Fleeting thought

I’m sitting in the dark, waiting for my son to fall asleep. By the lack of movement in his bed it seems like he already did fall asleep but I will take a few moments to wait and write an entry to this journal.

I just had a fleeting thought. While I was typing and in the back of my mind thinking about the sentence structure, and how bad the structure is, and through that ended up thinking about Edward Gibbon’s style—through this chain of thoughts I arrived at another thought, that I want to try to retype Gibbon’s work. I knew there was this online tool that allowed you to do just that — retype famous works, but I couldn’t remember its name. Now I know— it’s called TypeLit.io.

“The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.” – (Pinker, 2014, p. 24).

“The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world”–(ibid)

The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients…

The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth.

The writer knows the truth before putting it into the words.

The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of conversation.