requests the reader highlight: • Anywhere boring • Anything confusing • Anywhere your mind starts to wander Then he asks two questions - what is the: • 10% I must keep • 20% I should cut immediately
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twitter.com twitter.com
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For clear writing, answer these questions 1. What Am I Really Trying To Say 2. Why Should People Care 3. What Is The Most Important Point 4. What Is The Easiest Way To Understand The Most Important Point 5. How Do I Want The Reader To Feel 6. What Should The Reader Do Next
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www.brainpickings.org www.brainpickings.org
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trailblazing physicist David Bohm and Indian spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti sat down for a mind-bending, soul-stretching series of conversations about some of the most abiding human concerns: time, transcendence, compassion, death, the nature of reality, and the meaning of existence.
What came up for me in exploring the parallels between writing and mathematics.
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stylepedia.net stylepedia.net
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user n. When referring to the reader, use "you" instead of "user." For example, "The user must..." is incorrect. Use "You must..." instead. If referring to more than one user, calling the collection "users" is acceptable, such as "Other users may want to access your database."
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- Sep 2021
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developer.salesforce.com developer.salesforce.com
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stylepedia.net stylepedia.net
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Do not use articles in front of product names. For example, do not write "the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was..."
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writingcooperative.com writingcooperative.com
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Quite frankly, I find these 8 rules quite pedestrian.
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writingcooperative.com writingcooperative.com
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If the words of legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi:“If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.”
This is analogous to how I see systems everywhere, having studied them for a couple of decades.
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briansunter.com briansunter.com
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https://briansunter.com/blog/five-minute-journal/
Lists of prompts for writing/journaling:
- 365 Thought Provoking Questions
- 87 Self-Reflection Questions for Introspection
- 200 Icebreaker Questions
- 237 Icebreaker Questions to Try with your Team
- 36 Questions that Lead to Love
- 119 Journal Prompts
- 120 Questions to Ask Yourself
For a potential template:
- # Morning Questions
- [[Morning Questions]] #daily
- [[What Am I Grateful for?]]
- [[What Would Make Today Great?]]
- [[What Am I Worried About?]]
- [[What Am I Thinking of?]]
- [[Morning Questions]] #daily
- # Evening Questions
- [[Evening Questions]] #daily
- [[How Am I feeling?]]
- [[What's Something Good That Happened Today?]]
- [[What Did I Do Well?]]
- [[What Could I Have Done Better?]]
- [[Evening Questions]] #daily
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seltani.shoutwiki.com seltani.shoutwiki.com
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Manual for Seltani
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seltani.net seltani.net
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Platform for writing social interactive fiction.
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sakai.duke.edu sakai.duke.edu
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ving... Haste is seen as a lack of decorum combined with diabolical am
Haste is seen as a lack of decorum combined with diabolical ambition.
What a fantastic definition of haste!
via P. Bourdieu, "The attitude of the Algerian peasant toward time", in Mediterranean Countrymen, ed. J. Pitt-Rivers (Paris, 1963), PP. 55
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punctumbooks.com punctumbooks.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Suzanne Conklin Akbari</span> in Growing a Research Network: Approaches to Global Book History | Penn Libraries (<time class='dt-published'>09/12/2021 21:11:23</time>)</cite></small>
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finiteeyes.net finiteeyes.net
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To use your brain well, get out of your brain. Paul calls this offloading. To think well, she says, “we should offload information, externalize it, move it out of our heads and into the world” (243).
This is certainly what is happening in the commonplace book tradition and even more explicitly in the zettelkasten tradition.
What other methods of offloading exist besides writing and speaking? Hand gestures? Dance? What hidden modalities of offloading might indigenous societies use that Western culture might not be cognizant of?
Often journaling or writing in a diary is a often a means of offloading the psychological cruft of one's day to be able to start afresh.
This is some of the philosophy behind creating so-called "morning pages".
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One thing teachers can do to help students develop interest in a field, for instance, is to tell stories of the conflicts within that field. Present history as a series of undisputed facts and your class is likely to fall asleep pretty quickly; present some of the conflicts over what constitutes meaningful history and your class is likely to feel much more involved.
I'll have to dig up the reference, but I've seen some advice to write things with known outcomes as if they were a mystery or detective story. The general recipe was: Present the idea as a question and then slowly peel back the layers to come up with the solution in an organic fashion as a means to holding attention.
I wan to say it was someone writing about science and technical writing.
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Imitation, Paul says, allows us to think with other people’s brains. It is a key technique — globally and transhistorically — for learning, from babies imitating parents to apprentices imitating masters. And yet imitation is seen in contemporary US society, and schooling especially, as so debased that it is frequently punished. In fact, if Paul is correct (and I think she is, and have thought so for years when teaching writing), we should build imitation into many more of our lesson plans.
On the importance of imitation...
I'm reminded of Benjamin Franklin imitating what he thought were good writers to make his own writing more robust.
See: https://via.hypothes.is/https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm
Maybe the aphorism: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," should really be "Imitation is the sincerest form of learning."
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jrdingwall.ca jrdingwall.ca
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https://jrdingwall.ca/blogwall/25-years-of-ed-tech-blogs/
JR writes about some of his journey into blogging.
I appreciate some of the last part about the 9x9x25 blogs. For JR it seems like some smaller prompts got him into more regular writing.
He mentions Stephen Downes regular workflow as well. I think mine is fairly similar to Stephen's. To some extent, I write much more on my own website now than I ever had before. This is because I post a lot more frequently to my own site, in part because it's just so easy to do. I'll bookmark things or post about what I've recently read or watched. My short commentary on some of these is just that, short commentary. But occasionally I discover, depending on the subject, that those short notes and bookmark posts will spring into something bigger or larger. Sometimes it's a handful of small posts over a few days or weeks that ultimately inspires the longer thing. The key seems to be to write something.
Perhaps a snowball analogy will work. I take a tiny snowball and give it a proverbial roll. Sometimes it sits there and other times it rolls down the hill and turns into a much larger snowball. Other times I get a group of them and build a full snowman.
Of course lately a lot of my writing starts, like this did, as an annotation (using Hypothes.is) to something I was reading. It then posts to my website with some context and we're off to the races.
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longviewoneducation.org longviewoneducation.org
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The important thing, C.Wright Mills argues, is that you keep a journal, a place for ‘fringe-thoughts’, where you “will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person” as part of learning “how to keep your inner world awake.” While we might think of such journaling as merely a step towards the ‘real’ intellectual work of writing papers or publishing blog posts, crucially Mills argues that “the maintenance of such a file is intellectual production.” That message should be just as inspiring as the idea that we can all blog because we have stories to tell.
