1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  2. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  3. Abo, Akinori 9
  4. aesthetics 19
  5. agile 30
  6. Albers, Josef 17
  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
  9. Allsopp, John 4
  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 58
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 22
  29. body 11
  30. Boeing, Geoff 7
  31. boredom 9
  32. Botton, Alain de 38
  33. Brand, Stewart 4
  34. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  35. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  36. Broskoski, Charles 6
  37. brutalism 7
  38. building 16
  39. bureaucracy 12
  40. Burnham, Bo 9
  41. business 15
  42. Byron, Lord 14
  43. Cagan, Marty 8
  44. Calvino, Italo 21
  45. Camus, Albert 13
  46. care 6
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 16
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 66
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 131
  93. details 31
  94. Dickinson, Emily 9
  95. Dieste, Eladio 4
  96. discovery 9
  97. doors 7
  98. Dorn, Brandon 11
  99. drawing 23
  100. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  101. Duany, Andres 18
  102. Eatock, Daniel 4
  103. economics 13
  104. efficiency 7
  105. Eisenman, Peter 8
  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
  107. emotion 8
  108. ending 14
  109. engineering 11
  110. Eno, Brian 4
  111. ethics 14
  112. euphony 38
  113. Evans, Benedict 4
  114. evolution 9
  115. experience 14
  116. farming 8
  117. fashion 11
  118. features 25
  119. feedback 6
  120. flaws 10
  121. Flexner, Abraham 8
  122. food 16
  123. form 19
  124. Fowler, Martin 4
  125. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  126. friendship 6
  127. fun 7
  128. function 31
  129. games 13
  130. gardens 26
  131. Garfield, Emily 4
  132. Garfunkel, Art 6
  133. geography 8
  134. geometry 18
  135. goals 9
  136. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  137. goodness 12
  138. Graham, Paul 37
  139. graphics 13
  140. Greene, Erick 6
  141. Hamming, Richard 45
  142. happiness 17
  143. Harford, Tim 4
  144. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  145. Hayes, Brian 28
  146. heat 7
  147. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  148. Herbert, Frank 4
  149. Heschong, Lisa 27
  150. Hesse, Herman 6
  151. history 13
  152. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  153. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  154. home 15
  155. Hoy, Amy 4
  156. Hoyt, Ben 5
  157. html 11
  158. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  159. humanity 16
  160. humor 6
  161. Huxley, Aldous 7
  162. hypermedia 22
  163. i 18
  164. ideas 21
  165. identity 33
  166. images 10
  167. industry 9
  168. information 42
  169. infrastructure 17
  170. innovation 15
  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
  173. interfaces 37
  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
  176. Irwin, Robert 65
  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  179. iteration 13
  180. Ive, Jonathan 6
  181. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
  185. Jones, Nick 5
  186. Kahn, Louis 4
  187. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  188. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  189. Keith, Jeremy 6
  190. Keller, Jenny 10
  191. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  192. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  193. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  194. Kitching, Roger 7
  195. Klein, Laura 4
  196. Kleon, Austin 13
  197. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
  200. Kohlstedt, Kurt 12
  201. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  202. Krishna, Golden 10
  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
  204. language 20
  205. learning 30
  206. life 59
  207. light 31
  208. loneliness 12
  209. love 26
  210. Lovell, Sophie 16
  211. Lupton, Ellen 11
  212. Luu, Dan 8
  213. Lynch, Kevin 12
  214. MacIver, David R. 8
  215. MacWright, Tom 5
  216. Magnus, Margaret 12
  217. making 77
  218. management 14
  219. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  220. Markson, David 16
