A thousand words
02/01/20 04:16
The season of Christmas gives me some time to do a bit of thinking about a lot of things. With the New Year’s holiday a week after Christmas, there are two days off in the season and both happen to have fallen in the middle of the week for us, so work has been divided into smaller than usual pieces and there has been more time for taking walks and thinking about things. As I have been reflecting, I have also been in the process of rebuilding parts of my web site. My web site is fairly unusual. Most web communications are based on small doses of data, but the heart of my web site are these thousand word essays. So I have a lot of relatively large files on my site. Periodic reloading of the content usually involves a certain amount of looking for, finding and correcting small errors. If you look closely at the site, you will find that there are a lot of archival documents that are temporarily unavailable. I doubt that many people are sifting and sorting through my 2018 and 2019 journal entries, but at the moment the archive is incomplete. I haven’t lost any files. I have all of the documents in other places, but it has been time consuming to go through and discern why things aren’t loading properly. This process also gives me a bit of an opportunity to think about myself, as my journal is, after all, a record of my life. I pause to read entries from time to time and recall the events of my life.
On the other hand, some of the files that people do want to access are not currently available. For example, I have written a journal entry in the form of a letter to each grandchild on the day of that child’s birth. Our oldest grandchild is now 8. I plan to give the letters to the children on the occasion of their 10th birthdays, when they are confident readers who can read them on their own. I don’t know if their parents scan them from time to time, but I enjoy reading them. There are a few other journal entries that get read from time to time.
I also post book reviews, with a bit less discipline than I apply to my journal. Occasionally an author or publisher will find the book review and create a link to that review on their web site. This can cause a surge of visits to my web site. I got all of the book reviews up and going yesterday, so that process is working.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to come up with new systems of organizing information on my web site. Of course, as web sites go, even with what is now over 4,700 1,000-word essays, my web site doesn’t have a huge amount of data. Wikipedia, for example is a huge web site. Compared to that, mine is miniscule.
I came up with the idea of setting the personal goal of writing a 1,000 word essay just before I began to publish my journal online. I had kept journals prior to this, but was not disciplined to write every single day. I was working as a free-lance writer and editor on the side of my job as a pastor at the time and I wanted to improve my writing skills. Most of the information I could find about writing at the time indicated that the best way to develop skills is to develop a discipline of writing every day, in every mood, in every state of tiredness or energy. So I started writing an essay every day. Then I started publishing to create a little pressure to maintain the discipline. It worked. I’ve been able to maintain the discipline through major life events and challenges. I wrote on the days that family members were born and on days when family members died. I wrote essays from the intensive care unit of the hospital when my wife was being cared for in that place. Granted, I have not faced major illness or hospitalization since I started this discipline, but I’ve been able to maintain it through a lot.
The concept of 1000 words is based on the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” I’ve heard that phrase attributed to Confucius. That attribution is not likely to be true. The term was popularized in the 1920’s by Fred R. Barnard, who is often credited with its origin. It is likely he got the phrase from Tess Flanders, a newspaper editor who discussed strategies in publishing, editing and news reporting. Barnard, however, would sometimes say the origin of the phrase was a Chinese proverb. He also ascribed it to Japanese origins. He also said, “a picture is worth ten thousand words,” either greatly enhancing the value of a picture or devaluing words to only about 10% of their original value.
The phrase is probably only about a century old and probably originated in English, where it makes a lot more sense than it would in Chinese, which is a pictographic language in the first place. In Chinese, it takes several pictures to make a single word. Each Chinese character is a representative drawing. Of course many characters are complete words, making a picture and a word of equal value. It seems that the phrase almost demands an alphabetic language where letters are a bit more symbolic. For certain the value of a word is higher than a picture in a hieroglyphic language such as ancient Egyptian.
I do intend to incorporate more pictures into my web site as I move from full time work into semi-retirement. Over the course of the year to come, I hope to spend more time with my cameras and have more illustrations to add to my web site. But I suspect it will be a bit more like a single image each day or perhaps several images some days and none on others. I’m not sure. I suspect that photography is also a discipline that benefits from regular work. In the meantime I plan to keep writing essays.
And, for what it’s worth, I seem to be getting a bit more wordy. So far my 2020 essays have been a bit longer than my usual. I have no idea what that means.
On the other hand, some of the files that people do want to access are not currently available. For example, I have written a journal entry in the form of a letter to each grandchild on the day of that child’s birth. Our oldest grandchild is now 8. I plan to give the letters to the children on the occasion of their 10th birthdays, when they are confident readers who can read them on their own. I don’t know if their parents scan them from time to time, but I enjoy reading them. There are a few other journal entries that get read from time to time.
I also post book reviews, with a bit less discipline than I apply to my journal. Occasionally an author or publisher will find the book review and create a link to that review on their web site. This can cause a surge of visits to my web site. I got all of the book reviews up and going yesterday, so that process is working.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to come up with new systems of organizing information on my web site. Of course, as web sites go, even with what is now over 4,700 1,000-word essays, my web site doesn’t have a huge amount of data. Wikipedia, for example is a huge web site. Compared to that, mine is miniscule.
I came up with the idea of setting the personal goal of writing a 1,000 word essay just before I began to publish my journal online. I had kept journals prior to this, but was not disciplined to write every single day. I was working as a free-lance writer and editor on the side of my job as a pastor at the time and I wanted to improve my writing skills. Most of the information I could find about writing at the time indicated that the best way to develop skills is to develop a discipline of writing every day, in every mood, in every state of tiredness or energy. So I started writing an essay every day. Then I started publishing to create a little pressure to maintain the discipline. It worked. I’ve been able to maintain the discipline through major life events and challenges. I wrote on the days that family members were born and on days when family members died. I wrote essays from the intensive care unit of the hospital when my wife was being cared for in that place. Granted, I have not faced major illness or hospitalization since I started this discipline, but I’ve been able to maintain it through a lot.
The concept of 1000 words is based on the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” I’ve heard that phrase attributed to Confucius. That attribution is not likely to be true. The term was popularized in the 1920’s by Fred R. Barnard, who is often credited with its origin. It is likely he got the phrase from Tess Flanders, a newspaper editor who discussed strategies in publishing, editing and news reporting. Barnard, however, would sometimes say the origin of the phrase was a Chinese proverb. He also ascribed it to Japanese origins. He also said, “a picture is worth ten thousand words,” either greatly enhancing the value of a picture or devaluing words to only about 10% of their original value.
The phrase is probably only about a century old and probably originated in English, where it makes a lot more sense than it would in Chinese, which is a pictographic language in the first place. In Chinese, it takes several pictures to make a single word. Each Chinese character is a representative drawing. Of course many characters are complete words, making a picture and a word of equal value. It seems that the phrase almost demands an alphabetic language where letters are a bit more symbolic. For certain the value of a word is higher than a picture in a hieroglyphic language such as ancient Egyptian.
I do intend to incorporate more pictures into my web site as I move from full time work into semi-retirement. Over the course of the year to come, I hope to spend more time with my cameras and have more illustrations to add to my web site. But I suspect it will be a bit more like a single image each day or perhaps several images some days and none on others. I’m not sure. I suspect that photography is also a discipline that benefits from regular work. In the meantime I plan to keep writing essays.
And, for what it’s worth, I seem to be getting a bit more wordy. So far my 2020 essays have been a bit longer than my usual. I have no idea what that means.
