Tag: lists
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The Nerd Urban Dictionary, or: The Overcomplication Compilation
Seemingly frustrated at how ‘nerds’ throw around technical terms in order to sound smart, Chris Anderson (writer of The Long Tail, etc.) put together The Nerd Urban Dictionary to compile the most common and worst offenders. With terms coming from disciplines ranging from statistics to chemistry, finance to the military, here’s a small sample (mostly…
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Sets of Things
Found while looking up information on various puzzle hunts is this long list of sets of things. That’s it. That’s all it is. Sets of different things, in a big list. Sorted by the number of things in that set. For some reason, I find myself coming back to this list to satisfy a curiosity…
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NPR’s Annual Book Concierge
One of my favourite annual publications is NPR’s Book Concierge, released each December. After suffering from “an acute case of list fatigue”, NPR stopped producing year-end lists in 2012 and, from 2013 onwards, has instead elicited recommendations from NPR staffers and other critics to create this “interactive reading guide [that’s] more Venn diagram-y than list-y”.…
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The Good and Bad of Enumerated Lists
Writing by enumeration–writing a ‘list of n things’–restricts you to a structure that is easier to produce and is easier for readers to follow and comprehend, but limits free thought. That’s one of many points that Paul Graham makes in an essay discussing the merits and disadvantages of writing enumerated lists. One obvious negative that Graham points out…
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Writing Tools, Not Rules, for Better Writing
“Tools not rules” are what’s needed to teach good writing, says The Poynter Institute’s vice president Roy Peter Clark in Writing Tools — his acclaimed book compiling fifty of his favourites. To accompany this book, Clark released his fifty writing tools to improve your writing on his blog, and here are some of my favourites:…
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Myths About Introverts
As introverts are a minority—a mere twenty-five percent of the population—there are many persistent misconceptions about the introvert personality among the majority. After reading The Introvert Advantage, Carl King decided to compile a list of myths about introverts, explaining why each misconception is false: Introverts don’t like to talk. Introverts are shy. Introverts are rude. Introverts don’t like…
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Science Journalism’s Manifesto for the Simple Scribe
“To make somebody read it”. That is the only reason for writing, according to the renowned Guardian editor Tim Radford, author of the “manifesto for the simple scribe”. This manifesto, previously distributed to editors at Elsevier and Nature, consists of twenty-five writing tips that collectively tell a science writer all they need to know to write…
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Focus Points for Entrepreneurs
When someone asked for advice on How to become a millionaire in 3 years on Hacker News, serial entrepreneur Jason Baptiste took the task seriously providing thirty-seven things to focus on when starting a company, including: Market opportunity Inequality of information Surround yourself with smart people Your primary metric shouldn’t be dollars If you do…
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Stephen King on Writing Successfully
It took Stephen King ten minutes to learn how to have a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction and he believes he can teach us the same in ten minutes, too. King–author of countless novels and the much-lauded book on the craft, On Writing–starts with a short story of his youth followed by twelve tips professing…
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Derek Sivers’ Book List
Derek Sivers’ book recommendations continue to be some of the most well matched to my own tastes. Infrequently updated, Derek Sivers’ book list provides a tiny summary of his recent reads, followed by extensive notes he has taken from each: somewhat similar to my current process, now that Amazon’s Kindle has completely transformed my reading…