[AE.Personal] Please Allow Me to Explain Myself, I Am a Woman of Digression and Other Notes
As the point of NiNoBilMa is for me to acquire some writing skills I missed the first time around, it's certainly been useful for identifying my weaknesses when it comes to writing explanations.
That might seem like an odd declaration for someone who spent multiple years supporting her household mainly by writing topic explainers on Twitter, but it's the truth. It isn't that I'm bad at explaining things so much as I'm not sure where I need to start explaining, and once I get going, I find it hard to stop. With each thing that I explain, I become aware of new potential sources of confusion, which spiral out into new levels of recursive explanation...
This is why I am so much better at articulating my thoughts through Twitter, I think. The constraints of the medium force my thoughts into order and argue for me to keep each thought distilled down into manageable chunks. I can (and do) digress mid-thread on Twitter, but my awareness of the form of the thread and the presence of an audience discourages me from going overboard in that regard.
Writing that, I realize that when I launched the first version of this newsletter back on Substack, it was because I was getting involved with local affairs downtown and was doing most of my computing remotely. The screen devices I had available at that time were wearable and fit over an eye or eyes, necessitating smaller resolutions and larger font sizes, meaning that even when I was writing in a more expansive media than Twitter, I was still forced to fit my thoughts into a smaller space and deal with them in more of a one at a time manner.
I had not considered that when I started writing this newsletter, but I think it's a key point. I got swept up in a community outside the house because I started leaving the house once a week to try to evade writer's block with a change of scenery, but now that I'm thinking about the details, I am starting to believe that the change of scenery may have been incidental compared to the change of view screen.
When I started writing this newsletter, I'd had the idea that I would be talking about how my struggles with clarity and conciseness were affecting my various writing projects, both technical writing and more creative writing, but to the extent taht I've allowed my writing to follow my thoughts and vice-versa, I think I might have learned something useful about my writing process and how it might be strengthened.
Well, one of my existing resolutions for both writing more in general and keeping this newsletter up was to not pre-emptively edit myself and just write whatever it is I have in me to write, and I think that advice has served me well here.
In terms of practical steps, i don't think that dusting off my cyborg eyewear and using it while sitting in front of my computer in my office is the solution. I have tried that and found that the technical finnickiness of the setup creates too much friction to feel worthwhile when I have a great big computer screen in front of me.
But I have, just while I'm sitting here writing, taken what I think worked for me about the cyberpunk HUD setup and recreated it by putting the text editor I'm using for writing in the center of that big old screen, leaving the flanking space empty, and blowing up the text to the point that only the stuff I'm immediately working on is visible to me at any given time.
It's hard to judge how much benefit I actually derive from any change to my work setup vs. how much is a mixture of placebo effect, subjectivity, and wishful thinking, but I do believe this is working for me.
So, I'm going to tie this newsletter off here, as I seem to have arrived at a useful conclusion, and then I'll try to put the insight I think I've gleaned here today to the test by writing other things.
Thanks for being such an indulgent listener!