Tonight’s post is going to be a little bit meta (please note the lowercase “m”). I want to talk about the process of writing these, the pros and cons of my approach, and the aspirations I have for at least one of these. First, some logistics.
Normally around here, everyone is in bed by 10 p.m. Except me. That’s when I crack my knuckles and get to work on these. That usually means I need to already have an idea in mind about what I want to write about, and just buckle down to get the thoughts out of my head and onto this page. I may have mentioned it before, but to reiterate, I want to have everything up and posted before midnight. That gives me about two hours to get close to 500 coherent words together, add links where needed, choose a title from my predetermined list (have you figured out where I’m pulling these titles from yet?), and scroll through my old photos to select one which is mildly related to the evening’s topic.
So far, I’ve posted one of these almost every weekday evening since the beginning of November, my own version of NaNoWriMo. And after working on more than two dozen posts, one conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s so much easier to write about opinions than to write about facts. And maybe that’s why we’re so inundated with a morass of ideas which we have to navigate through to get to the truth. Let’s go back to the World Cup as an example.
If I want to put up 500 words about how much I despise the play, technique, and mindset of a certain high-scoring Portuguese captain, I could do that pretty effortlessly, without having to cite one stat or example, just a stream of consciousness about how watching him makes me feel. And, since that‘s my lived experience, there’s not really much debate about it. But if I wanted to present a well-informed case about why I think a more petite, 35-year-old forward from South America is a better all-around soccer player than a certain recently terminated Manchester United forward, I’d need to back it up with examples and statistics and a thorough evaluation about why one brings value to a team and the other only values himself. And that takes work. Just sharing an opinion is far from work.
When we start to evaluate information, it takes critical thinking. And research. And the humility of knowing what you don’t know as well as the confidence to get a little uncomfortable in order to potentially learn something new. Another in the long list of reasons why I loved Twitter was the ability to learn something new every day. Or even every hour, if I was willing to spend that much time and effort to seek new information. Under the new leadership, however, the burden to verify what you’re reading is far too much. You used to be able to trust that most of the news you were seeing, especially on the Explore tab, was presented with enough context for it to quickly make sense. Now that the entire Curation team is gone, though, one has to be more than skeptical about every trend and hashtag listed, especially on the Trending section.
While I stand by the thoughts I’ve been able to collect in these posts, I know that there’s not a lot to them. Right now, I think that’s fine. If you’re reading them, I hope you’re appropriately skeptical of what I’ve put here. Eventually, though, I want to be able to spend the time and effort to put something together which teaches you — and probably me — something new. I know that the process of putting these words together is a clarifying process for me, so from just that aspect, these are valuable. I hope they're a little valuable to you, too. Even if they’re not Tweets.
Ugly Truth
07 December 2022
Writing about writing.
Tonight’s post is going to be a little bit meta (please note the lowercase “m”). I want to talk about the process of writing these, the pros and cons of my approach, and the aspirations I have for at least one of these. First, some logistics.
Normally around here, everyone is in bed by 10 p.m. Except me. That’s when I crack my knuckles and get to work on these. That usually means I need to already have an idea in mind about what I want to write about, and just buckle down to get the thoughts out of my head and onto this page. I may have mentioned it before, but to reiterate, I want to have everything up and posted before midnight. That gives me about two hours to get close to 500 coherent words together, add links where needed, choose a title from my predetermined list (have you figured out where I’m pulling these titles from yet?), and scroll through my old photos to select one which is mildly related to the evening’s topic.
So far, I’ve posted one of these almost every weekday evening since the beginning of November, my own version of NaNoWriMo. And after working on more than two dozen posts, one conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s so much easier to write about opinions than to write about facts. And maybe that’s why we’re so inundated with a morass of ideas which we have to navigate through to get to the truth. Let’s go back to the World Cup as an example.
If I want to put up 500 words about how much I despise the play, technique, and mindset of a certain high-scoring Portuguese captain, I could do that pretty effortlessly, without having to cite one stat or example, just a stream of consciousness about how watching him makes me feel. And, since that‘s my lived experience, there’s not really much debate about it. But if I wanted to present a well-informed case about why I think a more petite, 35-year-old forward from South America is a better all-around soccer player than a certain recently terminated Manchester United forward, I’d need to back it up with examples and statistics and a thorough evaluation about why one brings value to a team and the other only values himself. And that takes work. Just sharing an opinion is far from work.
When we start to evaluate information, it takes critical thinking. And research. And the humility of knowing what you don’t know as well as the confidence to get a little uncomfortable in order to potentially learn something new. Another in the long list of reasons why I loved Twitter was the ability to learn something new every day. Or even every hour, if I was willing to spend that much time and effort to seek new information. Under the new leadership, however, the burden to verify what you’re reading is far too much. You used to be able to trust that most of the news you were seeing, especially on the Explore tab, was presented with enough context for it to quickly make sense. Now that the entire Curation team is gone, though, one has to be more than skeptical about every trend and hashtag listed, especially on the Trending section.
While I stand by the thoughts I’ve been able to collect in these posts, I know that there’s not a lot to them. Right now, I think that’s fine. If you’re reading them, I hope you’re appropriately skeptical of what I’ve put here. Eventually, though, I want to be able to spend the time and effort to put something together which teaches you — and probably me — something new. I know that the process of putting these words together is a clarifying process for me, so from just that aspect, these are valuable. I hope they're a little valuable to you, too. Even if they’re not Tweets.
See you tomorrow?