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oldschool.scripting.com oldschool.scripting.com
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“I never understand anything until I have written about it.” Supposedly Horace Walpole (1717-1797) wrote that, but Google can't help me pin down where he might have done so. Frankly, it doesn't sound to me like a sentence written in the eighteenth century. But it may be a useful hyperbole.
Track down the source of this for future use.
Related to the idea of the Feynman Technique.
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The big thing here for me, though, is the difference between tagged content showing up in a read-only space vs. showing up in a read-and-write space.
Or more powerful, in a read, write, remix, and edit space.
Somewhat related to:
The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb 2011-06-23 at OSBridge2011 having lunch with Ward, Tantek exclaimed
https://indieweb.org/2011/Smallest_Federated_Wiki#Inspiration
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fs.blog fs.blog
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What motivates the characters or the author? What are they seeking? What is their purpose? Here’s how Kurt Vonnegut described the importance of incentives in books: “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
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- Aug 2021
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www.khanacademy.org www.khanacademy.org
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slate.com slate.com
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Though the manicule was part of the furniture of the written page for centuries, it was not a mark of punctuation provided by the writer for the edification of the reader but a part of the apparatus of reading itself, a visual breadcrumb inked into the margin by and for one particular reader.
I like the phrase "furniture of the written page"
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ua.pressbooks.pub ua.pressbooks.pub
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How can you be surprised by your own writing, though? If you’re the author, how could you not know what you’re about to say?
Discuss: Have you experienced this type of surprise in your own writing? If so can you provide a specific example? Are you the type of writer that prefers to know where you'll end up in a piece of writing OR the type of writer who can be comfortable with uncertainty? Are you a different type of writer altogether?
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rhizome.org rhizome.org
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not for submission, but to follow
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chicago.chalkbeat.org chicago.chalkbeat.org
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This effort could look like teaching peers and caregivers about their favorite hobbies, be it Roblox or TikTok. Or it could look like interviewing elders about neighborhood histories and crafting short videos to share with their communities.
project-based learning
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Children should be given many opportunities to express themselves and to read and write texts with real-world implications.
Teachers need to be doing this, too, right? Write!
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a means to act in the world
Nice way of putting it
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vi.to vi.to
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Want to Write a Book? You Probably Already Have!
Patrick Rhone
Paper is the best solution for the long term. If it's not on paper it can be important, if it's not it won't be.
Our writing is important. It is durable.
All we know about the past is what survived.
Analogy: coke:champaign glass::blogger:book
Converting one's blog into a book.
"The funny thing about minimalism is that there's only so much you can say."
Change the frame and suddenly you've changed the experience.
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berjon.com berjon.com
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If believing that people shouldn't live in fear of their tech betraying them is ideological, I'll take it.
Not exactly an if-by-whisky, but (unrelated to the content of this article) worth serving as the launch pad for a series of examinations about why people feel compelled to couch their messages in this way—usually because the other "side" is using an appeal to emotion or appeal to reflex.
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sepwww.stanford.edu sepwww.stanford.edu
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an invitation to readers to invest their time reading it
structure vs. function. the introduction exists for a purpose; that is, to allure the intended readers.
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hellotimking.com hellotimking.com
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https://medium.com/writers-on-writing/pages-a-simple-productivity-enhancement-971b6a858432
How Tim King has modified Jilia Cameron's morning pages concept to improve his own creativity.
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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You would take a Didion sentence like 'Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs,' and learn how to see it as "Only the ____ and the ____ may ____, ____, ____ and ____." A reusable format for pointing out similarities between two distinct things.
An excellent little example of copying form and style.
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I used to think copying was unseemly before one of my writing professors in college filled me in on the big, unkept secret. He handed us a small trove of writing samples from folks like Joan Didion, John McPhee, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ernest Hemingway. Essentially a Who's Who of New Yorker essayists. We had to copy out their work, then write our own pieces using the copied sentences as 'templates.'
This general thought goes back to antiquity (and possibly earlier). In writing about classic rhetoric Seneca the Younger wrote in Epistulae morales
"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey | And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "
(Sound a bit like he's one of the original digital gardeners, but in an analog world?)
He's essentially saying, read the best, take their thoughts and ideas, consume them, make them your own."
Generations later in ~430 CE, Macrobius in his Saturnalia repeated the same idea and even analogy (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):
"You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."
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The Echo & Narcissus Writing Club is all about mimicking the work of exceptional writers in order to learn from them.
I'm reminded here of a portion of Benjamin Franklin's passage in his Autobiography where he describes his writing process and work to improve.
Also the main plotline of the movie Finding Forrester.
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wiki.c2.com wiki.c2.com
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To me, the greatest benefit of IndexCards is that they force you to not write too much. This is a big help to those of us who are still squishing the bitter juice of BigDesignUpFront from our brains. The expense and rarity of vellum played a similar role in MedievalArchitecture.
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Local file Local file
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For example, his erasable writing tablet is referenced inW. Blunt, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 70.
What form did Carl Linnaeus' erasable writing tablet take?
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- Jul 2021
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www.kristofferbalintona.me www.kristofferbalintona.me
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One of those professors recommended I read How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco, which I found to be a surprisingly close analog to Luhmann’s Zettelkasten.
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writingcooperative.com writingcooperative.com
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ask yourself which tangential questions it brings up. What were you curious about as you wrote it? What aspects of your piece deserve further exploration? Is there a wider issue to look at? Or one single element that could merit a couple of thousand words of its own? For every piece, find at least three new ideas that could be explored as articles. These may be in the form of questions, and only further research will reveal whether or not they can become pieces of their own.
Keep this in mind as a good practice.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Minto is the originator of the MECE principle pronounced "ME-see",[6][3] a grouping principle for separating a set of items into subsets that are mutually exclusive (ME) and collectively exhaustive (CE).[7] MECE underlies her Minto Pyramid Principle,[3] which suggests that people's ideas should be communicated in a pyramid format in which summary points are derived from constituent and supporting sub-points:[8] Grouping together low-level facts they see as similar Drawing an insight from having seen the similarity Forming a new grouping of related insights, etc. Minto argues that one "can’t derive an idea from a grouping unless the ideas in the grouping are logically the same, and in logical order.”[3]
Saw this mentioned/described in the first session of Roam Book Club 5 [video].
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www.thecut.com www.thecut.com
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These are emails composed for an audience not of one friend but of many fans. These emails are newsletters.
Indication of the morphing of long emails into newsletters.
How does blogging fit into this space and continuum? Blogging as the expansion of ideas to test them out, garner feedback and evolve ideas over time?
