What’s our five-paragraph essay?

29 Days Ago

The article I’m linking to below is about AI — wait don’t run away. It made me actually think about: What is the purpose of the five-paragraph essay? How does one write such a thing—what exactly am I doing when I go through the soul-sucking process of doing it?

So you don’t have to read the short, linked article… but I recommend it.

The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to compose a simple thesis and defend it in a methodical, easily graded package. It’s literature analysis at its most basic, and most rigid, level.

~ Emma Camp, from Rethinking the 5-Paragraph Essay in the Age of AI

Back to the question in my title:

In podcasting, what is our five-paragraph essay?

The five-paragraph essay is a blunt tool, sure. But it is clearly one, important but small, piece of a large puzzle called “learning to write well.” You do it very early in “learning to write well” and then you leave it behind.

What is our five-paragraph essay?

Any one of the following could be our five-paragraph essay…

  • Write a terrific, single, “hook sentence” from a podcast episode.
  • Write a paragraph of 3-5 sentences from a podcast episode.
  • Find at least one quotable portion from a podcast episode.
  • Write a list of takeaways in a specific style and with specific formatting.

Why do I say those things? Because once I understood how to do them by hand, turning to tools like AI is not cheating. The AI does a solid B+ (ref article above) job, which I can then finish to my A-level.

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Good questions

September 1

You can’t say that it’s a question of national peculiarities or even entirely political peculiarities. I mean, I think when the technological and applied scientific means are developed they just tend to be used. I mean, I think one can say that the whole history of recent times […] shows that if you plant the seed […] it grows and it tends to grow according to the law of its own being, and the laws of its being are not necessarily the same as the laws of our being.

~ Aldous Huxley, from 1961: Aldous Huxley on the power of TECHNOLOGY!

It’s interesting to hear an author speak about his own ideas. I’ve read Brave New World and a selection of his essays (Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow). That short video—I’m linking to YouTube, I hope I don’t regret that in another decade ¯\_(ツ)_/¯—contains a few questions; Huxley presents more questions than answers. And they’re just as relevant more than half a century later.

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100 issues of my “7 for Sunday” email

August 28

As some of you know, I write a weekly email that isn’t related to my podcasting efforts. On Sunday, Sept 1, issue 100 of 7 for Sunday will go out. (See https://7forsunday.com to sign up or to simply read any issue.)

From the first issue of 7 for Sunday, I’ve always wondered if I’d make it to 100, and I’m glad I stuck with it. Some weeks it was a right struggle to get it done. In a very real sense, knowing there were readers out there gave me a goal to get through some dark days. Yes, external validation is not a great idea. But also, the life preserver that saves you is necessarily thrown by another.

Thanks to a suggestion from 7 for Sunday reader Wayne, the centennial issue is about books. 7 books, of course. Each book is presented with bibliofervor (the urge to leap out of one’s chair, race to find a friend, and press a book into their hands, see Issue № 60.)

Sometimes people express amazement at all that I get done—

Please realize that I struggle just as much as everyone does to create. And, boy howdy!, do I hope that any part of anything I ever do somehow helps you, in even the slightest way, to move forward!

I appreciate your time and attention, and I don’t take it for granted.

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Benevolence

August 22

Benevolence and self-direction (described below) are usually near the top of the values we all share. Each of us also has an internal hierarchy of values, where we rank our values based on those we find extremely important to those that don’t really motivate us at all.

~ Chris Bailey, from There are just 10 basic values

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Benevolence—in my opinion—only pops up on our radar once we have enough time, energy and resources. Whether or not it’s clear in that moment, that’s because we, for the first time, manage an honest look back and actually realize all the places where we’ve received help from others. So that’s nice for ourselves, but also for the entire human race.

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Decide

August 21

Decide! There is nothing in the world so pitiable as an undecided man, who wavers between two feelings, hoping to reconcile them, and does not understand that nothing can unite them.

~ Goethe

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Victims of our own technology

August 20

Just a cou­ple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweet­ed out a video pro­mot­ing, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest prod­uct we’ve ever cre­at­ed.” The response has been over­whelm­ing, and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive: for many view­ers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crush­ing a heap of musi­cal instru­ments, art sup­plies, and vin­tage enter­tain­ment into a sin­gle tablet inad­ver­tent­ly artic­u­lat­ed a dis­com­fort they’ve long felt with tech­nol­o­gy’s direc­tion in the past cou­ple of decades. As the nov­el­ist Hari Kun­zru put it, “Crush­ing the sym­bols of human cre­ativ­i­ty to pro­duce a homog­e­nized brand­ed slab is pret­ty much where the tech indus­try is at in 2024.”

