No way I can survive in this haute couture essay world. Fully expect people to start announcing their fall or spring collections, doing ramp shoes on Twitter, mini pr campaigns.
I’m not doing that much work per word, no way. You can’t make me 🤬
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I think one reason this bothers me is that my general approach is “quantity to get to quality” and that does not scale with high production values. I do have more “produced” essays going at breaking smart but its bare minimum. Partly parable of pottery class, partly lazy research
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To be clear, I don’t there’s any quality difference in the mean but there is one in the variance. Production effort narrows the distribution but doesn’t shift the mean. Something something fat tail too. Also new-yorkerization as in dated ledes etc.
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Thoughts sparked by this tweet this morning
Quote Tweet
Creative nonfiction writers be like:
I first ate a hotdog when I was six years old. I remember the taste, the scent, the summer.
SECTION BREAK
Hot dogs were invented in 1693 by Steven Hotdog. According to Scientific American, the hotdog is
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I don’t think I can work in this mode, but I’m interested in seeing how far others can take it. I think it has potential if people start putting rich, dynamic embedded content in it. Like wolfram’s computational essays. Calculators, dynamic sims etc. writings.stephenwolfram.com/2017/11/what-i
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Takes a good deal more planning to pull such things off. Can’t just stream-of-consciousness wing it. I’ve only ever done one essay built around a sim. And that was an accident since I coded it up as a joke
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I do like the take on this though which is more like a coding notebook with embedded calculations. Still a product ethos, but more tinkering prototypes than finished
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Feels like hardware acceleration in chips, where software functions get absorbed into specialty circuitry.
Hardware = basic old-fashioned essay
Software = dynamic thinking enabled by a piece of text
Hardware acceleration = automate the thinking and put it in the text
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Example:
Old-fashioned essay: a personality model that suggests an obvious typology that you informally apply
Product-style essay: embed a personality test and maybe tweak the presentation based on responses
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Replying to
There are A LOT of good editors around. They are better at this than you. Let them help.
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