The Cliché “In Many Ways” and Why Writing Matters IV
Stop using the cliche “in many ways.” Now.
The Fix
The Sentence
In the last few posts, we’ve looked at a number of passages from a blogpost entitled “The Minimalist-ish Digital Nomad Packing List”. Here’s a line from her packing list:
Kindle Paperwhite – the Kindle in many ways transformed me into a reader.
Feedback
We don’t understand how a Kindle can transform you into a reader in many ways. “In may ways” sounds good but has no meaning in this sentence.
Once again, you need to find your voice as a writer and one way of doing this is to make a point of never ever using a cliche.
Odds and Ends
Why Writing Matters IV / The A Class
Last week, we argued that writing enables us to “reify” abstract objects and ideas. In other words, with writing, we can bring these abstract objects into or visual fields where we’re very good at manipulating them. As we argued previously, manipulating objects in our visual field goes back at least 2.5 million years to when our ancestor species started to make stone tools. While 784 x 86 is just about impossible to calculate with our naked minds, we can do it if we have paper and pen.
As we’ve already remarked, all of our culture has its origin in ideas. For example, before we began to cook food, someone had to have the idea that we try putting, say, a steak on a fire to see what happens to it. Some natural historians have suggested that our discovery of cooking had a lot to do with sampling the carcasses of animals who perished in a flash forest fire, some of which we may have started purposely. However we arrived at our cultural practise of cooking, it started as an idea.
Recognizing that all of our cultural practises, objects, and artifacts start as ideas, we defined a concept called the Ideasphere which is the set of all of our ideas over all cultures since the dawn of human consciousness. And because some ideas require writing to discover, we can partition the Ideasphere into those ideas which require writing to discover and those which don’t. Given that we only discovered writing about 5,000 years ago and cooking hundreds of thousands of years ago, cooking didn’t require writing to ideate. But Einstein needed writing to work out the details of Special Relativity. We’ve termed the collection of ideas that require writing to discover the A Class (“A” is for abstract) and those that don’t, the C Class (“C” is for concrete). So Special Relativity is in the A Class and cooking is in the C Class.
Next week we’ll begin to look at the structure of the A Class.
Word of the Day
It’s thirsty.
The meaning we’re used to is that you need a drink. But Merriam-Webster has added the meaning “feeling or showing a strong desire for attention, approval, or publicity (as on social media)” as in
… the brands did what was inevitable: They began to tweet about the question, hoping to grab some of that attention for their own. For a thirsty brand, the only thing better than April Fools’ Day is a hugely viral meme.
This is a good illustration of the principle that, when we have the need to summarize a new concept or idea with a word, we generally give an existing word a new meaning. In other words, the evolution of language is largely metaphorical.
Quote of the Week
We’ve decided to add this feature periodically. In it, we’ll record some of the wisdom about writing that can be captured in a sentence or two. Ideally, we should start with one of our favourite quotations about writing. But we’ve decided to go with this gem from the American novelist, Kurt Vonnegut:
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.
If you’re looking for a philosophy of life, this is a great place to start.