Daily Productive Sharing 103 - What is the Essense of Writing?

One helpful tip per day:)

(The English version follows)

#note_taking

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写作的本质是什么？是帮助我们更好地思考。

尽管阅读也是一种不错的思考辅助过程，但这只是一个输入的过程，而写作是一个输出的过程。输出就要求考虑受众，所以写作能帮助我们的思考变得更清晰，更连结，更全面。另外，写作也是一个慢慢迭代的过程，我们不需要强求自己一下笔就写出非常棒的东西，可以先把自己的思路记录下来，再慢慢修改。所以这是一个不断变清晰的过程，进一步促进我们的思考。

以我们的经历而言，一开始做 Daily Productive Sharing 只是为了输出我们日常的优质阅读，后面慢慢加入导语就是让这些阅读和我们自己的思考产生连结，再只会阅读中的优质内容摘抄出来，进一步强化我们的阅读。所以做 DSP 不仅分享了我们的阅读，也强化了我们的额思考。如果大家读了 DSP 的内容，也欢迎和我们分享自己的想法。

You start with a tidy nugget of an idea, but as you try to string it into language, it feels more like you’re pulling out your own intestines.

Well, the thing is, writing is not some mystic art. It’s a practical skill—particularly since most of our online communication is text-based to begin with.

When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you—because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has.

Because writing—that first leap into taking your idea and making it a Thing People Read—isn’t really about wording. It’s about thinking.

If you want to write extensively about one particular idea but your mind’s moving too quickly to flesh it all out, paraphrase for now and move on to the next big point.

Personal anecdote is hugely helpful, especially in a fast-changing field like web design and development.

But supporting your main point isn’t something you do just for the invisible essay-graders out there. You do it for your readers—the ones who live outside your own brain and don’t benefit from shared neural connections.

You want to be a friend to your readers here, in the sense that you want to respect their time and attention.

Each supporting argument or illustrative example you include needs to connect clearly back to your main point; the whole thing is moot if your readers trail off before getting to the cat food.

Writing Is Thinking

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What is the essence of writing? It is to help us think better.

While reading is also a good thinking aid, it is only an input process, whereas writing is an output process. Output requires consideration of the audience, so writing helps our thinking become clearer, more connected, and more comprehensive. In addition, writing is also a slow iterative process, we do not need to force ourselves to write something really great at first, we can first record our thoughts and then slowly revise them. So it's a process that keeps getting clearer and further promotes our thinking.

In our experience, we started to do Daily Productive Sharing just to export our daily quality reading, and then we slowly added the introduction to make a connection between these readings and our own thinking, and then only extracted the quality content from the readings to further strengthen our reading. So doing DSP not only shares our reading, but also strengthens our thinking. If you have read the content of DSP, please feel free to share your thoughts with us.

You start with a tidy nugget of an idea, but as you try to string it into language, it feels more like you’re pulling out your own intestines.

Well, the thing is, writing is not some mystic art. It’s a practical skill—particularly since most of our online communication is text-based to begin with.

When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you—because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has.

Because writing—that first leap into taking your idea and making it a Thing People Read—isn’t really about wording. It’s about thinking.

If you want to write extensively about one particular idea but your mind’s moving too quickly to flesh it all out, paraphrase for now and move on to the next big point.

Personal anecdote is hugely helpful, especially in a fast-changing field like web design and development.

But supporting your main point isn’t something you do just for the invisible essay-graders out there. You do it for your readers—the ones who live outside your own brain and don’t benefit from shared neural connections.

You want to be a friend to your readers here, in the sense that you want to respect their time and attention.

Each supporting argument or illustrative example you include needs to connect clearly back to your main point; the whole thing is moot if your readers trail off before getting to the cat food.

Writing Is Thinking

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