In praise of the ellipsis The ellipsis is an irreplaceable method for showing disdain, avoiding the subject, offering a knowing delay, bringing a sense of speech to the page, or just being plain snarky. It allows you to pause and then move on without the need to tell anyone why… via
REA’s AI Policy - Room Escape Artist I’m a fan of escape rooms and I recently discovered this great website dedicated to them. Aside from their regular posts however, I appreciated this recent post detailing in what ways if at all they use AI. It seems like a reasonable approach for an online publication but also speaks to the sad state of the AI slob-riddled internet these days that they have to make a post like this. ...
Today I learned that you can react to the most recent message just by adding +. So you can type +:thumbsup: as the message it add it as a reaction to the most recent message instead of an individual message. You can also type ⌘⇧\ or ctrl⇧\ to open the emoji picker on the message.
I just discovered Semantic Line Breaks. I could never decide on exactly how to do line breaks in markdown so I love that someone came up with a convention that’s been thought through. This led me to discover this post by Derek Sivers: Writing one sentence per line What’s interesting is that while he’s recommending the same approach, he suggests that it will improve your writing itself. Nicer git diffs is just a side benefit. 🙂 ...
Continue with the writing, Today I learned about the inverted pyramid in journalism: It’s a way to structure content so that it “begins with the details that readers care about most. As the article progresses, the focus shifts toward details that are relevant only to the most interested readers.” I came across it in this great post about How to Write Useful Commit Messages but is just as applicable to blog posts/reports/docs/emails. ...
I’ve been working on improving my writing and since it’s an important skill in our industry I figured it’s also a category of learnings worth sharing. I’ve been experimenting with using em dashes (—) lately but I just learned that it’s common to not put spaces around it. Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it. ...