While I carpe diem’d more this week, I went off plan and did not bother to keep my schedule updated. At all times during the week I thought I had a good understanding of what should be the task at hand, so I avoided the overhead of updating my schedule. If I believe I should forgo the overhead of maintaining a daily schedule for the week, it would make sense to go back to my original schedule format that had goals for the entire week vs. goals for everyday. However, I do not think it is a good idea to return to that schedule yet. It is better to pay the price of the extra overhead of maintaining a daily schedule to keep myself accountable.
The daily writing exercise has been quite useful. I will have pumped out seven articles this week while with previous weeks I struggled to produce one. It was painful to write each article, especially the Finding Meaning in a Deterministic World series. Writing these was painful because I know that the articles may reveal some ugly knots in my head that need to be untied. No problem though, writing through the pain gave me a kick similar to a runner’s high. I am excited to keep going for next week. One way to improve that I mentioned in channel is to do the 30 minutes of preparation earlier in the day (as opposed to when I’m tired at night.) I need to begin the writing session with an outline I can count on!
I am thoroughly enjoying studying Spanish. I would like advice on how to best structure my study sessions. I am doing thirty minutes of grammar drills a day and thirty minutes of reading/looking up words in the dictionary. On one hand I see the time spent on grammar drills as “unnatural” and similar to anki. But this week I struck gold and found an explanation of all the uses of the word “se” as well as a terse explanation for how to know which syllables to stress when pronouncing words. Although I may have eventually learned these concepts naturally by speaking / reading more I think that the speed boost from the grammar drills / textbooks makes dedicating some time to grammar worth it.
TheFleet project progressed, but not by as much as I would have liked. One day that you said sounded productive was not too deserving of that statement. There was some spinning that day in the form of flopping back and forth between ‘should I do this’ or ‘should I do that.’ That said I have gained more confidence in my ability to do something useful with short time blocks. I had no time yesterday spent officially on TheFleet project, but I used a spare 15 minutes to find the lines of code to execute to get multiple nicks simultaneously connected to different channels under one sbcl process.
Listing some more problems I have with writing:
1. I often start with a weak outline, causing me to have to organize what I’m trying to say as I’m writing the article. The weak outlines are just a list of vaguely related points I want to mention in the article; there is no flow from one point to the next.
2. Sometimes when I write an article, I realize after reading it that I don’t really believe what I wrote. This causes a time consuming rewrite of a portion or the whole thing.
3. Rewriting over and over again makes me pressed for time, so when I’m finished I only do one or two proofreads. Thus the proofreading process does not get the full attention it needs.
Comment by Will Haack — December 23, 2019 @ 4:36 am
For Spanish – what are exactly those grammar drills as you call them? Grammar is certainly useful and yes, you should study it too, absolutely. But study it (aka make sense of it) rather than memorize it: essentially the grammar is the structure of a language and as such, you *want* to know and understand it, it’s pretty much understanding how that language works from a mechanical point of view (and as such it can be quite interesting really). So yes, read grammar, certainly but find a good grammar book – precisely the sort that is full of actual explanations and insights – not some rote-memorizing set of exercises. The grammar study should support and help with the practice you get from talking/listening and in turn, the more you advance through the practical exercise, the more you’ll be able to digest of the more complex grammar aspects too since you’ll have some experience to link them to.
What parts of your plan fell by the wayside this week?
Re reading, the additional comment is helpful so I can help, you know? Specifically:
1. That is not an outline, indeed. So either you make an actual outline aka take the time to *also* order those ideas into something coherent or otherwise it’s just a bunch of notes and indeed, they won’t be very helpful (and they shouldn’t take 30 minutes to get out either, wtf?)
2. This is important. How do you end up writing something you don’t really believe?? Do you just get carried by how the words sound or what? There is *no point* in spending time to write down words you don’t even believe so it’s a huge waste of time to start with, you need to figure out just how & why you end up doing such a thing and then cut it out from the root and for good.
3. There should be fewer re-writes for sure. Part of it is that good old, “get over yourself” but it seems to me there’s something slightly different here at play and it’s mainly from 2 above so answer that first.
Comment by Diana Coman — December 23, 2019 @ 10:02 am
For Spanish grammar I am currently using http://www.bowdoin.edu/~eyepes/newgr/index.html (quite a shit website, I think it is written in flash). They have a brief explanation of some concept and then a set of exercises. I read the explanation and write down notes in my notebook, then I go through the exercises. I think that the website is built off of a textbook, so I’ll see if I can grab a copy of the textbook they used to make the site or just find another good grammar textbook.
1. Part of the 30 minutes is choosing what to write as well.
2+3. For some articles I’m writing, I am also fleshing out the ideas for the first time on paper (or screen, technically.) So I am writing what I believe, but when I see my thoughts projected on the screen sometimes it is obvious that they are ridiculous and I change my opinion on the spot. So while this is time consuming, it is imo a useful exercise. Another reason I rewrite is sometimes I read the article and decide I am omitting something important or highlighting a point that, while I believe true, does not fit well in the thesis of the article. (This last problem is back to the problem with the outline.)
Comment by Will Haack — December 23, 2019 @ 1:28 pm
Look for a reference book on Spanish grammar, not just whatever happens to be around.
Re writing hm, from what you say it’s not as much that you write what you don’t believe but rather that you still need to write it down to be able to properly evaluate it and as a result, you sometimes change your mind. This may be time consuming but it’s good in itself since it is effectively thinking indeed. The only way to make it take less time is to get in the habit of evaluating more seriously your thoughts as you think them – a sort of “writing & reviewing” in your head too, not only on paper/screen.
Given the above though, I guess for now you’ll just have to see indeed if putting more work into the initial outline pays off and then adjust from there.
Comment by Diana Coman — December 23, 2019 @ 2:00 pm