Great insight ... most Bibles are formatted with thin columns as well. Maybe why it is easier to memorize as well. I got to try this for writing! I don't know why I didn't think of this.
That goes back at least to the Gutenberg Bible, which was two columns per page with generous margins for annotation or hand-drawn decoration.
Write thin to write fast
51–60 of 146 posts
Re: Write thin to write fast
#52If browsers provide a CSS descriptor to limit the column height so that the page contains multiple columns and, if overflows, the overflowed content is shown in the downward direction (not horizontal direction), then maybe I can try this.
Re: Write thin to write fast
#53I could imagine this trick helps. In my experience, when I try to convert a text into tweets, it gets more concise. I'm often baffled how much I can condense information down to 280 characters.
I've found that when I condense an impressive amount of information down to 280 characters, the compression is lossy. People only pick up one tidbit out of the several that I've packed in; or maybe they'll come away with a completely wrong interpretation. Hell, even when I come back to my own writing, I find that it's too clever by half and I can't extract the nuance that I expected to be clear.
Re: Write thin to write fast
#54On a related note: At one point I switched to working exclusively on a laptop and after a while realized that the smaller screen had forced me to write better code. I wrote smaller methods, made smaller files, kept my concepts together, the whole nine yards. I even wrote better tests since that helped me keep my work small. It didn't last; I'm writing this on a 27" monitor, but I think that has more to do with bad la…
You can make the things on screen bigger on the 27” to match laptop.
I'm on a 32" and I don't full screen anything except for the odd video.
Re: Write thin to write fast
#55On a related note: At one point I switched to working exclusively on a laptop and after a while realized that the smaller screen had forced me to write better code. I wrote smaller methods, made smaller files, kept my concepts together, the whole nine yards. I even wrote better tests since that helped me keep my work small. It didn't last; I'm writing this on a 27" monitor, but I think that has more to do with bad la…
Interesting. The programmer equivalent of using smaller plates so you eat less at meals.
Re: Write thin to write fast
#56Re: Write thin to write fast
#57On a related note: At one point I switched to working exclusively on a laptop and after a while realized that the smaller screen had forced me to write better code. I wrote smaller methods, made smaller files, kept my concepts together, the whole nine yards. I even wrote better tests since that helped me keep my work small. It didn't last; I'm writing this on a 27" monitor, but I think that has more to do with bad la…
Re: Write thin to write fast
#58Surprised no mention of distraction free mode, sometimes called Hemingway mode: everything except the current sentence is faded out. Actually how I do most of my bulk writing.
Re: Write thin to write fast
#59Interesting. Scrivener 3 actually defaults to using no where near all the screen real estate for words when writing, keeping it in a thinner column (which I now wonder if has a way to configure it), and I wonder if a similar idea was why they did that.