Brown Noise in Written Language, Part 2

Here is some more thinking on the subject of brown noise in written language, stimulated by Joel Garry’s comment to my prior post.

My point is not an appeal for more creative writing in the let’s-use-lots-of-adverbs sense. It’s an appeal for clarity of expression. More fundamentally, it is an appeal for having an idea to express in the first place. If you have an actual idea and express it in a useful way, then maybe you've created something that is not spam (even if it happens to be a mass mailing), because it yields some value to your audience.

My point is about being creative only to the extent that if you haven’t created an interesting thought to convey by the time you’ve written something, then you don’t deserve—and you’re not going to get—my attention. (Except you might get me to criticize your writing in my blog.)

What Lanham calls “the Official Style” is a tool for solving two specific problems: There’s (1) “I have no clear thought to express, yet I'm required to write something today.” And (2) “I have a thought I'd like to express, but I'm afraid that if I just come out and say it, I'll get in trouble.” Problem #1 happens, for example, to school children who are required to write when they really don’t have anything in mind to be passionate about. Problem #2 happens to millions who live out the Emperor’s New Clothes every day of their lives. They don’t “get” what their mission is or why it’s important, so when they’re required to write, they encrypt their material to hide from their audience that they don’t get it. The result includes spam, mission statements, and 98% of the PowerPoint presentations you’ll ever see in your life.

I’m always more successful when I orient my thoughts in the direction of gratitude, so a better Part 1 post from me would have been structured as:

1. Wow, look at this horrible, horrible sentence. I am so lucky I don't have to live and work in an environment where this kind of expression (and by implication, this kind of thinking) is deemed acceptable.
2. I highly recommend Lanham's Revising Prose. It is brilliant. It helps you fix this kind of writing, and—more importantly—the kind of thinking that leads to it.
3. I’m grateful for the work of people like Lanham, Fried, Heinemeier-Hansson, and many others, who help us understand and appreciate clear thinking and courageous writing.

Writing is not just output. Writing is an iterative process—along with thinking, experimenting, testing—that creates new thought. If you try to use the waterfall approach when you write—“Step 1: Do all your thinking; Step 2: Do all your writing”—then you’ll miss the whole point of how writing clarifies and creates new thought. That is why learning how to revise prose is so important. It’s not just about how to make writing better. As Lanham illustrates in dozens of examples throughout his book, revising prose forces improvement in the writer’s thinking, which enriches the writer’s life even more than the writing, however tremendous, will enrich the reader.

Business of Software 2008, day 1

Greetings from Boston, where I'm attending "Business of Software 2008, the first ever Joel on Software conference."

It has been fantastic so far. Here's a featured presenters roll call for the day:

• Seth Godin, author of ten bestselling books about marketing
  
• Jason Fried of 37signals
• Eric Sink of SourceGear
• Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot
• Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator, author of Founders at Work
• Paul Kenny of Ocean Learning
  

That's not to mention the eight Pecha Kucha presentations, although I will mention two that I particularly enjoyed by Jason Cohen of SmartBear Software ("Agile marketing") and Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit ("How to start, run, and sell a web 2.0 startup"). Alexis won the contest, which netted him a new MacBook Air. Not bad for 6 minutes 40 seconds of work. ;-)

Here are some of the highlight ideas of the day for me (with apologies to the speakers for, in some cases, crudely over-simplifying their ideas):

• Ideas that spread win. (Godin)
  
• The leader of a tribe begins as a heretic. (Godin, Livingston)
• Premature optimization is bad. In business too. Not just code. (Fried, Shah)
• Interruptions are bad. Meetings are worse. (Fried, Sink, Livingston)
• "Only two things grow forever: businesses and tumors." Unless you take inelligent action. (Fried)
• Pricing is hard. Really, really hard. (Shah)
• Business plans are usually stupid. (Fried, Shah, Livingston)
  
• Software specs are usually stupid. (Fried)
  
• An important opportunity cost of raising VC money is the time you're not spending working on the business of your actual business. (Shah)
• The most common cause of startup failure isn't competition, it's fear. (Livingston)
• Your first idea probably sucks. (Fried, Sink, Shah, Livingston)
• Radical mood swings are part of the territory for founding a company. (Livingston)

An overarching belief that I think bonds almost all of the 300 people here at the event is this: If you're not working on your passion, then you're wasting yourself. It is inspiring to met so many people at one time who are living courageously without compromising this belief. Re-SPECT.

I think a good conference should provide three main intellectual benefits for people:

1. You can expose yourself to new ideas, which can make you wiser.
2. You can fortify some of the beliefs you already had, which can make you more confident.
3. You can learn better ways to explain your beliefs to others, which can make you more effective.

And then of course there's networking, fun, and all that stuff—that's easy. So far, this event is ringing the bell on every dimension that I needed. Absolutely A+.