1,278 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2022
    1. 2. What influence does annotating with an audience have on how you annotate? My annotations and notes generally are fragile things, tentative formulations, or shortened formulations that have meaning because of what they point to (in my network of notes and thoughts), not so much because of their wording. Likewise my notes and notions read differently than my blog posts. Because my blog posts have an audience, my notes/notions are half of the internal dialogue with myself. Were I to annotate in the knowledge that it would be public, I would write very differently, it would be more a performance, less probing forwards in my thoughts. I remember that publicly shared bookmarks with notes in Delicious already had that effect for me. Do you annotate differently in public view, self censoring or self editing?

      To a great extent, Hypothes.is has such a small footprint of users (in comparison to massive platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that it's never been a performative platform for me. As a design choice they have specifically kept their social media functionalities very sparse, so one also doesn't generally encounter the toxic elements that are rampant in other locations. This helps immensely. I might likely change my tune if it were ever to hit larger scales or experienced the Eternal September effect.

      Beyond this, I mostly endeavor to write things for later re-use. As a result I'm trying to write as clearly as possible in full sentences and explain things as best I can so that my future self doesn't need to do heavy work or lifting to recreate the context or do heavy editing. Writing notes in public and knowing that others might read these ideas does hold my feet to the fire in this respect. Half-formed thoughts are often shaky and unclear both to me and to others and really do no one any good. In personal experience they also tend not to be revisited and revised or revised as well as I would have done the first time around (in public or otherwise).

      Occasionally I'll be in a rush reading something and not have time for more detailed notes in which case I'll do my best to get the broad gist knowing that later in the day or at least within the week, I'll revisit the notes in my own spaces and heavily elaborate on them. I've been endeavoring to stay away from this bad habit though as it's just kicking the can down the road and not getting the work done that I ultimately want to have. Usually when I'm being fast/lazy, my notes will revert to highlighting and tagging sections of material that are straightforward facts that I'll only be reframing into my own words at a later date for reuse. If it's an original though or comment or link to something important, I'll go all in and put in the actual work right now. Doing it later has generally been a recipe for disaster in my experience.

      There have been a few instances where a half-formed thought does get seen and called out. Or it's a thought which I have significantly more personal context for and that is only reflected in the body of my other notes, but isn't apparent in the public version. Usually these provide some additional insight which I hadn't had that makes the overall enterprise more interesting. Here's a recent example, albeit on a private document, but which I think still has enough context to be reasonably clear: https://hypothes.is/a/vmmw4KPmEeyvf7NWphRiMw

      There may also be infrequent articles online which are heavily annotated and which I'm excerpting ideas to be reused later. In these cases I may highlight and rewrite them in my own words for later use in a piece, but I'll make them private or put them in a private group as they don't add any value to the original article or potential conversation though they do add significant value to my collection as "literature notes" for immediate reuse somewhere in the future. On broadly unannotated documents, I'll leave these literature notes public as a means of modeling the practice for others, though without the suggestion of how they would be (re-)used for.

      All this being said, I will very rarely annotate things privately or in a private group if they're of a very sensitive cultural nature or personal in manner. My current set up with Hypothesidian still allows me to import these notes into Obsidian with my API key. In practice these tend to be incredibly rare for me and may only occur a handful of times in a year.

      Generally my intention is that ultimately all of my notes get published in something in a final form somewhere, so I'm really only frontloading the work into the notes now to make the writing/editing process easier later.

    1. published under the title‘An Almost Obsessive Relation to Writing Instruments’, which firstappeared in Le Monde in 1973, Barthes describes the method thatguides his use of index cards:I’m content to read the text in question, in a ratherfetishistic way: writing down certain passages,moments, even words which have the power tomove me. As I go along, I use my cards to writedown quotations, or ideas which come to me, asthey do so, curiously, already in the rhythm of asentence, so that from that moment on, things arealready taking on an existence as writing. (1991:181)

      In an interview with Le Monde in 1973, Barthes indicated that while his note taking practice was somewhat akin to that of a commonplace book where one might collect interesting passages, or quotations, he was also specifically writing down ideas which came to him, but doing so in "in the rhythm of a sentence, so that from that moment on, things are already taking on an existence as writing." This indicates that he's already preparing for future publications in which he might use those very ideas and putting them into a more finished form than most might think of when considering shorter fleeting notes used simply as a reminder. By having the work already done, he can easily put his own ideas directly into longer works.


      Was there any evidence that his notes were crosslinked or indexed in a way so that he could more rapidly rearrange his ideas and pre-written thoughts to more easily copy them into longer articles or books?

    1. Nabokov arises early in the morning and works. He does hiswriting on filing cards, which are gradually copied, expanded, andrearranged until they become his novels.
    2. Mr. Nabokov’s writing method is to compose his stories and novels on index cards,shuffling them as the work progresses since he does not write in consecutive order.Every card is rewritten many times. When the work is completed,the cards in final order, Nabokov dictates from them to his wifewho types it up in triplicate.

      Vladimir Nabokov's general writing method consisted of composing his material on index cards so that he could shuffle them as he worked as he didn't write in consecutive order. He rewrote and edited cards many times and when the work was completed with the cards in their final order, Nabokov dictated them to his wife Vera who would type them up in triplicate.

    1. Nabokov’s working notecards for “Lolita.”

      Nabokov used index cards for his research and writing. In one index card for research on Lolita, he creates a "weight-heigh-age table for girls of school age" to be able to specify Lolita's measurements. He also researched the Colt catalog of 1940 to get gun specifications to make those small points realistic in his writing.

      syndication link

    1. Reviewing The Original of Laura, Alexander Theroux describes the cards as a “portable strategy that allowed [Nabokov] to compose in the car while his wife drove the devoted lepidopterist on butterfly expeditions.”

      While note cards have a certain portability about them for writing almost anywhere, aren't notebooks just as easily portable? In fact, with a notebook, one doesn't need to worry about spilling and unordering the entire enterprise.

      There are, however, other benefits. By using small atomic pieces on note cards, one can be far more focused on the idea and words immediately at hand. It's also far easier in a creative and editorial process to move pieces around experimentally.

      Similarly, when facing Hemmingway's White Bull, the size and space of an index card is fall smaller. This may have the effect that Twitter's short status updates have for writers who aren't faced with the seemingly insurmountable burden of writing a long blog post or essay in other software. They can write 280 characters and stop. Of if they feel motivated, they can continue on by adding to the prior parts of a growing thread. Sadly, Twitter doesn't allow either editing or rearrangements, so the endeavor and analogy are lost beyond here.

    2. Having died in 1977, Nabokov never completed the book, and so all Penguin had to publish decades later came to, as the subtitle indicates, A Novel in Fragments. These “fragments” he wrote on 138 cards, and the book as published includes full-color reproductions that you can actually tear out and organize — and re-organize — for yourself, “complete with smudges, cross-outs, words scrawled out in Russian and French (he was trilingual) and annotated notes to himself about titles of chapters and key points he wants to make about his characters.”

      Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977 leaving an unfinished manuscript in note card form for the novel The Original of Laura. Penguin later published the incomplete novel with in 2012 with the subtitle A Novel in Fragments. Unlike most manuscripts written or typewritten on larger paper, this one came in the form of 138 index cards. Penguin's published version recreated these cards in full-color reproductions including the smudges, scribbles, scrawlings, strikeouts, and annotations in English, French, and Russian. Perforated, one could tear the cards out of the book and reorganize in any way they saw fit or even potentially add their own cards to finish the novel that Nabokov couldn't.


