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Now on The Pastry Box: How to Edit Any Piece

For me, writing and design have often come down to a specific set of rules: define your thesis, then prove it.

(I was one of those jerks that loved writing literature papers by the way. My undergrad’s in English for a reason.)

The biggest problem, of course, is that you start by defining your thesis, go research it, and discover that hey, maybe your thesis is wrong. You refine your thesis, start writing, try to bring all that research into something that makes sense, and realize that nope, thesis isn’t quite right yet. That super-critical point that you believe with your heart to be true? Totally false. And you can try to fake it, but any good reader is going to see that you’re not actually backing your thesis adequately. And that’s going to erode your position, making the entire piece less effective. So you have to loop around again.

(I feel the same way about design. It’s great that the “thesis” of your webpage is “buy this shirt” but when you advertise seventeen other shirts, fifteen features of other products, and a lawn mower, as well as invite your reader to visit three other sites of yours and like you on Facebook, you’re eroding your thesis that “this is the shirt you want to buy”.)

My column on The Pastry Box shifted from the 16th of the month to the 3rd with the beginning of the new year, and I found that although I’d started a long and rambling piece on how different people come with different cognitive tools for dealing with the world, it has no functional thesis. Well, it has five function theses, which is a problem.

So instead, I described how to edit any piece down to one thesis.

Maybe it will help you. Heck, maybe it will help me.

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Now on The Pastry Box: Playing to Win

My post on The Pastry Box this month is a bit more personal than most of the others. Sure, the others were about things I’d learned or experienced in UX, but this one’s about being a writer — a dream of mine since I was very small.

Ironically, it’s a dream I’ve already achieved by being published on The Pastry Box. Still, there’s a very specific goal that I’ve set out to reach this month, National Novel Writer’s Month, and I’m going to get there if it kills me.

…By the way, I’m officially on track, in fact slightly better than on track, in reaching the goal :)

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Now on The Pastry Box: A Small Rant Courtesy of Your Users

Ugh. I spent seven years providing technical support to a major website. For seven years people called me up and said, “this isn’t working” (or more frequently “your website sucks”) and it was not only my job to care, it was my job to fix it if I could.

I would have lasted 10 minutes if my stock answer was “It works for me.”

Of course it works for me. If it didn’t work when we tested it, it wouldn’t have been elevated to production. That doesn’t mean it’s flawless. It means it passed our tests.

Anyway, I ranted about exactly this problem in A Small Rant Courtesy of Your Users over on The Pastry Box this month.

…I really should get around to writing more posts here instead of “just” publishing there.