Logic Blueprints
Take the Stress Out of
Writing Nonfiction
1. And Today We Learn How To...
Here's some advice for the amateur nonfiction writer.
You'll find my hints useful if you are a senior citizen, about to create half a dozen philosophical essays for a Web site. (One of the first people to study these hints, in April of 2003, was precisely such a senior citizen - a commercial client, in fact, for whom I was charging a special low hourly rate.) You'll also find my hints useful if you are a high-school or university student, about to create a term paper.
If you are a more advanced reader, such as an English teacher, or a professional author or professional editor, you may still find some of my ideas helpful.
In my next section, I sum up the conventional wisdom from authorities who write about writing. Perhaps you have seen such advice many times. Perhaps, however, having seen the conventional wisdom only a few times, you can do with a gentle reminder.
In the third (the final) section of my hints, I present my own ideas on one particular aspect of writing, namely the planning of your piece. As far as I know from reading the authorities, my specific hints are not presented at adequate length elsewhere. Consequently, I've made that final section rather long, rather detailed.
2. Basic Do's and Don'ts in Nonfiction Writing
(a) One of the first pieces of advice the authorities give us is to read.
Time for reading cannot be frittered away on the boob tube. Nor can time for reading be frittered away on the Reader's Digest, Newsweek, or Tom Clancy. Further, what promises to be productive, soul-enhancing reading when we in Canada pick up the Globe and Mail frequently proves, forty-five misspent minutes later, not to be.
So what do we do with our precious reading time? We read serious stuff, for the most part from books.
On one particular quiet day, we will perhaps look at Jeremy Rifkin's new analysis of the hydrogen economy. On another such day, we'll perhaps try serious nonacademic theology, say from Chesterton's Orthodoxy if we aspire to be sensible Catholics, or from Andrew Sullivan's Love Undetectable if we're feeling rambunctious.
Since the summer 1940 Battle of Britain is significant at levels transcending the military and political, we'll be grateful for the 135 trenchantly argued pages of Richard Overy's new Penguin, The Battle. In general, we'll take it that tiny dashes of history, from historians of substance, are useful in broadening even the nonhistorian's outlook.
Although our attitude to high literary culture, as pushed at us in university Departments of English, will stay sceptical, we will concede to our professors that even fiction can occasionally impart lessons. At some point we will no doubt find ourselves blinking back the tears as we see the broken David Copperfield, wandering in Switzerland, opening the letter from England that turns his life around. At some other point we will no doubt get the goose-pimples from Hamlet. ("What, has this thing appeared again tonight?" asks the sentry on the ramparts at Elsinore. Shakespeare doesn't write "spectre" or "phantom" or "shade". What he writes is "thing". The "thing" is Hamlet's dad, dead and buried a few weeks ago. That's on page one, where we get the first hint that all is not well in Hamlet's, ahem, intimate circle.)
(b) We must add to our general diet of reading a book or two about the actual craft of writing. All the authorities are fulsome in their praise of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. It's clear why: we really do have to trim away unnecessary words, we really do have to stop writing "begin"/"large"/"spectre" where the plain Anglo-Saxon "start"/"big"/"thing" will get our idea across; and Prof. William Strunk, Jr., now posthumously helped by E.B. White, has been explaining the knack for about eight decades.
Since 1990, we have a second interesting book to investigate, namely Joseph M. Williams's Toward Clarity and Grace. Williams makes original points about paragraph organization and the flow of thought. Perhaps we're confronted here with a second how-to-write classic, destined to be reprinted even in 2050 and 2090 and 2130. (And, as it happens, Williams is, of the authorities on writing that I have examined, the best companion to the particular approach to planning that I'll be showing you in my next section.)
Since reading is a momentous act, we have to exercise thought and care in deciding where to do it. Picking a reading spot is a bit like picking an upscale restaurant. Personally, I'm fond of the cafe in the Indigo bookstore at Toronto's Manulife Centre. I also find my crank most mightily turned by the new Trinity College library at the University of Toronto. It's hard to fault a place that puts a fireplace on every floor, even if the logs are fake and the flames come from gas. Further, the library window view of Trinity's formal garden, with its severe green lawns, its severe rectangular pool, its severe iron fencing, seems to do the right kind of honour to books in history and theology.
(c) As all the authorities say, we must first create the appropriate work space for writing, then stock it with the appropriate tools.
As I delight to read in bookstore cafes, so too was I delighted lately to see a poet of my acquaintance settle with her husband and laptop computer into a bookstore cafe. I hope she was crafting some of her verse. Personally, however, although I tend to read all over town, I like to write at home, in a cramped but silent room.
