Pavlovian

As I mentioned a week or two back, I’ve been struggling to break the habit of double-spacing post-period. But the muscle memory seems rather deeply ingrained, and I can definitively say the effort hasn’t been a roaring success. In nearly all my blog posts since, though I’ve removed the second spaces automatically after drafting, it appears I still inadvertently put them in initially at least 50% of the time. And, as I don’t similarly check most of my outgoing emails, nor the majority of what I draft as internal notes for work, I’m sure the problem is even worse when I’m less directly focused on it.

So, two days back, I opted for something more dramatic: I set up a TextExpander snippet to automatically replace “[period][space][space]” with “[period][space]okboomer.” Here’s hoping a little self-directed operant conditioning works where mere effort hasn’t.

Doubling Down

I owe most of whatever writing ability I have to my mother, who brutally copy-edited all of my papers throughout my childhood. Whether correctly comma-fying appositives, or matching prepositions in parallel structures, she’d mark up my papers, red pen in hand, and then make me talk through all the corrections with her, one by one.

Frankly, our styles are quite distinct – in fact, she’d likely object to the start of this sentence, on the grounds that ‘distinct’ is an absolute adjective and can’t be modified – and I still hear her voice in my head, chastising me, whenever I end sentences with prepositions, or split infinitives, or make other conscious, conversationally-written choices that run against the most traditional (or, one might say, pedantic) grammar ‘rules.’

But the biggest legacy of her teaching might be my long-standing habit of double-spacing after periods. As she grew up using a typewriter, that habit was deeply ingrained in her own typing. In turn, she passed it along to me, even circling with the aforementioned red pen anywhere I let things slip and single-spaced post-sentence instead.

For years, even as I read typographers’ screeds decrying that double-space practice, I still held onto the idea that it made good sense, a kerning assist to help break one sentence from the next. But, over time, I was slowly swayed by the monospaced vs already-proportionally-spaced font argument. And, by now, I’m certain that single spacing after periods is indeed the correct choice.

Still, like in so many areas of life, there’s a gap between knowing and doing. Especially in a sphere, like touch-typing, that depends so highly on muscle memory. For years, I was saved from myself by technology. For example, WordPress depended on HTML, which automatically collapsed multiple spaces to a single one. And MacOS (like iOS) began to convert double-spaces to periods, so I would catch slip-ups as they occurred.

Still, the Pavlovian conditioning of those MacOS conversions hasn’t appeared to override my years of prior typing. Because even in this very post, I reflexively double-spaced preceding five sentences, INCLUDING THIS VERY SENTENCE. Good grief.

Once WordPress switched to their new Gutenberg editor, it began to preserve (and post) multiples spaces as typed in blog posts. I only realized as much of late. So on top of actively trying to stop double-spacing when I type here, I’ve also been using a quick script to highlight and correct the spots where I slipped up. And, as already evidenced, I wouldn’t say it’s going great.

But, I’m working on it. The road to change is a long and difficult one indeed.

Cut

Benjamin Franklin, who helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, once share this anecdote with Jefferson:

When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice Hatter, having served out his time, was about to open a shop for himself.  His first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription.  He composed it in these words: “John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.” with a figure of a hat subjoined.  But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments.  The first he shewed it to thought the word “hatter” tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats” which shew he was a hatter.  It was struck out.  The next observed that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats.  If good and to their mind, they would buy, by whomsoever made.  He struck it out.  A third said he thought the words “for ready money” were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit.  Every one who purchased expected to pay.  They were parted with, and the inscription now stood “John Thompson sells hats.” “Sells hats” says his next friend?  Why nobody will expect you to give them away.  What then is the use of that word?  It was stricken out and “hat” followed it, the rather, as there was one painted on the board.  So his inscription was reduced ultimately “John Thompson” with the figure of a hat subjoined.

 

Harvest Moon

We’re midway through the Jewish holiday of Sukkot – a harvest festival celebrated by building a hut (a ‘sukkah’) outdoors, and then dining, relaxing, and celebrating in it as much as possible over the course of a week.  It’s a beautiful holiday, especially right on the heels of Rosh Hoshanah (the Jewish new year).  The world has been created, and now we have to create something out of the world.

 

But Jews aren’t unique in celebrating a harvest festival at this time of the year – many cultures do the world over, including America, with Thanksgiving next month.  And also, it turns out, China, which celebrates a Harvest Moon Festival on the same lunar calendar date (aligned with the same full moon) as Sukkot.

 

I’ve been (very slowly and painfully) learning some Chinese, and my tutor Michael Fu shared with me this week a pair of 5th Century Tang Dynasty poems linked to the festival.  Traditionally, the Harvest Moon evokes reunion, as with the harvest, workers return home after months away in the fields.

 

Each poem is a 5×4 grid of characters, and Michael took the time to walk me through them literally, one by one.  In that form, the lines are something like: “window light in-front-of through seeing,” so it took a bit of puzzling for me to extract English translations that Michael thumbed up as capturing the meaning and spirit.

 

The first was written anonymously, the second by Ching Dao Lee, a famous poet of the era, who wrote the below to her fiancé, a young captain in one of the era’s many wars:

 

1.

Outside my window,
I see a bright light,
and wonder if it is frost on the ground.
Looking up, I see it is the full moon;
I bow my head, and think of home.

 

2.

Dearest:
You are at the head of this great river,
and I am down where it reaches the sea.
I think of you day and night,
and though we cannot yet be together,
we may still drink from the river: the same water.

