For as long as I can remember I had a knack for putting words together. My ideas were often innovative and my stories contained a through-line that made them eminently readable, at least for a grade-schooler. Yet for as long as that has been the case it has also been true that for me writing has always been extremely hard.
When I say writing is hard for me, I don't mean that it is difficult to slap words down or make sentences that work. What I mean is that the act of writing well, writing to my own expectations, is a lot of hard work. As I start work on a blog post or a speech ideas swirl around in my head like a magnificent maelstrom and it's all I can do to try to capture the essence of a single sentiment, let alone weave that tempest into a coherent tapestry of ideas. I can see glimmers of the final picture I want to paint in my head, but as I plod through one poorly rendered concept after another I realize how much more work it needs, how far from the path I've deviated. And at some point I forget what path I was on as I find forks in the road that seem to lead me far from my opening paragraph.
I've never understood how someone can be lacking words in a composition. For me I am always flooded with them. A half dozen lines per idea and I've prose'd my way into an amalgam of related concepts that spans many pages and, like modern Physics, with no clear Unifying Theory of Everything to help it make sense. It is hard to write well because it is hard to express the million micro epiphanies I have as I explore an idea in my mind. It is hard to write well because every line I write is a "little darling", to quote popular literature on writing, and I cannot sacrifice enough of them to earn the cogency that I need to powerfully make the point that plays within the powers of my mind.
It is hard for me to write because it takes so long to do it. I am a perfectionist. I was inspired to write a speech recently for Toastmasters and instead of jotting down some ideas, I spent an hour and a half researching the barest roots of the essential fundamentals surrounding the topic. Does a normal person when writing a short speech about freedom of ideas and intellectual property research Platonic Idealism? Perhaps they do and they are simply faster at it than me. Despite my own derision towards my approach I yearn to read the results that ultimately await. I want to see come to life a powerful and insightful speech about the relativity of ideas and ownership contrasted with the concept of underlying truths and greater good. It would be a speech about society and our futures as humans on this floating rock, which is a lot to evolve from the quote, “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research.”. I become crippled by the burden of that concept, it is too big for me to treat adequately. My skill is not enough.
Words challenge me. They challenge me to be used as they pop unbidden into my head from some netherworld of forgotten references. Half the time I have the meanings wrong and the spelling worse, yet they demand my attention as if they alone can solve the riddle of a sentence. More often than they should they wend their way into my rose garden and present their difficult barbs to my readers and diverting my careful tending. It is a weakness I suppose, and one that author's like Stephen King have nearly completely abolished to their great success. The track record is clear, run without the added weight of complex words and you reach the finish line straighter and faster and everyone remembers how you got there. Yet, it remains a perniciously persistent predicament which faces me endlessly, needlessly, and heedlessly.
In the end, deep down, I know most of my problem is lack of practice. Even author's like Stephen King struggled through their first novels and developing a writing system and routine. Now they bang out a book a year, business as usual, and are having a great time doing it. So maybe I need to take a page from their book and just write. Get the first draft on paper, even if it is equivalent to what one of my old English teacher's called "Verbal Diarrhea". At least then that steaming mess of verbs and nouns and ideas has been parked somewhere and I can move on to working with it, flushing it, or starting on something new.
I've written this blog post that way. Grabbed time I didn't have and blurted it all out. No revision, no review, no second guessing. Not even the poop reference. And aren't we all the richer for it? If you are reading this out in writer/blogger land, let me know how you deal with the difficulty of writing. What challenges you and makes writing hard?
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Why #yxu is a Bad Label
In the Twittersphere for London, Ontario there has been a trend recently to change what we use as a hashtag, or label, to identify tweets pertaining to our City and area. For years now I have been using #LdnOnt as the hashtag for London. As you can guess, simply using #London is often confused with London England and searching on that hashtag brings up both resident's tweets. Recently, there has been an influx of competing hashtags, such as the current favourite #yxu. Primarily, I see no reason to change my tried and true hashtag but let's see why I don't like #yxu.
Why is #yxu a bad Label? It is Cryptic, Elitist, and Immemorable.
It is Cryptic because it is nonsense. The letters do not stand for anything at all and you can not decipher its meaning by simply looking at it or cross-referencing it to any knowledge of London aside from it's actual precise representation. So in other words, the only way to understand what it is, is to look it up and even then, it means nothing more than a code for London's Airport.
It is Elitist because if you do not know we are all using it, you would likely not intuit to use it. My argument for this? How many people in London actually fly in or out of our Airport? I've lived here for 6 years and have flown to British Columbia twice and don't even know where our airport is, let alone the code, I fly out of Pearson. I have flown out of the Powell River airport twice and have no earthly idea what it's airport code is. Nor do I know the airport codes for Prince George or Orillia where I also resided for a number of years.