When it comes to tools, we recall that much of the finest work has been done (perhaps some of it still is being done) in handwriting on paper. But we recognize also that the computer can be used in various creative ways.
I, for my part, deliberately distance myself from the conventional office environment. I use the Unix text editors vi and emacs in place of a conventional word processor, and Linux in place of the conventional Microsoft or Macintosh operating systems.
I find the computer essential for filing notes and facts, under the Library of Congress system familiar to us from university library shelves. (The local municipal library is liable to use, instead, the less satisfactory Dewey Decimal System.)
Here's the essence of that Library of Congress scheme: we assign subject classification letters, with "A" as a catch-all for "general works"; B for philosophy, psychology, and religion; C, D, E, and F for various aspects of history and travel; G for geography; H for social science; J for political sciences; K for law; L for education; M for music; N for fine arts; P for language and literature; QA, QB, QC, and QD for mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry; R for medicine; S for agriculture; T for technology; U for military matters outside the navy; V for naval matters; and Z for editing, publishing, and librarianship.
Now suppose that my writing task requires me to retrieve a fact - as it might be, a treatment of diarrhea in a developing country, where Lomotil is unavailable or inappropriate. In my particular Linux-driven setup, I make a couple of keystrokes, including the subject-area code "R", to bring up my medical fact file, arranged as a book index, and in a split second find myself scanning a note that I made from reading a few weeks ago:
diarrhea, treatment of,
in developing-nation environment
__into 1.5 L of water: 1 heaped tsp salt,
12 level tsp sugar
__take 1 L of soln daily,
interspersed with daily total
of 3 L plain water
Again, suppose that my writing task requires me to retrieve some resources for the theology of manual labour. I can't immediately recall anyone who writes on that topic. But I do recall reading about manual labour this past winter. I found an interesting reference back then, and I dimly recall matching that reference to the very book I encountered in a retreat at a Pennsylvania monastery three years ago. Did I put the reference into my philosophy-psychology-theology resources file, when I copied the contents of my daily breast-pocket reading cards into the computer? In my Linux-driven setup, I make a couple of keystrokes, including the subject-area code "B", and in a split second indeed find myself scanning a note I made last winter:
labour, theology of manual
__Fr {rembert.sorg} _Toward a
Theology of Manual Labour_
Although many writers no doubt swear by commercial databases, I implement everything with the simplest appropriate tools, in the spirit of the Small is Beautiful economist E.F. Schumacher. My computer contains a bundle of fact files on the one hand and a bundle of pointers-to-further-resources files on the other hand, in both cases in what the computer people might call "tagless ASCII" format. That's essentially the computer technology of the 1970s, and yet its speed, capacity, and accuracy are all a writer could ask for. (In general, part of the art in computer engineering is figuring out what not to buy.)
(d) The authorities insist that if we write, we are to revise ruthlessly. The version of Walden which Henry David Thoreau delivered to the printer was his eighth - as I learned recently from p. 32 of Philip van Doren Stern, ed., The Annotated "Walden" (New York: Bramhall House, 1970).
Revising sometimes involves a peculiarly savage kind of recycling. We may find ourselves helping a commercial client turn her unsuccessful book into a more promising set of essays. We may find ourselves embarking on a series of essays of our own, which we intend later to pull together into a book. We may find ourselves attacking an unsuccessful play with a chainsaw a year after we drafted it, replacing the final scene with new material, and in the process quite altering our dramatic judgement on some controversial social topic, such as twelve-step recovery groups.
(e) The authorities agree that writing is a high and serious calling. It is useful to keep the image of a sacred flame before the mind's eye. (If I were designing a library myself, I'd perhaps omit the faux gas fireplaces, but would decorate the foyer with a sacred flame in a reflecting pool.) It is useful also to read Thoreau's Walden chapter on readers, recalling especially his remark, "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."
And it is useful to visit the writing-and-publishing shelves of the big bookstores, taking seriously such things as Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul. Vulgar, you say? But the very first story in the book is an unconscious echo of Walden. In that story, an Alberta writer, Judith A. Chance, describes her work with a disadvantaged child learning to read:
When he finished reading, Ronny closed his book, stroked the cover with his grubby hand and said with great satisfaction, "Good book." ... At that moment, I knew I would get serious about my own writing career and do what that author had done, and probably still does - care enough to write a story that changes a child's life, care enough to make a difference.
3. Beyond the Basics:
Working with a Logic Blueprint
Now I am ready to offer my own, distinctive, advice.