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www.rollstonepigraphy.com www.rollstonepigraphy.com
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http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/?p=921
An archaeological find indicates that alphabetic writing may have occurred earlier in history than we've previously known.
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www.nwp.org www.nwp.orgHome1
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Writing is the currency of the new workplace and global economy
No, the finance metaphor is so fraught with capital and considerations of the bottom line that I really buck against this. Writing at its best has never been about using it as a currency. It is not BitCoin.
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www.everythingisaremix.info www.everythingisaremix.info
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1) Define the ProblemReal simple: what is the problem you're trying to solve? And yes, it is a problem. If you think it's not, find the problem.2) Pinpoint the TensionThis is where we start finding those weird links. Look for the elements that don't fit together, that seem opposed. Find two contrasting elements and isolate them.3) List the AssociationsThis is a brain dump. List the words and ideas that are related to these two contrasting elements. Nothing is wrong, let rip whatever springs to mind.4) Connect the DotsFrom the two lists you just generated, connect an item from one list to an item in the other.
1 + 1 = 3 Tension to Creativity
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www.metafilter.com www.metafilter.com
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Fictional writing tips, templates, and guides.
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10 easy edits to improve your manuscript right now
Quick tips for refining your drafts.
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icla2021.jonreeve.com icla2021.jonreeve.com
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A charming letter!
One writing style of Ezra Jennings I noticed it that he likes to use exclamation mark.
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If he attempted to defend himself, or to deny the facts, she was, in that event, to refer him to me.
The writing style of Mr. Bruff just really matches his occupation, direct and clear. And often we can ask just like this sentence, he writes as what a lawyer would say at work, such as "attempt," "defend," and "deny," etc.
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There was an absence of all lady-like restraint in her language and manner most painful to see. She was possessed by some feverish excitement which made her distressingly loud when she laughed, and sinfully wasteful and capricious in what she ate and drank at lunch.
Comparing to Betteredge's writing style which more focus on the description of character's physical appearance and story reveal personality; Miss Clack' writing style are more focusing on character's speaking attitude.
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In order that the circumstances may be clearly understood, I must revert for a moment to the period before the assault
Start from the beginning of this book, I noticed that many sentences were written in inverted order. Is this a popular writing style of the 19th centuries, or it just author's personal writing style?
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The objects, which he describes as cylinders, are clay tubes about the size and shape of a little finger—like elongated beads. Because of their shape, and because they were found near pottery vessels inside the tomb, he suspects they might have served as tags that could be strung on the vessels to identify something about them, whether their contents, their owner, or their origin or destination. If that is the case, he speculates that the writing could denote names, or descriptions of property.
These archaeological objects could theoretically have been one of the first written tags in human history.
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"The earlier systems of writing were extremely difficult to learn," says Schwartz, the Whiting Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. "There were thousands of symbols used in very complicated ways, which meant that only a very small group of people could ever learn how to write or read. With the invention of the alphabet, it meant that a much larger number of people could, in theory, learn how to read and write. And so it ultimately led to the democratization of writing. And of course it is the system that all Western European writing systems used because Greeks, who borrowed the Semitic alphabetic system, then used it to write their own language."
Early writing systems used thousands of symbols and were thus incredibly complex and required heavy memorization. This may have been easier with earlier mnemonic systems in oral (pre-literate societies), but would have still required work.
The innovation of a smaller alphabetic set would have dramatically decreased the cognitive load of massive memorization and made it easier for people to become literate at scale.
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The generally accepted origin story of the alphabet as we know it holds that in 1800 BCE, Semitic speakers in Egypt, aware of the Egyptian writing system's mix of characters that stood for words and symbols that stood for sounds, wanted a system of their own and borrowed the Egyptians' alphabetic portion. Semitic languages are the predecessors of most of today's Middle Eastern languages.
Generally accepted origin story of writing.
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paulgraham.com paulgraham.com
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Whereas what drives me now, writing essays, is the flaws in them. Between essays I fuss for a few days, like a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. But once I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work, because there's always some error or omission already pushing me.
Potential drive to write essays
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boffosocko.com boffosocko.com
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Not all the ancients are ancestors.
I'll definitely grant this and admit that there may be independent invention or re-discovery of ideas.
However, I'll also mention that it's far, far less likely that any of these people truly invented very much novel along the way, particularly since Western culture has been swimming in the proverbial waters of writing, rhetoric, and the commonplace book tradition for so long that we too often forget that we're actually swimming in water.
It's incredibly easy to reinvent the wheel when everything around you is made of circles, hubs, and axles.
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gowers.wordpress.com gowers.wordpress.com
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The article starts with a question on the necessity and feasibility of massive collaboration and proceeds with discussion of the two immediate questions. In particular, the author addresses concerns he can think of, such as the problem of a person who tries steal the fruits of labor from others. Doing so makes the article more convincing and sincere. Furthermore, talking about the limitation also helps to gain the readers' trust.
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This suggestion raises several questions immediately. First of all, what would be the advantage of proceeding in this way? My answer is that I don’t know for sure that there would be an advantage. However, I can see the following potential advantages.
raises several questions immediately
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www.edutopia.org www.edutopia.org
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Similarly, in Alex’s 3D arts class, students learned about traditional art concepts like perspective and color theory to create 3D clay models that then became digital creations, and in an esports class he created, students wrote backstories for characters and scripts for esports broadcasts. One student had previously struggled with writing assignments, but writing within the context of esports helped him realize that he could write—and that he enjoyed it.
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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Refer to the research of Rimé et al, _Social Sharing of Emotion (see references) who have found people talk about troubling topics like emotions a lot. Some suggest this is an indicator that talking will clarify your understanding.
I've heard that keeping a journal can also be helpful for sorting out and expanding on emotions. This is assuredly related. More often it's framed from the perspective of getting things out rather than working them out.
This could be useful research to read.
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Thoughts written down can be retrieved as-is. This conquers hindsight bias which makes you change your mind after the fact, pretending you knew it all along.
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flancia.org flancia.orgFlancia1
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Welcome to Flancia! It is both a place and a draft.
I love the idea of a web document or digital garden always being considered a draft.
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www.heise.de www.heise.de
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Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.
You cannot think without writing; at least not in a sophisticated, connectable way. —Niklas Luhmann
(Source of the original??)
This is interesting, but is also ignorant of oral traditions which had means of addressing it.
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www.loc.gov www.loc.gov
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For example, for radio programs Hope engaged a number of writers, divided the writers into teams, and required each team to complete an entire script. He then selected the best jokes from each script and pieced them together to create the final script.