  221. Mars, Roman 13
  222. material 39
  223. math 16
  224. McCarter, Robert 21
  225. meaning 33
  226. media 16
  227. melancholy 52
  228. memory 29
  229. metaphor 10
  230. metrics 19
  231. microsites 49
  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  233. Mills, C. Wright 9
  234. minimalism 10
  235. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  236. Mod, Craig 15
  237. modularity 6
  238. Mollison, Bill 31
  239. morality 8
  240. Murakami, Haruki 21
  241. music 16
  242. Müller, Boris 7
  243. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  244. names 11
  245. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  246. nature 51
  247. networks 15
  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
  250. notetaking 35
  251. novelty 11
  252. objects 16
  253. order 10
  254. ornament 9
  255. Orwell, George 7
  256. Ott, Matthias 4
  257. ownership 6
  258. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  259. Palmer, John 8
  260. patterns 11
  261. Patton, James L. 9
  262. Pawson, John 21
  263. perception 22
  264. perfection 7
  265. performance 17
  266. Perrine, John D. 9
  267. Petroski, Henry 24
  268. philosophy 6
  269. photography 20
  270. physics 6
  271. Pinker, Steven 8
  272. place 14
  273. planning 15
  274. Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 18
  275. poetry 13
  276. politics 9
  277. Pollan, Michael 6
  278. practice 10
  279. problems 31
  280. process 22
  281. production 7
  282. productivity 12
  283. products 21
  284. programming 9
  285. progress 16
  286. Pye, David 42
  287. quality 26
  288. questions 8
  289. Radić, Smiljan 20
  290. Rams, Dieter 16
  291. Rao, Venkatesh 14
  292. reading 16
  293. reality 13
  294. Reichenstein, Oliver 5
  295. religion 11
  296. Rendle, Robin 12
  297. repair 28
  298. research 17
  299. Reveal, James L. 4
  300. Richards, Melanie 3
  301. Richie, Donald 10
  302. Rougeux, Nicholas 4
  303. Rowe, Peter G. 10
  304. Rupert, Dave 4
  305. Ruskin, John 5
  306. Satyal, Parimal 9
  307. Saval, Nikil 13
  308. Sayers, Dorothy 32
  309. Schaller, George B. 7
  310. Schwulst, Laurel 5
  311. science 17
  312. seeing 36
  313. Sennett, Richard 45
  314. senses 11
  315. Seuss, Dr. 14
  316. Shakespeare, William 4
  317. Shorin, Toby 8
  318. silence 9
  319. Silverstein, Murray 33
  320. Simms, Matthew 19
  321. Simon, Paul 6
  322. simplicity 14
  323. Singer, Ryan 12
  324. skill 17
  325. Sloan, Robin 5
  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
  327. Smith, Justin E. H. 6
  328. Smith, Rach 4
  329. socializing 7
  330. society 23
  331. software 68
  332. solitude 12
  333. Somers, James 8
  334. Sorkin, Michael 56
  335. sound 14
  336. space 20
  337. Speck, Jeff 18
  338. spirit 10
  339. streets 10
  340. structure 13
  341. Strunk, William 15
  342. Ström, Matthew 13
  343. style 30
  344. Sun, Chuánqí 15
  345. symbols 12
  346. systems 18
  347. Sōetsu, Yanagi 34
  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
  351. taste 10
  352. Taylor, Dorian 16
  353. teaching 21
  354. teamwork 17
  355. technology 41
  356. texture 7
  357. thinking 31
  358. Thoreau, Henry David 8
  359. time 54
  360. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
  361. tools 32
  362. touch 8
  363. transportation 16
  364. Trombley, Nick 44
  365. truth 15
  366. Tufte, Edward 31
  367. Turrell, James 6
  368. typography 25
  369. understanding 32
  370. urbanism 68
  371. ux 100
  372. Victor, Bret 9
  373. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 4
  374. vision 7
  375. visualization 34
  376. Voltaire 4
  377. wabi-sabi 8
  378. walking 23
  379. Wallace, David Foster 33
  380. Wang, Shawn 6
  381. war 7
  382. waste 12
  383. Watterson, Bill 4
  384. Webb, Matt 14
  385. Webb, Marc 3
  386. Weber, Michael H. 3
  387. Wechler, Lawrence 37
  388. whimsy 11
  389. White, E.B. 15
  390. Wirth, Niklaus 6
  391. wisdom 20
  392. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7
  393. Woolf, Virginia 11
  394. words 35
  395. work 81
  396. writing 55
  397. Wurman, Richard Saul 18
  398. www 88
  399. Yamada, Kōun 5
  400. Yamashita, Yuhki 4
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The Written Word

