Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips I still learn new things. I still want to learn new things. I recently learned how to make the em dash and en dash characters in OS X with keyboard shortcuts. I no longer have to go to the “insert symbols” function to insert these special characters. One of the disappointing results […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A review of the writing rule about writing small numbers. Sometimes you just feel the need to write a blog post about something in writing that everyone is supposed to know. Then you read a stack of papers and see that almost no one knows it. So here goes: Write small numbers […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The more things change, well, you know, they don’t change. The world is now ruled by hashtags. There are no more standard categories for anything. Everyone makes their own category when they want. This was all described several years ago in Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. Since nothing has a category, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is something about attempting to write a longer piece that makes writing a sentence much more difficult. I’ll start with something that is probably obvious to everyone else in the world: Writing doesn’t scale. Explanation: People who can write a two-page piece, flop when they attempt to write a 20-page piece. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I point back to a classic but little-known work on instructing people how to do something. Way back in time in the mid-1980s (yes, I am that old), I stumbled onto a book written by Edmond H. Weiss titled How to Write a Usable User Manual. I thought it was a basic […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Focusing for a long period of time is contradictory, but it is possible. Graduate school in 1983 (yes, I am that old): I had to study a text on a new concept called object-oriented software. I don’t mean read the text, I mean read it, study it, master it. I faced a […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Writers need not be afraid to take a chance in their writing. Criticism first requires something that most of us writers lack. Writers are insecure. Well, I read that a lot on the Internet. We don’t write this or that because we are afraid of being criticized for writing something like that. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The napkin or envelope is still one of the best tools for the engineer or manager or fill-in-the-blank. I have a(n old-fashioned) laptop computer, a smartphone, and a tablet – and I still write notes on a napkin. Yes, I am old, that is part of the explanation. Yet, there is something […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Take care with the reasons why you write. You may be putting the decisions of others as the key to your satisfaction. Why do you write? People who don’t write often ask me this. Google that question and see a million blog posts for answers. One of the things I do is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes I “outline” writing pieces by type a series of questions. There are many ways to write a piece. One way is to outline the piece first. There are many ways to outline a piece. One outline method I use more often is to write a set of questions. I type a […]

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