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Nevertheless, Heftel says, the notes tend to stick close to the major themes of Carlin’s work: “big ideas, the minutia of everyday life, and then language.”
George Carlin's comic craft was to take broad themes and the minutiae of life and craft it together with careful language.
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austinkleon.com austinkleon.com
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He even kept “indexes to indexes,” as Robert D. Richardson describes in his wonderful biography, Emerson: The Mind on Fire: Indexing was a crucial method for Emerson because it allowed him to write first and organize later and because it gave him easy access to the enormous mass of specific materials in his ever-increasing pile of notebooks… Emerson spent a good deal of time methodically copying and recopying journal material, indexing, alphabetizing indexes, and eventually making indexes of indexes. When he came to write a lecture, he would work through his indexes, making a list of possible passages. He then assembled, ordered, and reordered these into the talk or lecture.
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- Jun 2021
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asaobinoue.blogspot.com asaobinoue.blogspot.com
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This article was mentioned/recommended by @RemiKalir earlier today at a session at [[I Annotate 2021]].
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We just cannot know all that life will throw at us, and if we want our grading contract to be fair and equitable for everyone, we need to reexamine it, reflect on how it has been working for each of us, and perhaps adjust it.
This idea of re-evaluating at regular time points can be a very useful and powerful tool in more areas than just writing.
Society as a whole needs to look carefully at where it is do do this same sort of readjustment as well.
It's the same sort of negative feedback mechanism which is at work in the scientific method and constantly improving the state-of-the art.
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While the teacher or others may say they don’t agree with your ideas or find problems with your writing, these concerns will not affect your course grade at all. They will be the material of our conversations about your writing.
[[John McPhee]] has a passage in Draft No. 4 (The New Yorker, 2013-04-22) which describes some of their editorial process which mirrors some of this sort of work and conversation about writing.
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There will still be general guidelines for assignments in order for them to count as complete labor. These are simple things like: How much time you spend on a task, whether you followed the labor instructions, and how many words you produce or read.
I'm glad to see that reading makes an appearance here, if only a nodding one. Reading and subsequently annotating and thinking about my reading takes up a significant portion of time and labor which goes into my ultimate writing. Reading and annotating is the underlying bedrock for my rhetorical inventio process. Where would I be without it?
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your goal cannot be to follow orders in order to get a higher grade, instead you are free to listen, consider things, ignore ideas, or ask more honest questions of your readers. You are now free to make your own decisions on your writing.
Labor-based grading in writing allows students to listen and adjust to comments which gives them greater freedom and autonomy in both their learning process as well as their writing.
Ideally, in a system like this, a shorter feedback loop of commentary and readjustment may also help to more carefully hone their skills versus potentially hitting a plateau after which it's more difficult to improve.
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Writing is a verb, a practice. It is labor. A paper is at least one step removed from that labor and learning. It is a product of your labor, not your labor itself. So our grading system should align with what this course is mostly about, which is your acts of learning, your labors of writing.
I'm reminded here of a portion of Benjamin Franklin's passage in his Autobiography where he describes his writing process and work to improve:
About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator.[18] It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact of me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, thought I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.
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viahtml.hypothes.is viahtml.hypothes.is
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Choose a trusted paper writing service. Save your time. Score better
What is a Research Proposal?
In some cases, a student might have just found a very complicated and technical topic. Students have to come up with a viable research question to cover in their paper. After that, they must create a proposal that captures the relevant aspects of the subject. Nevertheless, most students do not know what makes a research proposal distinct from other types of writing a research proposal.
In such a case, a student might be under the impression that a teacher assigns the whole project. Hence, it would be sensible to think that a essay writer has a tight schedule when it comes to writing a research proposal. This could be quite confusing for anyone who might be working on the proposal.
Knowing the specifics of a research proposalwill enable a scholar to structure the work ahead of them. It constitutes the introduction of the student to the assignment. Furthermore, it shows the instructor the amount of work that the student has put into coming up with the proposal.
A research proposal is undoubtedly demanding. Therefore, it should be feasible for every individual to attain the necessary skills required to develop the submission. In this regard, a student can consult a writing expert to ensure that they have a good grip on the pertinent sections of the writing. Furthermore, one of the critical aspects that a scholar ought to consider in developing a proposal is the format. As a result, a student will rely on the appropriate structure to ensure that he or she structures their research proposal accordingly.
Applying the Right Structure
It goes without saying that a good research proposal entails applying the correct structure. Thus, it is essential to find out the specific elements that are supposed to be included in the paper. A notable aspect to look out for in a research proposal include:
- The title of the study
- Background information should be duly stated
- Questions to be answered in the proposal
- The methodology that will be used to carry out the proposed search
- The objectives and aims of the research
From these elements, it is easy for a student to formulate a detailed outline for the proposal. The framework will also help the scholar to incorporate all the crucial aspects of the proposal. However, it is worth noting that the structure is usually misleading. For instance, the title will not attract the attentiveness of the reader unless it is explicitly said. This can be overcome by clearly stating the purpose of the proposal, which is its relevance and significance to the field.
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www.nature.com www.nature.com
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How to write a first-class paper Six experts offer advice on producing a manuscript that will get published and pull in readers.
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www.migrationencounters.org www.migrationencounters.org
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Angelo: Yes, it was very difficult. Growing up like, up until middle school, I was all about school. I was in honors, AP classes, all of that. There was a point where one of my teachers—one of my reading teachers—basically just had me by myself because whatever she was teaching wasn't enough for me. She had me on a college level reading. I forgot the book, The Count of Monte Cristo? The Count of Monte Cristo.Isabel: That's definitely college level [Laughs].Angelo: Yeah. So—Isabel: In what grade?Angelo: I was in the eighth grade. And so that was awesome for me because I feel like, “Okay, I'm not from here, but they're praising me, and they're saying I'm doing good." And I'm sorry, what was the question?Isabel: No, no, that was perfect. I was just saying it's a hard dynamic, like refusing those opportunities.Angelo: Yes. And so after middle school, I was also into poetry a lot. I got a reward and I was asked to go to Nevada to receive the reward in front of a bunch of people. The website was legit—it was if you search poetry on Google, it was the very first one that came up. It was even to a point where you search my name and my poem came up. I got a mail certificate inviting me to Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada to receive that reward. I ran around the house; I told my sister. But at the end of the day, it was that risk of if we go, we're going to get pulled over, and we're going to get deported. So, you can't receive that certificate.Isabel: And this is a poem you've written yourself?Angelo: Yes.Isabel: What was it about?Angelo: I think it was a love poem, it was most definitely a love poem, yeah.Isabel: I love poetry too. I only imagine how awful would be to when you pour yourself into a piece of art, like poetry, and then get recognition for it, and how amazing that feels, but then having that last hurdle that you can't go over.Angelo: Yeah. So, once we got that established that "No, you can't." Basically, for me it was like, “So what's the point? So what am I working for? If I finish high school, I'm not going to be able to go to college, what's the point?” And I really never saw a future after middle school.Isabel: Yeah, I feel like some students in high school have a hard time staying motivated knowing that they might be able to go to college someday. So, like being a high school student and knowing that you can't because of the law, I can only imagine being very discouraging in terms of doing that work. You mentioned you stopped going to school midway through your junior year, so what happened there and where did you go from there?Angelo: Well I dropped out of school because I had a baby. So from then on it was basically work, work, work. And that was basically my life after junior year—just work and work.