Ask yourself if someone in Hamilton or Chatham would think to look for London tweets by our airport code? What about someone in Somalia? I understand some major Canadian cities are using their codes, namely Vancouver and Toronto, but let's face it guys, those are two of the busiest International airports in all of Canada. London is not. So the way you'll know how to find our tweets is if... you already know the password into our elite club.
It is Immemorable because it is nonsense! There is no mnemonic property at all to #yxu or any other airport code aside from pure coincidence. For example, nearly every time I fly to Vancouver and decide to use the airport code at booking I have to double-check whether YVR or YYZ is Vancouver or Toronto - and that one even has a coincidental mnemonic in it (YVR has VR for VancouveR) but I start wondering, "or was it the opposite of what makes sense." You see I can get doubtful because I know YYZ means nothing. I know YXU means nothing. How am I to remember them other than through sheer repetition?
In my opinion a good label, a good index, a good way for people to find each other is not something they have to learn. It isn't something WE have to learn to use and memorize. It is whatever comes naturally, whatever makes sense, and whatever means something. #ldnont isn't perfect, but it at least means something when you read it.
Why is #yxu a bad Label? It is Cryptic, Elitist, and Immemorable.
It is Cryptic because it is nonsense. The letters do not stand for anything at all and you can not decipher its meaning by simply looking at it or cross-referencing it to any knowledge of London aside from it's actual precise representation. So in other words, the only way to understand what it is, is to look it up and even then, it means nothing more than a code for London's Airport.
It is Elitist because if you do not know we are all using it, you would likely not intuit to use it. My argument for this? How many people in London actually fly in or out of our Airport? I've lived here for 6 years and have flown to British Columbia twice and don't even know where our airport is, let alone the code, I fly out of Pearson. I have flown out of the Powell River airport twice and have no earthly idea what it's airport code is. Nor do I know the airport codes for Prince George or Orillia where I also resided for a number of years.
Ask yourself if someone in Hamilton or Chatham would think to look for London tweets by our airport code? What about someone in Somalia? I understand some major Canadian cities are using their codes, namely Vancouver and Toronto, but let's face it guys, those are two of the busiest International airports in all of Canada. London is not. So the way you'll know how to find our tweets is if... you already know the password into our elite club.
It is Immemorable because it is nonsense! There is no mnemonic property at all to #yxu or any other airport code aside from pure coincidence. For example, nearly every time I fly to Vancouver and decide to use the airport code at booking I have to double-check whether YVR or YYZ is Vancouver or Toronto - and that one even has a coincidental mnemonic in it (YVR has VR for VancouveR) but I start wondering, "or was it the opposite of what makes sense." You see I can get doubtful because I know YYZ means nothing. I know YXU means nothing. How am I to remember them other than through sheer repetition?
In my opinion a good label, a good index, a good way for people to find each other is not something they have to learn. It isn't something WE have to learn to use and memorize. It is whatever comes naturally, whatever makes sense, and whatever means something. #ldnont isn't perfect, but it at least means something when you read it.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
The Time-slice Paradox
One thing that I do not excel at is so-called Time Management. The bare truth of the matter is that I simply don't "get it". Perhaps it is a function of my preternatural obsession with the literal defintion of the namesake I carry (Shirk), or merely a learned behaviour unwittingly harvested from a bout of debilitating depression as a teenager.
Often lauded as key in Time Managment is Multitasking. This is a term often thrown at me in the context of what I do poorly, as if an evolved human adult should inherently be able to do it well. The term itself comes into the popular lexicon through computing and the famously multitasking processors in our home computers. It is implied through it's popular use, and idiomatic use in self-management circles, to mean the ability to and act of performing more than one task at a time. This is utter nonsense.
In computing, with the exception of multi-core processors, multitasking never entails two processes having control of the main processor core at one moment, but rather it is the ability and act of priority switching between them. Even in multi-core processors the trick is that there is more than one processor core available! If you equate a cpu core to the human brain - which I might point out we have only one of - it is clear Multitasking really means, the ability to juggle multiple tasks based on priority, focusing on only one at a time.
Given this better definition of Multitasking I contend I am actually pretty decent at it. Where I fail is in judgements involving relative priority and efficient use of focus length. In the first case, priority is highly relative and subjective. Nine out of ten times my problem is in not using another persons relative priority matrix but instead using my own. Since I am a selfish, egoistic being, this is fraught with hazards. So fair enough, I'm basically a newb at applying an understanding of what other people find important. Luckily I am lately able to get pretty close as I build a secondary internal matrix of 'common priorites' such as timeliness of arrival (people hate it when you are late or make them so), fullfillment of promises (if you say it, do it, and not late, see #1), observance of details (do everything you said you would neglecting nary a detail), and added value (only if you've done the other three).