We cannot overemphasize the importance of structure. The publishing industry distinguishes a mere copyedit from a structural edit. The copyeditor works through the author's draft sentence by sentence, essentially repairing the grammar and punctuation while keeping eyes open for ambiguities and inconsistencies. The more highly paid and more senior structural editor, by contrast, is authorized to do major surgery, such as the transposing of paragraphs or the splitting of chapters, and is honoured by publishing-house management in so doing.
It is astonishing how bad an author's structure can become. A colleague of mine at the Editors' Association of Canada lately complained that she had been given a couple of hundred pages of pastoral theology (or, perhaps, rather, of crudely evangelical moral exhortation - the author had struggled heroically to overcome severe disadvantages in education and upbringing). The book had no chapter divisions at all! I note with sorrow that my small commercial client, whose case has stimulated me to write this essay, was in nearly as awkward a position with one version of his book, having divided his 256 double-spaced pages into just four chapters. Ominously, while the last three had about the length one would expect of book chapters, the first one finished on page 161.
Less spectacular sins against structure get committed everywhere. An author will surprise and disappoint the editor by using a notion forty pages before explaining it. (As it might be, "the seven fundamental sorrows of humanity" - with this mildly fictitious example, I disguise slightly an issue I've encountered with the client I've just mentioned. The problem is that we are supposed to have some idea what the seven fundamental sorrows are, and yet have to read for another full hour before we get something like a partially relevant list.)
Again, authors will explain a complex point with one example where three are needed, or will illustrate a simple point with three examples where one is sufficient.
Again, authors will - even if a chapter is of considerable length, amounting to perhaps 40 doublespaced pages - neglect to supply descriptive section headings within the chapter.
Again, authors will make the same point twice, rather briefly both times, where the argument requires the point to be developed at proper length just once. Or, conversely, they will make a complex point just once, where the intricacy of the argument in fact requires recapitulation and summary.
Above all, authors will write without a clear goal. A few years ago I had to rescue a piece of political theory, as editor on a volunteer project. It was clear that that particular author was interested in John Locke. But what was the nature of the interest? Was the author defending Locke against critics? Was the author siding with the critics? Was the author's aim neither to uphold nor to criticize, but merely to summarize Locke's thought in neutral terms? (In the end, I had to go into urban guerilla mode, shrewdly and brutally deciding that the third possible goal was all the author had entertained, and then settling down less to edit than to ghost-write. It took days to get the essay into even wretched shape.)
We must, then, have some systematic way of discouraging sins against structure.
Although I have been writing in one way or another since 1970 and 1971, when as a first-year undergraduate I composed my weak unpublished two-hundred-page history of Nova Scotia's Truro region, I evolved an effective technique only in the runup to the recent dot-com bubble. That was when I was trying to earn a partial living in Toronto, writing for commercial Web clients. Since my method is now perhaps five years old, it's time (just barely time) to expose it to a wider public.
My method in a nutshell: Make the amount of time you put into writing your logic blueprint about as great as the amount of time you put into writing your first draft. Make the investment in stress and sweat - in mental energy - much greater for your blueprint than for that draft.
What I call a logic blueprint is a special kind of outline. No doubt many established writers use essentially my approach to outlining, without talking much about it in public. No doubt, also, many of the structural problems we encounter as professional editors are the result of less experienced authors' keeping the plan of their work in their heads, instead of writing the plan out - or, alternatively, of such authors' indeed writing their plan out, but mistakenly trusting in something less detailed than a logic blueprint.
A logic blueprint uses levels of formatting, including levels of indention, to show which points in the argument are logically coordinate, which points subordinate. (By the way: yes, "indention", not "indentation". That's part of the mystical jargon of publishing, along with discourse on en dashes, guillemots, and mutton quads. "Well, Charlie, I thought you knew better than to set the mathematical minus sign as an en dash or a hyphen. And while you're at it, Charlie, see if your page looks lighter once you use mutton quads for paragraph indention." - "Okay lady; doin' it now, lady.")
Here, to start with, is a fanciful example of a logic blueprint, with lots of nonsense words, such as the Unix engineer's traditional standbys "foo" and "bar":
__this essay is an open letter of warning
to our leaders:
it is NOT clear when to foo the bar
(_even though strident columnists like
* Margaret Wente
__she writes for the _Globe_
* Mark Steyn
__he writes for the _Post_
would have us believe the issue is clear)
__admittedly, everyone agrees that fooing the bar
is okay when the froozle is a dongle
__what is controversial is what to do
when the froozle is a non-dongle
__Lester Pearson thought we should
foo the bar anyway
(_we see this from this Nobel
Peace Prize acceptance speech,
given in Oslo
[_MEMO: check this]
in 19xx)
__Martin Luther King Jr, echoing Gandhi,
said on many occasions
that we should only foo the bar
if we can do so without violence
__the United Nations has in recent years
been unable to make up its mind
__Kofi Annan
(_commenting on the Rwanda massacre)
said we should always foo the bar
__Dr Hans Blix
(_a few weeks before
diplomacy collapsed in Iraq)
said we should avoid fooing the goozliest bars
until we get a ruling
from the International Criminal Court
__awkwardly, the USA produces
85% of the world's froozles
and yet is not a member of
the International Criminal Court
(_froozle-production
statistics from UNESCO, 1999
__alas, no more recent
statistics have been published)
__can some of our current troubles be due
to politicians assuming
that every question has a clearcut answer?