Close
  • Assemblages

    Radić's texts are almost always assemblages of several pieces or paragraphs that, although written by an architect, do not attempt to refer to a particular project or work (and if they do, it is always laterally, avoiding explanations of the how and the why, or demonstrations and apologies).

    Like notes from a fragmentary diary or a review of a collection of memories, at times they share the melancholy tone of the writings by Aldo Rossi and at other times they recall the obscure density of John Hejduk's poems.

    — Patricio Mardones

    Smiljan Radić, Every So Often a Talking Dog Appears
    1. ​​Fragments​​
    2. ​​Compositions of desire​​
    • i
    • writing
  • Follow the brush

    One of the oldest and most deeply ingrained of Japanese attitudes to literary style holds that obvious structure is contrivance, that too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart, that the truest representation of the searching mind is just to 'follow the brush.'

    Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper, In Praise of Shadows
    1. ​​The Age of the Essay​​
    2. ​​Game feel​​
    • writing
    • art
    • making

    From Thomas J. Harper's afterword.

  • Never change the technology

    Once you choose the technology that runs your blog, use it. Don’t replace it, ever. Never ever rewrite it.

    If you’re trying to blog, write. Work in the ‘posts’ and ‘drafts’ folders. Create TODO lists and schedules to get posts live. Stay out of the blog configuration, templates, plugins, and whatnot.

    ...This is a specific instance of a larger problem: most people are unable to finish their side projects or focus on their side hustles, because they get distracted and sidetracked by tinkering and other things that increase the complexity of the project, instead of working toward the original goal. Being able to manage oneself is a skill as useful as it is rare, and I’m sure there are a few business books that draw that idea out into hundreds of pages.

    Tom MacWright, How to blog
    macwright.com
    1. ​​Managing Oneself​​
    • writing
  • v0.crap

    I couldn’t seem to convince my writers that I was genuinely ok working with a super rough first draft — i.e., that I’d harbor no hidden judgment about their intelligence, commitment, or excellence at their craft.

    So I came up with a new word. “Just give me a v0.crap.” (Pronounced “version zero dot crap”.)

    v.0.crap works because it’s attuned to the psychology of the situation. It’s punching through our innate desire not to “look bad”, plus years of corporate conditioning that tells us not to share less-than-polished work. It’s easier for people used to delivering exceptional work to feel they’ve exceeded the goal of “crap”; they can sit comfortably in “good enough for the current purpose.”

    Courtney Hohne, The monkey, the tiger beetle and the language of innovation
    blog.x.company
    1. ​​Writing, Briefly​​
    • quality
    • ideas
    • writing
    • making
  • One brick

    She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”

    Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating.

    She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

    Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
    www.drury.edu
    1. ​​Rationality: From AI to Zombies​​
    2. ​​I recommend eating chips​​
    3. ​​Looking Closely is Everything​​
    4. ​​The Student, The Fish, and Agassiz​​
    • writing
    • constraints
    • seeing
  • More that can be done

    The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says:

    Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.

    Toby Shorin, Open Transclude for Networked Writing
    subpixel.space
    • writing
    • www
    • media
  • To deprecate beauty itself

    One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, Washi
    • paper
    • writing
    • beauty
    • life
  • iA writer

    Image from medium.com on 2020-08-31 at 3.37.13 PM.png
    Oliver Reichenstein, Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design
    ia.net
    • writing

    iA writer is one of the few applications that I pay for, and happily. Great to see it included in this list.

  • Scientific writing

    What Mick Southern taught me was both the imperative to and the means of writing scientific prose—“if it’s not published it’s not done,” as a later adviser put it. Mock showed me that the rather dry technical requirements of scientific writing did not necessarily mean that elegance, humor, and even wit need be excluded from the scientists’ products.

    Roger Kitching, A Reflection of the Truth
    1. ​​Selling new ideas​​
    2. ​​You cannot consume what is not produced​​
    • science
    • writing
  • Information remix

    Effective writing stems from intelligently connecting the dots between the concepts you understand and can articulate. It stands to reason, then, that in order to generate more creativity you must not only add to a knowledge base, but deepen and expand the number of connections within the totality of the network. By establishing and explicitly mapping your knowledge, you allow yourself the freedom to remix information. You will often find that solutions come from previously unsuspected fields or topics—proving to be analogous in some shape or form.

    Will Darwin, Building a knowledge base
    www.willdarwin.com
    • connection
    • creativity
    • writing
    • networks
  • Angkorwatification

    Applied to a blog, angkorwatification is a sort of textual equivalent of rewilding. You have a base layer of traditional blog posts that is essentially complete in the sense of having created, over time, an idea space with a clear identity, and a more or less deliberately conceived architecture to it. And you have a secondary organic growth layer that is patiently but relentlessly rewilding the first, inorganic one. That second layer also emerges from the mind of the blogger of course, but does so via surrender to brain entropy rather than via writerly intentions disciplining the flow of words.

    Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm
    www.ribbonfarm.com
    • writing
    • entropy
    • decay

    From Elderblog Sutra: 11

  • Narrative codes

    The idea, as both sides' counsel worked it out, is that you will regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities, & c. as simply the modern literary analogs of 'Once upon a time...' or 'Far, far away, there once dwelt...' or any of the other traditional devices that signaled the reader that what was under way was fiction and should be processed accordingly. For as everyone knows, whether consciously or not, there's always a kind of unspoken contract between a book's author and its reader; and the terms of this contract always depend on certain codes and gestures that the author deploys in order to signal the reader what kind of book it is, i.e., whether it's made up vs. true. And these codes are important, because the subliminal contract for nonfiction is very different from the one for fiction.

    David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
    • writing
    • reading
  • Stories

    I know nothing of stories.

    Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
    • writing
  • Poppies

    I write, erase, rewrite,
    erase again, and then
    a poppy blooms.

    Yoel Hoffman, Japanese Death Poems
    • writing
  • Imagining her

    I think this is perhaps the hardest part of writing—of “generously imagining her”—continuously, unendingly. And this is the only difference between good and bad writing in the end. That doesn’t mean it’s easy (being kind is often the hardest thing to do) and of course I mention this not to lecture anyone but only as a keepsake and as a reminder for myself.

    Robin Rendle, Who the fuck is Guy Debord?
    www.robinrendle.com
    • writing
  • Like normal people

    Abe: What's wrong with our hands?

    Aaron: What do you mean?

    Abe: Why can't we write like normal people?

    Aaron: I don't know...I can see the letters. I know what they should look like, I just can't get my hand to make them.

    Shane Carruth, Primer
    • writing
  • Thinking in terms of outputs

    In our use of digital and analogue filing tools, we classify information through folders. An article about railway construction gets filed under ‘infrastructure’ or ‘transport’. In Evernote we tag it with ‘rail’ or ‘construction’. This is thinking like a librarian and not like a writer. We are classifying the information as an input. The reason you take notes as a writer is to produce content. It makes sense, then, to take notes in line with this goal.

    Traditional filing like this tends to fail when you attempt to write your content. You are stuck trying to figure out which categories will be relevant for your proposal, paper or blog post. Interesting writing often comes from connecting separate fields through a common idea. By revealing the common denominator. By unifying two seemingly-contradictory ideas. How can you possibly achieve this if you’re looking in the same category for your information? The categories simply do not fulfil the function required by the writer.

    The notes you take and indeed, the way you process information, should be with a specific project or idea in mind. You must classify information in terms of its outputs. When you take notes on a book, think about how this could apply to a specific idea you had or how it argues against a paper you read last week. The premise is that you should be organising by context and always trying to connect the dots between the content you're consuming.

    Will Darwin, How to Think About Notes
    www.willdarwin.com
    1. ​​How to be a genius​​
    • notetaking
    • information
    • writing
  • Babble and Prune

    For those who read and listen much more than they speak (guilty), an overly-strict Prune filter is applied to their writing; when these people go to write something of their own, their minds don’t produce thoughts nearly as “coherent, witty or wise as their hyper-developed Prune filter is used to processing”.

    Hence, my dilemma and an opportunity to break out of this trap. I recognised that if I attempted to write at the quality I was used to reading at, first time every time, my brain would promptly grind to a halt—like trying to brainstorm with a group that laughs at your suggestions.

    Will Darwin, The Artist and the Critic
    • writing
    • creativity
  • Several Short Sentences About Writing

    A Book by Verlyn Klinkenborg
    www.goodreads.com

    Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.
    Know what each sentence says,
    What it doesn't say,
    And what it implies.
    Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.

    1. ​​Sonorisms V​​
    2. ​​Both models are completely useless​​
    3. ​​The shape of the sentence​​
    4. ​​The Anxiety of Sequence​​
    5. ​​You can get anywhere from anywhere​​
    1. ​​Wittgenstein's Mistress​​
    2. ​​Write Simply​​
    3. ​​The most important thing you do​​
    • writing

    The connection to Wittgenstein's Mistress is mostly stylistic. Both have similar line-by-line constructions. One beautiful sentence after another.

