by Dwayne Phillips A simple piece of paper on the table next to the keyboard keeps everything flowing — especially new ideas. I have a productivity multiplier that I use everyday and have for decades. It is not the computer that is a thousand or million times more powerful than what we used to go […]
Entries Tagged as 'Writing'
A Piece of Paper
October 26th, 2026 · No Comments
Tags: Ideas · Record · Thinking · Tools · Work · Writing
Angst and Needless Writing Assignments
October 8th, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips College professors and other educators continue to struggle needlessly with writing assignments and AI-regurgitated text. Here we have yet another story of a teacher with the best of intentions trying to have students write papers in the era of the current slate of AI systems that pump out text at the push […]
Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Communication · Learning · Machine Learning · People · Systems · Teaching · Writing
Untangling
October 5th, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, you have to work hard to untangle what someone is trying to convey. Then again, if their words are tangled, maybe they don’t have anything to convey. I spend much of my days untangling the words of others. Long documents; long talks, and the like. What is that person trying to […]
Tags: Communication · Concepts · Conversation · Reading · Writing
Write Again Tomorrow
September 28th, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Writing is a skill (and an art). How do you improve a skill? Do it again tomorrow. Here is some old advice to improving as a writer: write everyday. I don’t have all the quotes to repeat here. I wish I did. I wish I could give credit to those who have […]
Tags: Commitment · Communication · Growth · Learning · Writing
Why Aren’t These Posts Longer?
September 7th, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips These blog posts are longer, i.e., don’t have many words. Sorry, I can’t help myself. My blog posts aren’t very long (see, I could have shortened that sentence by removing the word “very” and also the word “blog.”). I recently wrote about the Paramedic Method of Editing. That method helps editors shorten […]
Tags: Blog · Brevity · Clarity · Notebook · Writing
I Wrote This Because …
September 3rd, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips If it is important to me to tell others what I think, I write it myself. If it is just stuff that a machine could write, let the machine write it. I write this blog. I sit in the coffee shop on Saturday mornings and press every key on the keyboard to […]
Tags: Artificial Intelligence · Commitment · Communication · Ideas · Time · Tools · Value · Work · Writing
The Word Is ”Typical,” Not ”Average” or ”Median”
August 20th, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips Writers seem to struggle to express the lot of the average person. Let’s talk about the average savings of an American in their 50s, i.e., born in the 1970s. We want to understand their lot in life and all that. The figures are somewhere. Hmm, average means to sum everyone’s savings and […]
Tags: Choose · Communication · Language · Writing
Asynchronous Meetings and Eternal Optimism
August 17th, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips There are occasions when we spend the resources to have everyone in the same room at the same time. We can do this review and do this meeting asynchronously. The documents are online. Everyone review them when they have time today and leave your comments —said an eternal optimist. We have some […]
Tags: Agreement · Communication · Management · Meetings · Questions · Writing
The Big Document (Waste)
August 13th, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips If “big” is in the description, it is in all the descriptions. That hurts. Here is a process for writing a big document: Uh, this usually means a BIG waste of resources. The BIG draft means the writer works and works and works. Finally, finished. The BIG review means half-a-dozen people read […]
Tags: Energy · Learning · Review · Writing
The Shortest True Sentence
August 6th, 2026 · No Comments
by Dwayne Phillips I find, or re-find, a basic concept of writing non-fiction. I recently worked through a piece of rewriting and revision. I used several AI systems combined with the best writing advice I accumulated through the years. When it was over, I attempted a summary. Surely there was something to pin on the […]
Tags: Brevity · Clarity · Communication · Learning · Simple · Word · Writing