[_MEMO: if time permits,
find some pithy decorative
quotation from Wittgenstein
on the nonexistence of clearcut answers,
to give this concluding point
a little more weight
__can start by looking up
Wittgenstein on "forms of life"
__try not Internet search engines,
but back-of-book index
to _Philosophical Investigations_
(_if indeed the book has
an index at the back)
__Trinity College Library
probably suffices for investigating
__no need to start an
elaborate search in Robarts Library]
The first thing to notice here is that the more logically subordinate a point is, the more heavily it is indented. Really fundamental points are marked with "__" right up against the left boundary of the workspace. Points which qualify those points are marked with two spaces, followed by "__". Points which qualify the qualifications are marked with four spaces, followed by "__".
Next, we notice that the really parenthetical points are isolated in special "(_", ")" parentheses. Later, when you turn from the high-stress activity of building a logical blueprint to the more relaxed task of composing your piece, you can decide how, exactly, to signal the parenthetical character of your point. In one case, you might find yourself using a footnote. In another case, you might use parentheses in the composition. In yet another instance, you might find it sufficient to use some simple verbal signal, such as "incidentally", or even to trust the reader to infer the parenthetical character of your remark without seeing an explicit signal.
We note also the use of bulleted lists, marked by asterisks, to keep items in an enumeration straight. In your subsequent act of composition, you might decide actually to create bullets. Alternatively, however, you might find it sufficient to write verbal cue words, say in the style "on the one hand the Globe's Margaret Wente, and on the other hand the Post's Mark Steyn...".
Finally, we note that where we are not actually planning the various points that go into the composition, but are commenting on the plan, we use brackets. This example has brackets twice, first for a comment on the need to check whether it was really in Oslo that Mike Pearson spoke, and later for a comment regarding possible approaches to library research. That second comment itself contains some levels of logical subordination, with a qualifying point ("can start by"), two qualifications to the qualification ("try not"; "Trinity"), a parenthetical attachment ("if indeed") to the first of those two qualifications-of-qualification, and a qualification-of-qualification-of-qualification ("no need to start") under the second.
Now I can proceed to a real-life example. To be true to life, I will take my logic blueprint straight from my project archives, without any tidying up apart from the introduction of Web-friendly line breaks, and the occasional replacement of a hasty "(" with a more careful, and more appropriately whitespaced, "(_". I had to create that blueprint at high speed in the summer of 2002, against a tight deadline for the Truro Daily News. The newspaper editorial staff had allowed me to try submitting, without formal guarantee of publication, about 700 freelance words on the papal visit to Toronto.
Here, then, is the blueprint:
__no precedent in ordinary life
(_the September 11 feeling)
__well, maybe that's not quite fair
__Expo 67 moved to Third World
__picture this: vast field,
from onetime military airport
toward Toronto's northern fringe,
marked off with string into rectangles
(_"yellow section, nr 168"--with good
view of two huge
TV screens, and distant view of the great
presentation stand, with its
multistorey cross)
__every square foot of grass
space occupied by someone's sleeping
gear
__and gear in pretty bad shape by Sunday morning,
after some downpours worthy of the tropics
__a dialogue with the whole world, as at Expo
__a snatch of dialogue:
German Military Deacon Fr Simon Joachim,
in battle fatigues,
explaining theology:
Xian soldier is a servant
of peace and justice not
for his own nation alone,
but for people of all nations
__another snatch of dialogue:
petite Mary Lou Maynard,
an Objibway of the Native People's Parish
celebrating her 60th birthday
Saturday night
(_"I came
because of you guys")
over our simple meal of
stew and biscuits, and filling us in on liturgy
with the help of her friend
Cookie Pitwanikwat:
the sacred smoke in Catholic native people's
worship - I've smelled it,
and it makes you think
of the woods around Truro - is in fact
a compound of sage, cedar,
sweetgrass, tobacco
__but really the thing is unique, without precedent
__since at the heart is a paradox;
crowd predominantly young,
with wealthy and well educated
Europeans well represented;
and they are wowed, to the point
of endlessly chanting "We love you,
JP2" by an increasingly
frail octagenarian,
firm in manner and clear in speech,
but stooped and tired
__how does JP2 do it?
__strip away the glitz
(_the music, the dance,
the chicken-soup-for-the-soul testimonials)
and we are left with a witness to the young
from a man who is himself,
in his heart, young
__on Saturday night,
he held up for us a contrast between
the constructive
(_which he illustraed with WYD 2000,
in Rome)
and September 11
__he then asked, On what
foundations should we build our
lives? on community values
that have regard only to
criteria of productivity?