Time in the US, School, Working hard, getting good grades, Extracurricular activities, poetry, Struggling, Dropping out, Immigration status, lost opportunities, in the shadows
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docs.microsoft.com docs.microsoft.com
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Enter Instructing the customer to type or otherwise insert a value, or to type or select a value in a combo box.
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> James Somers</span> in You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (<time class='dt-published'>04/03/2021 15:21:10</time>)</cite></small>
Originally arked as "want to read" on 2021-04-03 at 4:43 PM
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read and annotated an unnamed .pdf copy
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Local file Local file
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"Dear Jenny: What am I working on? How is it going?
I love that after the break, he brings it back around to something from the beginning to close things out nicely. Something done by the best writers and usually the best comedians).
Create some context, then use that context to your advantage.
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A Gould proof rarely endeavored to influence in any manner the structure or thesis of a piece, and was not meant to. Its purpose, according to Miss Gould, was to help a writer achieve an intent in the clearest possible way.
There's something interesting in this take on writing.
It also brings up the looming question: "What is your intent?"
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I call this "the search for the mot juste," because when I was in the eighth grade Miss Bartholomew told us that Gustave Flau-bert walked around in his garden for days on end searching in his head for le mat juste. Who could forget that? Flau-bert seemed heroic.
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You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their as-signment but seem to present an op-. A portunity.
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The basic thing I do with col-34 THE NEW 'I'ORKEI\, APRIL 29. 2013 lege students is pretend that fm their editor and their copy editor.
Teaching writing...
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It just seemed d ead easy-a rip, a scam-to tickle some machine and cause it to print money.
A solid twelve year old's definition of writing.
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The adulating por-trait of the perfect writer who never blots a line comes express mail from fairyland.
what a great sentence!
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The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting some-thing--anything--out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something--anything-as a first draft. With that, you have acf>ieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit it again-top to bottom. The chances are that about now you'll be see-ing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time. What I have left out is the interstitial time. You finish that first awful blurt-ing, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a . certain problem. Without the drafted version-if it did not exist-you obvi-ously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day-yes, while you sleep-but only if some sort of draft or earlier ver-sion already exists. Until it exists, writ-ing has not really begun."
Some solid advice not only for writing, but even thinking in general. Writing out your thoughts can help to sharpen and improve them.
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- May 2021
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harpers.org harpers.org
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These boys possess a teenybopper cuteness and, because they’re between the ages of eighteen and twenty, they have noisomely strong metabolisms and thus go shirtless pretty much all of the time, displaying either the ectomorphic thinness of trees or greyhounds or, in one boy’s case especially, the sharply delineated musculature of a really big insect. They bite their lower lips, and their expressions are—I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe them—precoital.
What a fantastic description!
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patthomson.net patthomson.net
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Getting to grips with structure means keeping your reader in mind.
Always write with the reader in mind. Good writing isn't a vanity project i.e. it's not about you. If you can't get your message across clearly then you're letting down your reader.
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it’s more accurate to say that readers notice the absence of structures, and/or when we shift the logics of one structure to another mid-stream, without saying anything.
I often see this in my undergraduate and postgraduate students; they make a conceptual move without signalling it to the reader, which leaves the reader feeling discombobulated.
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www.simplypsychology.org www.simplypsychology.org
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Method
How to write a methods section: Participants
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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In all his writings Parry argued for a historical approach to literature, condemning the classi cists who re‐created the past in the image of the present. We must “re construct the community of thought through which the poet made him self understood to those who heard him sing.”
This is reminiscent of an admonishment to recall that we shouldn't act as if (famous) writers never lived nor as writers never died.
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doctorow.medium.com doctorow.medium.com
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That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.
This sounds a lot like the Zettelkasten method. If writing is your default mode, writing complex pieces is just making concrete an organization of things that were already formalized in your mind
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Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial — it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.
This idea is far from new and is roughly what Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was doing with the science portions of his Waste Books in the late 1700's where he was running experiments, noting wins, losses, and making progress using the scientific method.
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The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them.Writing for an audience keeps me honest.
I've seen this sentiment before as well.This is also well attested in writing code too.
Writing for the public keeps you honest and makes one put more work into the product than they otherwise might.
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The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic, fixing the moment more durably in your memory so that it’s easier to recall in future, even if you never consult your notes.
Many people report this phenomenon, though I've never particularly experienced it.
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jeetheer.substack.com jeetheer.substack.com
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jhiblog.org jhiblog.org
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“Sibi scribere: The reasonable author writes for no other posterity than his own, for his own old age, in order to take pleasure in himself even then,” Blumenberg quotes Nietzsche (here, 83).
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Ideas have a history, but so do the tools that lend disembodied ideas their material shape −− most commonly, text on a page. The text is produced with the help of writing tools such as pencil, typewriter, or computer keyboard, and of note-taking tools such as ledger, notebook, or mobile phone app. These tools themselves embody the merging of often very different histories. Lichtenberg’s notebooks are a good example, drawing as they do on mercantile bookkeeping, the humanist tradition of the commonplace book, and Pietist autobiographical writing (see Petra McGillen’s detailed analysis).
I like the thought of not only the history of thoughts and ideas, but also the history of the tools that may have helped to make them.
I'm curious to delve into Pietist autobiographical writing as a concept.
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As Friedrich Nietzsche famously conceded to his friend Heinrich Köselitz a century later, “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.”
This is a fascinating quote and something I've thought about before. Ties to McLuhan's "the medium is the message" as well.
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history4today.com history4today.com
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english.sfsu.edu english.sfsu.edu
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www.impressivewebs.com www.impressivewebs.com
- Apr 2021
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madland.ca madland.ca
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As I was gearing up to start my PhD last fall, I received a piece of advice that made a lot of sense at the time, and continues to do so. My colleague, Inba told me to 'write while I read', meaning that I should take notes and summarize research while I read it, and not just read and underline article after article. That way, not only do I not lose my thoughts while I'm reading an article, but I am actively thinking through the arguments in the paper while I am reading it and my writing is thoroughly grounded in the literature.
