Two books I recently finished and want to mention:
Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
Ken Kocienda (Picador)
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
Mary Norris (Norton)
They have some interesting parallels:
- Neither author is primarily a non-fiction writer, but one writes code and the other is a copyeditor, so the right words in the right places are their craft.
- Both books are indeed about craft. It’s more than a job.
- Both books start out in a way that initially threw me, but later serves as important context.
- Both end with the death of a person in the story, for Kocienda it is Steve Jobs, and for Norris it is a fellow copyeditor at The New Yorker, Lu Burke.
- Both copyediting and coding, in these stories, are a combination of individual work and, quite importantly, team effort.
- Both tasks are, on the surface, guided by rules, but yet there is a huge human and creative element in both of these jobs which make them more than a task (thus, craft).
- I was sad to reach the end of both.
My favorite chapter in Kocienda’s book was about figuring out the iPhone keyboard, which really was uncharted territory. My favorite chapter in Norris’ was about dashes. I won’t give any spoilers, each book is a journey worth taking.
One section I will recreate here is Kocienda’s seven items which he uses to describe and summarize the Apple development process (pp. 247-248). I think they work really well for writing, or at least academic writing: it’s craft. Kocienda helpfully includes examples in each item, stories from the previous chapters, I will omit those.
- Inspiration, which means thinking big ideas and imagining about what might be possible.
- Collaboration, which means working together well with other people seeking to combine your complementary strengths.
- Craft, which means applying skill to achieve high-quality results and always striving to do better.
- Diligence, which means doing the necessary grunt work and never resorting to shortcuts or half measures.
- Decisiveness, which means making tough choices and refusing to delay or procrastinate.
- Taste, which means developing a refined sense of judgment and finding the balance that produces a pleasing and integrated whole.
- Empathy, which means trying to see the world from other people’s perspectives and creating work that fits into their lives and adapts to their needs. [For academic writing, I feel this is about the audience.]