      Link to the idea behind Cain’s Jawbone by Edward Powys Mathers which had a different conceit, but a similar publishing form.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Perec

      Georges Perec (born George Peretz) (French: [peʁɛk, pɛʁɛk];[1] 7 March 1936 – 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust, and many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.

    1. During the same period zibaldone designated notebooks kept bywriters, artists, and merchants to record a wide variety of information: outgoingletters, copies of documents, indexes to books, lists of paintings, and excerptscopied from all kinds of texts, including poetry, prose, merchants’ manuals, legalsources, and tables of weights and measures.27
    2. Some florilegia focused on poetic excerpts and were used to teach prosody, others specialized in prose. Both kinds were likely used in teaching at many levels—from the young boys (pueri) mentioned in the Opus prosodiacum of Micon Centulensis in the mid- ninth century to the twenty- year- old Heiric who wrote under dictation from Lupus of Ferrières, ca. 859–62, a Col-lectanea comprising excerpts from Valerius Maximus and Suetonius, followed by philosophical and theological sententiae.104

      Some florilegia were used as handbooks to teach composition. Those with poetic excerpts were used to teach prosody while others specialized in prose.

      Examples of these sorts of florilegia include Micon Centulensis' Opus prosodiacum from the mid-ninth century and a Collectanea by Heiric who wrote under dictation from Lupus of Ferrières, ca. 859–62.

    1. I had to admit that once again my attempts to disrupt thinking with a technology of note-taking had only resulted in an enormous, useless accumulation of busywork.

      I am starting to think the Zettelkasten is impossible for most people. Luhmann worked on his manically, as do I. That isn't sustainable or the goal for most, increased magical efficiency is, and is does not seem that technology has been able to make it more accessible.

      Still though, I cannot believe that their note taking practice produced no value. Even if it failed to write the dissertation, where would they have been without it? I guess that they wish they had spent their time on something different, but what would that have been and would if have inspired them like their professor's note archive?

    1. Links or references do not emphasize the relationship between notes (ideas, content). The context of connections usually remains unclear due to arbitrary relationships. Folgezettel, however, create specific relationships – adding manual links (references) to these relationships create relationship of relationships, the core aspect of Luhmann’s working principle

      I think the distinction between Folgezettel and direct links isn't useful. The real distinction is between connections that are defined relationships, and connections that are undefined.

    1. to develop concepts for thinking about how programmable attention systems can extend beyond productivity (which is where these systems are most prolific, as can be seen from above examples)

      Netflix-like autoplay but for binge reading...

      Although it is productive: Incremental Writing

  2. Mar 2022
    1. In short, to collect connections without an explicit intention, captured meaning, or statement of relevance is not knowledge production, and as a habit, it is even counter-productive: You make shallowness of work a habit and lower your skill as a creative knowledge worker in consequence.

      I both agree and disagree. Filling your notes up with only surface level or tangentially related notes will make using your web harder, but actively recalling notes that are even a little related is part of the reason we use this method. Sometimes I will just link five or ten notes without thinking about it, and then I will go and revise those connections down to the most relevant ones.

    1. You should link abundantly to other content. Wikipedia articles provide some of the best examples of “every page is page one” style.
    1. sometimes it's 00:55:43 not the actual information bit but in a combined order that this is what it's all about and that often makes a difference between yeah you understand it and 00:56:00 you really understand it and um so maybe that's a good reminder that when we write it's it's not so much about new information and yeah don't have to 00:56:15 be too worried about not having the new information but about making this difference to really understanding it as something that 00:56:28 a significant or makes a difference

      For overall understanding and creating new writing output from it, the immediate focus shouldn't be about revealing new information or simple facts so much as it's about being able to place that new information into your own context. Once this has been done then the focus can shift to later being able to potentially use that new knowledge and understanding in other novel and enlightening contexts to create new insights.

    1. You also need to design a compensation structure that pays writers what they’re worth.

      A writer's collective trying to gather writers using the bait that they've managed to crack the problem of "paying writers what they're worth" seems to be a lot of hype.

      This seems to put the already extant fear into a writer's mind that they're not being paid enough. Doesn't the broader economics of a capitalistic system already solve this issue? Where are the inequalities? What about paying the website designers and developers? What about the advertising and other marketing people?

    1. For all have perished, all!

      Truth bending

    2. Yea verily—in mighty wreck hath sunk the Persian world!

      Truth bending

    3. Woe falls on Persia’s race, yea, woe again, again!

      Truth bending

    4. Alas, the woe and cost!

      Truth bending

    5. Cry out, and learn the tale of woe! Where are thy comrades? where the band Who stood beside thee, hand in hand, A little while ago? Where now hath Pharandákes gone, Where Psammis, and where Pelagon? Where now is brave Agdabatas, And Susas too, and Datamas? Hath Susiscanes past away, The chieftain of Ecbatana?

      Using personal narratives to strengthen story, some truth bending

    6. With plashing tears our sorrow’s tale, Lamenting for the loved and lost!

      truth bending, expanding on fate

    7. O king and lord! thine Asian land Down, down upon its knee is bent!

      Truth bending

    8. For Persia’s honour, pass’d away, For glory and heroic sway Mown down by Fortune’s hand to-day! Hark, how the kingdom makes its moan,

      Bending the truth, fate as a tool

    9. On Persia’s land what power of Fate Descends, what louring gloom of hate?

      Political consequences, using fate as a tool instead an end in itself.

    10. But now there are none to gainsay that the gods are against us; we lie Subdued in the havoc of wreck, and whelmed by the wrath of the sky!

      Punished by gods because of political reasons

    11. The land is wasted of its men, And down to death are rolled Wreckage of sail and oar, Ships that are ships no more, And bodies of the slain!

      Visual depiction of Persian defeat, like a war movie.

    12. Of Persia’s fallen power, that none can lift nor save!

      Bending the truth to make point.

    13. My son went forth to wreak his great revenge On famous Athens! all too few they seemed, Our men who died upon the Fennel-field!

      Changing history to fit point

    14. Woe on us, woe! disaster’s mighty sea Hath burst on us and all the Persian realm!

      False description of total devastation of Persia

    15. Thou, Athens, art our murderess

      Depicts Athens as 'murdering' the Persian empire.

    16. Yet must I all the tale of death unroll! Hark to me, Persians! Persia’s host lies low.

      Although the Persian empire actually flourished in other ways after the attempted invasion of Athens, Aeschylus bends the truth in order to strengthen his point and make the play more 'marketable', like a modern day war movie. EoG, on the other hand, is based more in general historical beliefs at the time that were commonly accepted (eg: the flood).

    17. Marshals who serve the great king’s word Chieftains of all the mighty horde! Horsemen and bowmen streamed away, Grim in their aspect, fixed to slay, And resolute to face the fray! With troops of horse, careering fast, Masistes, Artembáres passed: Imaeus too, the bowman brave, Sosthánes, Pharandákes, drave— And others the all-nursing wave Of Nilus to the battle gave; Came Susiskánes, warrior wild, And Pegastágon, Egypt’s child: Thee, brave Arsámes! from afar

      More realist description than EoG; great army, uses individual names of soldiers and paints mortals against mortals, such as a large army returning in defeat, compared to EoG (deity consequences for godlike actions)

    1. writing non-fiction

      I feel like the process is similar. It's about making connections, right? So, a long walk is instructive. Letting one's mind wander and paying attention to whatever floats in. Then sifting through it all to try and make sense. I feel like the older we get, the more connections we make, as well, because we've read more widely and have experienced more things. This little stream of consciousness vomit reminded me of an exercise of several years ago, a "twisted pair." Taking seemingly unrelated things and finding connections. I think at the end of the day, pretty much everything is connected in some way. In non-fiction, maybe the trick is to identify the strands that you want to focus on in making the connections.

