Writing in 2021

The Twitterverse that I inhabit has various writers and related people in it. They suggest for the improvement of your writing, actually do it. So I’m going to try to spend some part of each day doing some, and this is the first attempt this year.

I write to express ideas. I find that, having written about something or other, I can much more easily talk about it off-the-cuff in class. It means I’ve thought about the idea before. It means I have preconceived.

Just because I’ve thought about it before, doesn’t mean I’ve thought about it correctly before. When I revisit a topic, I’ve often had the chance to take on other information and sometimes the revisitation changes my views. One thing I’ve often done when I think about specific problems or conundrums I face is to think about them deeply. And then “background”¹ them

If I try to talk about an idea without having thought about it before, then my own peculiar form of “silent stutter” (block?) kicks in: I go quiet, and words come haltingly or not at all. For me, being able to speak confidently and fluidly about a topic means I need the preparation that comes with organizing my thoughts about a topic.

1 Background refers to the Linux command line idea of detaching a program from the command line interface so that it’s still running, but not stopping other programs being able to be run on the same command line. ↩