College Composition Lesson Plan - Advice To Writers
College Composition Lesson Plan - Advice To Writers
College Composition Lesson Plan - Advice To Writers
English words (the one I get tripped up on is Atkins) so a quick search through your
document for TK will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your
editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.
Dont be ceremonious
Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget
candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. Its nice to have
all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only
write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem
of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to
keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.
Kill your word-processor
Word, Google Office, and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and
automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the
last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, correcting your spelling, criticizing your
sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day
long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for
entering text into a computer. They dont write their software with Word. They use a text-editor,
like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most
venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since theyre at the core of all
other software) and they have almost no distracting featuresbut they do have powerful
search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every
application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and cant transmit a virus.
Realtime communications tools are deadly
The biggest impediment to concentration is your computers ecosystem of interruption
technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait
for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your
screen to announce something new occupies your attention. The more you can train your
friends and family to use email, message boards, and similar technologies that allow you to
save up your conversation for planned sessions instead of demanding your attention right
now helps you carve out your 20 minutes. By all means, schedule a chatvoice, text, or video
when its needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a
giant DISTRACT ME sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the
entire world.
I dont claim to have invented these techniques, but theyre the ones that have made the 21st century
a good one for me.
Writing In The Age Of Distraction by Cory Doctorow is distributed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Visit http://craphound.com/context for more info.
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