    1. To fully understand quipu, we must shed our preconceived notions of what defines writing.

      We need to get rid of conceived notions of what constitutes writing to be able to better understand quipu.

    1. The report is 33 slides long; yet about 10 slide-equivalents are essentially content-free (compulsive repetitive branding, twiddly hierarchical organization, empty space, assorted title pages, and so on). This PP fluffed-up material here and quite a bit more could easily be placed in a technical report on 4 pages of an 11" by 17" piece of paper (folded in half)
    2. One does not read a printout of someone's two-month old PowerPoint slides, one guesses, decodes, and attempts to glean meaning from the series of low-resolution titles, bullets, charts, and clipart. At least they do that for a while...until they give up. With a written document, however, there is no reason for shallowness or ambiguity (assuming one writes well).
    1. Make Use of Frames FacebookLinkedInTwitterPinterestEmailPrint Using frames or templates is a great way to scaffold instruction and build learners’ confidence in writing, particularly in writing tasks and genres with which they have little prior experience. A writing frame consists of a skeleton outline given to learners to scaffold their writing. By providing a few sentence starters and some rhetorical phrases common to the task or genre, frames give learners a structure that allows them to focus on expressing their thoughts
      • enough guidance to get people going with writing about what they are learning, but not being super rigigd to be limited
      • The Verge has a unique mission statement: see technology through the culture it creates, optimistically. How many high quality writing is a product of such deliberate mission statements (incentives setting)?
    1. Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects possessing gravitational pulls so powerful even light cannot escape them. Supermassive black holes, which reside at the centre of many galaxies, including our own, are the largest of them

      ... கோள்களின் நடுவே சூரியன் உள்ளது. அது வெளிச்சத்தின் மயத்தை குறிக்கிறது. அதுவே திரள் ஆனது black hole மயம்மாய் கொண்டு இயங்குகிறது. காரிருளே மையமாய் உள்ளது.

    2. places at the centres of many large galaxies that have tremendous luminosity – sometimes outshining all of a galaxy's billions of stars combined – and produce the universe's most energetic outbursts seen since the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago. The energy arises from gas violently falling into a supermassive black hole that is surrounded by a cloud of tiny particles of rock and soot along with mostly hydrogen gas.
      • சிவன் நெற்றிக்கண் திறக்கும் பொது வெளிப்படும் சக்தி.அந்த நெற்றிகண்ணின் கருவிழியானது [[supermassive black hole]] aagum
    1. And it’s easier to share a personal story when you’re composing it 280 characters at a time and publishing it as you go, without thinking about or knowing where the end may be. It’s at least easier than staring down a blank text editor with no limit and having to decide later how much of a 2,500 word rant is worth sharing, anyway.

      Ideas fill their spaces.

      When writing it can be daunting to see a long blank screen and feel like you've got to fill it up with ideas de novo.

      From the other perspective if you're starting with a smaller space like a Twitter input box or index card you may find that you write too much and require the ability to edit things down to fit the sparse space.


      I do quite like the small space provided by Hypothes.is which has the ability to expand and scroll as you write so that it has the Goldilocks feel of not too small, not too big, but "just right".


      Micro.blog has a feature that starts with a box that can grow with the content. Once going past 280 characters it also adds an optional input box to give the post a title if one wants it to be an article rather than a simple note.


      Link to idea of Occamy from the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that can grow or shrink to fit the available space: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Occamy

    1. “Noteson paper, or on a computer screen [...] do not make contemporaryphysics or other kinds of intellectual endeavour easier, they make itpossible” is one of the key takeaways in a contemporary handbookof neuroscientists (Levy 2011, 290) Concluding the discussions inthis book, Levy writes: “In any case, no matter how internalprocesses are implemented, insofar as thinkers are genuinelyconcerned with what enables human beings to perform the

      spectacular intellectual feats exhibited in science and other areas of systematic enquiry, as well as in the arts, they need to understand the extent to which the mind is reliant upon external scaffolding.” (Ibid.)

      Does Neil Levy go into anything on orality with respect to this topic? Check: Levy, Neil. 2011. “Neuroethics and the Extended Mind.” In Judy Illes and B. J. Sahakian (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics, 285–94, Oxford University Press

      Link this to P.M. Forni's question about how I think about mathematics and my answer relating to scaffolding or the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

      Link this to the 9/8 zettel quote from Luhmann about writing being thinking.

      Compare the ideas of visual thinking (visualizations) and a visualization of one's thinking being instantiated in writing along with the Feynman quote about the writing being the thinking. What ways are they similar or different? Is there a gradation in which one subsumes the other?

      What does Annie Murphy Paul have to say on this topic in The Extended Mind?

    2. Make a Career One Note at a Time

      Ahrens compares the writing output of Anthony Trollope to Niklas Luhmann and suggests that Luhmann wins hands down because the zettelkasten provides some additional leverage above and beyond the basic linear output of Trollope.

    3. half ofall doctoral theses will stay unfinished forever (Lonka, 2003, 113).

      Half of all doctoral theses are never finished.

    1. வரலாற்றுக்கு ஊடாக சாமானியர்களை ஊடாடவிட்டு விளையாட்டும் விமர்சனமுமாக கதைசொல்வது இரா.முருகனின் பாணி. அரசூர் வம்சம் போன்ற அவருடைய பெருநாவல்களில் உருவான அந்தப்பாணி முழுமையை அடைந்திருக்கும் நாவல் இது.

      pepper மிளகு novel

      • [[@ இ ரா முருகன் Murugan]]
  3. Feb 2022
    1. The Curiosity Gap

      Best headlines tell the beginning (what, who...) and the end (outcome, promise...) of an idea or story, but leave out the middle part (why?) to pique the interest. For example: "9 reasons writers // suffer from writer's block & give up writing forever" (// represents the middle)

    1. When you read widely, your brain is exposed to different ways in which a sentence or paragraph is written. There are patterns in the use of nouns, pronouns, verbs and other parts of speech; there are patterns in syntax and in sentence variation; and there are patterns in sound devices, such as alliteration and assonance. You can annotate these with different symbols or colors, and develop understanding as patterns emerge, and style emerges from patterns. To read like a writer, you need to annotate like one, too.

      I haven't seen very much in the area of annotating directly as a means of learning to write. This is related to the idea of note taking for creating content for a zettelkasten, but the focus of such a different collection is for creating a writing style.

      Similar to boxing the boring words (see Draft #4; http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary), one should edit with an eye toward the overall style of a particular piece.


      Annotating structures and patterns in books is an interesting exercise to evaluate an author's style as a means of potentially subsuming, modifying, or learning other styles.

    1. Argument that popular modern dictionaries are taking the wrong approach by defining words as plainly as possible. That makes it no fun to use them except for definitions.

      For writing at least, using something like the original Websters dictionary is a great help to improve your style.