This is generally fantastic advice! It's also the general underpinning behind the idea of Luhmann's zettelkasten method.
I'll also mention that it's not too dissimilar to Benjamin Franklin's writing advice about taking what others have written and working with that yourself, though there he doesn't take it as far as others have since.
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rampages.us rampages.us
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Nevertheless, Milton does not force the issue concerningbelief in God's mere existence, for that is something he simply assumes; forhim God's existence is a premise much more than a conclusion (see YP 6:130-2). In spite of the radical polarities of belief about God in ParadiseLost, its humans and devils and angels are united in this: they all believethat he is
I'm glad this is brought up. I think its really interesting that Milton, a devout Christian, was able to write something that retold a story from the bible- the characters being Christian icons- without needing to convince the readers that God is real/Christianity is the path to salvation. His intention was not to convert readers, but to write! By carefully crafting PL's character relationships, the importance of faith is naturally conveyed through the dialogue between all characters.
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english.stackexchange.com english.stackexchange.com
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Generally speaking, it would not be a good way to express something in formal writing, unless perhaps you were deliberately injecting humor.
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www.theminimalists.com www.theminimalists.com
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We Instead of You. Use the first-person plural when possible. Statements of we and our are more powerful than you and your, especially when talking about negative behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it this way: we’re writing peer-to-peer—we are not gods.
This makes so much sense - colleagues and fellow sojourners instead of a lecture.
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Pretty good writing for what seems evident to be a non-native speaker of English
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linusakesson.net linusakesson.net
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boardgamegeek.com boardgamegeek.com
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Building a wonky factory is way more fun than it has any right to be - and being rewarded for leaving last turn's pieces where they are (or punished for moving them) means that you're always working on top of the mess you made last turn, though you're never completely stuck.
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css-tricks.com css-tricks.com
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docs.microsoft.com docs.microsoft.com
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The best procedure is the one you don’t need. If the UI is crystal clear and leads the customer through a task, a procedure isn’t necessary. Start there.
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A book where you can enter “sport” and end up with “a diversion of the field” — this is in fact the opposite of what I’d known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that’s finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare. No wonder McPhee wrote with it by his side. No wonder he looked up words he knew, versus words he didn’t, in a ratio of “at least ninety-nine to one.”
The real reason for using a dictionary.
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le mot juste.
"the right word" in French. Coined by 19th-century novelist Gustave Flaubert, who often spent weeks looking for the right word to use.
Flaubert spent his life agonizing over "le mot juste." Now Madame Bovary is available in 20 different crappy english translations, so now it doesn't really make a damn bit of difference. by namealreadyusedbysomeoneelse July 21, 2009 at https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=le%20mot%20juste
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www.redblobgames.com www.redblobgames.com
- Mar 2021
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owl.purdue.edu owl.purdue.edu
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In general, APA style recommends using words to express numbers below 10, and using numerals when expressing numbers 10 and above
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medium.com medium.com
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A nice list of replacement words to make one's writing seem warmer and more human.
It would be cool if tools like Grammar.ly or Hemmingway.app had pieces like this built in.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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He wrote for the same editor, Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster, for more than three decades before moving to Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, in 2014.
Too few editors are spoken of...
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In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he liked to tweak his critics by wearing a T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist.”
I want a shirt like this!
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www.eyebrowhairs.com www.eyebrowhairs.com
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Be sure to make notes while reading and write a little summary at the end. This will help greatly when you need to look back at the text.
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open.umn.edu open.umn.edu
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<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Dan Allosso</span> in From Print to OER Ebook to Obsidian - History4Today - Note-taking, Research, Writing (<time class='dt-published'>03/15/2021 10:56:56</time>)</cite></small>
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www.chevtek.io www.chevtek.io
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He says that writing the function yourself makes it easy to modify and to fix bugs or improve efficiency.
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blogs.lse.ac.uk blogs.lse.ac.uk
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Impact of Social Sciences. ‘How to Run an Academic Writing Retreat and Bring the Campus Back Together’, 9 November 2020. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/11/09/how-to-run-an-academic-writing-retreat-and-bring-the-campus-back-together/.
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Write That PhD. (2020, October 31). Doing a systematic review? How to prepare, conduct & document a search + manage your results & screening tools https://t.co/xdAC35VmaK #phdchat #phdadvice #phdforum #phdlife #ecrchat #acwri https://t.co/sh62MypqOi [Tweet]. @WriteThatPhD. https://twitter.com/WriteThatPhD/status/1322467814733713408
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Since “Sexy Times With Wangxian” became a whole Thing, it has spawned memes, spinoff fics, and a frankly fabulous fic prompt generator that scans all of the STWW tags and chooses some at random for you to write fics around. Just now I got the tags, “Foursome – M/M/M/M,” “I’m Bad At Summaries,” “Cryptography,” “Body Dysphoria,” and “Organs.” Outstanding.
This could be an interesting feature for a personal website/blog. A generator that takes pre-existing taxonomies from one's website and suggests combinations of them as potential writing prompts when one has writer's block.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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short stories, poetry, and novels as well as non-fiction autobiographical works
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Anne Urai. (2020, November 15). All-inclusive authorship on large scientific papers can a be dangerous practice Alert: Potential unpopular opinion Thread 👇1/n [Tweet]. @AnneEUrai. https://twitter.com/AnneEUrai/status/1327934091929464832
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educatorinnovator.org educatorinnovator.org
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we (the researchers) shared our own career dream boards with the girls
I love that Jennifer and Autumn also created their own boards and shared them with Tamika and Malia. The questions that followed are a lovely example of the power of doing this.
Writing alongside each other, and sharing our writing, is a powerful way to support literacy learning and dialogue and a core writing project practice. It is powerful to see this practice within the research here.
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shared our own career dream boards with the girls
I love that Jennifer and Autumn also created their own boards and shared them with Tamika and Malia. The questions that followed are a lovely example of the power of doing this.
Writing alongside each other, and sharing our writing, is a powerful way to support literacy learning and dialogue and a core writing project practice. It is powerful to see this practice within the research here.
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- Feb 2021
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jrsinclair.com jrsinclair.com
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patthomson.net patthomson.net
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One study suggests that academics who write daily and set goals with someone weekly write nearly ten times as many pages as those without regular writing habits.
