Convergence

This is a sample of columnular basalt in the Field Museum in Chicago: The famous place I’ve heard of this formation is the Giant’s Causeway, a cliff on the northern coast of Ireland. There’s a geological explanation and a legendary one, a tale I enjoy because the hero actually dodges the issue and defeats the

Why I Like Computers

Back when I was in college, kids, before there were word processors, I wrote or typed my papers for school on the back of scratch paper and laid it out on the floor. To edit, I snipped it apart with scissors, taped in new paragraphs or rearranged it, and retyped it.

Is It Really Fat, What They Tell You to Cut?

I clicked on somebody’s link on Twitter and found an interesting tool: The Wasteline Test assesses whether your writing is ‘flabby’ or ‘fit’. The test works by counting percentages of words in five categories commonly associated with stodgy sentences: weak verbs, abstract nouns, prepositions, adjectives/adverbs and ‘waste words’ (it, this, that, there). For every writing

Small Town Views

I made a comment a while back that it turns out I need to clarify. I said that when I went off to college in the Big City, I didn’t know how to use an elevator, and apparently created a vision of a youth spent among cargo cults or the Amish. “We went into a

The Devices We Reach For

Karen Quah wrote about the stories we tell over and over in our work, and it got me thinking of what else we come back to in our creative work. Along with what kinds of stories we retell, do we reuse ways to tell them? In my various projects, I’m going on my third or