    1. கோர்மக் மெக்கார்த்தியின் The Road (2006) நாவலைஆரம்பமாகச் சொல்லலாம். நாவல் ஒரு பிரளய நிகழ்வுக்குப்பின் ஒரு தந்தையும், மகனும் சாம்பல் படிந்த பெரும் பரப்பை கடப்பதைசொல்லுகிறது. அணு ஆயுதங்களையும், உலகப்போர் அழிவுகளையும் எண்ணி அஞ்சிய தலைமுறைக்கும், உருகும் பனிப்பிரதேசத்தையும், பரவும் காட்டுத்தீக்களையும் எண்ணி அஞ்சும் அடுத்த தலைமுறைக்கும், நாவல் களம் பாலமாக அமைகிறது.

      transition of generation fear from catastrophe on world war to catastrophe on natural disasters

    2. நிகழ்காலத்தை அவதானிக்க கடந்த காலத்தின் கூறுகளை கையாள்கிறது. வருங்காலத்தை நோக்குவதில்லை. தொழில் மயமாகிக் கொண்டிருந்த, சமூக ஏற்றத் தாழ்வுகள் உருமாறிக் கொண்டிருந்த விக்டோரியன் காலகட்டத்தின் பெரும் படைப்புகள் அன்று சரித்திரமாகி விட்ட கால கட்டத்தை கதை களமாக கொண்டுள்ளன. (Middlemarch, A Tale of Two Cities) தற்கால நாவலாசிரியர்களும் உலகப் போர்களிலோ, அதற்கும் பிந்தைய காலத்திலோ தங்கள் கதை பொருட்களை தேடுகிறார்கள்.

      Novel Literature disadvantage - no outlook on future

    1. More backlinks to you and your work: Being the teammate that contributes to the system of knowledge shared shows how much you care about the success of the organization. And, it does it in a way that helps you have more documented and attributable credibility for the value you create within your organization.

      Why it is important to write clear documentation in an organization

    2. Writing supplants meetings: When there is good documentation around a meeting (briefs, meeting notes, etc.), meetings can be leaner and more productive because people don’t have to be in the room to know what’s happening. So, only those who are actively contributing to the discussion need to attend.
    3. Without meeting notes and documentation, companies become reliant on unreliable verbal accounts, 1:1 updates, and needing to be in the room to get things done.
    4. Scales everyone’s knowledge: think about how many people you interact with on a given work day. I’m talking about the real human to human kind where you relay your ideas to others. It’s probably in the 5-20 range. If you put those same ideas into a doc or an email, your distribution goes to infinity. Anyone can read it.

      Writing can greatly scale up

    1. Steven Johnson indicates that the word processor is a terrible tool for writing because it doesn't have usable affordances for building up longer pieces from one's notes or basic ideas.

      He discusses his specific workflow of note taking and keeping ideas in Scrivener where he arranges them into folders and outlines which then become the source of his writing.

      Different from the typical zettelkasten workflow, he's keeping his notes hierarchically organized in folders based on topic keywords and only later when creating a specific writing project making explicit links and orders between his notes to create longer pieces. It's here that his work diverges most dramatically to the zettelkasten method described by Sönke Ahrens.

    2. One subtle advantage of this approach is that it helps you avoid the “blank page problem,” one of the major drivers of writerly procrastination.

      Steven Johnson's "blank page problem" isn't as prosaic as Ernest Hemingway's "white bull", but is an encapsulation of the same problem writers face.

    3. You can just visually scan the existing cards in the left-hand panel, or do a quick search inside of Scrivener itself. The interface doesn’t just let you to see the forest and the trees of your project. It also lets you see the seedlings.

      Note the use of the word "seedlings" here in a context reminiscent of the metaphor of the digital garden.

    4. In the research phase, you’re just creating a disorganized pile of cards, with quotes, ideas, links, fragments, hunches. There’s no order, no sequence; just a non-linear collection of vaguely related ideas. But as the project takes shape, certain themes begin to emerge, and those become folders housing other cards. Eventually those themes start to map onto actual sections of the book, or individual chapters. At this point, sequence does begin to matter, but you can change the sequence just by dragging cards and folders around in the left hand outline view.

      Example of writing advice that builds the links in after-the-fact instead of cross-linking ideas into initial networks as they're finding them. Compare/contrast this to the creation of these networks in the zettelkasten tradition as well as Sönke Ahrens description.

      There's less upfront work in creating these links at the start than there is in reloading the context in one's brain to create these links after the fact. Collecting ideas without filing, linking, or organizing them upfront also means that one is more likely to only use these ideas in the context of specific projects which one already has in mind rather than keeping them for a lifetime's work which might also create generative projects one hadn't expected.

    5. In fact, my allegiance to Scrivener basically boils down to just three tricks that the software performs, but those tricks are so good that I’m more than willing to put up with all the rest of the tool’s complexity.Those three tricks are:Every Scrivener document is made up of little cards of text — called “scrivenings” in the lingo — that are presented in an outline view on the left hand side of the window. Select a card, and you see the text associated with that card in the main view.If you select more than one card in the outline, the combined text of those cards is presented in a single scrolling view in the main window. You can easily merge a series of cards into one longer card.The cards can be nested; you can create a card called, say, “biographical info”, and then drag six cards that contain quotes about given character’s biography into that card, effectively creating a new folder. That folder can in turn be nested inside another folder, and so on. If you select an entire folder, you see the combined text of all the cards as a single scrolling document.

      Steven Johnson identifies the three features of Scrivener which provide him with the most value.

      Notice the close similarity of these features to those of a traditional zettelkasten: cards of text which can be linked together and rearranged into lines of thought.

      One difference is the focus on the creation of folders which creates definite hierarchies rather than networks of thought.

    1. With schools open now, State governments must set clear priorities, says Anurag Behar, CEO, Azim Premji Foundation. The syllabus from Classes I to XII must be re-configured, reducing content without compromising on core learning objectives.

      Meet atleast any one Core objectives for each student

      ... If I was asked in a teaching staff meeting, about my role as a teacher in a semester, I will say, fulfilling atleast any one core objective in the subject curriculum to each and every student is my highest priority *if this has been the priority for every teacher and the pressurising management during covid online classes, the [[covid batch wisdom catastrophe]] would not be this much impact - I can certainly write an feature article on this covid batch catastrophe topic - especially who passed 10th as covid batch, during start of the covid now directly face 12th public face-off with [[post-covid zero knowledge calibre]]. And then going to join college without learning subject fundamentals [[Devastating post-covid college education for freshers]]

    1. எழுத்தாளனுக்கு வாழ்க்கையில் இருந்து அவனுள் செல்லவேண்டிய அனுபவ சாரம் தேவை. அந்த அனுபவங்களுக்கு அவன் அளிக்கும் எதிர்வினைதான் ஒருவகையில் இலக்கியப்படைப்பு. அனுபவம் சிறு துளியாகக்கூட இருக்கலாம். ஆனால் அது அவனை சீண்டுகிறது, அமைதியிழக்கச் செய்கிறது, மேலும் மேலும் என சிந்தனை விரியச் செய்கிறது, கண்டடைதல்களை அளிக்கிறது.

      Writing is an act of oppposing reaction to our life experience

    1. The linear process promoted by most study guides, which insanelystarts with the decision on the hypothesis or the topic to write about,is a sure-fire way to let confirmation bias run rampant.

      Many study and writing guides suggest to start ones' writing or research work with a topic or hypothesis. This is a recipe for disaster to succumb to confirmation bias as one is more likely to search out for confirming evidence rather than counter arguments. Better to start with interesting topic and collect ideas from there which can be pitted against each other.

    2. Give Each Task the Right Kind of Attention

      Ahrens talks about the variety of different tasks that underpin writing and the varieties of attention that each can take. He suggests that for increased productivity that one focus on one sort or type of tasks at a time in each part of the process.

