Finally! Looking forward to sending this to my parents after it develops a bit more. They've struggled with communication for years (decades?) now because they can't type using phonetics.
That's exactly my goal! I'm very much interested in supporting people who speak minority dialects. I don't feel that technology should be pushing Mandarin on people.
Thank you for the tip on speeches! I suspect that will help my writing sound more natural too.
As for (2c), I've come up with a similar idea for doing multiple edits. I try to focus on a different writing "axiom" for each iteration. For example, I can cut out adverbs on the first run-through, add metaphor next, etc.
I don't think the main takeaway is about writing by hand. A word processor is fine too. What's important here is the act of "active writing" vs "passive writing".
Franklin's method forces you to create writing (instead of just ingesting it) and then gives you specific feedback on whether you succeeded or failed (through comparison to the original).
The dissect-chunking-integrate-feedback model works everywhere, and what fascinates me is that Franklin figured it out through his own experiments.
I don't mind the concept of a third party hosted document editor, after all I use google docs.
But what does irritate is that the site has dozens of third party scripts, including passing on your email to "intercom" and a bunch of other trackers without hashing it or using a different tracker Id.
So you not only have to trust the content to Draft, you have to trust it to a dozen third parties with which you have no relationship.
And to achieve nothing you can't achieve by setting your preferred text editor to full screen.
Heck set your taskbar to "auto-hide" and notepad.exe can replicate what you've got there.
Hmm interesting, I hadn't thought of looking at the scripts and such, thanks for the heads up. I do like the interface (the distraction-free and Hemingway modes as someone else mentioned) but I don't like the idea of my data being leaked. A desktop-based approach for drafts might make more sense as you say.
I dig Ulysses for the Mac[0]. Its distraction-free mode is very nice, but the organizational tools are there once you need to start stringing together larger pieces of text.
I do wish someone would make a non-OSX version that was as nice.
Have you heard of Scrivener? It's available for both OSX and PC, and I believe there's an iOS version, too. It's really wonderful. The organizational tools are just incredible, and are only as complicated and involved as you want them to be.
I have! I like Scrivener as well and it's very powerful but its "does everything" functionality has led to some bloat in the UI department. Ulysses seems more thoughtfully designed but doesn't have the same breadth of features.
Draftin is a great. I often use the Hemingway writing mode (no backspace or delete). I make the browser full screen, switch off the spell checker, and just write.
My main point was about how Franklin's methods used a lot of tedious overwork. Hand-copying is an illustrative aspect of that, yes, but memorizing the text of an Italian grammar book is of similarly limited value even if you are using Anki and distration-free writing software to do it.
Haha, it's amazing how new you can make your stuff look when you add a filter to it! Just to give you a snapshot, I wore my last dress shirt until my bare elbow was hanging out of a tear in the sleeve.
But yea, as others have mentioned, I am not 'minimalist' in the sense of reducing consumption. I am minimalist in the sense of reducing choices.
Maybe you've already tried it, but I've got a roughly 12x3x2" dopp kit and it's AWESOME. The utility/cognitive load for my dopp kit has to be higher than for any other thing I own.
I think I bought it at Walmart for maybe $20 bucks. It might be the highest EV purchase I've ever made.
Generally, the only places that may regularly need soap are the armpits and groin. So why do we think we need to soap up all over every day?
The same reason we do a lot of unnecessary things: advertising. Soap manufacturers spent many years promoting the idea that unless you bathed daily using soap everywhere you would be more smelly than a skunk and people would shun you.
That's also why we use mouthwash daily, by the way. Listerine was first sold to consumers as a floor cleaner. To boost sales the manufacturer invented the word "halitosis" (because that makes it sound much more serious than "bad breath") and promoted Listerine as the way to prevent it using scary ads proclaiming that you might not even know you have it but your friends will know. It worked, and in under a decade revenue went up by nearly two orders of magnitude.
There's an excellent "Adam Ruins Everything" episode on hygiene that goes over these things and more.
> Soap manufacturers spent many years promoting the idea that unless you bathed daily using soap everywhere you would be more smelly than a skunk and people would shun you.
I have had occasion to be near people who believe as you do on a regular basis, and yes — they have a strong odour. I do not find it pleasant, although I suppose it is not completely and totally unpleasant either. It is definitely present, and not something I would choose to invite into my own personal space.
And whatever one calls bad breath, it can be so bad as to cause one to retch.
I won't propose that modern washing & mouthwash measures are the best preventatives to these issues, but I do insist that these are actual issues.
Yup. Basic idea is hormesis: you WANT the bacteria on your skin, and you are doing yourself a disservice by washing it off. Same deal with gut bacteria. Hell, they even have soap with bacteria IN it now...
