Tag Archives: Chris Kennedy

The thinking that happens along the way

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Yesterday I re-watched an interview I did with Dean Shareski a couple years ago (and wrote about it). In that interview I lamented that social media and blogging are not what they used to be. I felt a bit of sadness thinking about how rich the conversations were that we had ‘back in the day’… When I’d post something on my Pair-a-Dimes blog and full conversations would happen in the comments and on Twitter, and how this would sometimes even inspire another blogger to write their own post… and this is one of those posts.

From Chris Kennedy’s blog post, Building Our Noticing Muscles:

“After my recent post about What We Notice, my friend Dean Shareski left a comment that challenged me to write some more on the topic. He wondered how much of our ability to notice the little things is inherent and how much is learned. He suggested that noticing, like delight, requires us to pause long enough to appreciate what might otherwise pass us by. And he wondered if we could actually build our noticing muscles.”

Later in the post, Chris wrote a section titled, “Thinking in Blog Posts”. It starts:

“Writing this blog has had a similar effect, although in a different way.

After more than 15 years of writing Culture of Yes, I often find myself thinking in blog posts. I will see something happening in a school, hear an interesting comment in a conversation or read something that makes me curious. I wonder about it. I want to know more. Sometimes I start connecting it to other things I have seen or experienced.

This post is a good example. It began with a comment I could easily have read, appreciated and moved past. Instead, it stuck with me. Many of these ideas go nowhere. They never become posts. And that is fine. The value is often in the thinking that happens along the way.”

Thanks to Chris, I now realize that it wasn’t so much the conversations themselves I enjoyed about the old days of blogging, it was the thinking that happened along the way. And that hasn’t disappeared for me, I just find it in different places. It took a post on ‘noticing’ to help me notice what I couldn’t see. I was stuck on the ideas of lost discussion on blogs, lost engagement on social media, and didn’t notice that I still find these things. I still have my thinking changed by friends, and bloggers like Chris and Dean. I still have my thinking changed on social media, but more likely on TikTok rather than on Twitter.

For years I’ve felt like we passed the golden years of blogging and something was missing. Now I can see that while things changed, I’m still finding ways to push my thinking, and inspire my writing. I feel like I’m seeing both the past and present with new eyes, noticing the differences without placing judgement that ‘things were better back in the day’.

Chris ends his post (well worth reading) thinking about schools and how we need to slow things down sometimes so that students can notice things too. I feel this. I read the post this morning, started ‘thinking in blog posts’ and wondering how to put these ideas together, but I needed time to let it brew in my brain, for me to notice the connections I wanted to share. And so this post became about the thinking along the way, and not just about the nostalgia of the old days of blogging.

I owe Chris and Dean gratitude for helping me to reframe my thinking, and notice that while the sharing, engagement and connections have changed, there are still many wonderful ways that my thinking is challenged. I need not feel remorse for the loss of the way things were… there are a lot a great ways to excite and inspire my thinking and blogging today.

My blog writing

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I just read Chris Kennedy’s ‘The AI Crutch’ where he admits that he relies on AI to ‘sand the rough edges’ of his writing. He goes on to say, “That may be one of the more interesting unintended consequences of AI. We spend a lot of time asking whether it will make us better writers, worse writers, faster workers or lazier thinkers. The subtler question is whether it makes us less comfortable deciding that something is already good.”

He linked to Dean Shareski’s post, ‘Delight #39 Spelling Errors’. Dean is more comfortable with the rough edges, and he states, “When I find a spelling error now in an email I’m kind of delighted. It means there’s a real human writing this. A human who was busy, in a rush, attending to other human things and clicked send before they fully read everything. I can’t ever remember being bothered by this but only delighted.”

I have enjoyed reading the writing of both Chris and Dean for about 20 years. I know their styles, and while Chris will use AI (and other people) as editors, and Dean is more like me, writing and posting with rougher edges, both of them have a voice and style that I enjoy… and more importantly, they share perspectives and insights that help me learn and grow.