      This sort of structural planning in one's work is possibly the most important planning one can do.

    3. We need to getour thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we canlook at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into alinear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical readerinstantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to callextremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print,perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extremeprofessionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it wastime for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the rightwords during writing requires much more floating attention.

      Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.

      Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.


      Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.


      Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.

      Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.

    4. On closer look, it becomes obvious how different the tasks are thatare usually summarised under “writing” and how different the kindsof attention are that they require.

      What are the constituent parts of writing and how do they differ based on their functions with respect to attention?

      • note taking
      • composing
      • invention
      • creativity
      • thinking
      • editing
      • structuring
      • outlining
      • proofreading
      • etc.

      Where do each of these sit with respect to the zettelkasten? How can one create flow with respect to each of these or with respect to one or two which may necessarily need to be bound together to accomplish them?

    5. The slip-box provides not only a clear structure to work in, but also forces usto shift our attention consciously as we can complete tasks inreasonable time before moving on to the next one.

      Ahrens provides a quick overview of some research on distraction, attention, and multi-tasking to make the point that:

      The simple structure and design of the zettelkasten forces one's focus and attention on small individual tasks that cumulatively build into better thinking and writing.

      (Summary of Section 9.2)

    6. Who can blame you forprocrastinating if you find yourself stuck with a topic you decided onblindly and now have to stick with it as the deadline is approaching?

      Students may potentially built up enough context within a particular course to be able to luckily stumble upon an interesting question or idea about which to write, but the procrastination and wait times required to get lucky means that they don't have enough time to research and read additional material to move towards ultimate solutions. As a result, their work product is boring and dull and doesn't advance the space in which they're working. And these are the lucky ones which will stumble upon something interesting or be able to remember it. The results of the rest will be even less interesting.

    7. There is one reliable sign if you managedto structure your workflow according to the fact that writing is not alinear process, but a circular one: the problem of finding a topic isreplaced by the problem of having too many topics to write about.

      Writing is a circular generative process and not a finite, linear one.

    8. Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existingpreconception, which then can be transformed during further inquiresand can serve as a starting point for following endeavours. Basically,that is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle

      (Gadamer 2004).

      All intellectual endeavors start from a preexisting set of ideas. These can then be built upon to create new concepts which then influence the original starting point and may continue ever expanding with further thought.


      Ahrens argues that most writing advice goes against the idea of the hermeneutic circle and pretends as if the writer is starting with a blank page. This can prefigure some of the stress and difficulty Ernest Hemingway spoke of when he compared writing to "facing the white bull which is paper with no words on it."

      While it can be convenient to think of the idea of tabula rasa, in practice it really doesn't exist. As a result the zettelkasten more readily shows its value in the writing process.

    9. no underlinedsentence will ever present itself when you need it in the developmentof an argument.
    10. Even ifyou decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you willimprove your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just bydoing everything as if nothing counts other than writing.

      Is there evidence that this is true?

    11. Everything You Need to Do

      Ahrens looks at the discrete steps of writing a paper or book in reverse order... all the way back to creating the initial notes and ideas. By framing it this way, he shows the value of note taking as a means of making the entire enterprise so much easier.

    12. A good structure is something you can trust. It relieves you fromthe burden of remembering and keeping track of everything. If youcan trust the system, you can let go of the attempt to hold everythingtogether in your head and you can start focusing on what isimportant:

      Whether it's for writing, to do lists, or other productivity spaces, a well designed system is something that one can put their absolute trust into. This allows one to free themselves from the burden of tracking and dealing with minutiae so they can get serious work done.

    13. They struggle because they believe, asthey are made to believe, that writing starts with a blank page.

      Writing does not begin with the blank page!

    14. What can we do differently in the weeks,months or even years before we face the blank page that will get usinto the best possible position to write a great paper easily?
    1. It was like a miracle. Three months before I started chemo, pot and pot products were legalized here in Arizona.

      THIS is how you start a good essay.

  4. gingkowriter.com gingkowriter.com
    1. https://gingkowriter.com/

      This looks like an interesting tool for moving from notes to an outline to a written document. Could be interesting for dovetailing with a zettelkasten.

      How to move data from something like Obsidian to Ginko Writer though?

    1. I've observed for myself that not all weeks of writing are made equal. When I do try to impose a schedule on myself – like resolving that ‘I'll write for three hours every day and hit 1200 words’ – it can work out OK, but it’s usually not that great.But I have learned that when I’m really on a roll – when I’ve found a voice that’s really working and that I’m excited about – I need to just clear the decks and go with it. I will empty my schedule, dive in, and stay up late in order to be as productive as I can. I would say this is how I got both of my novels written.

      Robin Sloan's writing process sounds similar to that of Niklas Luhmann where he chose to work on things that seemed exciting and fun. This is, in part, helped by having a large quantity of interesting notes to work off of. They both used them as stores to fire their internal motivation to get work done.

    2. Transferring my notes from notebooks into nvALT is a process that I always enjoy. When I fill up a physical notebook, I'll go through it, acting as a sort of loose, first filter for the material I’ve accumulated. I’ll cross out a few things that are obviously garbage, but most of my notes make the cut, and I transcribe them into nvALT.When that’s done, I throw away the notebook.

      Robin Sloan has a waste book practice where he takes his notes in small Field Note notebooks and transcribes them into nvAlt. When he's done, he throws away the notebook.

    1. Most writing is chasing clout, rather than insight

      As the result of online business models and SEO, most writing becomes about chasing clout and audience eyeballs rather than providing thought provoking insight and razor sharp analysis. The audience reaction has weakened with the anger reaction machines like Twitter.

      We need better business models that aren't built on hype.

    1. It should be recognized that these basic note types are very different than the digital garden framing of 📤 (seedbox), 🌱 (seedling), 🪴 (sapling), 🌲 (evergreen), etc. which are another measure of the growth and expansion of not just one particular idea but potentially multiple ideas over time. These are a project management sort of tool for focusing on the growth of ideas. Within some tools, one might also use graph views and interconnectedness as means of charting this same sort of growth.

      Sönke Ahrens' framing of fleeting note, literature note, and permanent note are a value assignation to the types of each of these notes with respect to generating new ideas and writing.

    1. Highlighting would be a crude form of knowledge telling. Knowledge transforming involves interpretation on the part of the content producer.

      Scholars who study writing differentiate between knowledge telling and knowledge transforming.

      Highlighting can be seen as a weak form of knowledge telling. It's a low level indicator that an idea is important, but doesn't even go so far as the reader strengthening the concept by restating the idea in their own words similar to the Feynman technique.

      One could go steps further by not only restating it but transforming it and linking it into one's larger body of knowledge or extending into other contexts.

  5. Jan 2022
    1. https://vimeo.com/232545219

      from: Eyeo Conference 2017

      Description

      Robin Sloan at Eyeo 2017 | Writing with the Machine | Language models built with recurrent neural networks are advancing the state of the art on what feels like a weekly basis; off-the-shelf code is capable of astonishing mimicry and composition. What happens, though, when we take those models off the command line and put them into an interactive writing environment? In this talk Robin presents demos of several tools, including one presented here for the first time. He discusses motivations and process, shares some technical tips, proposes a course for the future — and along the way, write at least one short story together with the audience: all of us, and the machine.

      Notes

      Robin created a corpus using If Magazine and Galaxy Magazine from the Internet Archive and used it as a writing tool. He talks about using a few other models for generating text.