~ Colin Marshall, from Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

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Setting aside the marketing brouhaha, I was gobsmacked by the phrase, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized brand-slab […]” Yes, “homogenized brand-slab” is brilliant and feels like a line of dialog from THX-1138. But I was really fish-hooked by the “symbols of human creativity” part. I talk a lot and often these days about creativity, but I’d never really considered the question: What are symbols—images, place holders, iconography—of creativity?

Because it doesn’t seem to make sense to me why a paint brush, or a trumpet (for example) represent creativity. It’s the mind of the person that does the creativity part… and so: What are symbols of creativity?

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I wish

August 18

I wish when I was younger I knew what I know today, what I feel like today, a kind of ease with myself. Because when you’re younger you are much more intense and everything’s much more important and you look back and you think, “Oh what was that all about?” Nothing is that important, just live your life because we’re here so briefly.

~ Anthony Hopkins, from Anthony Hopkins

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Oh good, it’s not just me who thinks this. Because, if I could take that knowledge with me, I’d really like to again be the age I was, when I thought I’d surely have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now.

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Tic-toc?

August 16

When a person relies heavily on the clock to determine what to do and when to stop, research suggests they might also have a looser relationship with their own sense of control. This is because they look towards an external cue to guide their actions, according to Sellier, and that external cue, rather than something within them, is what seems to control the world around them. Event-time people appear to believe, more than clock-time people do, that their actions make a meaningful difference in determining what happens to them.

~ Shayla Love, from Is it better to live in ‘clock time’ or ‘event time’?

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This feels closely related to my point above about shifting my focus to longer time frames. I definitely use clock-time a lot. How would I go about being intentional about choosing one style over the other? I suppose simply asking myself: Is this thing better done in clock-time or event time? Because my default is clock-time.

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What will change your mind?

August 14

What are you working on? When will you change your mind? What can you learn, what can you challenge?

~ Seth Godin, from https://seths.blog/2024/07/what-are-you-thinking-about/

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As is often the case, Godin asks really good rhetorical questions. Me? In recent weeks I’ve been challenging myself to shift my focus to longer timeframes. I’ve reached a level of sophistication where—give or take—what I do on any given day does not matter; I don’t go off the rails. What I do, is get anxious about “all the things” when I get lost thinking about too many things.

Instead of hyper-focusing on the right-now, I need to zoom out. What I just accomplished moves me towards a goal. Yes, even if I just blew off some scheduled thing to go play outside; That moves my health forward energizing me for another day. And each day making some progress is just exactly the right thing to be doing.

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13th birthday

August 13

I go to great lengths to build processes which remind me of my past. This year, I’ve decided to start posting to remind myself of this blog’s birthday; August 13, 2011. Today is 13 years, and 4,841 posts.

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Filed and lost

August 12

Taking notes on the books I read was a great start, but it wasn’t enough. It did me no good to leave those notes sitting in a software program like a musty filing cabinet in the basement, never to see the light of day again.

I realized if I wanted to benefit from my reading, I needed to engage with the books I read on a much deeper level. I needed to make something out of them. Otherwise, I would continue to passively consume information with no lasting memory of what I learned.

~ Tiago Forte, from The Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books

Has anyone noticed that’s what I’m attempting to do with all my blogging and writing? Shirley, that’s obvious. (It’s not obvious, and don’t call me Shirley.)

I’ve always deeply loved movies. I was raised (on hose water and neglect) in the era when going to a movie was special. Remember when you had to use the phone (with a rotary dial, mounted on the wall) to call the theatre and listen to a looooong recording detailing what was playing and when? I could tell you so so so many stories about going to the movies. In more recent issues of 7 for Sunday, I’m feeling less inclined to stomp down the inside-joke movie references. If you find them even half as enjoyable to read, as I do to write them, then we’re both better off. I’m pretty sure that my recalling and retelling of all those stories about and around movies makes the entire movie experience more fun; yes the experience during the movie, but also all the stuff around it too.

No, I’ve not lost my own plot. Forte’s point about how to benefit from what one reads is the same thing. If you want to hold on to whatever it was that you’ve gotten from a book… you have to integrate it with the rest of your ongoing, lived experience. You have to go around telling the story of who gave you the book, what the book means to you in the context of your entire life, and what you think your interlocutor might get from it (like this, this, this, this, this, this or… you get my point.)

And as soon as you realize that’s fun for movies, and great for books, you should wonder if it could be a super-power for self-improvement if you could share the contents of your mind, with yourself, in that same fashion. Two suggestions: Start journaling immediately after reading this issue of 7 for Sunday, so you can then begin in a year, to regularly review your journals.

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