I’m not remotely critical of their writing strategies. I love their writing styles. I don’t care if Chris improves a paragraph with the help of AI. I’d never think critically of Dean if I saw a typo or grammatical error in his writing because he didn’t use AI. Both of them have a distinct voice that I want to read.

I’m more like Dean. In a post like this one, I’ll publish with zero AI assistance. But occasionally I’ll write a paragraph, rewrite it, get frustrated with my inability to sound clear or succinct, and I’ll throw the paragraph into the LLM I’m playing with, (I only have free versions now so I bounce around). Unlike Chris, I won’t disclose my AI use at the end of my post. I also use it for definitions that I share and again, don’t always quote or identify the use of AI.

I’m not trying to be deceptive, in the past, I would do the same with a dictionary and not necessarily state where that information came from. I’m not writing academic papers, and I’m not being graded. Although sometimes I’m being judged.

I remember an example on my Pair-a-Dimes blog. I was writing about working with students on a project and a student made an error of about 100 years and I said she was off by a millennia. A commenter not only corrected me, but questioned whether I should even be a teacher if I’m going to make a mistake like that. In a subsequent comment I thanked him for correcting me.

I see the appeal of using AI as an editor. I probably would do so if I was writing for someone else, or if I was being paid, or had a specific audience where minor errors would matter. But I’m outputting a blog post every day, and I already find it hard to find time for longer posts like this one. Adding an AI assistant or editor would do two things for me, it would stretch the time required to write, and it would compete with my personal creativity and desire to write. So, for now, I don’t use much (if any) AI.

Besides, I break a lot of writing rules.

I’ll write a single sentence paragraph. I’ll write a one word sentence. Frequently. I absolutely love to use ellipsis… way more than they are required. An AI editor would have a field day correcting my writing idiosyncrasies… and sanitize my writing style. That would make me a different writer, but would my writing be better? Grammatically, yes. More enjoyable to read? I don’t know? Maybe. What it won’t make me is more likely to write every day.

So, you’ll catch the odd spelling mistake, although I tend to find those. What’s more likely is that you’ll catch a wrong word. You’ll find a ‘do’ instead of ‘so’ or heaven forbid a ‘then’ instead of ‘than’.

‘Fir’ the record, (left that in as an honest example that actually happened), I do reread my posts before publishing. However I’m notoriously bad at (or rather good at) seeing the word I think I wrote and skipping over the errors obliviously. If you want to judge me for that, it’s your prerogative, but do me a favour… please tell me. Despite everything I just said, it still bugs me that my writing has errors. I appreciate and never feel slighted by someone helping me out with a correction.

~

Ps. I use AI a lot to create the images that go with my blog posts. Again, I don’t usually state this anywhere, but I try to add a consistent style to them, and believe the use is obvious enough that it doesn’t need stating. If it was a human artist I’d feel obligated to give credit, but I feel no such obligation with AI’s trained on humans and not giving them credit.

This was my prompt I put into Bing’s Copilot for this post’s image: “Draw a stylized, abstract, watercolour of a piece of writing with many errors being corrected like you would see on a term paper of a C+ student. However, make it such that you can’t actually read any of the writing, the words should be a little bit blurry and impossible to read, but the corrections should look quite clear in red ink.” … and I quickly edited out the ‘C+’ grade it added in the top right corner.

Streaks and hard things

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I read Chris Kennedy’s post this morning, ‘Still Running – A Long Read’. It might be long, but for anyone who uses streaks to make a commitment, it’s a great read.

This is my comment. I think each of the points will eventually be a post on their own, but for today, I’ll leave them as I wrote them:

Two thoughts come to mind.

1. Our streaks are part of our identity. They don’t define us, we are defined by the act of keeping them.

2. Do hard things. The effort is its own reward. I don’t know anyone with a hard-to-keep streak who isn’t also doing well in other aspects of their lives, and ‘crushing it’… A life with intentional hard things begets a life where challenges are met and overcome rather than seen as barriers and limitations. 

There might be a reason to stop in the future… but until then the streak will keep streaking.
💪😄👍