Category: Writing

  • Two memorable quotes from Ira Glass’s interview

    Two memorable quotes from Ira Glass’s interview

    While perusing Aaron’s Swartz’s blog, I stopped and read his post titled “Writing A Book: Part 2”. In this post, Aaron swoons over Ira Glass’s unparalleled storytelling skills. Wanting to learn more about Ira, I whipped out my iPhone, opened up my YouTube app, and loaded a (podcast) interview where Ira Glass shares his thoughts on “finding ones creative voice”. Along the way, I jotted down two memorable quotes.

    Ira was not born an amazing story teller. Early on in his career (in his early 20s), he realized a gap existed between his current and future skills. And when asked what kept him moving forward, Ira Glass responded:

    Just over the horizon

    I feel like I could … imagine a thing … which didn’t exist, that was so much better than what I was doing. And … and it’s like it was just over the horizon. And … I didn’t have any other goals. Like, I really thought like I can’t do this now, and I’m not sure how you get to the point where you can do it. Um…and I think, I’m stubborn. And I act on faith.

    The above quote deeply resonates with me, especially when it comes to my current writing abilities. I know — I feel — that I can produce good writing: cohesive; coherent; and beautiful. And like Ira, my writing skill gap lives just over the horizon: I just need to continue practicing, continue learning, and ultimately, continue producing large volumes of work.  All that hard work, plus the two most essential ingredients: faith and luck.

    No sign for talent

    And when I hear what I was doing, I can see why. It wasn’t good. Years ago, one of our producers dug up one of those pieces. Because I said, “Oh, I did a piece on that, when I was 26”. And she just dug it up and she said “This is amazing. There was no sign that you have any talent for radio. There was no sign that you will ever turn into something good. At all.” And when I hear it, I hear the same thing: You can’t tell.

    So just keep dancing with your craft and have a little faith. Not just in yourself, but in the universe. Because the time will come when luck will pay you a visit.

  • Reader expectations and three dimensions for emphasizing writing

    Reader expectations and three dimensions for emphasizing writing

    Fred the dog beater

    Look at the above example, the four sentences. Now, take each of those sentences and imagine you poll an audience of 100 people, asking them the following question: “Does the author want you [the reader] to give Fred either a thumbs up or thumbs up?” How do you think the audience answer? More than likely, the audience answers as follows:

    a) mostly thumbs down for Fred

    b) mostly thumbs down up for Fred

    c) slightly more thumbs down for Fred

    d) slightly more thumbs up for Fred

    What the heck is going on here?

    Why? Why when we present the audience with semantically equivalent sentences — but with the order of the words re-positioned — do their perceptions of Fred swing in completely opposite directions?

    Three dimensions

    The answer lies within how the author structures the sentences, how the author arranges (and rearranges) the words to leverage the reader’s expectations, using the following three dimensions: stress position, main clause, length (because each of the above example sentences run the same length, we won’t discuss this dimension, but just bear in mind that the longer a clause, the more the readers emphasize it). With these dimensions in mind, let’s deconstruct the first two examples. But first, let’s define the stress position.

    Analysis of example (a) and example (b)

    The stress position (which emphasizes certain words) sits immediately to the left of any of the three punctuation marks that denote the end of a semantic closure: a period, a semicolon; a colon.  Because our examples only house a period, so let’s focus our attention there, starting with the first example: “Although Fred’s a nice guy, he beats his dog.” In this example, “he beats his dog” is the main clause and occupies the stress position. For these two reasons, the audience will generally (not always) emphasize Fred beating his dog and as a result, they give him a thumbs down. Next, moving on to the second example: “Although Fred beats his dog, he is a nice guy.” With this sentence, the author subordinated “Fred beats his dog”, reducing the sentence’s importance; “he is a nice guy” now holds the stress position and lives as the main clause. Therefore, Fred gets a thumbs up.

    Leverage reader’s expectations

    You can emphasize certain words within your sentences by leveraging reader’s expectations. Take advantage of the inherent structure within the English language, by applying the three simple techniques: place important (what you consider important) words in the stress position; make them the main clause; and lengthen the clause for additional for additional emphasis.

  • You should NOT always prefer active over passive voice

    You should NOT always prefer active over passive voice

    Like many other aspiring authors, I’m always sharpening my writing skills, dozens of writing books (including one of my favorites: On Writing by Stephen King) lined up on my bookshelf. Almost all these books share the same stance when comparing the active and passive voices. They strongly prefer the active voice over the passive voice. Always. Black and white. No grey area. Their justification? The books claim the passive voice sound weak when compared to the (strong) active voice.

