communication. community. cognition.
An Experiment in the Process of Writing
I was wondering what Wave might be good for, then it struck me. It might be a window into the process of composition.
I recently wrote a post about writing, which ended up with a clever little turn as I tied everything back to the theme of the chicken and the the egg. It became the Chicken’s Guide to Writing a Better Blog Post.
Like many posts I am remain proud of, it was internally consistent and coherent, but not because it started that way. What you saw was still the finished product, and it is hard to separate the original sparks from the final polish when all you see is a post that is temporally “flat.”
What we need, if we truly want to get into the writing process, is a means of seeing the revisions as they happen. While WordPress does support multiple revisions of documents, there is no easy way to publish them all simultaneously.
Then I thought it might be instructive to do a Wiki, as you can spend all the time you want comparing revisions and seeing how the post evolves. But that would be a pain for the reader, and it would not be as evident what was changing, and why.
So in the hopes there would be a way to not bore the reader, I think I will embark on a little experiment. I think I will start writing posts (about writing) in Google Wave, and use it to track the changes in the document. Then, I ought to be able to showcase the changes, as I move bits and pieces of text around to suit my needs. I can start with the outline of the piece (where one exists, and in the case of this one, you really are getting stream of consciousness here), and fill in the bullets before filling them out.
Still might be a couple of other hurdles to cross, such as how to display it. Right now, I am hoping there is a way to export a Wave in motion – and if there isn’t, I can always play it back as a Jing screencast. Then embed it with the finished post.
Who knows, maybe *I* will learn something about how I write, once I see the playbacks.
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and by the way the smithy is a dirty place, blacksmiths only ~