Essays That Help Write Themselves

by Brian on 11-30-2009

I just reached 5130 words on a blog post… a little to long to still qualify as a “blog post,” methinks.

It’s an essay really, but still long enough I should explain.

When I’m writing an essay, I often start adding a sentence or a paragraph in the middle or close to the start, and that just keeps flowing into new sentences until I’ve written almost a whole new draft, pushing the first one down in the process.

After doing that a few times it turns into a cut-and-paste carnival, using blocks of text from all the different drafts — eventually becoming a very different essay than the one I intended to write.

Out of the 5130 words I have now, I’ll probably write a few thousand more and end up with something like 2000…

The idea of pushing the text down reminded me of the origins of blogging — when proto-bloggers simply started typing today’s updates above yesterdays, pushing the whole page down — before people started writing applications that presented a box to type into automatically added date and time stamps, separating entries into distinct posts.

Then I thought, instead of the box being what we use to type into, what if there were applications that made boxes for deleting?

Or exporting, I should say — or moving, or something.

I mean, it would be useful (for me) to have an application that removes blocks of text from view and organizes them with contextual metadata making them restorable and accessible for importing anywhere else back into the document.

In a way I’m already using an application for keeping the thousands of words I delete but don’t want to lose altogether — either plain old TextEdit or Google Docs — but it would be nice if it all that was better organized and associated with places in the essay.

I guess that’s basically what a wiki does — just maybe not as well for my specific uses. Google Wave might be better.

Then I wondered…

What if the application didn’t just keep track of placement within the original/final/whole text. What if it was continuously figuring out new semantic associations — i.e. “reading” text and interpreting the relations among the different parts — and making suggestions for fitting them together?

paulmrodriguez

It sounds as if you're looking for a programmer's text editor, like Vi or Emacs. I can't say much about Vi, but I “live in Emacs”, as they say. It has most of what you're looking for. For example, every time you delete something—”kill” it, in Emacs terminology—it is added onto the “kill ring” and can be “yanked”, that is, pasted, anywhere in the file. (Emacs has a lot of peculiar names for its featured, generally because Emacs had them first.) Once you've gotten used to the kill/yank metaphor you stop thinking of “deleting” and “moving” as being separate operations. You can also do things like undo-in-region—roll back one “region” (selection, that is) while leaving the rest of the file alone, or narrow-to-region, which is a sort of inverse to cutting text, changing it, and pasting it back—it makes everything but the part of the file you're working on disappear from view.

That's just the tip of a very, very big iceberg. Take a look at the EmacsWiki if you want to learn more.

I'm not out to make a convert (though, of course, new members are always welcome in the Church of Emacs). But you should be aware that very powerful editors are available, and have been for a long time (Emacs and Vi have both been around since the mid-70s). The obstacles aren't technological, but psychological: powerful editors require a serious investment of time and effort to master. Although you could worse with your time and effort—learning an editor is one of the few computer-related skills that never become obsolete.

As for the editor making suggestions about arranging text—this might be less useful than you think. For example, Emacs provides “predictive abbreviation”—that is, it can anticipate the word you're typing based on what you've already typed, or even based on a list of words you've supplied, and let you autocomplete it (like addresses in the browser bar). It's very handy for code editing, but in typing English it just gets in the way—I can almost always finish typing a word much faster than I can read the suggestion, decide if it is correct, and accept it. An editor that lets you transparently rearrange text would probably just slow you down by making suggestions. Although I may not understand you correctly. Could you give a “use case” where a suggestion feature would be useful?

(And thanks for the Wave invite. It didn't show me your ping the other day until after I had logged out and back in.)
http://brianfrank.ca Brian Frank

If I'm not careful I'll end up spending an awful lot of time not just mastering text editors but programming languages too — maybe something I should've done a long time ago…

Either way, I'm thinking of yanking some of the jargon. I'm a fan.

The post's last paragraph was sort of a spontaneous, blue sky stream of thought about artificial intelligence.

I was thinking (very unrealistically) of it being a lifeline in cases where I get stuck but have a lot of killed material that can potentially be rearranged to get things back on track again.

It probably isn't useful but it was kind of interesting in itself, at the time.
paulmrodriguez

I take it from your mention of TextEdit that you use a Mac. In that case, if you're interested in trying out Emacs (I can't quite tell), you might want to look at Aquamacs. It conforms to the Apple UI, but it's still a real Emacs. Might make the learning curve a little less steep.

Then if you're looking for something to do with it, take a look at Org Mode. Emacs isn't just an editor, it's also an environment with its own applications; Org Mode is arguably the most powerful note-taking/organization system available.
http://brianfrank.ca Brian Frank

This will go on the list – though unfortunately I probably will not get much opportunity to learn new environments for the next little while.
http://brianfrank.ca Brian Frank

This will go on the list – though unfortunately I probably will not get much opportunity to learn new environments for the next little while.

Essays That Help Write Themselves

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