“The truth is dancers and musicians live in two different worlds.” For academic writers, the Rule of 200. Writing 200 words/day is rather like writing for 15 minutes/day — it sets an objective, emotionally neutral goal. Getting that first draft squeezed out is most important; quality can be layered in later. Also, this raises the …
Category Archives: Tools/Tips/Tricks
Readability and toread.cc bookmarklets
Here are two bookmarklets I use every day. (Bookmarklets, you ask? What are they? More here.) The beautiful thing about bookmarklets is they should work from within IE, Firefox, Safari, or any web browser that lets you put a bookmark in its Links bar. Because I read lots of articles and blogs online, I click …
Annoying Firefox problem fixed
For the last couple of months, I’ve had an incredibly annoying problem in Firefox, when entering text into text boxes: the cursor would disappear, the text box would appear to lock up, and I’d have to click inside the text box to resume typing. Often, too, I’d hit the Backspace key and this would jump …
2 VMWare Fusion tips
I’ve enjoyed having VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, as it’s made the transition from a PC to a Mac easier. Also, since I now have only the MacBook, I’m able to easily duplicate what I had on the old PC and to edit work documents on my copy of Microsoft Office. But I hit a …
Writing research papers
First in a (no doubt about it) ongoing series. When I had to do my first literature review, and my first big grad school paper, last fall, I asked my mentor, The Indomitable Cassidy, for her advice. Here’s what she said: I actually like starting with a “haphazard search,” but I prefer to start in …
Storing Nuggets of Information
The following are comments I left on the high-fun personal blog PigPog. Back in 2005, Michael wrote a post on storing and retrieving nuggets of information. This invited a couple of unedited brain-dumps from your Humble Correspondent. I’m posting them here because my original links to the post were broken after a site redesign and …
Write what you feel
Advice for the creative writer, yes. But the student? My manager is taking a summer class and his teacher told the class, “Don’t write down what I say. Write down what you feel about what I say.” Interesting advice for a note-taker who’s thinking about regurgitating the content for the next test. My reporting background …
Too soon old, too late shmart…
…goes the old Yiddish proverb. And it works for the spring semester as well as for real life. Using a simple 1-inch binder and two sets of five tabs were fantastic in helping me organize my two classes’ syllabi, assignments, special handouts, and so on. I could carry it with me to work and school, …
Jumping the gun on a MacBook?
Although UNC requires incoming freshmen to buy a laptop computer, and although some SILS classes require a laptop (I’m thinking here of the database or programming courses), by and large, I’ve found that I haven’t really needed a laptop on campus. I prefer taking notes by hand on paper, and the campus is lousy with …
Systemantics
I’m starting my third official semester as a graduate student but there are still a few nuts I haven’t cracked yet. I’m starting to wonder if they’re worth cracking or if I’m just worrying too much. What I’ve been doing Note-taking strategy. For both reading and classroom lectures, I still have (I think) a shockingly …
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