      Some of the idea here is reminiscent of the way John McPhee used the 1913 Webster Dictionary for finding words (or le mot juste) for his work, as tangentially suggested in Draft #4 in The New Yorker (2013-04-22)

      Cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/t2a9_pTQEeuNSDf16lq3qw and https://hypothes.is/a/vUG82pTOEeu6Z99lBsrRrg from https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary


      Croatian acapella singing: klapa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sciwtWcfdH4


      Writing using the adjacent possible.


      Corpus building as an art [~37:00]

      Forgetting what one trained their model on and then seeing the unexpected come out of it. This is similar to Luhmann's use of the zettelkasten as a serendipitous writing partner.

      Open questions

      How might we use information theory to do this more easily?

      What does a person or machine's "hand" look like in the long term with these tools?

      Can we use corpus linguistics in reverse for this?

      What sources would you use to train your model?

      References:

      • Andrej Karpathy. 2015. "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks"
      • Samuel R. Bowman, Luke Vilnis, Oriol Vinyals, et al. "Generating sentences from a continuous space." 2015. arXiv: 1511.06349
      • Stanislau Semeniuta, Aliaksei Severyn, and Erhardt Barth. 2017. "A Hybrid Convolutional Variational Autoencoder for Text generation." arXiv:1702.02390
      • Soroush Mehri, et al. 2017. "SampleRNN: An Unconditional End-to-End Neural Audio Generation Model." arXiv:1612.07837 applies neural networks to sound and sound production
    1. Attending class means doing the work required rather than coming to campus this spring. Much of the learning in this course happens through your doing the writing and reading assignments each week,

      I will be coming to class EVERYDAY

    2. Digital Literacy Narrative

      I think this project will build on my knowledge of literacy narratives and will improve my ability to reflect on my development.

    1. just speaking instead of having to type with my with my fingers is that i can 00:02:11 kind of think out loud a little bit more and get more information and i sometimes find i generate more insights being able to speak versus uh type things so i find that really useful

      Voiceliner advantage for Obsidian and Logseq

    1. The nature of technical writing is explained in "The nature of technical writing". Technical communication is something we do every day without even noticing. Having strong communication skills is beneficial in all areas of one's life, from personal to professional. From a business standpoint, communication is key to every transaction. Communicating effectively allows others and yourself to understand information at a faster and more accurate rate. A lack of communication skills leads to frequent misunderstandings and frustration.

    2. Technical communication/writing is something that has been around for a very long time. The earliest examples belong to Aristotle and his dictionary of "philosophical terms" and his summary of the "Doctrines of Pythagoras". World War I is considered the "Golden Age" of technical writing due to advances in medicine and aerospace.

    1. I used Obsidian daily notes to keep records of an interesting three-minute meditation practice. I used Python to copy those records from my daily notes and summarize them in a log. Then as a crude sort of theme-extraction, I wrote a Python program that calculated the frequency of words in these meditations.

      Linking Python with Obsidian Daily Journaling for my meditiation

    1. I could quote Luhmann on this as well, who thought that "without writing one cannot think," But there is nothing peculiarly "Luhmannian" about this idea. Isaac Asimov is said to have said "Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers." And, to give one other example, E. B. White (of "Strunk and White" fame) claimed that "writing is one way to go about thinking." In other words, writing is thinking. And since I do almost all my significant writing in ConnectedText these days, it might be called my "writing environment."

      Various quotes along the lines of "writing is thinking".

      What is the equivalent in oral societies? Memory is thinking?

    1. Literature Essay Outline

      An essay is a paper in prose, small in length, and free in composition. It expresses the individual impressions and thoughts of the author on a particular topic or issue. The structure of writing an essay is determined by the requirements of the genre: the thoughts of the author of the text are set out as brief theses, each thesis must be substantiated, supported by evidence.

      A person who does not often have to write various texts may find it difficult to grasp all the nuances and requirements of an essay. The work on the chosen topic will be written by professionals https://studyessay.org/, they will reveal the problem, select convincing arguments and examples, as well as properly format the text.

      Consequently, the structure of the essay is circular:

      1. introduction;
      2. theses and arguments;
      3. conclusion.

      The number of theses and arguments depends on the topic, the written plan of the essay, and the direction of thought development. Also, the introduction and conclusion should focus on the chosen issue. The scheme of the essay assumes the presence of paragraphs, red lines, which help in achieving the integrity of the work. Contact us here https://studyessay.org/research-proposal-writing-service/, If you need more information and help with writing your assignments. enter image description here

      How to write an essay: outline

      The scheme of writing an essay is looser than that of other written works. That is why the author must independently think about the structure of the future text. The structure depends on the goals, form, volume of the work. The scheme will be most conveniently perceived if you fix it on paper. The plan of writing an essay is a kind of "skeleton", on which the author builds up thoughts and ideas. Work on the essay begins with a writing plan. To make the text connected, it is convenient to act according to the following scheme:

      1. choose a topic;
      2. fix theses and thoughts on the issue;
      3. justify the stated ideas, pick up arguments;
      4. build the theses in a logical sequence, the thoughts should follow one another.

      Essay writing tips

      1. The main recommendation for writing an essay is to outline the text. This will help to keep the thought in one line, remember the topic and purpose.
      2. The essay is a genre that does not involve writing long texts. Thoughts should be expressed briefly, but understandable to the reader.
      3. It is helpful to reread your essay to make sure that the text is connected logically, the topic is not lost and all theses and arguments are mentioned.

      Despite the fact that the essay does not have any strict rules of writing, there are still a number of recommendations and peculiarities of the genre, which are worth adhering to.

    1. It proves to be the agent of destiny for her; the hero, Kovalan (Kannagi’s husband); and the Pandya king who unjustly has Kovalan killed for a crime he has not committed, then himself dies on realising his blunder. The wrath of Kannagi burns down the capital city of the Pandyas. Later, the Chera king invades the North and pelts rocks on the heads of the defeated North Indian kings for installing an icon and building a temple to Kannagi. The anklet proves pivotal in all of this: any stage production of Silappadikaram should have a surrealistically huge image of the anklet as its backdrop. It represents Destiny.

      what is agent of destiny

      Anklet

      • Like, Lord of the rings (Ring)
      • Kannagi can be speculated as Kali for beheaded North indian kings
    2. Like Shakespeare, he knows that each word has two values, dramatic and literary. Only in the hands of a genius, words acquire their appropriate literary or dramatic identity depending on the context — whether you read it as a poem or see it as a play in your mind’s eye. In other words, a ‘literary word’ acquires a new incarnation as ‘dramatic word’ when it is performed as a play on stage and one can visually experience it.

      Shakespeare and Ilangoadigal aesthetic dual word values

    1. in Luhmann’s mind theprocess of writing things down enables disciplined thinking in the first place: “Underlying the filing tech-nique is the experience that without writing, there is no thinking.”22
      1. Luhmann, Zettelkasten II, index card no. 9/8g (my translation).

      The act of taking notes helps to focus the mind and one's concentration. This facilitates better and deeper thinking. While he erases oral cultures and those who used mnemonic techniques, Niklas Luhmann said, "without writing, there is no thinking."

    1. This is a great example of a "Year in Review" post.

    2. My plan is to turn Write of Passage into an independent publishing company, which will become the main growth channel for Write of Passage.

      This is a tremendous opportunity for people to leave academia. Imagine being a technical writer, business writer, poet, or creative writer. This could be a good networking opportunity.

    3. All these interests unite around a single initiative: the intersection between online writing, the Liberal Arts, and Judeo-Christian teachings.

