The Fix
The Passage
Last week we looked at a passage from a blogpost entitled “The Minimalist-ish Digital Nomad Packing List”. Here’s another passage from that piece:
After traveling to 50+ countries, making many a packing mistake, and stubbornly avoiding buying a new backpack for far too long, I present to you a checklist of items you didn’t know you needed (or maybe you did). These are things that to some are “so obvious!” or "digital nomad essentials" but took a while to enter my packing rotation but have quantifiably improved my life in some way.
Let’s see what we can do with this.
Feedback
This is the paragraph that introduces the writer’s list. Let’s have a look at the first sentence. Note that she includes the issue of a new backpack. Sure, you can mention the idea of purchasing a more functional backpack but this paragraph is not the place.
The words at the end of the sentence, “you didn’t know you needed (or maybe you did),” are unnecessary. One of these will be true for every item for every reader. So why include it?
With these two suggestions, we could rewrite the sentence
After traveling to 50+ countries and making many packing mistakes, I now have a good checklist for what to pack.
Now let’s move to the second sentence.
These are things that to some are “so obvious!” or "digital nomad essentials" but took a while to enter my packing rotation but have quantifiably improved my life in some way.
We have some trouble with the two “but”s in this sentence. You could eliminate one of them with this revision:
These are things that took a while to enter my packing rotation but have quantifiably improved my life in some way.
We’re still not happy with this sentence. For one, are the words we’ve bolded necessary? One of the things on her list is a menstrual cup. It’s really not our area of expertise but would this improve her life quantifiably? Certainly the phrase “in some way” is not required. If these things improved her life, they certainly improved her life in some way. We’d be inclined to rewrite this
These are things that took a while to get to my list but they’ve improved my life on the road considerably.
The complete revision is this:
After traveling to 50+ countries and making many packing mistakes, I now have a good checklist of what to pack. These are things that took a while to get to my list but they’ve improved my life on the road considerably.
We still don’t like this and would rewrite as follows:
After traveling to 50+ countries and making many packing mistakes, I now have a good checklist of what to pack. These are things that have improved my life on the road considerably.
Frankly, we wouldn’t include the second sentence because it’s implied by the first. We end up with this “minimalist-ish” sentence:
After traveling to 50+ countries and making many packing mistakes, I now have a good checklist of what to pack.
Odds and Ends
Why Writing Matters III
Last week in this series, we suggested we need writing to discover certain kinds of ideas but there are many other ideas—e.g. spears, ploughs, the back-beat—which don’t require writing. What, then, is the essential difference in these two classes of idea?
As we suggested last week, we are very good at manipulating objects in our visual fields. This showed itself at least 2.5 million years ago when we began to chip away at stone to make tools. The technical know-how to do this chipping became increasingly complex. Certainly, the fossil record is clear that this tool-making was associated with the staggering encephalization that our ancestor species experienced.
We’ve also seen that manipulating certain concepts is difficult if we have only the visual scratchpad in our minds to work with. It’s very difficult to get the product 784 x 872 if all we have is our mind.
Let’s begin by observing that there is no such thing as 784 in the real-world. You can’t reach out and touch 784 like you can a Snickers bar or a tree. Numbers are a fabrication of the human imagination. But we can get these phantasms out of our heads and into our visual fields by representing them on a page with a pen. 724 written on a page is just as real as football. And the great thing about getting them to our visual fields is that we can then start to manipulate them. We can define what 784 x 872 means and then calculate it. In this way we say that writing allows us to reify abstract concepts like numbers. And once we’ve reified whatever abstract objects we’re interested in, we can start to manipulate them.
As it turns out this reification has enabled us to come up with a great number of ideas that we otherwise couldn’t and next week we’ll describe this class of ideas more fully.
Word of the Day
It’s quotidian.
The word means: of or occurring every day; daily as in “the car sped noisily off through the quotidian traffic”; ordinary or everyday, especially when mundane as in “his story is an achingly human one, mired in quotidian details”
Here is an example of its use from NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd (“Apocalypse Right Now,” NY Times, July 24, 2021):
Crazy storms that used to hit every century now seem quotidian, overwhelming systems that cannot withstand such a battering.
We found the following sentence in an article published on medium.com by an author who offers this bio snippet: “A fresh mind, impassioned by writing; making up for lost time.”
Shakespeare invented a tremendous quantity of words used in our quotidian vocabulary.
We’re guessing that this author had originally written “daily vocabulary” but then used a thesaurus to get to “quotidian vocabulary.” Of course, the phrase “in our quotidian vocabulary” is unnecessary. He could have written
Shakespeare invented words we still use today.
This pretty much ends what we want to say about quotidian but we can’t help but comment on the sentence’s idea. There is some debate about who invented the words first seen in Shakespeare’s plays. Most historians believe the words were in common use but that Shakespeare was the first to write them down. But, more to the point, we think Shakespeare’s real strength was his turn of phrase rather then word invention, phrases like: “heart of gold”; “faint hearted”; “good riddance”; “to much of a good thing”; “send him packing”. Maybe some of these were already in use by the general English population but, by putting them in print, Shakespeare brought them forward for posterity.