    Sorry — that’s baloney.

    Some situations call for passive voice. What I’m saying is this: sometimes passive voice outperforms the active voice.  Voice selection depends on whose story you want to tell. Here’s a simple example: Jack loves Jill. In this example, Jack (the subject) loves (the action) Jill (the object); as readers, we expect that the following sentences revolve around the subject, Jack. But, what if the author really wanted to focus the story on Jill, instead? Simple: change the voice from active to passive. Switch the subject from Jack to Jill and change the tense: Jill is loved by Jack. Jill (subject) is loved (the action) by Jack (agent).

    How about taking a look at an example of changing the voice (from passive to active) adds confusion to the mix. In the two examples below, the top is written in passive, the bottom its active voice equivalent.

    Passive voice. Source: Gopen (2020) video companion PDF

     

    Active voice. Source: Gopen (2020) video companion PDF

    Does the conversion improve the movement, improve the quality, improvement the passage as a whole? No! If anything, the new passage confuses us readers! We are now distracted, our attention pointing towards the scientists, when we should be focusing on the science.

    References

    1. Gopen George (2020) Video Companion PDF

  • Want to improve your craft of writing? Imitate!

    Want to improve your craft of writing? Imitate!

    There are no shortcuts to becoming a great writer. As Stephen King says, great writers need to read a lot and write a lot. But that’s not enough. Nope. I’d argue you need to take writing one step further: imitate good writing.

    Imitating great tennis players

    When I was a young boy, about 8 or 9, I imitated all the top tennis players. I’d slip on my worn-out tennis shoes (leaving the laces untied, a bad habit that I cannot seem to shake, even as an adult), slide into my above-the-knee shorts and position myself in front of the 10″ CRT television. I’d then watch the tennis legends from the late 90s, mirroring their every move. Gripping my imaginary carbon fiber tennis racket, I’d bend my knees and point my finger into the sky as I leaned into the platform serving position (aka trophy position) just like Pete Sampras, I’d shuffle my feet like Michael Chang, I’d glide towards the net to serve and volley like Patrick Rafter.  Over time, my tennis game became an amalgamation of theirs (of course, I never reached their levels). And I believe that this approach of mimicking the greats should be applied to aspiring writers who want to improve their craft.

    Claim: Great writers reverse engineer

    Great authors imitate other great authors. In “Sense of Style”, Pinker asserts that good writers are avid readers and that they have “absorbed a vast inventory of words,idioms, constructions, ropes, and rhetorical tricks, and with them a sensitivity to how they mesh and how they clash.”

    One example of an author who took this deliberate approach to learning the craft is Elizabeth Gilbert. In her book, Big Magic, she talks about how she studied from great teachers: “teachers that live on the shelves of your great library, that live on the walls of museums, that live in recordings made from decades ago”. She states that “No living writer has ever taught me more about plotting and characterization than Charles Dickens has taught me.” Although she didn’t study from Charles Dickens directly she did  “spend years privately studying his novels like they were holy scripture, and then to practice like the devil on my own”.

    Imitators

    Another example of such an author who took a rigorous approach to learning the craft is Benjamin Franklin.

    Benjamin Franklin

    Benjamin Franklin would read articles, take voracious notes, and set them a side for a few days. When he returned to his notes, he attempted to rewrite the article, using his own words. Then, he’d compare his writing with that of the original and took stock of where his writing fell short. His vocabulary was weak, so he worked on expanding it. He had also noticed another shortcoming: his organization (or lack thereof). Tackling this head on, he would decompose some piece of writing that he admired into sections and copy each of them onto their own index cards. After mixing the cards a pile, he’d then attempt to rearrange them in the correct (original) order. That’s how he practiced organization skills. That’s amazing discipline.

    Why don’t more of us take this same approach? Well, some do, like Stephen King.

    Stephen King

    In “On Writing”, Stephen King shares about how, when he was a child, he would read comic book after comic book after comic book, reading whatever he could get his hands on. Believing that imitation precedes creativity, King would “copy Combat Casey” comics word for word in (his) Blue Horse tablet, sometimes adding (his) own descriptions where they seemed appropriate.”

    Hunter Thompson

    One final example: Hunter Thompson. “He chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, “I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that well.”

    Summary: Go and imitate

    There are no short cuts. Clear out space on your cluttered desk. Make a neat stack of all the books that you want to write like. And come to terms that, writing is a life long journey of reading and writing, a never ending cycle of these two activities.