See Silvia, P. J. (2018). How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Second Edition). APA LifeTools.
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thesiswhisperer.com thesiswhisperer.com
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This left branching sentence forces the brain to ‘hold’ a lot of information about what the academic managers are doing before applying it to the action. It’s the kind of sentence that forces the reader to go back to the start after they have finished in order to really understand what is going on.
See Pinker, S. (2015). The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (Reprint Edition). Penguin Books for a more detailed discussion of these points.
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blogs.lse.ac.uk blogs.lse.ac.uk
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jargon comes so naturally
See Pinker, S. (2014, September 26). Why Academics Stink at Writing. Chronicle of Higher Education, 16.
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www.manuscriptsapp.com www.manuscriptsapp.com
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Writing software
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www.infoworld.com www.infoworld.com
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Does that make it so? Not for me. Were it simply a matter of words, I wouldn't write another word on the matter. But there are two distinct concepts behind these terms, concepts engendered separately and best understood separately.
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blogs.lse.ac.uk blogs.lse.ac.uk
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An academic blogger may feel constrained to topics only related to his or her academic research, whereas a blogger who is also an academic is free to explore wider fields of discussion.
This idea of "identity" is important. Many academics don't even think of themselves as authors let alone bloggers.
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us6.campaign-archive.com us6.campaign-archive.com
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Fewer screenshots means less maintenance work. If the product changes, the screenshots must change too, to remain helpful and prevent confusion. Lots of screenshots plus frequent product changes can cost a lot of time: keeping the docs in sync with the product can become unmanageable. A middle-ground approach is using text descriptions of UI elements, like “Click the START button”, as it’s easier to keep text descriptions matching the UI. And well-designed user interfaces and UI microcopy often mean that users don’t need screenshots to find their way through the product.
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opensource.stackexchange.com opensource.stackexchange.com
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medium.com medium.com
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hilarious sarcasm
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- Jan 2021
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jmuccigr.github.io jmuccigr.github.io
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Are the books that much better than the disses? Mostly, no, I'd say. So what's the deal? I think it's that we just like books. And by "we" I mean the whole industry of academe.
Often when I see this pattern happening, the dissertation is the new and original research and the subsequent book is a rewriting of that research into a form meant to help popularize and distribute it into a broader public.
This is similar, in a way to journal articles being written about by science journalists which then usually massively broadens the audience of the work. Usually this version helps the work to reach more eyeballs than the dissertation to book route does.
Another version of this might be the translation of a screenplay and a move into a novelization for popular movies. Some of the goal here however is just to make more money.
It's worth looking at who is (privileged to be) doing the writing in each of these cases.
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blogs.baruch.cuny.edu blogs.baruch.cuny.edu
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clear goals
I find this to be particularly important, in part because if you have clear goals then you're usually less susceptible to distractions.
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www.platformer.news www.platformer.news
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One of the things that Platformer members support is my ability to use part of each week to mentor junior writers. Today I want to tell you about my first mentee: Benjamin Strak, author of Design Lobster. As its name suggests, it’s a newsletter about how objects look and work, with an eye toward connecting modern designs with historical antecedents.
Example of a writer with a platform helping out new talent.
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Pretty good tutorial, but annoying somewhat overdone, very casual writing style ("Get ready to shocked in 3, 2, 1...") with lots of animated memes.
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www.mtc.gov.on.ca www.mtc.gov.on.ca
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formulating written policy governing operations and defining programs securing funding necessary to carry out the museum's programs preparing or approving an annual budget and monitoring it to ensure public accountability ensuring that the purposes for which the museum exists are being fulfilled
Program development, grant writing accountability and documentation.
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css-tricks.com css-tricks.com
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Verb plus noun is the winning combination. Describe what the link does and what it gets you: <a download href="downloads/fonts.zip"> Download Fonts </a> By itself, the verb Download would only signal what behavior will be triggered when the link is activated. Including the noun Fonts is great for removing ambiguity about what you’ll be getting.
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The debate about whether a button or link should be used to download a file is a bit silly, as the whole purpose of a link has always been to download content. HTML is a file, and like all other files, it needs to be retrieved from a server and downloaded before it can be presented to a user. The difference between a Photoshop file, HTML, and other understood media files, is that a browser automatically displays the latter two. If one were to link to a Photoshop .psd file, the browser would initiate a document change to render the file, likely be all like, “lol wut?” and then just initiate the OS download prompt. The confusion seems to come from developers getting super literal with the “links go places, buttons perform actions.” Yes, that is true, but links don’t actually go anywhere. They retrieve information and download it. Buttons perform actions, but they don’t inherently “get” documents. While they can be used to get data, it’s often to change state of a current document, not to retrieve and render a new one. They can get data, in regards to the functionality of forms, but it continues to be within the context of updating a web document, not downloading an individual file. Long story short, the download attribute is unique to anchor links for a reason. download augments the inherent functionality of the link retrieving data. It side steps the attempt to render the file in the browser and instead says, “You know what? I’m just going to save this for later…”
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www.themarginalian.org www.themarginalian.org
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Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains.
Steven Pinker said that writing is a way for one mind to cause ideas to happen in other minds.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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The hacks unanimously shared Dr Johnson’s view that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, while my academic colleagues thought it peculiar to waste one’s energy writing anything that would not figure in scholarly citation indices. The idea that one might maintain a blog simply because one enjoyed doing it never crossed their minds.
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- Dec 2020
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docs.microsoft.com docs.microsoft.com
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Include articles, such as the. Articles help readers and translation software identify the nouns and modifiers in a sentence. Examples Empty the container. The empty container
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docs.microsoft.com docs.microsoft.com
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Use display as a general term for any visual output device, including the built-in display on a computing device and an external monitor or projector.
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docs.microsoft.com docs.microsoft.com
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To open the document in Outline view, select View > Outline.
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On the Font tab, choose the effects you want.
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github.com github.com
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Making UIs with Svelte is a pleasure. Svelte’s aesthetics feel like a warm cozy blanket on the stormy web. This impacts everything — features, documentation, syntax, semantics, performance, framework internals, npm install size, the welcoming and helpful community attitude, and its collegial open development and RFCs — it all oozes good taste. Its API is tight, powerful, and good looking — I’d point to actions and stores to support this praise, but really, the whole is what feels so good. The aesthetics of underlying technologies have a way of leaking into the end user experience.
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patthomson.net patthomson.net
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Put yourself in the reader’s position and see if you can get a grip on how they might respond to your writing.
It seems like good advice but it's actually quite hard to divorce yourself from what you know. See the curse of knowledge.
This is why I think that having this list of questions is a good idea; you don't have to rely solely on putting yourself in the reader's shoes.
