I was trying to explain to a student why tight writing is is important. I started with fractals: is you can write every paragraph so it represent your argument, you’ve written elegantly:
Then I moved onto poetry. See how Bill Holm summarizes the views of those around him cleanly:
A marriage is risky business these days
Says some old and prudent voice inside.
Finally, my student being a CS major and me being a geek, I found this article. Turns out Jonathan Schwartz (Sun’s ex-CEO) said goodbye with a haiku. I’m not going to write about my feelings of abandonment and betrayal at Sun’s sale (growing up at various mid-Peninsula campuses, I have probably eaten more Sun cafeteria food than most new hires do in a year), but I do particularly like the taught verse the ex-CEO used to explain Sun’s sale.
But I loved these haiku error messages even more, and may be a new fan of this micro-poetry blog. And let us not forget that the current President of the European Union (the same group that caused much agony in the Sun community in the last 6 months) blogs his haiku.
And my student? It turns out he uses Twitter, and so I told him to write every topic sentence of every paragraph in his tweet-box on Twitter, and only use topic sentences of less than 140 characters. He may not do it, but I bet his next paper will be sharper.
Inspirational Quote:
Sun sets. I’m not set
to let it go. I’ll take my
last Sun t-shirt now.
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