The Fix
The Passage
Here is a passage on a blogpost about learning to code:
Over the past year I’ve taught myself to code. I’ve built and launched four web applications, taken courses from front-end to back-end, can work with APIs, and know what a Promise is.
Feedback
We’re going to focus on the second sentence which is effectively a list. But unfortunately, this list is not grammatically consistent. To see this, let’s break the list into four separate sentences according to the structure in the first two:
I’ve built and launched four web applications.
I’ve taken courses from front-end to back-end.
I’ve can work with APIs.
I’ve know what a Promise is.
As you can see, the last two items don’t work when the sentences start with “I’ve.” With a view to repair, the third one could be expressed “I’ve worked with APIs” and the fourth “I’ve learned what a Promise is.” The revised sentence is
I’ve built and launched four web applications, taken courses from front-end to back-end, worked with APIs, and learned what a Promise is.
This list is now consistent grammatically.
Odds and Ends
Why Writing Matters V / More on the A Class
We’ve conceptualized the Ideasphere to be all the ideas we’ve had since the dawn of consciousness. We then defined the A Class to be the subset of Ideasphere ideas which required writing to discover. Euclid’s treatise on geometry is in the A Class. Our ideas to perfect the quill pen are not.
What, then, can we say about the structure of the A Class?
The A Class has a five-thousand-year history. The first significant A Class contributions were in mathematics. In ancient Mesopotamia, we observe the invention of a place-holder system for numbers including fractions, the refinement of arithmetic, the solution of quadratics and cubics, an approximation of root 2, the Pythagorean Theorem, and the formulation and solution of different kinds of geometry problems including the areas and volumes of regular and irregular shapes.
One of the best indications of growth in the A Class is how the curricula at universities in the West have changed over time. When universities first formed (about a thousand years ago at Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and Cambridge), the curricula consisted of seven subjects: the three in the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the four of the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). Since that time, there has been a substantial growth in the number of disciplines including those of the humanities, social sciences, the sciences, and engineering. The website, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines lists these disciplines and it’s long. Furthermore, all of these disciplines have seen an exponential growth in ideas. Take for example economics. If you walk into an economics professor’s office, you will observe many books and textbooks, all containing A Class ideas in economics. The website https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=2002 ranks the top fifty economics journals and each publishes A Class ideas on regular basis.
There is no indication that this superlinear growth is not going to continue.
We will also continue to add to the list of disciplines as we discover new frontiers for ideas. Media Studies didn’t exist 100 years ago but almost all major universities have a Media Studies department now.
The A Class now contains a large number of artifacts that either directly or indirectly required writing to produce. Take for example the smartphone. It’s a large amalgam of technologies that goes back decades. For example, work on digital cameras began in the fifties and a lot of that work required writing to discover. So even though the smartphone is a concrete object, it sits squarely in the A Class.
Or what about the Eiffel Tower? Its design and construction required significant measurement and anytime there is a measurement to ideate an object, that object is in the A Class because you can’t get to measurement without writing. The Eiffel Tower is in the A Class.
To summarize, there has been an exponential growth in A Class ideas and there are no signs that this growth will slow down.
Next week we’ll look at what explains The Great Divide, the name Jack Goody gave to the stark differences in oral, indigenous societies and our advanced techno-literate societies. Goody thought it was literacy, a position most literacy scholars today reject. But we think Goody was correct.
Word of the Day
It’s chockablock.
It’s defined: crammed full of people or things / “the manual is chockablock with information”
Here is an example of its use taken from Frank Bruni’s column, the NY Times, Sept 30, 2022
Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book about Donald Trump, “Confidence Man,” is chockablock with fresh anecdotes and insights, just as her reporting on him over the years has been.
Now let’s consider these sentences:
The film is chockablock full of people with great ideas of how you can be part of this change.
The bedrooms are chockablock full of personal items, each one unique telling the life story of the senior.
In each case “chockablock” is followed by “full.” To us, it seems redundant to follow “chockablock” with “full” since chockablock already means full. So we might rewrite these sentences
The film is chockablock with people with great ideas of how you can be part of this change.
The bedrooms are chockablock with personal items, each one unique telling the life story of the senior.
By the way, in this last sentence we’re not sure what the author means with “each one unique telling the life story of the author.”
Quote of the Week
It’s a beaut by Mark Twain:
The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
“and learned what a Promise is.”
I was always taught not to end a sentence with a preposition. Is that fake news? I know Shakespeare broke it a few times but can we really say he was writing in sentence form?