  • A short review on Zettlr (open source Zettelkasten app)

    A short review on Zettlr (open source Zettelkasten app)

    I serendipitously stumbled on another Zettelkasten desktop application called Zettlr. Perusing the online forum over at Zettelkasten.de, I had noticed that at least three of four members repping the app in their signatures. Naturally, I was curious so I followed the scent on the trail and loaded up the Zettlr website in my browser.

    After skimming through the description, I decided to test drive the application.

    And so far, I am really loving the application. It’s beautiful. It’s use friendly. It sparks joy.

    Sure, the application is still in an infancy and has a few rough edges: the application fails to open up external third party application links (e.g. DevonThink) and the support for markdown tables is clunky at best and sometimes the cursor lags behind when I’m typing at my top speed. However, none of these issues are deal breakers. And I’m certain that, overtime, the application’s performance will be improved.

    Top features

    Keyboard shortcuts. Want to generate a unique identifier for your note card? Type in “CTRL + L” and the app will spit out a timestamp that serves as a unique ID for other cards to reference. Just plain awesome. How about inserting a markdown hyperlink? Well, just select some text and then press “CTRL + K”, the text converted to a markdown based hyperlink. And these two shortcuts are just the tip of the iceberg.

    Built-in statistics. Check out at a glance how many words you are writing daily.

    Writing is on fire!

     

    Built in emojiis. I didn’t anticipate that I would enjoy inserting emojiis into my documents. Of course, I don’t over do it and only sprinkle them sparingly. Regardless, they add a nice little touch, a spark of joy in the creative writing process.

    Auto-generated table of contents. By marking down your content with appropriate headings, you get a beautiful table of contents located in the side bar (which renders the emojiis nicely too).

    Zettlr: Emojii support and auto-generated table of contents

    Wrapping up

    Overall, I love the application so far (again: it’s only been about 3 days). I’m certain I’ll discover other blesmishes as I continue to use the application. Regardless, Zettlr allows me to enjoy creating content: I’m able to achieve a sense of flow, often losing myself in the process, thanks to both the aesthetically pleasing interface as well as the low cost of context switching between reading, editing, writing and searching.

  • Neil Strauss’s 3 pass writing technique

    Neil Strauss’s 3 pass writing technique

    Three passes

    World class writers sit down and pour out beautiful prose in a single sitting, right? That’s the image I image I held in mind for many years and this belief is not only far from the truth but this belief crippled me as a writer. I would sit down to type and proceed to write at glacial speed, spending more time watching the cursor blink. But over many many years of reading about writers and reading about the craft of writing, I learned the truth: that the best of writers make multiple passes at their writing.

    Recently, Neil Strauss shared his creative writing process in his weekly newsletter and he suggests breaking down the writing into three discrete passes. Each pass serves a different purpose. They differ in modes of thinking and vary in speed of execution.

    • Second pass – edit and keep your reader/audience in mind
    • Third pass – scrutinize your work

    Get it all out … as quickly as possible

    One of the most common mistakes is trying to write everything perfectly. As if each word was being etched in stone, or going straight to print.

    During this first pass, you aim for banging out the writing — as fast as possible. Your goal is NOT perfection. Your goal is to brain dump and clear your working memory. You want to generate a mountain of writing that you can, in the subsequent phases, chisel and shape and smooth out. And don’t fear: you never show this writing to anyone (unless you want to, of course). This first draft is for your eyes, and your eyes only.

    Think about your reader

    This is where you start sculpting the clay of your book. You see the book not through your ego, which wanted to write the book, but through an ideal reader’s eyes.

    Now that a heap of writing sits in front of you, what next? You shift your mode of thinking. In the previous pass, you were writing for yourself. But now, center your attention towards your audience. Try and view the writing from their perspective. Consider the clutter. Consider where you are losing their attention. Consider the reader and be prepared to toss out entire sentences — or even sections.

    Welcome the haters

    Note that hater-proofing isn’t just anticipating their arguments and defusing them ahead of time, but also checking to make sure your facts, research, and even spellings are correct. And your arguments are correct and unassailable.

    Once you’ve consider your reader, you now put yourself in the position of your hater, your worst enemy. This is the time for you to really scrutinize your work, to find any chinks in your armor. This is the phase in which you get to play devil’s advocate. Basically, imagine stepping into the ring and boxing with a logical opponent, someone trying to poke holes in your writing, someone trying to expose you as a fraud. Anticipate the punches and tackle them head on.

    Summary

    Ultimately, the three phases creates some structure and within that structure lives creative freedom. And again, each phase serves a different purpose. At the beginning, you want to be your biggest cheerleader, rooting for yourself. Then, towards the end, you transition into your toughest critic.

