Be explicit!!!

Draw conclusions from the graphs!
Be explicit!!!
Tell people what I expect them to see in the graphs.

(From my daily notes)

Ya gotta love to write

My economy-related posts usually come to me in quick flashes. I try to write them down quickly, at least the key insight and a few of the explorations flooding my brain. It always takes longer then, to find the numbers or develop the graphs that will confirm or confound the initial flash.

And there is always the question to be resolved, of whether the quick flash was an insight or a glitch.

"Uh half hour"

The unit of time is the hour. If you need half of one, it's half an hour. Not "a half hour".

To my ear "a half hour" is crude, raucous, and illiterate. "Half an hour" is almost musical. But I guess the people on TV, news people, don't hear it the way I do.

I don't care. I'm not saying it the way they say it. I don't care.

Sic

What do you do when you want to quote something because it's important for what you have to say, but there is a mistake in the text you want to quote?

You can stick a "[sic]" in there.

That's what I was gonna do. Somebody misspelled the word "ideological". It came out as "idealogical" which was kinda funny and quite distracting.

But does sticking a sic in there make it less distracting? Not really. Just the opposite, I think. It draws attention to the error and distracts the reader from your important message.

But I wasn't thinking that way. I just looked up how to use sic properly. Then I found this example and commentary in Wikipedia:

"Professor Smith stated that 'in the Domesday Book of 1087 [sic]' the king owned more manors than any other person." The professor had given the incorrect date for Domesday Book (recte 1086) and leaving his error uncorrected followed by [sic] emphasises that the error was his. The professor has thus been somewhat ridiculed. A more diplomatic way of quoting the professor would have been to omit the date altogether whilst retaining the substance of his argument or simply to have corrected it in the knowledge that it was a "slip of the pen".

That was useful.

It's okay to make minor corrections to quoted text. Good to know.

Cut to the chase

I've gotten better at trimming loose ends from the end of my posts. Usually, I read thru what I've written until it gets confusing, and then cut off the confusing part. It seems to work pretty well.

But I also have trouble getting to the point. I sorta have to get warmed up first. I write about related irrelevant things like trimming loose ends from the end of my posts, when really what I want to say is:

Find the thing that you really want to say, and just keep that part.

The Hardest Thing to Learn

I don't know how it is in other subject areas. This is about writing about the economy.

Everybody has experience with the economy, and everybody knows quite a lot about it. But not everybody studies it and does graphs and like that all the time, like I do. So I guess I tend to look at things different than most people.

I never hesitate to compare what I think to what anyone else thinks -- Paul Krugman or Adam Smith or anybody. How else am I gonna learn more about these ideas?

But most people don't do that, apparently. Most people decide whose ideas they like best, and they adopt not so much the ideas as the the person whose ideas they are.

I see this most often when I am critical of Krugman. No matter how small the difference between my ideas and his, when I point out the difference people immediately rise to the defense of Paul Krugman.

It always catches me by surprise, because I'm not talking about Paul Krugman. I'm talking about the economy. But it happens again and again, and not only to me. I've seen the same thing on other blogs.

Here's a little irony for ya. If I write a lot about Krugman's ideas, it is because I like them a lot. I am sure -- I am positive -- that the people who jump to defend Krugman against my attacks are totally unaware of this, unaware that I am doing nothing more than finessing his ideas.

Anyway, they're not attacks. They're comparisons.

Nevertheless, that's how people are. I would do better not to attempt to make my writing interesting by "challenging" Krugman.

Hard to learn: People don't identify with ideas. People identify with people.

Pruning

Apparently when I write, I say the same thing in different ways.

When I'm reviewing my work and it seems confusing, very often I can solve the problem by saving the best version of a duplicated thought, and pruning away the other.