on personal values which leave
desires to the "impulses
of instinct"? The 20th century,
he said, often sought to
build the City of Man without
reference to Christ, and
succeeded in building the
city against man.
__on Sunday morning, he obliquely called
to mind the sex-abuse
scandals, speaking of
a "deep sense of sadness and shame,"
but added, "Be not afraid
to follow Christ and the royal
road of the Cross."
__on both days he dared us
to be the salt of the earth,
the light of the world
__he claimed on Sunday
to be old, but it's not true
__to be young at heart is to hope,
and hope was the essential
element in his message
That, as I say, had to be written under the gun. Tight as the deadline was, I spent a lot of time on the logic blueprint, perhaps roughly as much as it took to write the first draft. There was then a little bit of time for checking a name, for phoning the newspaper to see how the general Sunday-night rush to press was developing, and for making final revisions. The final draft is still pretty close to the blueprint. Gratifyingly, the final draft appeared in the paper the next morning with essentially no revisions, except for a bland headline where my own headline was an attention-grabber:
((REVISION_HISTORY ODER="latest first"))
*20020728T204737Z/version 0001.0000
__polished the style
__ran spell-checker
__did final check of wordcount
__wordcount
(_without headline, without author blurb)
= 708
__confirmed from Yellow Pages:
yes, "Native Peoples' Parish,"
not "Native Peoples Parish"
__corrected WYD name: "World Youth Day,"
not "World Youth Days"
as in earlier version
*20020728T204737Z/version 0000.9000
__adequate (but very rapid)
literary polish
__no time to check spelling
__had to rush to get
this version to _Truro Daily News_
after strugglig with
jammed public transit
__need to get back to desk
from site to write
((/REVISION_HISTORY))
((POSSIBLE_HEADLINE))
John Paul II Still Young
((/POSSIBLE_HEADLINE))
((BODY WORDCOUNT="708"))
Sometimes, as last September,
we find ourselves in an experience
without precedent.
That's how I, and indeed most of us,
felt at the culmination
of 17th World Youth Day, in Toronto
this Saturday and Sunday.
Well, maybe I'm not being fair. If you
were old enough to recall
visiting Expo 67, you found
WYD at one level vaguely familiar.
Imagine, more concretely,
Expo moved to the Third
World. Picture this: flimsy barricades
divide a homungous field,
in fact a onetime military
airport, into homungous rectangles.
(My contingent from
the University of Toronto
was in the "yellow section"
of the field, in "block 168."
That placement gave us
a fine view of two big screens,
on high scaffolding, and a distant
view of the presentation stand. The cross
crowning the stand served
as a landmark in our forays to
distant food stations, distant
water taps, distant suchlike.)
Now picture every square foot
of the long, trampled, dead grass in
those homungous
rectangles covered in sleeping gear.
Picture, further, the gear in
bad shape by Sunday morning,
a wave of tropical downpours now
finishing, emergency garbage-bag ponchos
now crumpled up, sleeping mats
now baking under tropical sun.
And imagine, further, person-to-person
dialogue with much of the planet,
in the spirit of Expo.
All WYD pilgrims have their
own stories. Here are two of mine.
First tale: before making the trek
from the campus to that
onetime airfield, I got
briefed on theology from
Military Deacon Fr Simon Joachim.
(He had battle fatigues,
combat boots, and I
think the obligatory moustache.)
The Christian soldier, he said,
is a "servant of peace
and justice" not for his own
nation alone, but for the people of all
nations. A deacon from the Canadian
forces? No, German.
Second tale: on Saturday
Mary Lou Maynard (celebrating her sixtieth
birthday that day - "I'm here
for you guys") and her friend Cookie Pitwanikwat
of Toronto's Native Peoples' Parish briefed me
on liturgy. To make the sacred
smoke characteristic of aboriginal
Catholic worship (and in fact,
I know, sharply evocative
of the woods in Colchester County), they said
you use sage, cedar, sweetgrass, and tobacco.
So maybe Expo 67 supplied
a sort of reference point. But at a deeper level,
the culmination of WYD was
without precedent.
