Sparks – building a list of ideas

Steven Berlin Johnson, author and well-known DEVONthink user, recently described what he calls his spark file. It’s a rambling document with no organization where he stores his hunches and questions. This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, …

Third-Grade Writing Lessons from 1980

My third-grade teacher was infuriating. Memories of 1980 include learning to read using advanced phonics (man-u-fac-ture), struggling with multiplication tables (I still do), and writing sentences using our vocabulary words. Ms. Robinson (no, nothing like that) wouldn’t let us start sentences with the words “I” or “The.” Furthermore, if my memory is churning correctly, our …