Writing

There are 44 posts filed in Writing (this is page 2 of 5).

Keeping track of a topic

Ken Smith is looking at workflows to help develop a topic over multiple blog posts (at least, that is one part of what he is writing about, I think). I would like to offer some examples. The first is drawn from my zettlekasten experiments last year (link is to my zettlekkasten file). I created a section in my topical outline for the history of podcasting, and was adding posts and articles to it, and arranging them in chronological order. The Politics section was similar, where I was collecting information on the Kari Lake election conflicts in Arizona. Finally, I created a Github repo where I was editing posts by Ken Smith on organizing information for use. I think all of these are possible solutions for what Ken Smith is trying to do.

Zettlekasten – the recipe looks great, show us the beef!

This morning, I saw that Chris Aldrich has written an excellent overview of zettlekasten-note taking techniques and history. Ton Zijlstra comments that the article is great, and is itself a product of a zettlekasten, so Chris is “practicing what he preaches”. I agree with Ton’s compliment, but I still have one nagging qualm – what does the zettlekasten itself look like? In July 2022, Chris Aldrich called for public examples of zettlekasten output, which he has created a great example in his recent post. But what about the zettlekasten itself? As I state in the title (a play on the classic Wendy’s hamburger commercial) – show us the beef! Show us what was collected and how it was collected so we (humanity) can try to learn from your experiences. Of all my looking through Zettlekasten.de, I have found only one post with semi-specific information about actual zettlekasten cards/notes. Sounds like a 30-day challenge is in order here…

Some thoughts on “Why write?”

Ken Smith wrote a stream-of-consciousness post on why writers write, or why people should write. I have collected a few resources, and wanted to share them today.

From the first two episodes of my podcast Thinking About Tools For Thought, I discussed writing as a primary tool for thought.

Anna Havron at Analog Office recently wrote about how pen and paper (simple tools) can be used to create complex things (all artifacts of writing)

Sascha at Zettlekasten.de had an excellent breakdown of how value is added to a zettlekasten system (writing/knowledge system)

Swyx proposes a “three strikes rule” for blogging (three stumbles across something means you have to write it down/share)

Josh Bernoff shares his top three reasons why writers should blog (practice, testing ideas, building an audience)

So – there you go – get started! I’m going to try to keep up this writing streak…

Explainers on Donald Trump legal troubles

In an earlier post, I gave some examples of explainers (a form of journalism that provides the essential background knowledge necessary to follow events in the news). Recently, I have seen some good examples concerning Donald Trump and his legal troubles.

Axios.com – Presidential Records Act and Trump search explained

JustSecurity.org – Expert Backgrounder: Criminal Statutes that Could Apply to Trump’s Retention of Government Documents 

CNN.com – Opinion: Trump is worried after FBI search — and he should be

Resources for writing

In organizing information for use, writing skills can be particularly helpful, especially in trying to summarize topics. Here are some resources I recently came across:

How To Make Notes and Write by Dan Allosso and S. F. Allosso – Learn to make effective notes on sources and your interpretations, then turn those into clear and compelling output. This link is to a website version of the book, an ePub version can also be downloaded.

The Documentation System from Divio – A theory of documentation composed of four types (tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation) with excellent explanation of the differences and examples on how to create these four types of documentation effectively.

Resources for explainers

In an earlier post, I mentioned work that Jay Rosen and his Studio 20 journalism program did in 2010-2011 on the subject of explainers (a form of journalism that provides the essential background knowledge necessary to follow events in the news). Here are links that I did not include in the post:

PressThink: National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News – Jay Rosen’s initial post about the “Giant Pool of Money” podcast that helped explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, contains analysis of why it was excellent, and pointers to explainers (2008) 

PressThink: John Ashcroft: National Explainer – why US Attorney General John Ashcroft felt justified in only talking to television news, and not print news (2003)

PressThink: Normalizing Trump (2017)

Explainer.net: The Explainer Awards, a look at the best explainers on the net (2011)

A great example of organizing information for use

Ken Smith wrote a post yesterday showing a great example of activities that wedding attendees could participate in around the wedding date. The example was an outline created in Drummer and published using the drummer.this.how construct/PagePark plugin. This could be done for any event, with a permanent URL that can be sent to a group, and updated as needed since Drummer is a web app. Or – this could be a set of instructions, which could be updated based on feedback. Or – this could be an agenda for a meeting. Or – hopefully you are getting the picture – it could be any information that can be easily structured in an outine. Boom!

How to organize information for use

Ken Smith had two recent posts (“For the team” and “Or maybe not“), discussing the ideas of forming a community, collecting information on a topic, processing information as a group, and providing a summary of that information. I think the collection and processing tasks are attainable and occur on a regular basis. The task not being performed well is the curate/share/maintain steps.

As an example, I started collecting information on the topic of personal book lists in a Github repo. I provided a chronology of recent posts on the subject, collected tools and techniques, and also created some tools of my own. The recent Github repo for Drummer stuff would be another example, as well as other “awesome-fill-in-the-blank” sites on Github. A mega example of this is a tech guide put together by Stephen Downes on resources for creating an online community, class or conference. 

Perhaps the main thing is to start a “beach-head” of some sort where people can collaborate, then publicize and support that beach-head. Thoughts, anyone?

(cross-posted from my Drummer blog)

A first look at Bookdown for book publishing

I recently completed the first draft of a book using Google Docs (subject is how to create a social media presence through your own web site and newsletter), but when I saved a copy as a PDF, it did not look as good as I would like. I had been considering trying out Scribus (an open source desktop publishing tool), but had read about the Bookdown toolset when I was looking at some resources on the R programming language. This weekend, I decided to install the toolset and see how much effort that took and what the results looked like.

The creator of Bookdown has written a book on how to create books with Bookdown, so I thought I would start there with the Get Started page/section. I downloaded a repo from Github containing a demo book. Next, I downloaded and installed RStudio, which is supposed to be used to create the book. In the process of installation and startup, I found out that I needed to download and install R as well – ooops! Funny how this was not mentioned in the Get Started page….

The next step was to install the bookdown package using the R IDE. However, there was a popup asking if I wanted to set up a separate library. I clicked “No” and tried to install, but got the error message that the R library was not writable. After some searching, I found this Stack Exchange post that addressed this problem…again, interesting that this was not in the book.

Finally, I got the bookdown package installed, opened the demo book, and was able to build the book in HTML form. The console displaying info on the build process showed some errors in generating ePub and PDF versions of the book. The Get Started page indicated that another toolset (TinyTek) was needed for the PDF output. I used the Windows batch file to install Tiny Tek, and went ahead and restarted all the apps (R, RStudio). I then rebuilt the book, it took 1-2 minutes to generate the demo book in PDF form. It had a few pagination problems, but looked ok. Overall, I spent about an hour working through these steps. I will explore it some more, but will also check out Scribus as well. To me, I would have to go through some effort to convert my book draft to R Markdown. If Scribus could create a book with less work, I might head in that direction.