Summary
I want to write in a way that feels like art.
I am trying to write more as an avenue to be more creative and to learn and reflect on topics that I normally would not think about. This includes reflecting on My Relationships which can often times be uncomfortable. I typically really enjoy writing if its in an analytical way and not forced upon me by Structured Education.
I really enjoyed writing essays about Shakespeare in high school since coming up with some thesis and searching for largely irrelevant evidence to support this thesis felt like a puzzle to me. I also liked learning new words that I could use to increase my Concision.
These days the majority of my writing is Technical Documentation, my class notes, or through my Obsidian notes, rather than in the humanities. Oh well, hopefully I’ll return to it at some point.
Consistency
I am trying to make myself write for 30 minutes everyday as a TickTick habit but sometimes its hard to come up with things to write about but the longer I sit down, the more ideas I come up with. I need to get better at returning to old notes instead of generating new ones.
Consistency is king.
I am working on a Spotify playlist to help with my writing.
Style
One very impressive thing about professors is their ability to write. Maybe this was developed over years of writing papers. Epilogues of textbooks and professor exerts are always very beautifully written. This is a style I would love to adopt. See Waterloo Culture.
Writing is Reflecting, Reflecting is Thinking
As inspired by this video. Writing is editing, and editing is thinking.
In the book 1984 (which is on my Reading list because of this), the speakwrite is a device that prints live audio onto paper. Most people in this setting write to themselves only through the speakwrite, if at all. A theme of this book is the loss of literacy. As a consequence, the population of air strip one has lost the ability to write and to reason. Attempts at writing produce mostly slop, which is unclear and unorganized, the same as if it were just spoken. Therefore, a consequence of the loss of literacy, is a loss of the ability to think.
When you write, you need to put things in your own words, in a way that can be followed, and in a way that can be referenced in the future (unlike when speaking). As such, reflections through writing provide a unique opportunity to think about why you feel the way that you do and to answer internal questions that you might now have even known that you had.
For example, when I am writing about technical topics and I run into something I don’t fully understand, I typically need to research that topic so that I can continue. The same thing it true when writing reflectively. This is why writing reflections is so valuable.
When people write, most of the time they are not producing words, but rather rearranging the order of those words and thinking about how to materialize their ideas in an organized and interpretable way (in a way that makes sense). Therefore, if writing is thinking, but writing is mainly editing, then editing is actually thinking. This is why I choose to journal in obsidian. If editing is thinking, we should use tools that give us the ability to revise in the most efficient way possible. By doing so, we can organize our thoughts in unprecedented ways.