Amplifying your intelligence
- The world is run by people who write.
- Clear writing leads to clear thinking.
- You don’t know what you know until you try to express it.
- Fact: That would be like saying exercise is mainly about ballet dancing!
- Most of the writing in the world is for information.
It’s often done by people who don’t even like poetry and fiction.
- Fact: Grammar is not the problem.
- You are exposed to huge amounts of good English every day.
If you know what you’re trying to say, 99% of the time you’ll say it grammatically.
- At most, an educated person needs help with only a few small points of grammar.
- Of a 100-page grammar book, you may need 3 pages, or less.
- Good writing is partly a matter of character.
- Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader.
- Don’t ask the reader to put up with your quirks (sloppiness, bad spelling, etc.).
- You do the extra work so the reader has an easy time.
- Writing is almost too complicated for human beings to do.
- Decide what you are writing and for whom.
- If you can’t envision the audience, try using yourself as a sample.
If someone had needed to give you this information 6 months ago, how should they have done it?
- Organizing a written paper is just like structured programming:
Every section has its purpose and is broken down into smaller sections each of which has its purpose.
- If you can’t figure out how to organize your material…
write down ideas in random order, then sort them
- In the drafting step, get it down on paper
– not elegantly, not perfectly, just get it down on paper so you no longer have to hold it all in your brain!
- During drafting, do not worry about grammar, spelling, or format.
Concentrate on what you want to say and how you’re going to organize it.
- The rule for clear writing:
Get to the point. Your reader won’t follow you down a garden path.
- To keep things clear and readable:
State the main point before you give the reasoning that leads to it.
- To keep things clear and readable:
Put the main point of each paragraph in its first sentence.
That way, people can skim your paper by reading just the first sentences of the paragraphs.
- K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid!)
– If you don’t understand it, you can’t do that!
- Never try to sound formal or sophisticated.
If your paper isn’t full of street slang, it is already formal enough.
Stuffy writing is bad writing!!!!
- What words should you never use in writing?
Words whose exact meanings you don’t know!
Never use a word unless you know EXACTLY what it means.
- With computers, we can revise anything, any number of times, without wasting paper.
- The goal of the revising step is to make your writing clearer and easier to read.
This is done mainly by finding better ways to put ideas into words.
- If you can only express it one way, you don’t understand it.
- When revising, pretend to be your own worst enemy.
Is there anything that can be misunderstood?
If so, change it so that it can’t!
- Make sure the main point of each paragraph is in the first sentence.
A person reading just the first sentences of the paragraphs should get a summary of your paper.
- You can clarify almost anything by putting it into fewer words.
- Editing is where you fix up the grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
- Don’t be quick to label yourself a “bad speller.”
Remember, none of us were born knowing how to spell.
- Take the time to learn the spellings in the first place.
- Don’t practice bad habits.
- Recognize related words.
- Pronounce words carefully, or even comically, to help you remember spellings
- With computers, we can make decisions about layout and typography long after we write the text.
- Use familiar typefaces, no more than 2 or 3 in a document, each with a clearly defined purpose.
- Use conventional roman type for text, typewriter type for computer programs, and maybe sans-serif type for headings.
Sans-serif type is also good for labels and presentations.
- Needless decoration distracts the reader and can look really stupid!
- Never draw the reader’s eye to anything that is not the main point.
- Look at well-produced material and make sure you’re following accepted practices.
- Don’t leave out anything basic, such as page numbers or adequate margins!
- Use italics instead of underlining.
- Use a dash (—) instead of 2 hyphens (--).
- Follow the standard practices of the printing industry, not the limitations of the typewriter!
- If you have 2 typefaces, or different margins in different places, there had better be a reason, or the reader will waste a LOT of time looking for one!
- We all use language (or other symbolic representations) to do most of our thinking.
- How do you know whether you know what a word means?
- You know how to tell whether or not the word applies to something.
- Beware of talking about things without knowing what they are, or putting words together without knowing what they mean.
- How do you know what a sentence means?
- Largely, by knowing how to find out if it’s true or false.
- Some sentences, such as “Murder is wrong,” cannot be proved true or false by physical tests.
- I do not think this means that they are “meaningless” or “neither true nor false,” only that they are different from sentences about physical facts.
- Some sentences really are meaningless.
- Some sentences that sound very deep can be equally meaningless.
- The study of how to acquire knowledge…
- How to end up believing things that are true and not believing things that are false.
- “Scientific method” is part (not all) of epistemology.
- Conjecture or guess
- Opinion; belief supported by evidence
- Firm belief, thoroughly tested against evidence and still holding up
- Try to prove them true
- Try to prove them false
- Your guesses and opinions have to be testable.
- They have to say what will not happen (so that if it did, they’d be proved false).
- Beware of vague predictions that are compatible with any outcome!
- It is important to be able to understand and present sympathetically a position that you do not agree with.
- If people believe something, they probably have a reason worth knowing about, even if they’re mistaken.
- Main goal is familiarity with lots of things.
- Many large trends but few rigorous logical connections.
- There is no starting point – you can start anywhere.
- Read a lot of books and “get the big picture.”
- Analysis relies on understanding other people’s experiences.
- Main goal is clear understanding of key points.
- Important ideas are not so much learned as rediscovered, often in a flash of insight.
- It is important to trace ideas to their sources (remember who discovered them).
- You must take things in order – if you skip a chapter, or even a page of definitions, you’re lost.
- Main goal is to apply science to solve problems.
- It’s easy to experiment to find out whether your solutions work (especially with computers).
- You must learn things in order.
- No need to trace ideas to sources; any book that gives you the information will do.
- Authorities can be trusted absolutely.
- Learn the vocabulary, and be precise about it.
- If something is unclear, don’t wait for it to clear up later.
- Back up and get it clear.
- Constantly check your own understanding in as many ways as you can.
- If you guess anything, you must test your guess immediately.
- You don’t “absorb” knowledge.
- Knowledge is something you build in your own mind, not something the teacher puts into you.
- Learning is a lot like writing a book.
- Organizing knowledge is something you have to do for yourself.
- The knowledge in your mind is your own creative product!