My main challenge is in efficiently determining how long to focus on any one task. My nature is one of the artisan, focusing intently on one work of art until it is completed then moving to the next. I am not a slave to this nature and do juggle mutiple tasks at once but I'm all to often stuck focus-firing one item down until I've long past the time where my priority matrix should dictate I switch targets. This is where I encounter the Time-slice Paradox.
In my personal life I have many, many pulls on my time, such as, cleaning, laundry, organizing, planning, preparing, gaming (oh so many games), reading, writing, exercising, cat time, sleep time, friends time, travel time, etc. Any number of these things feeds into two factors in regards to my feelings towards a given day, 1) my sense of personal effectiveness and 2) my sense of accomplishment. The Time-slice Paradox is essentially the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle of life management. The more clear I am about 1) the less sure I am about 2) and the reverse.
On a day where I return from work and perform 1 hour of each cleaning, reading, writing, eating, XBOX and PC I will feel a very high sense of personal effectiveness but will feel like I accomplished very little in any of them. On a day where I come home and spend no more than an hour on cleaning/eating and spend 5 hours playing a game on XBOX, I will feel I have accomplished a great deal on that game, but been fairly ineffective overall, wasting most of my time on one thing.
Perhaps this is only something that effects me, a result maybe of my own skewed sense of accomplishment, but it no doubt plays into all my Time Management woes, confusing my ability to rationalize the proper size of time-slices to use in my multitasking. Considering I am lagging on writing assignments, slacking on blog posts, slumming in a chaotic apartment, starting to watch 2 new TV series, and sitting on 4 or 5 new games... this is going to be one heck of a paradoxical month.
Often lauded as key in Time Managment is Multitasking. This is a term often thrown at me in the context of what I do poorly, as if an evolved human adult should inherently be able to do it well. The term itself comes into the popular lexicon through computing and the famously multitasking processors in our home computers. It is implied through it's popular use, and idiomatic use in self-management circles, to mean the ability to and act of performing more than one task at a time. This is utter nonsense.
In computing, with the exception of multi-core processors, multitasking never entails two processes having control of the main processor core at one moment, but rather it is the ability and act of priority switching between them. Even in multi-core processors the trick is that there is more than one processor core available! If you equate a cpu core to the human brain - which I might point out we have only one of - it is clear Multitasking really means, the ability to juggle multiple tasks based on priority, focusing on only one at a time.
Given this better definition of Multitasking I contend I am actually pretty decent at it. Where I fail is in judgements involving relative priority and efficient use of focus length. In the first case, priority is highly relative and subjective. Nine out of ten times my problem is in not using another persons relative priority matrix but instead using my own. Since I am a selfish, egoistic being, this is fraught with hazards. So fair enough, I'm basically a newb at applying an understanding of what other people find important. Luckily I am lately able to get pretty close as I build a secondary internal matrix of 'common priorites' such as timeliness of arrival (people hate it when you are late or make them so), fullfillment of promises (if you say it, do it, and not late, see #1), observance of details (do everything you said you would neglecting nary a detail), and added value (only if you've done the other three).
My main challenge is in efficiently determining how long to focus on any one task. My nature is one of the artisan, focusing intently on one work of art until it is completed then moving to the next. I am not a slave to this nature and do juggle mutiple tasks at once but I'm all to often stuck focus-firing one item down until I've long past the time where my priority matrix should dictate I switch targets. This is where I encounter the Time-slice Paradox.
In my personal life I have many, many pulls on my time, such as, cleaning, laundry, organizing, planning, preparing, gaming (oh so many games), reading, writing, exercising, cat time, sleep time, friends time, travel time, etc. Any number of these things feeds into two factors in regards to my feelings towards a given day, 1) my sense of personal effectiveness and 2) my sense of accomplishment. The Time-slice Paradox is essentially the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle of life management. The more clear I am about 1) the less sure I am about 2) and the reverse.
On a day where I return from work and perform 1 hour of each cleaning, reading, writing, eating, XBOX and PC I will feel a very high sense of personal effectiveness but will feel like I accomplished very little in any of them. On a day where I come home and spend no more than an hour on cleaning/eating and spend 5 hours playing a game on XBOX, I will feel I have accomplished a great deal on that game, but been fairly ineffective overall, wasting most of my time on one thing.
Perhaps this is only something that effects me, a result maybe of my own skewed sense of accomplishment, but it no doubt plays into all my Time Management woes, confusing my ability to rationalize the proper size of time-slices to use in my multitasking. Considering I am lagging on writing assignments, slacking on blog posts, slumming in a chaotic apartment, starting to watch 2 new TV series, and sitting on 4 or 5 new games... this is going to be one heck of a paradoxical month.
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