My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.” Looking at it from the other side, for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, everything is “content” regardless of its provenance. Each creation is merely an object, only valuable for its ability to increase our time spent on their platforms, allowing them to sell more advertising.
Don’t write
fopenwhen you can writeopenFile. WritethrowValidationErrorand notthrowVE. Call that namefunctionand notfct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.
Language is not an invention. As best we can tell it is an evolved feature of the human brain. There have been almost countless languages humans have spoken. But they all follow certain rules that grow out of the wiring of the human brain and human cognition. Critically, it is something that is hardwired into us. Writing is an altogether different and artificial thing.
It’s hard to overstate how important my blog has been, but if I were to try to distill it down into one word, it would be: “amplifier.”
Khoi talks about writing on his own website.
I personally can’t imagine handing over all of my labor to a centralized platform where it’s chopped up and shuffled together with content from countless other sources, only to be exploited at the current whims of the platform owners’ volatile business models.
I got a preview copy of this book and, my oh my, it is superb!
If your job involves dealing with humans (or if it might involve dealing with humans in the future), you’ll definitely want to read this.
Krystal compares two styles of writing and applies them to onboarding.
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The Training Commission is a speculative fiction email newsletter about the compromises and consequences of using technology to reckon with collective trauma. Several years after a period of civil unrest and digital blackouts in the United States, a truth and reconciliation process has led to a major restructuring of the federal government, major tech companies, and the criminal justice system.
Ted Chiang has new collection out‽ Why did nobody tell me‽
Okay, well, technically this is Joyce Carol Oates telling me. In any case …woo-hoo!!!
The slides from Carolyn’s talk at Beyond Tellerrand. The presentation is ostensibly about writing documentation, but I think it’s packed with good advice for writing in general.
There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission.
A wonderful and inspiring call to arms for having your own website—a place to express yourself, and a playground, all rolled into one.
Building and maintaining your personal website is an investment that is challenging and can feel laborious at times. Be prepared for that. But what you will learn along the way does easily make up for all the effort and makes the journey more than worthwhile.
A beautiful post by Brendan, comparing the ease of publishing on the web to the original Flip camera:
Right now there’s a real renaissance of people getting back to blogging on their own sites again. If you’ve been putting it off, think about the beauty and simplicity of that red button, press it, and try and help make the web the place it was always meant to be.
When you greet a stranger, look at his shoes.
Keep your money in your shoes.
Put your trouble behind.
When you greet a stranger, look at her hands.
Keep your money in your hands.
Put your travel behind.
Improve your word power:
Using ‘very’ + adjective makes your writing stale. This dictionary finds you a less dull, alternative word. It’ll help make your writing more convincing and engaging.
Jason contemplates his two decades of blog posts, some of which he now feels very differently about:
Tim Berners-Lee’s idea that cool URIs don’t change is almost part of my DNA at this point, so deleting them seems wrong. Approximately no one ever reads any post on this site that’s more than a few years old, but is that an argument for or against deleting them? (If a tree falls in the woods, etc…) Should I delete but leave a note they were deleted? Should I leave the original posts but append updates citing my current displeasure?
Onboarding. Reaching out. In terms of. Synergy. Bandwidth. Headcount. Forward planning. Multichannel. Going forward. We are constantly bombarded and polluted with nonsense speak. These words and phrases snag and attach themselves to our vocabulary like sticky weeds.
Words become walls.
I love this post from Ben on the value of plain language!
We’re not dumbing things down by using simple terms. We’re being smarter.
Read on for the story of the one exception that Ben makes—it’s a good one.
Writing on your own website associates your thoughts and ideas with you as a person. Having a distinct website design helps strengthen that association. Writing for another publication you get a little circular avatar at the beginning of the post and a brief bio at the end of the post, and that’s about it. People will remember the publication, but probably not your name.
Nick Harkaway on technology in fiction:
Humans without tools are not magically pure; they’re just unvaccinated, cold, and wet.
SF is how we get to know ourselves, either who we are or who we might be. In terms of what is authentically human, SF has a claim to be vastly more honest and important than a literary fiction that refuses to admit the existence of the modern and goes in search of a kind of essential humanness which exists by itself, rather than in the intersection of people, economics, culture, and science which is where we all inevitably live. It’s like saying you can only really understand a flame if you get rid of the candle. Good luck with that.
And on Borges:
He was a genius, and he left this cryptic, brilliant body of work that’s poetic, incomplete, astonishing. It’s like a tasting menu in a restaurant where they let you smell things that go to other tables and never arrive at yours.
It turns out that “it turns out” is a handy linguistic shortcut for making an unsubstaniated assertion.
What a lovely timeline of civilisation. This site makes for a nice companion piece to that database of dimensioned drawings—they’re both delightful to explore.
Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.