      This is exactly the intersection that I have seen and thought about for a long time. If David Perell sees this as a gap that intellectuals can fill, then I am definitely onto something.

    1. Reading "refreshes," but it must lead to writing. Neither activity should be pursued at the exclusion of the other. "Continuous writing will cast gloom over our strength, and exhaust it," while continuous reading "will make our strength watery and flabby. It is better to have recourse to them alternately, and to blend one with the other, so that the fruits of one's reading may be reduced to the concrete form by the pen" (277).

      Almost like saying that "man cannot live by bread alone"...

    1. St. Bonaventura (1221-1274) found that there are basically four ways of 'making books' (modi faciendi librum):"A man might write the work of others, adding and changing nothing in which case he is simply called a 'scribe' (scriptor).""Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a 'compiler (compilator).""Another writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a 'commentator' (commentator) …""Another writes both his own work and others' but with his own work in principal place adding others' for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an 'author' (auctor).’"
  6. Dec 2021
    1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/can-distraction-free-devices-change-the-way-we-write

      A surface look at writing and writing interfaces, but one which misses part of the point of what writing tools should facilitate. Perhaps there's a different mode of creative writing that Julian's getting at and mentions tangentially, but I feel that given the context of non-fiction writing, it's missing the boat. My framing of non-fiction writing also meshes into the creative versions as well.

    2. Word

      Capitalized this is a direct reference to Microsoft Word, but I can't help thinking of John 1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." presumably as the first Word.

    3. Wole Soyinka wrote “The Man Died” in a Nigerian prison with Nescafé for ink and a chicken bone for a stylus.
    4. Pomera, a folding Japanese pocket writer
    5. “focus mode,”

      The idea of a "focus mode" or "distraction free mode" is exactly the wrong framing for writing. You don't want to focus on the nothing and emptiness of a page or a screen. You want to start by focusing on an idea and preferably many ideas. Do this first and then proceed from there.

    6. The main feature of iA Writer is not having many features. The program is, essentially, a white rectangle, where the user can do little else but type in a custom monospaced font. There are no headers, footers, drawing tools, or chatty paper-clip assistants. The bare-bones interface uses special characters in a simple formatting language called Markdown to bold, italicize, or otherwise transform text—a way of encouraging writers to keep their hands on the keyboard and their minds on their work.

      Using a completely blank page as the start of any creative endeavor is a miserable choice for writing. Start with some other object and annotate either on it or next to it. Look at something else as a base. Starting with blank nothing is a recipe for loneliness and disaster. So-called distraction free writing tools are the worst.

      Didn't Ernest Hemmingway analogize staring at a blank page like facing a white bull? There is a litany of quotes about writers facing the blank page.

      Why not, instead, use the advice of ancient rhetors by starting with the best? Become a bee and collect the best materials for your honey first. If we don't look to them, then perhaps follow the lesson taught by Benjamin Franklin on writing or the same lesson repeated in the movie Finding Forrester. Start with someone else's work and rewrite that until you find your own words. This is what makes writing while annotating so easy and simple. You've got a nice tapestry of textures to begin your work.

      Giving birth to something fully formed as if from the head of Zeus is a fallacy. It only works for the gods.

    7. Medium, a writing app that is also a publishing platform and a social-media network, represents the logical extreme of this vertical integration.

      Julian Lucas indicates that tools like Microsoft Word, WordStar, WordPerfect, and Google Docs, are writing tools which ultimately result into the vertical integration of Medium. The mistake here is that while they are certain tools and one can write into them and use them for editing, they are all probably best thought of as tools in the chain of moving toward publishing with Medium being the example that allows one to present their work as well as a distribution mechanism with a cheery on top.

      What she is not focusing enough (any?) attention on is the creation processes at the start. How does one come up with an interesting idea? How does one do the research? How does one collect ideas moving toward some teleological endpoint? Tools that address these ideas of invention and creation are the real writing tools that writers so elusively search out.

      Far better to look at note taking tools or tools like Hypothes.is that go to the roots of the creation process. Tools that can take fleeting ideas and collect them. Tools that can take those collections and interlink them. Tools that allow for combinatorial juxtaposition and rearrangement. Tools that allow outlining.

      It is only after this that one may use a tool like Microsoft Word to do the final arrangement, editing, and polish before sending it off to a publisher.

    8. Even so, new inventions have always influenced literary production, as Friedrich Nietzsche, who struggled with a semi-spherical typewriter, once lyrically observed: “The writing ball is a thing like me: made of / iron / yet easily twisted on journeys.”

      Probably overbearing, but this is also the exact sort of thing a writer faced with a blank page is apt to focus on as they stare at the type ball in front of them. Their focus isn't on the work its on the thing immediately in front of them that isn't working for them.

    9. The tools of writing have seldom been designed with writers in mind.

      Perhaps its just that modern writers have been so long divorced from the ideas of classical rhetoric that they're making the process so much harder than it needs to be. Do writers know what they really need in the first place? Perhaps they've been putting the cart before the horse for too long.

      Rethinking one's writing process to start at the moment of reading and annotation is possibly a far better method for composition? Then instead of needing to do the work of coming up with an idea and then researching toward one's idea and then creating something de novo, one can delve into one's notes of things they know have previously been of interest to them. By already being of interest or answering questions they've previously asked themselves and had interest in pursuing, they might make the load of work more evenly spread across their lives rather than designing a massive mountain of a problem first and then attempting to scale it after the fact.

      By building the mountain from the start, it then isn't a problem to be solved, just a vista from which to stand and survey the area.

    10. I was suddenly deluged with ads for “the world’s thinnest tablet,” which promised not only to replace pen and paper but to help you “Get Your Brain Back.” The company’s Lovecraftian promotional ad, which has racked up nearly three million views, begins with a hissing demon-child clinging to her iPad and proceeds through an animated hellscape complete with attention-sucking brain tubes and notifications circling like sharks. The narrator quavers an ominous warning: “We have to modify technology, or else it will modify us.”

      Given the diversions of modern digital life, perhaps the best way to do one's writing is to do it at the moment of reading the actual references. Often while reading, one isn't as apt to have their attention diverted by the vagaries of life, instead they are focused on the thing at hand. It is while one has this focused attention that they should let their note taking practice while reading take over.

      Even if you are distracted, you can at least maintain focus on a single line of text and your thoughts related to it and write them down in either a summary sentence or with a few related ideas which are sparked by the initial idea.

      (This note is such an example.)

      Then one can start and complete a small idea at a time and then letting them build over time and space, then recollect them to create a piece which then doesn't need to be written and painfully created, but which may only need an outline structure and some final polish and editing.

    11. The experiments gradually meshed into a literary Rube Goldberg machine, a teetering assemblage of Scriveners and SimpleTexts that left me perpetually uncertain of which thought I’d written down where.

      The most solid basis of a note taking (reading, thinking, and writing) practice is having a central repository from which all material is linked and readily available. Having separate loci, especially digital ones, is a recipe for failure for the lack of the ability to find what you need when you need it.

    12. I’d fallen into the trap that the philosopher Jacques Derrida identified in an interview from the mid-nineties. “With the computer, everything is rapid and so easy,” he complained. “An interminable revision, an infinite analysis is already on the horizon.”

      This also ignores the context of a writing space that is optimized for the reading, thinking and writing process.

      Digital contexts often bring in a raft of other problems and issues that may provide too much.

