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writing

129137 words

One of the nice features of the Cowriters.app is that it shows some nice statistics on your profile. Along the obvious streak length and post count there is also the total count of words written across all those posts.

Mine shows 129137 after yesterdays post. That's a lot of words. Quick googling gives 90000 words as an average word count of a book. So that's already almost halfway to a second book.

To write is to think

Besides writing just for the sake of it or improving ones writing skills there are three different reasons to write: to convey knowledge, to express oneself or to think.

First two are obvious. They are meant for others to read. But the last one doesn't require an audience. Writing can be a powerful tool to help you think.

In the end all other forms of writing must start with the writing to think. To out it the other way around it is quite impossible to write without thinking. It's just a matter of expression and refinement if the end result will be of any use for others.

Missing connections

When reading, and to some extend also watching movies or series, there are sometimes inconsistencies. Something doesn't add up, or things don't quite make sense.

Sure, it can be that I have just missed something. Or even forgotten. It's hard to say without redoing revisiting the whole of the preceding story. 

Auto complexity

I know I do a lot of spelling mistakes. Over the years I have learned to spell most words correctly and whenever I'm not sure I usually check the correct spelling. So most, if not all of those typos are accidental.

Sure I could (and I do, to some extend) use spell checker, autocomplete functionality or any other tools that could fix or point out those issues. But they aren't without their own problems either. They don't always offer the word I intended. 

40 000 posts

There is a theory that you need 10000 hours to become a world class expert in something. And that's not just doing it for that time, it requires that time to be spend on deliberate practice.

I spend around 15 minutes writing these posts. I do try to pay attention to my writing, constantly trying to improve. So I could could count it as deliberate practice. 

Despite my years of experience, I'm still far from the said expertise. At this rate I would need to stack up 40000 posts to reach that. One post per day I'd need to keep doing this another 106 years.

Too important to write casually

There are things I want to write about. But I just can't seem to get those posts done. They are more than just random thoughts or facts, they are things that really matter.

First of all, they need a lot more effort to write. It doesn't do justice for them to not pay attention to write those words properly. I feel like I don't have the time or the energy to put into writing about those things.

Writing waveform

It feels like my writing follows a certain waveform or pattern. I can go from writing some meaningless filler or rant about not being able to write up to writing some insightful revelations of myself or the world around me. In between lies the plateau of random facts and curiosities along the tales of ordinary days of my life. Some occasional breaking waves might hit if something extraordinary happens to happen.

More is less

After the 200 word limit was dropped I decided to loosen my own targets as well. Before, I tried to keep also as close as possible from the upper bound to 200 words, not just keeping it as minimum. Back then I rarely wrote more than 250 words.

Now it had been a while with the new rules. Looking back there has been a few posts a bit below 150 words and few more below the magic 200. But what's interesting that there has been lot more of those 250 plus posts, multiple posts over 300 words, even a couple of post with over 400 words.

Big and small things

It's quite easy to write a 200 word post on average things. It's enough to tell the overview or focus on some smaller detail. It seems to be a sweet spot foe an average thought.

Digging more into the topic requires more words. That's easy as I can split the topic into multiple posts. Just focusing in one aspect of it at the time and following up in consecutive post drilling deeper.

One thing led to another

Another day I was going through my daily news and topics when I came across a link to a Wikipedia page listing common myths and misconceptions. Sure I had to check it out, just to ensure I didn't have any. Or at least correct my knowledge in case I would have found I was wrong.

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