  • The Elements of Style

    A Book by William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White
    www.gutenberg.org
    1. ​​Choose a suitable design and hold to it​​
    2. ​​Make the paragraph the unit of composition​​
    3. ​​Use the active voice​​
    4. ​​Put statements in positive form​​
    5. ​​Specific, definite, concrete​​
    1. ​​The Elements of Typographic Style​​
    2. ​​The Elements of Graphing Data​​
    3. ​​The Sense of Style​​
    4. ​​The superficial aspects of what someone else is doing​​
    • writing
    • communication
  • You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary

    An Essay by James Somers
    jsomers.net
    1. ​​As if a word were no more than coordinates​​
    2. ​​Another mind as alive as yours​​
    3. ​​A soft and fitful luster​​
    4. ​​Pathos​​
    5. ​​An affection for words​​
    1. ​​Webster's Dictionary, 1913 Edition​​
    • language
    • writing
  • The Sense of Style

    A Book by Steven Pinker
    1. ​​Classic style​​
    2. ​​The assumption of equality​​
    3. ​​Nominalization​​
    4. ​​The curse of knowledge​​
    5. ​​Structural parallelism​​
    1. ​​The Elements of Style​​
    • writing
    • communication
  • Downsides of the internet

    An Essay
    blog.royalsloth.eu

    The type of nitpicking behavior that I mentioned earlier, is especially problematic since it often causes the loss of writer’s authenticity. With time, these criticisms cause one of the following:

    • The writer stops publishing their work.
    • The writer stops reading comments and minds their own business.
    • The writer learns their lesson and sands off their edges in order to fit better in the society du jour.

    The larger the writer’s audience, the more likely it is for the writer to pick the last option and tone down their voice. You can experience this first hand when reading the essays of prominent bloggers. Their early work is usually interesting and fun to read, which naturally brought a large audience to their doors. But the more the show goes on, the more they will waffle around the topic, since with a large enough audience every thought will be misunderstood and nitpicked mercilessly.

    • writing
    • www
    • critique
    • personality
  • only the questions

    A Tool by Clive Thompson
    only-the-questions.glitch.me
    Image from uxdesign.cc on 2022-03-03 at 8.39.10 AM.png

    I’ve been watching how writers use questions lately, and thought: Hmmm, it’d be cool to see only the questions in a piece of prose.

    • questions
    • writing
  • gwern.net

    A Website by Gwern Branwen
    www.gwern.net
    Screen Shot 2022-01-15 at 3.44.36 coffee time.png

    The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.

    • writing
    • hypermedia
    • commonplace
  • Some thoughts on writing

    An Essay by Dan Luu
    danluu.com

    Besides being unlikely to work for you even if someone is able to describe what makes their writing tick, most advice is written by people who don't understand how their writing works. This may be difficult to see for writing if you haven't spent a lot of time analyzing writing, but it's easy to see this is true if you've taken a bunch of dance classes or had sports instruction that isn't from a very good coach. If you watch, for example, the median dance instructor and listen to their instructions, you'll see that their instructions are quite different from what they actually do. People who listen and follow instructions instead of attempting to copy what the instructor is doing will end up doing the thing completely wrong. Most writing advice similarly fails to capture what's important.

    1. ​​The superficial aspects of what someone else is doing​​
    2. ​​Things that increase popularity that I generally don't do​​
    • writing
    • learning
    • expertise
  • The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting

    An Article by Matt Webb
    interconnected.org
    • The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
    • Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
    • Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.
    1. ​​The McDonald’s Theory of Creativity​​
    • writing
    • thinking
    • iteration
  • Stream on

    An Article by Simon Collison
    colly.com

    A primary motivation for creating my Stream was the paralysing sense that a blog post needed appropriate length and weight. Since switching to Kirby, there’s relatively little friction to posting, but there’s definite friction in evaluating a post’s worth to the reader. I’d think to myself, “I’d like to write something about that, but I’ll have to come up with all sorts of extra stuff and dressing, and it’ll take all afternoon.”

    And so, I was increasingly aware that I was letting many interesting or essential thoughts go undocumented, allowing them to drift from memory, or exist only on social media, likely to one day evaporate. I’ve become more and more interested in the human desire to document, and it’s something I’ve always valued, so I needed to find a solution that I could entirely control and own. That solution was my Stream.

