Category: Course Notes

Writing Notes: Essay Status as of October 2023

23 December 2023. (was: 19 October 2023)

Notes on where I think the various essays I’ve produced are. This is unlikely to be of interest to others.

Status of Essays

  • 1. Napkin Thief. Unsure. It is a fun story, but not much substance. Not sure what to do.
  • 2+6 A Straight Transect. Nearly done.
  • 3. Mind in the Hand. Final.
  • 4. Body and Mind. Mostly done. Replace lime tree section with exercise at home — retitle as PT. –> I am partway through replacing the lime tree section, but the new section seems a bit boring.
  • 5. Aloha. Unsure. It is a fun story, but not much substance. Not sure what to do.
  • 7. Why I like Hiking. Mostly done. Alter ‘crystal rain’ section. Bring in more Muir
  • 8. Alone Together.
Continue reading Writing Notes: Essay Status as of October 2023

ILSG 2023 Conference Notes

April 23-26, 2023

I attended the Institute of Lake Superior Geology meeting from April 23 to 26, 2023. I provide a brief description of the field trips in my Journal blog entry for May 1. These are notes I made during (and sometimes but not always about) the conference talks.

The conference papers were, for me, something of a mixed bag. Some were a bit too abstruse for me to follow, some ventured in to extreme detail on subjects I didn’t care so much about, but others introduced me to interesting comments, or provided provocative perspectives on what I had imagined were settled matters.

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What is this Rock, 3: Course Notes

What is this Rock, 3

I just returned from a weekend up on the North Shore. K and I went up and stayed at Cove Point Lodge, while I took a 3-day course on North Shore Geology, focusing on the Beaver Bay area. The course was taught by Jim Miller, a retired Minnesota Geological Survey person, and an emeritus professor from UMD: he was a great person to teach the course, both because he was a good and enthusiastic instructor, and because he has spent his career focused on the northern Minnesota in general, and the North Shore in particular. Many of the geological maps of the north shore include his name as cartographer.

This is a laundry list of what I learned — however, there are problems with the images which I have yet to fix.

Continue reading What is this Rock, 3: Course Notes

Things I learned from the 2021 Loft Essay course

16 August 2021

Things to pay attention to:

  • Telling details: One telling detail is preferable to many details
  • Embodiment. Emotions and actions work best when embodied: gaze, gesture, posture, proprioception, proxemics
  • Scenes. Scenes should vary in length, and be interleaved with summaries. This gives rhythm and weighting. Think of a scene as a spotlight. 
  • Language: avoid ‘to be’s. Avoid “is” “are” “have” etc. and limit use of adjectives. 
    “To be” is the weakest verb. Not “He is tall” but “He smacked his head on the door frame”
  • Language: avoid distancing: Avoid habitually using filtering/distancing language such as “I noticed,” “I heard,” “I saw,”  
    (That said, sometimes you may want to use it to distance yourself, as when you are uncomfortable and don’t want to be in it.) 
  • Language: avoid adverbs. Use actions and embodiment rather than adverbs:
    “Yeah,” she said, stroking his bare arm, “that’s what I heard.” vs. “Yeah,” she said gently, “that’s what I heard.”
  • Support reader inference. There is something about readers being able to figure something out on their own that is very rewarding.
  • Revising Tricks: Print it out in a different font. Read it out loud and notice where you stumble, speed up, lag, etc. Replace “to be’s”