The length of complete ideas
Zettels about ideas should capture enough to bring their ideas back to life when you need them---I think of them as Vulcan mind melds with a future me (assuming you're old enough to remember Star Trek and mind melds).
The problem is that I find myself fleshing out my ideas as I write, including excursions and embellishments that will make it easier to recall and use the idea, but may lead to Zettels of two or three hundred words instead of one hundred. I see two advantages in this: first, it gives me ideas for other Zettles along the way, and, second, the expanded ideas are easy to combine into finished papers.
Finally, this approach appears to meet my workflow. Breaking my long flowing ideas into a sequence of shorter Zettels takes will-power, the need for which the Zettelkasten approach is supposed to reduce.
But this does seem to run counter to the fundamental "less is more" idea on which Zettelkasten is based.
My intended audience for the idea in this Zettel is students in technical curricula or young engineers (many of whom have yet to master a concise English sentence, let alone paragraphs or papers).
I'd appreciate any comments you might care to make.
202411302052 Writing Style
In writing, the idea you want to convey is the most important thing. The next most important is the style in which you do it.
You write to convey an idea from your mind to another's. That mind may belong to another person, or it may belong to you, sometime in the future. (Who'll really be another person by then anyway.) Your style is package in which that idea is wrapped. Like any package it must be rugged enough to withstand the journey, yet delicate enough to be unwrapped at the other end.
Here are a few quick thoughts:
- Active voice is better than passive. "The results showed..." rather than "It was observed that..."
- Shorter is better:
a. Short words are better than long, and the old words, when short, are best of all (Winston Churchill). (Technical topics sometimes require long technical words. Pick the shortest and most intuitive and try to make their meaning clear, either explicitly or in context.)
b. Short sentences are better than long. Each sentence should contain one thought, unless two ideas are so closely related that they stand better together (as do these two).
c. Paragraphs should contain a collection of sentences (thoughts) that convey one concise idea. The key idea of the paragraph should be compact enough to be stated clearly in a single sentence. The rest the sentences should contain just enough examples, nuances, and details to make the key idea clear---and no more. If it takes two sentences to state the a paragraph's key idea, then probably there are two ideas, each of which deserves a paragraph of its own. - Follow the rules... The rules of grammar have evolved to make it easier to present thoughts clearly. Use them. You needn't be a grammar Nazi, no one will be diagramming the sentences in your paper, but you do need to understand the basics. I suggest a simple book such as Strunk's (or Strunk and White's) "Elements of Style" or William Zinsser's "On Writing Well." (I particularly like "Elements of Style" because it's broken into small chunks. I used to keep a copy on my desk to take to the mens room.)
- ...Except when it's better to break them. Sometimes you can be more effective by bending, or breaking, the rules. True fact! But you need to know how and when. Break them only when doing so will clearly improve the reader's understanding---and knowing when that happens will come only with experience. And speaking of experience...
- Read good writing. Knowing the rules is one thing; seeing them in action is another. Read books by good authors: Churchill for history, Heinlein and Hemmingway for fiction, Tolkien for fantasy, Gilbert Strang and Richard Feynmann for technical writing---among many others. Absorb the rhythm of their writing: the words they use, the way they construct their sentences, and the way they use those sentences to build their paragraphs. If you read enough writing by good authors you'll naturally absorb what makes them good and it will make your writing better.
- And, most important, write! (and not just papers). Saving your writing for official occasions is like suiting up for the big game after skipping all the practices. You don't make your first run a marathon. When you highlight a book passage, write a marginal note to explain why. When you read something interesting, write a note summarizing and explaining why it caught your interest. Write essays to yourself. I practice by writing notes (and short essays) summarizing what I read and what I think. The result is a freezer full of thoughts and ideas I can pull out and defrost whenever I need them. (I organize my notes using the Zettelkasten system. See https://zettelkasten.de.)
But all of this finally boils down to one simple principle. Anything helps get your idea from your mind into someone else's is good writing. Anything that doesn't is bad. Keep to that, and you can't go too far wrong
[[202411301712 Writing]]
[[202411301730 Writing as a Jungle Gym]]
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
My comment concerns "The Elements of Style," which has misled writers with unfortunate and uninformed advice on grammar and style.
For grammar, I recommend Geoffrey K. Pullum's "The Truth about English Grammar" [1]. A linguist, Pullum co-authored the "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" with Rodney D. Huddleston and has written on problematic advice in "The Elements of Style" [2, 3, 4]. Professor Pullum's "The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style" is available online in HTML format here, and "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive" is available online in HTML format here.
For Style, I suggest "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" by Joseph M. Williams and Joseph Bizup [5].
References
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
ZettelDistraction, thank you for your comment. I agree with your HTML citations. The Elements of Style isn't perfect; I ignore some of it myself. But it is clear, short, inexpensive, and widely available---and people read it. Perhaps The Truth about English Grammar or Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace will be better alternatives. (I have copies on the way.) Meanwhile, I'd rather people actually read a book that's mostly right than not read a better one.
If I may jump on the grammar nerd tip here, speaking as a professional copy editor, I recommend Dreyer's English. It's written in a somewhat acerbically humorous style, but the advice Dreyer gives is, universally, very good.
The answer is dependent on what you want to do next.
If this is a text snippet that you want to copypasta to a student or students, the goal is achieved with no further action.
The moment you want to work on the individual ideas, atomicity will be an ideal that guides the next actions.
The above note is what would call a rough draft. The title for example is very broad with little, just an associative connection, to the content. This shows that there is no specific idea that you thought about, but rather a rough direction or starting point that led to the creation of this note. Further evidence for that is that you started the list by ideas about good style and moved to ideas how to improve style. (a typical shift in one's thinking, btw. moving from static entities to procedural during a train of thought)
This is completely fine and part of the process.
It is also completely fine to store text snippets, so you don't have to rewrite them again and incrementally improve re-occuring events of communication (the list can grow into a comprehensive handout for students, for example).
However, in that instance you are using the Zettelkasten as a repository for a text, not as a thinking tool. The intended audience, if we keep this term, for thinking is yourself. If the audience is somebody else, you start communication. The difference is that thinking (on paper/screen) is more free, focussed on improving the thinking machine (mind and/or Zettelkasten as a thinking environment), communication is restricted to the social and didactic rules (e.g. making sure that another person can follow)
So, there is no way of saying this is right or wrong "Zettelkasten" practice. You are just not using the Zettelkasten as a thinking environment in this case, for which there is no obligation. There seems to be no need also, since you seem to have written down what is rather crystallised knowledge to you and not something that you write about to think.
I am a Zettler
I find it's virtually impossible to persuade anyone to change their grammatical allegiances. Rather than repeating the arguments of professional linguists (often taken personally), I state my preference for empirically and scientifically grounded linguistics and provide references for others to consider. I'll add one more reference: A Student's Introduction to English Grammar is of intermediate difficulty between The Truth about English Grammar and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
References
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
ZettelDistraction, thank you for this comment as well. I've ordered The Truth about English Grammar and Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace and I'll take a look at A Student's Introduction to English Grammar. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language sounds heavier than I want (and is quite expensive). Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace is reasonably expensive on Amazon if purchased new and the "new edition" rental on Amazon is horribly so.
Thanks for the pointer. I've ordered a copy.