    • writing
    • blogging
  • Things Learned Blogging

    An Article by Jim Nielsen
    blog.jim-nielsen.com

    Eschew anything beyond writing the content of a post. No art direction. No social media imagery. No comments. No webmentions. No analytics...Imagine stripping away everything in the way of writing until the only thing staring you back in the face is a blinking cursor and an empty text file. That’ll force you to think about writing.

    ...[And] write for you, not for others. And if you can’t think of what to “write”, document something for yourself and call it writing.

    If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the mystery of blogging, it’s that the stuff you think nobody will read ends up with way more reach than anything you write thinking it will be popular.

    So write about what you want, not what you think others want, and the words will spill out.

    1. ​​How to blog​​
    2. ​​Write the books you want to read​​
    • blogging
    • writing
    • interest
  • Writing, Briefly

    An Article by Paul Graham
    www.paulgraham.com

    As for how to write well, here's the short version:

    Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can;
    rewrite it over and over;
    if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said;
    expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it;
    start writing when you think of the first sentence;
    write about stuff you like;
    learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

    1. ​​v0.crap​​
    2. ​​The situation talks back​​
    • writing

    Selections edited and formatted from a larger list.

  • Writing and Speaking

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    paulgraham.com

    Being a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better.

    • writing
    • speech
    • communication
    • practice
  • Forget the computer — here’s why you should write and design by hand

    An Article by Herbert Lui
    uxdesign.cc
    2021-08-27 13.47.43.png

    In the middle of the 2000s, the designers at creative consultancy Landor installed Adobe Photoshop on their computers and started using it. General manager Antonio Marazza tells author David Sax:

    “Overnight, the quality of their designs seemed to decline. After a few months of this, Landor’s Milan office gave all their designers Moleskine notebooks, and banned the use of Photoshop during the first week’s work on a project. The idea was to let their initial ideas freely blossom on paper, without the inherent bias of the software, before transferring them to the computer later for fine-tuning. It was so successful, this policy remains in place today.”

    1. ​​From the desk of: Austin Kleon​​
    • writing
    • design
    • drawing
    • tools
    • creativity
  • Blogging with Version Control

    An Article by Will Darwin
    willdarwin.com

    I’ve been musing for a while now on the way blog posts are typically presented—in reverse chronological order. This format has never truly made sense and does not reflect the way good writing and thinking happens.

    ...The main issue with the ‘pile’ system is that this post is eventually buried beneath more recent pieces of writing; there is no incentive for revisiting or updating the work. Even worse, if an author does decide to unearth the piece and make some major changes, those who read the original piece are not made aware of these alterations. The sorting order is static.

    • blogging
    • writing
    • information
  • Don't Write the Tedious Thing

    An Article by Maud Newton
    maudnewton.medium.com

    Ugh, now I have to write this boring part, I would think. I would spend a few days in active rebellion against this directive that I imagined the book was imposing.

    Then I would realize: this is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would think, if I’m bored by something that I believe I need to write, the reader undoubtedly will be too, if not because the subject is inherently boring, then because I myself find it so unbearably tedious to imagine discussing it for five pages. Often as not, I would remember some aspect of the subject that deeply interested me, something a little outside the way it’s usually perceived or written about. Then I would meditate on that, and soon I would be scribbling notes from an increasingly excited place until I found a way forward. A form of beginner’s mind.

    1. ​​Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind​​
    • boredom
    • writing
    • interest
  • Waiting around to write

    A Quote by Gertrude Stein
    subtlemaneuvers.substack.com

    If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year. To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day.

    • writing
    • creativity
  • The most important thing you do

    An Article by Austin Kleon
    austinkleon.com
    Image from austinkleon.com on 2021-07-06 at 9.22.22 AM.jpeg

    For the writer, your career will be the result of whatever piece you’re working on right now, and the piece you’re working on right now will be the result of whatever sentence you’re working on right now.

    1. ​​At least everything was important​​
    2. ​​Several Short Sentences About Writing​​
    3. ​​Successful careers are not planned​​
    • writing
  • Poison sniffers

    An Article by Austin Kleon
    austinkleon.com

    Christopher Johnson says “prescriptivists” or “Cute Curmudgeons” — people who are interested in only policing usage and grammar rules — are “linguistic poison sniffers.” They turn language into “a source of potential embarrassment rather than pleasure.”