  • Free E-book: Advanced operating systems (AOS) refresher course – summary and study guide

    Free E-book: Advanced operating systems (AOS) refresher course – summary and study guide

    Click here to download “Advanced OS refresher course – summary and study guide”

    I compiled my various blog posts from the advanced operating systems refresher course and bundled them together into a nicely packed e-book. So, if you are about to enroll in Georgia Tech’s advanced operating system course (AOS) and want to step through the refresher material (without sitting through and watching the entire lecture series) or just get a sense of whether you can skip the refresher course all together, then definitely check out the e-book above.

  • 30 different ways to write paragraphs – series introduction

    30 different ways to write paragraphs – series introduction

    This blog post is the first in the series on the different ways to write powerful paragraphs, inspired by Victor Pellgrino’s book “A writer’s guide to powerful paragraphs”.

    According to Victor Pelligrino, a paragraph is a unit of thought that expresses a single idea, communicated through related sentences. And although there are many ways to create powerful paragraphs, you must — first and foremost — identify your topic: “A topic sentence is the most important sentence in a paragraph. Sometimes referred to as a focus sentence, the topic sentence helps organize the paragraph by summarizing the information in the paragraph

    Put another way, the topic sentence is generally what your “paragraph is about.” That’s it.

    After identifying the main topic, your main goal is to fully develop that topic. You’ll want to anticipate your reader’s questions and answer them. And if, along the way, you discover your paragraph fails to satisfy those questions, then perhaps you need to better understand your subject: Take a step back from the actual writing and pivot.  Do some research.

    But most importantly, throughout the writing process, constantly keep the reader at the center of your mind. Ask yourself, “Who am I writing for … what do they know…. what do they NOT know”. Think about what assumptions you are making about your reader; more often than not, we assume too much of our reader and lose them along the way. We fail to fill in the missing gaps and we fail to logically link our thoughts, failing to use transitional phrases (or sentences).

    In summary, you’ll want to identify your topic, provide descriptions, arguments and examples (maybe one, perhaps two, sometimes even three).

  • Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/11/01

    Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/11/01

    No Halloween this year

    I used to love Halloween growing up, not so much the dressing up part but the knocking on doors and getting handed fist fulls of candy. Now, as an adult, I love returning the favor and always think about giving out larger than average candy and chocolate.

    But not this year, thanks to COVID-19.

    Hopefully 2020 will be the one and only year that we skip Halloween …

    Starting writing my first e-book

    I’m compiling all my blog posts on “advanced operating systems refresher” into a single, nicely formatted e-book. The book will provide a summary and detailed notes on Udacity’s Advanced Refresher course.

    Media Consumption

    Watched the first two episodes of “This is Us”. Again, as I mentioned in my blog posts, the writer’s (and cast and crew) deserve a huge applaud for pivoting and incorporating two major events in history — the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality on black lives — into the story line. That’s no easy feat but they are pulling it off.

    Watched Borat subsequent film. I found the film hilarious and ingenious. Reveals how complicated people can be. For example, two trump supporters end up taking Borat into their homes and at one point, they even speak up on behalf of women.

    Home Care

    I’m super motivated keeping our new home in tip top shape. I had learned that the previous owner’s took a lot of pride in the house, the retired couple out in the front or back yard on a daily basis, the two of them maintaining the lawn and plants.

    Learning how to take care of the lawn. That includes learning the different modes of mowing (i.e. mulching, side discharge, bagging), the difference between slow release and fast release nitrogen, the importance of aerating, the importance of applying winterizer two weeks before the last historical freeze day, how to edge properly and so on.

    Family

    Still working from home and still appreciate the little gestures from Jess throughout the day. I sometimes get lost in a black hole of thoughts and troubleshooting, not drinking any water or eating snacks for hours at a time. So the little snacks that Jess drops off go a long way.

    Health

    Although taking care of mental health, not so much physical health. Only exercised once last week which was basically jogging on the treadmill.

    Graduate School

    Applied theory of lightweight recoverable virtual machine to work. In advanced operating systems, I took the concept of the abort transaction and suggested that we install a similar handler in our control plane code.

  • Being paged out of bed at 3 AM …

    Being paged out of bed at 3 AM …

    Sadly I didn’t get to start the day off with writing, my morning routine, since my phone paged me out of bed at 3 AM due to an operational issue from work that lasted about about three hours. Because of this, I know that I’ll feel “off” the rest of the day given that I’ve been awake for over 5 hours and the time is barely 9 AM. Oh well. Time to heat up another Chai Latte to keep me awake for the day …

    Sometimes I wonder if this is all worth it …