Here we had over 800,000 people - many of them
from the Nike-and-Microsoft generation, many of them
from the affluent West -
wowed by the most unlikely of men.
How did JP2 work his magic?
I think - sue me for Catholic
bias if you like, but well I'm
Catholic and what the heck -
I think he did it
by triumph of substance
over style. Strip away the WYD glitz
(the music, the dance,
all that fancy stage ceremonial)
and you're left with a substantial witness.
We got the substance
in the homily in Saturday Vespers,
as JP2, having held up
for us the contrast between the 2000
Rome WYD and last September's carnage, asked,
repeatedly, on what foundations
we should build our lives. Should we
build on community values
that have regard to "criteria
of productivity"? On personal values
that leave desires to the
"impulses of instinct"? The twentieth
century, he said, often sought to
build the City of Man
without reference to Christ, and succeeded
instead in building a city against man.
We got the substance again in the homily
from Sunday Mass, in which JP2 obliquely called the
ecclesial sex-abuse scandals
to mind. (His words then:
a "deep sense of sadness and shame.")
But, he said, we must recall also
the service done by others in the Church,
and "be not afraid to follow Christ
and the royal road of the Cross."
On both days he dared us to be
the salt of the earth, the light of the
world.
Speaking Sunday morning,
JP2 claimed to be old. However,
to be young at heart is to hope.
Hope (the kind worth having,
the kind grounded in realities,
in substance) was the core of his message. We
lived WYD with a man whose pontificate
proclaims its 1978 opening
message, "Be not afraid,"
with undiminished conviction in 2002.
The guy is young, and so the young at his big
Toronto party heard in him the echo of themselves.
((/BODY))
This particular blueprint formalism is what I strictly call a "pointlist". I write pointlists not only when I have to decide what to say in a literary piece, but when I am taking notes on some complex scientific topic. My clearest examples of such notetaking come from the twenty minutes at the computer which I consider a necessary followup to our local one-hour Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics colloquium.
My toolkit of formalisms also contains what I call a "tasklist", for use in planning practical projects, such as intricate computer jobs. For what it's worth, here is a very short tasklist extract:
!_do LaTeX run to confirm
that source code has no gross errors
__DONE@20030214T154742Z
__we see glitch:
* unexpectedly thin
space with Kelvin in "Conclusions"
__repaired
(_we do NOT at this point bother
checking "figure" and "Figure",
even though the macro does some checks
__justification: LATER in this
tasklist, we tackle
the "igur" problem systematically,
making sure we say "Fig." and "Figs.")
!_make the substitutions
(_these are essentially
what is documented by xxxxxxxxxxx
as 8Premk_E line 510)
* Eq. -> eq.
* Eqs. -> eqs.
* Equation -> eq.
* Equations -> eqs.
__DONE@20030214T161750Z
__no occurrences found
The full tasklist for this particular job runs to 679 lines, before the addition of Web-friendly linebreaks. I was working on an editorial assignment, namely language control for a physics journal. The tasklist helped ensure that basically the right tasks got done, in basically the right order, and that the various inevitable glitches got logged.
Finally, I have what I call a "querylist", to ensure that I ask basically the right questions in basically the right order when interviewing. If I were an investigative journalist, rather than an astronomer-editor-writer, I'd probably use querylists every month.
It's a simple toolkit, organized on grammatical lines: pointlists for assertions; tasklists for imperatives; querylists for questions. And it is only the pointlist formalism that you need to adopt, or somehow to adapt, in planning your essay.
It is fine to alter the details of my formalism, to fit your own particular working style. For example, you might well prefer "--", or indeed "----", to "__". You might stick with my device of "__", but prefer to replace those rather hard-to-count blank spaces with dots, using "..__" to introduce a qualification of a point, and "....__" to introduce a qualification of a qualification. You might find "(_", ")" an unnecessarily fancy variation on the familiar "(", ")". You might use numbers more heavily than I tend to.
So important is the high-anxiety blueprinting stage that you will want to spread it over more than one work session wherever deadlines allow it. If time permits, it is good to plan, have lunch, plan again, have dinner, and the following morning review and revise the plan. Don't stop revising until you are sure the plan is solid enough to let you compose from it without gross deviations. (But, you will ask, can't the plan turn out to need revising in the very heat of composition? I answer that on my way of working, there isn't really such a thing as the heat of composition. We are heated when we plan, but cool when we compose. If, in the act of composing, we find ourselves returning to the act of planning, our initial planning session must have been hasty.)