    Johnson sees his job as getting people to love and appreciate language by being curious about and paying attention to “what makes language delicious.”

    This reminded of Olivia Laing’s distinction between identifying poison and finding nourishment.

    Everywhere you look these days, there are lots of poison sniffers, but very few cooking a delicious meal…

    1. ​​Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison​​
    • writing
    • language
  • Almanacs and cyclical time

    An Article by Austin Kleon
    austinkleon.com
    Image from austinkleon.com on 2021-07-22 at 9.43.53 PM.jpeg

    I am fascinated by the Farmer’s Almanac, and the “Planting by the Moon” guide in particular, which has advice such as: “Root crops that can be planted now will yield well.” “Good days for killing weeds.” “Good days for transplanting.” “Barren days. Do no planting.”

    I think it’d be funny to make up an almanac for writers and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.

    • cycles
    • art
    • writing
  • Open Transclude for Networked Writing

    An Essay by Toby Shorin
    subpixel.space
    1. ​​Not an accumulation of facts​​
    2. ​​More that can be done​​
    3. ​​Open Transclude​​
    1. ​​Designing Synced Blocks​​
    • information
    • writing
    • hypermedia

    Open Transclude is a spec for networked writing on your own blog.

  • Don't get me wrong

    An Article by Austin Kleon
    austinkleon.com
    Image from austinkleon.com on 2021-07-01 at 11.38.04 AM.jpeg

    No phrase makes me want to stop reading more. “Don’t get me wrong” is usually a tell — a kind of backpedaling that sets off an internal alarm and suggests I’m a) reading a hyperbolic argument (which, admittedly, describes the majority of online writing these days) or b) that the writer is just lazy. Either way, when I see “don’t get me wrong,” I start to suspect I’m reading a piece of writing that might not be worth my time.

    If you find yourself using “don’t get me wrong,” I have a suggestion: Delete the phrase and rewrite what came before it so I don’t get you wrong.

    • writing
  • Writing. By Tully Hansen

    A Website by Tully Hansen
    overland.org.au
    Screenshot of overland.org.au on 2021-03-03 at 4.55.22 PM.png
    1. ​​Wittgenstein's Mistress​​
    2. ​​Telescopic Text​​
    • writing
    • surrealism

    An experimental expanding essay in the spirit of David Markson.

  • Write Simply

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    www.paulgraham.com

    I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.

    That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas.

    1. ​​Several Short Sentences About Writing​​
    • writing
  • Telescopic Text

    A Website
    www.telescopictext.org

    telescopictext.org is an experimental tool for creating expanding texts. It is based on telescopictext.com.

    1. ​​Writing. By Tully Hansen​​
    • microsites
    • writing
  • Re: Pointing at things

    An Article by Robin Rendle
    www.robinrendle.com

    I think I’ve been darting around this question for a while now:

    ...I think we’ve all been taught to write in a style that forgets the reader entirely. My English degree taught me, incentivized me in fact, to write poorly with this sort of obfuscatory language, “nevertheless...”, “in this essay I will set out to...” etc.

    All that stuff is me pointing at me, pointing at a thing. But we should just get out of the way of the thing we’re pointing at!

    1. ​​Pointing at things​​
    • writing
  • The Age of the Essay

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    www.paulgraham.com
    1. ​​Essayer​​
    2. ​​Expressing ideas helps to form them​​
    3. ​​Flow interesting (The Meander)​​
    1. ​​Follow the brush​​
    2. ​​The Anxiety of Sequence​​
    • writing
  • Politics and the English Language

    An Essay by George Orwell
    jarango.com
    1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
    2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
    3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
    4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
    5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
    6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
    • rules
    • writing
  • Who the fuck is Guy Debord?

    An Article by Robin Rendle
    www.robinrendle.com
    1. ​​Long, unwieldy sentences​​
    2. ​​Imagining her​​
    1. ​​Psychogeography​​
    2. ​​Such tortuous syntax​​
    • writing
    • simplicity
  • Zettelkasten

    A Tool by Niklas Luhmann
    en.wikipedia.org

    A zettelkasten consists of many individual notes with ideas and other short pieces of information that are taken down as they occur or are acquired. The notes are numbered hierarchically, so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place, and contain metadata to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other. For example, notes may contain tags that describe key aspects of the note, and they may reference other notes. The numbering, metadata, format and structure of the notes is subject to variation depending on the specific method employed.

