Every day, I battle three devils.
These devils are Laziness, Impatience, and Pride.
I fight Laziness by researching completely, thinking carefully, and writing constantly.
I fight Impatience by striving always for quality over quantity.
I fight Pride by remembering how distant I am from my betters and how foolish my mistakes have been and will be.
May God grant me the strength to repay even the tenth part of the debts I owe to those who have helped me.
My work stands as a testament to their generosity.
Proverbs:
Be thick-skinned.
Tell a story.
Good writing takes effort. If it's easy to write, it's hard to read.
If you get a C!, ask what that person liked about your writeup.
Don't complain. If there's something you can do about it, then do it. If not, it's none of your business.
Be polite.
Did you check your spelling?
Let your penultimate draft sit for twenty-four hours before revising and submitting it.
Cite your references.
My koan is this: what value do nodeshells add to the database?
- A nodeshell is a place that information gathers around.
- If a nodeshell is likely to attract informative or creative work to it, it should stay.
- Some nodeshells serve only as a place to hang softlinks to nodes where the real juice is. This kind of nodeshell should stay, even though it may not itself attract work to it.
- A nodeshell with a misspelling should probably die.
- A joke nodeshell should only stay if it's funny.
What I vote on:
- I use "Random Node" exclusively to choose the nodes I vote on.
- Once I get to a random node, I vote on every writeup in it. If I don't have a strong opinion about a particular writeup, I make myself have an opinion and vote on it anyway.
- If "Random Node" offers me a daylog, I don't vote on it. Those writeups have enough votes.
- I do not vote on writeups from group accounts like "Jargon". Jargon isn't going to do anything differently no matter how many votes he gets.
- I vote down non-original work, even if blessed by the copyright gods. E2 needs writers, not typists.
- I vote down factual writeups where the author spent less than five minutes researching the facts.
- I vote down narrative writeups where the author had no insight into the story.
- I vote down fiction writeups that do not make me mad, sad, glad, or afraid.
- I vote down tone-deaf poetry.
- Short writeups are fine... if there's nothing more to say.
- I vote down writeups with persistent spelling, capitalization, or grammar errors.
Even if a writeup breaks every rule, I'll still vote it up if it's good. But it had better be good.