To make sure that you can revise and adjust the plan until it works, acquire appropriate tools. Writers who work with computers will find a simple text editor, such as programmers use, more effective than a word processor, as used by secretaries. If, however, you must work with conventional office software, such as Microsoft Word, you may find it helpful to select a monospaced font, such as Courier, in a point size large enough to limit you to the programmer's traditional 80-character line.
Although I have hardly ever tried writing a logic blueprint without a computer, I suspect good results can be had from an intelligent choice of writing tools: quality mechanical pencil, perhaps, rather than pen or wooden pencil; the graphite fairly soft, perhaps in grade B rather than HB; the paper of decent quality, say unlined white bond with a lined sheet to go underneath as a guide for the neat formatting of your lines; a clean eraser or two perpetually handy, and in actual use at least every ten minutes.
You'll now be wondering to what extent I have managed to practice as I have been preaching, composing even this present essay from a logic blueprint. Fairly well, I answer, with only comparatively minor deviations from plan. I worked on the plan for an hour before dinner, on my first day, and for an hour or two after dinner. I finished the first draft toward the end of the evening.
You've finished reading the essay. Here's its plan, without cosmetic retouching except for the correcting of some "(_" formatting and the adding of some Web-friendly line breaks:
1. [Intro]
^^^^^^^^^^
__this essay is meant in the first place
for an audience of amateur
nonfiction writers
(_examples:
* the senior citizen
writing some
philosophical-theological essays
for his Web site
* the high-school or university student
writing a term paper)
__but more advanced readers
may also find it useful
(_examples:
* English teachers
* professional nonfiction writers)
__how this essay is organized:
* first, I sum up some conventional
wisdom on writing,
saying where you can learn more
* second, I give my own ideas
on one aspect of the writing process,
the unfairly neglected topic of planning
(_of organization,
of getting the structure right)
(_this is material whihc you will
NOT really find discussed
adequately elsewhere, as far as I know)
2. [A Reminder of Standard Advice]
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
*1_first piece of advice that everybody gives,
but which I may as well repeat here,
is that you have to read
__avoid television entirely
__avoid trash reading
__so newspapers and
Internet have to be used with caution
__make time for reading
__one excellent idea is to devote
Sunday to concentrated reading
__select your places for serious reading
as carefully as you would
select your places for serious dining
__example: the armchairs
by the gas fires in Trinity Coll Libr
*2_study at least some books about writing
__hardly anyone will
neglect to mention Strunk and White
__simple words, omission of needless words
__also very good: xxx _xxx Clarity and Grace_
*3_get appropriate milieu and tools for writing
__writing milieu even
more important than reading milieu
__was delighted a few weeks ago
to see poet settling into a Chapters cafe
with her laptop
__for tools, remember that computer
is more than a glorified typewriter
__I myself use a text editor,
rather than the distracting word processor
(_but I realize this is a minority preference,
as is my preference for
Linux over Microsoft or Mac)
__I myself find it handy to use the computer
for filings notes and facts
__I use the Library of Congress system,
benefitig also from the power
of a special Linux-implemented
shortcut called the "bash alias"
and implemented in the
".bahsrc" file
__to cut a long story very short:
faR
resJ
plain fa
plain res
__all implemented without speical databases
*4_revise ruthelessly
__the version of _Walden_
which Henry David
Thoreau submitted to the printer
was his eighth
(_Philip van Doren
Stern, ed., _The Annotated "Walden";
New York, Bramhall House, 1970, p. 32)
__need to be prepared to recycle quite savagely,
tearing a piece apart some months after writing it,
repackaging it in a quite different form
*5_keep the seriousness
of the writer's mission before you at all times
__useful to recall Thoreau's
discussion of books and readers:
"How many a man as dated a new era in his life
from the reading of a book"
__useful to scan
the writing-and-publishing shelves
in the big bookstores,
for ideas on writing as a vocation
__for instance, _Chicken
Soup for the Writer's Soul_
__starts with an account
of a little boy from a troubled home,
reading
3. [My Own Nonstandard Advice]
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
__we cannot overemphasize
the importance of good structure,
and yet this side of writing
seems to be downplayed
in the advice people give to writers
__publishing industry distinguishes copyedit from
structural edit,
and rightly considers the latter kind of surgery
worthy of higher pay
__things can go astonishingly wrong with structure:
* my colleague, faced with a couple of hundred pages
of pastoral theology,
with no chapter divisions at all
* my own project:
256 pages, and yet chap 1 pp. 1 - 161,
followed by three shorter chaps
__examples of less
spectacular sins against structure:
* using a notion
40 pages before explaining it
("the seven sorrows of humanity" -
here I modify
slightly a problem
I encountered this past working week)
* explaining with one
example where three are needed
* making the logically
subordinate points as prominent
as the logically coordinate ones
* failing to supply section headings
* making the same
point in two different places
__above all, writing without a clear goal:
__my author on political theory
a couple of years ago
discussed Locke and contemporary
theorists, but gave the reader
no account of what his own
purpose was
(_to defend Locke? to oppose Locke?
to summarize Locke in neutral
terms?)
