Thinking about writing
In this article, I will rethink the importance of writing, and discuss how the tools I used evolved.
Motivation
- In information era, the way we express ourselves matters.
- Different thinking pattern could be reflected from the writing.
- Among applications, we could use the most efficient way to express and organize our ideas.
The importance of writing
Writing, in its board aspect, is an everyday activity for all of us. However, according to my friends, little of us have ever thought carefully about this activity. Different format we use could help us train different thinking patterns. Different applications we chose could effect the efficiency of expressing ourselves and organizing ideas. It is also an important way for us to exchange serious opinions in a decent manner (like publications).
Different format could be applied to writing. Within my knowledge, they are plain text (.txt, .word files), hypertext (.html, .md files) and outline (.opml files). Each format has an implication of different thinking pattern. For example, if you use outlining more often than other format, you are tend to be a person with a good sense of the overall picture.If you use hypertext (e.g. markdown) very often, you tend to care about the content more than the format it is presented.
In Sönke Ahrens’s book
An idea kept private is as good as one you never had. And a fact no one can reproduce is no fact at all. Making something public always means to write it down so it can be read. There is no such thing as a history of unwritten ideas.
My experience in writing
During my early life, I used Microsoft Word as my main editing tool as this is the only one I am familiar with. The software works fine, however, as I grow older, I tend to realize that I spend a lot of time editing the format for different headings and emphasis.
With my exploartion in computer science, I started to use markdown as the main form of many writings. Markdown is a kind of mark up language, which uses a small set of symbols to realize the formatting. This freed me from doing manual adjustment for different parts of the text and could now focus more on the content. Markdown is also a portable format. The formatting is realized by limited symbols which allows the raw text to be readable.In my university, I have been using markdown to take notes, write reports and draft my dissertation.
Though markdown itself is a powerful concept, the editor could be of great add on to this kind of writing. I have tried a lot of different markdown editors and now kept mainly two of them (Typora and Obsidian), I will write more about the reasoning of choices I made in a later post.
As my writing in markdown format increases, I started to realize one drawback for this format. It is more of a connstraint in its methodology rather than software design. Markdown kinds of suggest a fragmented thinking, where each piece of markdown note stands for a concept or event solely. Though markdown provides link feature, it is not good for getting the whole picture (say you are taking notes for a course and want to have an overview before exam). This let me to another kind of writing - outlining.
Compared to putting emphasis on the details, outline writing put an emphasis on the key points or the main topic. It encourages concise language choices which is helpful for letting you know the bigger picture and the key points. Using the outlining tools together with my markdown notes, I could both get an general understanding and have detailed information when refering to my notes.
Later when I came accross the PKM concept, I began to use Obsidian to manage my markdown notes, which could provide two-way linking between different files. How I implemented my own PKM system using Obsidian could be found in another post.