    13. For a long time, I believed that my only hope of becoming a professional writer was to find the perfect tool.

      What exactly would be the ideal group of features in a writer's perfect tool? There are many out there for a variety of axes of production, but does anything cover it all?

      Functionality potentially for:

      • taking notes
      • collecting examples
      • memory
        • search or other means of pulling things up at their moment of need
      • outlining functionality
      • arranging and rearranging material
      • spellcheckers
      • grammar checkers
      • other?

      With

      • easy of use
      • efficiency
      • productivity
    1. “One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!” ― Roald Dahl
    1. Evaluating poetry by heritage

      தண்ணீரும் காவிரியே தார்வேந்தன் சோழனே மண்ணாவ துஞ்சோழ மண்டலமே - பெண்ணாவாள் அம்பொற் சிலம்பி யரவிந்தத் தாளணியுஞ் செம்பொற் சிலம்பே சிலம்பு.

      பொருள் :-

      வற்றாதது காவிரி ஆறு. சோழமன்னனே மன்னருள் சிறந்தோன். சோழநாடே நிலவளம் மிகுந்தது. அம்பர் என்னும் கிராமத்தில் வாழும் சிலம்பியே பெண் என்று சொல்லத்தக்கவள் ஆவாள்.

    1. “Don’t feel guilty if you spend the first 90 minutes of your day drinking coffee and reading blogs,” Nate Silver once advised young journalists. “It’s your job. Your ratio of reading to writing should be high.”
    2. Stephen King says he writes all morning and reads all afternoon.
    1. Plotting is not for the faint-hearted, particularly if you’re working in a complex genre like crime or fantasy, and/or planning to write a series.
    2. a ‘pantser’ – whose moniker comes from the phrase to fly by the seat of your pants – will start writing and see what happens.
      • எழுத்து மீட்டுருவாக்கம் [[@Jeyamohan#ஜெயமோகன் on fiction writing புனைவுக்கும் சிந்தனைக்குமான வேறுபாடு]]
    3. novel-writing process tends to follow one of two patterns: plotting or pantsing.
    1. The professionalisation of academic writing has forced us “to substitute the more writerly, discoursive forms, such as the essay, for the more measured and measurable –largely unread and unreadable – quasi-scientific journal article”

      I wonder if it would be useful to distinguish between research and scholarship, where formal research is but one type of scholarly practice?

      If we look at a journal as a channel for promoting scholarship then there's no reason that we can't include essays as a category of writing.

    1. Good history comes from a combination of sources: in this case, private papers ranging from Lord Curzon’s letters to the diary of a royal tutor; from archival records in Delhi and London, not to speak of parliamentary papers; art, and not just paintings by Ravi Varma, to understand how princes projected themselves; newspaper records, which contain debates and ‘live’ commentary; scholarly material on connected themes; and, of course, anecdotal information from biographies and memoirs, which add texture.

      sources for Anecdotal writing to history fiction

    1. இன்று ஒருவர் என் பதிப்பை அடியொற்றிக் ‘கு.ப.ரா. கதைகள்’ என்னும் மின்னூலை உருவாக்கி இணையத்தில் இலவசமாக வழங்குகிறார். ஓரிரு நாளுக்குப் பிறகு விலை வைத்து விற்கக்கூடும். என் பதிப்புரை, முன்னுரைகளை நீக்கிவிட்டுக் க.நா.சு., ந.பிச்சமூர்த்தி ஆகியோர் கட்டுரைகளைச் சேர்த்திருக்கிறார். நூலின் அட்டையைப் போலி செய்திருக்கிறார். கதைகளின் மூலபாடமும் காலவரிசையும் என் பதிப்பில் உள்ளவையே. இரண்டு ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன்னால் நண்பர் கல்யாணராமன் வழியாகக் கண்டடைந்த கு.ப.ரா.வின் ‘வேறு நினைப்பு’ என்னும் புதிய கதை ஒன்றைக் காலச்சுவடு இதழில் வெளியிட்டேன். அக்கதையையும் எடுத்துச் சேர்த்துக் கொண்டார். என் பதிப்புக்கும் காலச்சுவடுக்கும் நன்றி தெரிவித்துள்ளார். இதை ‘அறிவுத் திருட்டு’ என்று நான் கருதுகிறேன்

      plagiarism in Tamil literature

    1. Theories of reference for the words that sentences contain need to make sense of this fact. The upshot is that the philosophy of belief is inextricably intertwined with the philosophy of language.

      Meta-ethics - believing words in writing sentences

  7. Nov 2021
    1. Yesterday, I was at a thrift store with my wife, Jayne, and as I usually do, I went straight to the books section. I happened upon a couple books. One was entitled Elephant Reflections and included high praise from Jane Goodall. Another was The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

      While in the store, I was checking my email and noticed there was something from the Design Science Studio.

      Tomorrow’s visiting Visionary, Catherine Connors will be speaking on New Narratives: Storytelling ARTchitecture!

      As I was flipping through the book in the checkout line, I noticed the preface to the second edition:

      “I’m not trying to copy Nature. I’m trying to find the principles she’s using”

      — R. Buckminster Fuller

      A book goes out like a wave rolling over the surface of the sea. Ideas radiate from the author’s mind and collide with other minds, triggering new waves that return to the author. These generate further thoughts and emanations, and so it goes. The concepts described in The Writer’s Journey have radiated and are now echoing back interesting challenges and criticisms as well as sympathetic vibrations. This is my report on the waves that have washed back over me from publication of the book, and on the new waves I send back in response.

      On the back of the book, the description includes the following introduction.

      Christopher Vogler explores the powerful relationship between mythology and storytelling in his clear, concise style that's made i this book required reading for movie executives, screenwriters, playwrights, fiction and non-fiction writers, scholars, and fans of pop culture all over the world.

    1. Vogler based this work upon the writings of mythologist Joseph Campbell, particularly The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and holds that all successful films innately adhere to its principles.

      Yesterday, I was at a thrift store with my wife, and as I usually do, I went straight to the books section. I happened upon a couple books. One was entitled Elephant Reflections and included high praise from Jane Goodall. Another was The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.

  8. dictionary.cambridge.org dictionary.cambridge.org
    1. an example of a product, especially a computer program or piece of recorded music, given or shown to someone to try to make them buy or support it: a software demo

      I prefer this to the Merriam-Webster definition.

    1. 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

    1. 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

    1. 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.

    1. "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.

  9. Oct 2021
    1. it is already clear in this case that the plan will spring from the materials, not the materials from the plan.
    2. 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?

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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
    1. 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
    1. 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
    1. 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.

    1. 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."
  10. Sep 2021
    1. Do not use articles in front of product names. For example, do not write "the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was..."
    1. 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.

    1. https://briansunter.com/blog/five-minute-journal/

      Lists of prompts for writing/journaling:

      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?]]
      • # 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?]]
    1. 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

    1. 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".

    2. 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.

    3. 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."

    1. 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.

    1. 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.
    1. “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.

    2. 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

    1. 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.”
  11. Aug 2021
    1. 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"

    1. 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?

    1. 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

    2. 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!

    3. a means to act in the world

      Nice way of putting it

    1. Want to Write a Book? You Probably Already Have!

      Patrick Rhone

      video

      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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    2. 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."

    3. 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.

    1. 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.
    1. 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?

  12. Jul 2021
    1. 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.

    1. 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].

    1. 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?

  13. www.nwp.org www.nwp.org
    1. 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.

    1. 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

    1. Fictional writing tips, templates, and guides.

    2. 10 easy edits to improve your manuscript right now

      Quick tips for refining your drafts.