 

 

 

Blessings

by Ronald Wallace

occur.
Some days I find myself
putting my foot in
the same stream twice;
leading a horse to water
and making him drink.
I have a clue.
I can see the forest
for the trees.
All around me people
are making silk purses
out of sows’ ears,
getting blood from turnips,
building Rome in a day.
There’s a business
like show business.
There’s something new
under the sun.
Some days misery
no longer loves company;
it puts itself out of its.
There’s rest for the weary.
There’s turning back.
There are guarantees.
I can be serious.
I can mean that.
You can quite
put your finger on it.
Some days I know
I am long for this world.
I can go home again.
And when I go
I can
take it with me.

Iterate

For years, I’ve been a fan of British productivity guru Mark Forster, sort of the UK equivalent of David Allen.

Unlike Allen, who’s pedantically determined to prove that his Getting Things Done system is The One True Way, Forster instead tends to play around with a variety of systems, tools and approaches, always searching out new ways of getting more important things done more easily.

From Forster, I picked up a writing trick that remains one of my most used tools: iterative expansion drafting.

The approach is simple. You start by jotting or typing out very fragmentary ideas, roughing out the piece. For the start of this blog post, it might be something like:

Following Mark Forster, UK David Allen.

Open to new ideas.

From Forster: iterative expansion.

Start with fragments, expand in passes.

Using this kind of framework, you can get thoughts out quickly, focus on what you want to say before you become mired in how you want to say it.

Then, after a break, you can come back and expand a bit:

For years, I’ve been a fan of Mark Forster. He’s sort of the UK’s answer to David Allen.

He’s open to new ideas, and tends to play around with a variety of tools and approaches.

One technique I took from Forster was the concept of successive iterative drafting.

The concept is simple: start with words and sentence fragments to get out the ideas, then return repeatedly to the document to expand and edit those fragments on subsequent passes.

From there, another pass or two yields a publishable post.

Without this approach, especially when creating dense work documents, I tend to spend an inordinate amount of time stuck drafting and re-drafting the first paragraph. But going iteratively, I can flesh out the spine of a two-thousand word white-paper in just a few minutes. And with each successive expansion, momentum carries me forward. I’m no longer forced to come up with ideas from scratch, not faced with the terror of the blank page. Instead, I’m simply adding to what already exists, and then phrasing and rephrasing in clearer, more readable ways.

At it’s core, successive iterative drafting is the concept of ‘shitty first drafts’ taken to its logical extreme: creating a draft so shitty, it barely even resembles writing, yet that still gets you an initial foothold from which to build.

For more on the approach (and a bunch of other excellent insights), check out Forster’s Do it Tomorrow. It’s the book I’ve gifted more than any other, and it’s certainly worth the read.

The Blog also Rises

Thinking about writing apps, here’s another one I’ve been leaning on of late: Hemingway.  Available as both a free website and a (paid) OS X app, this one comes in handy during the editing phase.

Paste in text, and Hemingway grades the readability of what you’ve written.  It highlights words, phrases and sentences that reduce comprehension.  It marks adverbs you might want to drop.  And it flags use of the passive voice.   All to help you make your writing more forceful and clear.

Left to my own devices, I tend to favor sentences built as overly-long, clause-filled constructions, those that wedge multiple thoughts together in a single, unnecessarily commingled whole.  Like that last sentence, for example. According to Hemingway: “very hard to read.”

So, after writing a shitty first draft, I next hop to Hemingway to slim things down.  Highlighted section by highlighted section, I tweak away.  Trimming the fat, subdividing messy sentences into clearer, shorter ones.  The result: better writing that’s far easier to understand.  And that makes a big difference.  Especially on screen, where comprehension is already reduced as compared to paper.  And on the web, where people scan as much as actually read.

Try it yourself.  And, while you’re at it, have a stiff drink.  It’s what Hemingway himself would want you to do.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

As I mentioned in a prior post, I’ve been thinking a lot of late about Cal Newport’s excellent new book, Deep Work.  In it, Cal argues for the power of being able to focus hard on a single difficult task for an extended period of time.

Cal proposes a slew of ideas to help push towards that goal. But I’ve also been collecting tools that help nudge me in that direction. A lot of my own deep work is writing-related.  And for me, the hardest part of writing is just getting the words down in the first place.  So I need to force myself to bang out shitty first drafts.  Otherwise, I end up critiquing and editing, or stare at the blank screen.

Enter the excellent app Flowstate.  And the recently-launched free website The Most Dangerous Writing App. Both do the same simple yet powerful thing: they delete what you’ve written if you stop writing.

In either app, you choose a time frame for which you have to keep moving – five minutes, twenty.  And then you start typing. And you keep typing. You pour stuff out, good, bad or ugly. Because if you stop for more than five seconds, everything you’ve written fades away.  It disappears forever into the digital abyss.

It sounds a bit ridiculous. And, perhaps, it is. But it’s also just enough fire beneath my feet to keep me moving.  Sure, I need to edit the hell out of what I create. And it may not be your best bet for drafting poetry. But when I need to just get things on paper (or screen), to create a starting point, it’s an awesome tool.

Try them out, and see if living on the edge a bit helps you, too.

Word Wise

Over the last few months, I’ve heard a slew of smart, literate people use ‘nonplussed’ to mean ‘unfazed’ or ‘unimpressed’.

Unfortunately, that’s not what the word means.

Instead, ‘nonplussed’ means ‘bewildered’ or ‘confused’.

I’m totally nonplussed as to why nobody can use that shit correctly.

[Bonus fact: similarly, ‘ambivalent’ doesn’t mean ‘I don’t care’. Instead, it means pretty much the exact opposite: ‘I’m torn between strong opposing feelings about this.’ Get that one right, too.]

Relax

by Ellen Bass

Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat–
the one you never really liked–will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up–drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice–one white, one black–scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

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