__we must, then, have some way of achieving
logical structure in our work
__I think I have a method that works
__since my method is not widely discussed,
even though many successful
writers must be practicing
something like it,
I want to explain it at considerable length,
with an actual case study
__the essence of my method is this:
((ital))
invest about as much time in writing
the logic blueprint
as you do in writing the first draft
((/ital))
[_approx wording]
__here "logic blueprint" is my own term
__I suspect, from the materials
I read as a professional editor,
that many people try to keep the plan
for their essay in their heads,
instead of writing it out
__I also suspect that some
people do write a plan out,
but write it in an ineffective form,
neglecting to produce a true logic blueprint
__a logic blueprint uses formatting,
including levels of indention,
to shows what points are coordinate,
what points subordinate
__a very crude, fanciful example:
((EXAMPLE))
__this essay is an open letter of warning
to our leaders:
it is NOT clear when to foo the bar
(_even though strident columnists like
* Margaret Wente
__she writes for the _Globe_
* Mark Steyn
__he writes for the _Post_
would have us believe the issue is clear)
__admittedly, everyone agrees that fooing the bar
is okay when the froozle is a dongle
__what is controversial is what to do
when the froozle is a non-dongle
__Lester Pearson thought we should
foo the bar anyway
(_we see this from this Nobel
Peace Prize acceptance speech,
given in Oslo
[_MEMO: check this]
in 19xx)
__Martin Luther King Jr, echoing Gandhi,
said on many occasions
that we should only foo the bar
if we can do so without violence
__the United Nations has in recent years
been unable to make up its mind
__Kofi Annan
(_commenting on the Rwanda massacre)
said we should always foo the bar
__Dr Hans Blix
(_a few weeks before
diplomacy collapsed in Iran)
said we should avoid fooing the goozliest bars
until we get a ruling
from the International Criminal Court
__awkwardly, the USA produces
85% of the world's froozles
and yet is not a member of
the International Criminal Court
(_froozle-production
statistics from UNESCO, 1999
__alas, no more recent
statistics have been published)
__can some of our current troubles be due
to politicans assuming
that every question has a clearcut answer?
[_MEMO: if time permits,
find some pithy decorative
quotation from Wittgenstein
on the nonexistence of clearcut answers,
to give this concluding point
a little more weight
__can start by looking up
Wittenstein on "forms of life"
__try not Internet search engines,
but back-of-book index
to _Philospohical Investigations_
(_if indeed the book has
an index at the back)
__Trinity College Library
probably suffices for investigating
__no need to start an
elaborate search in Robarts Library]
((/EXAMPLE))
__note here that the more
logically subordinate a point is,
the more heavily it is indented
__note also the use of
parentheses to isolate really parenthetical
points
(_later, in the act of writing,
we have to decide how exactly
to handle such strongly parenthetical material
__we could turn it into footnotes
__we could put it into parentheses
__we could simply say something like "incidentally")
__note also the use of bulleted lists
__note the use of brackets,
as distinct frm parentheses,
with MEMO, to mark off a memo
__now for a real-life example,
which I take straight
from my project archives, without any gussying up
__first, the outline
[_INSERT the papal-visit outline here]
__then the piece, as filed under
tight time constraints
to _Truro Daily News_
[_INSERT the piece here]
__this is just one suggestion
for formatting a logical blueprint
__it is, admittedly, a suggestion
that I worked out over the
last 5 years or so, and
seems to be standing up to the test of time
__if you don't like this format,
devise one of your own
__my own format is what I
strictly call a "pointlist"
__I also have tasklists,
to help in planning practical projects,
such as intricate computer jobs,
and interviews
__I've even made very
occasional use of "querylists",
to help in planning interviews
__think of pointlists,
tasklists, and querylists
as ways of writing out
assertions, commands, and questions
in a logically structured style
__to repeat: the trick in writing
nonfiction is to create
a meticulous blueprint first,
using at least SOMETHING
like my own pointlist formalism
__if your deadline allows it,
spread the planning out
over more than one work session
__use tools that will let you
revise and fine-tune the plan
__if computer, simple text editor,
such as programmers use,
is better than word processing software,
such as secretaries use
__if traditional paper,
then consider using good-quality
mechanical pencil
with (soft) B lead, and good eraser
__you'll now be wondering
how this present essay got planned
_so here's the plan:
[_INSERT plan here]