    1. ​​zettelkasten.de​​
    2. ​​How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think​​
    3. ​​The Zettelkasten Method​​
    4. ​​What this site is​​
    • notetaking
    • thinking
    • writing
  • Fragments of time

    A Quote by Italo Calvino

    Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot live or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

    1. ​​Understanding Architecture​​
    • time
    • writing
    • attention
  • Koya Bound

    A Book by Craig Mod
    walkkumano.com
    Screenshot of walkkumano.com on 2020-08-11 at 10.02.26 AM.png

    Koya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.

    We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.

    1. ​​To Make a Book, Walk on a Book​​
    • writing
    • photography
    • walking
  • Every Website is an Essay

    An Article by Robin Rendle
    css-tricks.com

    "Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.

    And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work.

    And by treating web design like an essay, we can be weird with the design. We can establish a distinct voice and make it sound like an honest-to-goodness human being wrote it, too."

    • writing
    • www
    • essays
  • How to Think About Notes

    An Article by Will Darwin
    www.willdarwin.com
    1. ​​Thinking in terms of outputs​​
    1. ​​Maggie Appleton's Digital Garden​​
    • notetaking
    • writing
    • information

    The fourth post in the ‘Prose’ blogchain series on taking intelligent notes.

  • High Cadence Thoughs

    A Website by Ryan Dawidjan
    quip.com
    Image from quip.com on 2020-08-08 at 7.08.23 PM.png

    [I] personally wish blogging was more about peeking behind the curtain into one's mind rather than shipping a polished contained unit.

    • writing
  • I am an explorer

    A Quote by C.S. Lewis
    www.chipswritinglessons.com

    I do not sit down at my desk to put into in verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind I would have no incentive or need to write about it. I am an explorer…We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.

    • writing
    • understanding
  • Eyes on the ground

    A Quote by Akira Kurosawa
    www.youtube.com

    When you go mountain climbing, the first thing you’re told is not to look at the peak but to keep your eyes on the ground as you climb. You just keep climbing patiently one step at a time. If you keep looking at the top, you’ll get frustrated. I think writing is similar. You need to get used to the task of writing. You must make an effort to learn to regard it not as something painful but as routine.

    • writing
    • experience
    • skill

See also:
  1. creativity
  2. information
  3. www
  4. notetaking
  5. communication
  6. blogging
  7. art
  8. making
  9. hypermedia
  10. language
  11. thinking
  12. interest
  13. time
  14. attention
  15. science
  16. i
  17. understanding
  18. media
  19. connection
  20. networks
  21. reading
  22. entropy
  23. decay
  24. experience
  25. skill
  26. simplicity
  27. essays
  28. photography
  29. walking
  30. constraints
  31. seeing
  32. speech
  33. practice
  34. rules
  35. quality
  36. ideas
  37. paper
  38. beauty
  39. life
  40. surrealism
  41. microsites
  42. cycles
  43. boredom
  44. design
  45. drawing
  46. tools
  47. iteration
  48. learning
  49. expertise
  50. commonplace
  51. questions
  52. critique
  53. personality
  1. Will Darwin
  2. Robin Rendle
  3. Paul Graham
  4. Austin Kleon
  5. Toby Shorin
  6. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
  7. Thomas J. Harper
  8. Yoel Hoffman
  9. Italo Calvino
  10. Roger Kitching
  11. Miguel de Cervantes
  12. Smiljan Radić
  13. C.S. Lewis
  14. Shane Carruth
  15. David Foster Wallace
  16. Venkatesh Rao
  17. Akira Kurosawa
  18. William Strunk Jr.
  19. E.B. White
  20. James Somers
  21. Ryan Dawidjan
  22. Craig Mod
  23. Niklas Luhmann
  24. Oliver Reichenstein
  25. Robert M. Pirsig
  26. Steven Pinker
  27. George Orwell
  28. Courtney Hohne
  29. Yanagi Sōetsu
  30. Verlyn Klinkenborg
  31. Tully Hansen
  32. Gertrude Stein
  33. Maud Newton
  34. Herbert Lui
  35. Matt Webb
  36. Tom MacWright
  37. Jim Nielsen
  38. Simon Collison
  39. Dan Luu
  40. Gwern Branwen
  41. Clive Thompson