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www.gq.com www.gq.com
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Lanier is sometimes credited as the father of virtual reality; he is also sometimes credited as the owner of the world's largest flute
Nice juxtaposition.
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- Nov 2020
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scholars-stage.blogspot.com scholars-stage.blogspot.com
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More importantly, both systems assume that writers have full access to the full conversation that prompts them into writing. On Substack, there are too many walls dividing up the garden.
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I invite you to read some of these investigations (start with “The World Twitter Made.” Also relevant: “Requiem For the Strategy Sphere," "Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives,” “Life in the Shadow of the Boomers,” “Book Notes: Strategy, a History,” and “On Adding Phrases to the Language.”) A running theme in all of these essays is the importance of seeing individual authors not as individual authors, but as voices in a chorus. No writer is an island. If a "public voice" is inspired to spend hours massaging paragraphs and digging up references, it is because she has something to prove, and more important still, someone to prove it to. She writes in response to ideas she has heard or read. She feels compelled to add her voice to a larger conversation. The best thinkers speak to more than their immediate contemporaries, but without that contemporary argument in the background few would bother speaking at all.
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uxdesign.cc uxdesign.cc
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When writing copy for buttons, make sure that you keep consistency.
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medium.com medium.com
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Keep sentences small. They’re easier to work with that way.If something doesn’t feel right, there’s a problem with one or more of your sentences. Listen to that feeling. Try to pinpoint exactly which word or phrase is triggering it. Naming exactly what’s wrong, in grammatical terminology or otherwise, will come later.Understanding a word’s etymology will teach you how to use it. Words contain imprints of their histories.The subject of a sentence should appear as close to the beginning of a sentence as possible.You don’t have to “grab” anyone with the first line of your story. Just write a simple sentence that says what you want it to say. It’s harder than it sounds! And also very effective, if done well.“A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences, the relentless exploration of possibilities, the effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say the possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.”Noun phrases (“the realization that…”) almost always sound clunky and dead. Try rewriting them as verb phrases (“realizing that…”).Prepositions are difficult to get right, even for native English speakers.A reader’s experience has nothing to do with a writer’s. A sentence that reads “naturally” or “conversationally” to a reader may have been painstakingly assembled by a stressed-out writer who wishes they could sound more natural or conversational.
How to write more effectively:
Keep sentences small. They’re easier to work with that way.
If something doesn’t feel right, there’s a problem with one or more of your sentences. Listen to that feeling. Try to pinpoint exactly which word or phrase is triggering it. Naming exactly what’s wrong, in grammatical terminology or otherwise, will come later.
Understanding a word’s etymology will teach you how to use it. Words contain imprints of their histories.
The subject of a sentence should appear as close to the beginning of a sentence as possible.
You don’t have to “grab” anyone with the first line of your story. Just write a simple sentence that says what you want it to say. It’s harder than it sounds! And also very effective, if done well.
“A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences, the relentless exploration of possibilities, the effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say the possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.”
Noun phrases (“the realization that…”) almost always sound clunky and dead. Try rewriting them as verb phrases (“realizing that…”).
Prepositions are difficult to get right, even for native English speakers.
A reader’s experience has nothing to do with a writer’s. A sentence that reads “naturally” or “conversationally” to a reader may have been painstakingly assembled by a stressed-out writer who wishes they could sound more natural or conversational.
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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One pane: With one pane outliners, the content is displayed immediately below the category. A printed legal document is an example of a one-pane document. A web site with a table-of-contents "frame" on the left hand side is similar to a two-pane outline. A Usene t news group is similar to a three pane outline. When writing documents, or organizing ideas for a project (such as a speech, or for software design) I much prefer one pane outlines. I find they are more conducive to collapsing ideas, because you can mix text with categories, rather than radically split ting the organizational technique from the content (as the two and three pane outlines do).
In one pane outliners the text is displayed under its parent.
This can be more conducive to writing because you're not splitting work on the organization from work on the content. In writing this separation is fuzzy anyway.
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marginalsyllab.us marginalsyllab.us
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It also means that my annotations are in the paths of others and I need to consider that, forcing me to add context and consideration to my own notes.
Epiphany! Social annotating while reading brings to READING a stance I try to have when WRITING: considering an audience. Do I read differently when my annotations mean my reading has an audience?
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- Oct 2020
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codesandbox.io codesandbox.io
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Look at their Readme:
Well we have had a great time adding field validations, but there are validations that are tied up to the whole record we are editing than to a given field, for instance let's face this scenario: - You are not allowed to transfer more than 1000 € to Switzerland using this form (for instance: you have to go through another form where some additional documentation is required). - The best place to fire this validation is at record level. - Record validation functions accept as input parameter that whole form record info, and return the result of the validation (it accepts both flavours sync and promise based), let's check the code for this validator: ...
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nesslabs.com nesslabs.com
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As objective you may try to be, interpreting a text doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The hermeneutic circle captures the complex interaction between an interpreter and a text.
This is the only useful idea in the text. Whatever we read has the context in which it was written and the context in whcih it is being read. Is this a hermeneutic circle as described earlier? Don't think so.
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danielmiessler.com danielmiessler.com
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github.com github.com
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Long ago, the standards deities gifted us <style scoped>, before removing it in favour of the arguably less-useful shadow DOM encapsulation mechanism.
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andrewdeandrade commented on Jul 30, 2015
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andrewdeandrade commented on Jul 31, 2015
locked issues that I would comment on if I could: Can't react to comment because locked. Want to thumb up.
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The react community has become a big cargo cult. There are some good ideas in the community and many Bad Ideas™. Paving the bad idea cowpaths lends a sense of legitimacy to these bad technical ideas that is not merited.
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dylanvann.com dylanvann.com
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github.com github.com
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I'm suggesting there should be a way to write lifecycle related code that also responds to changing props, like how useEffect works. I think how React handles this could be a good source of inspiration.
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fortelabs.com fortelabs.com
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Consider that no single step in the process of turning raw ideas into finished pieces of writing is particularly difficult. It isn’t very hard to write down notes in the first place. Nor is turning a group of notes into an outline very demanding. It also isn’t much of a challenge to turn a working outline full of relevant arguments into a rough draft. And polishing a well-conceived rough draft into a final draft is trivial. So if each individual step is so easy, why do we find the overall experience of writing so grueling? Because we try to do all the steps at once. Each of the activities that make up “writing” – reading, reflecting, having ideas, making connections, distinguishing terms, finding the right words, structuring, organizing, editing, correcting, and rewriting – require a very different kind of attention.
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