Writing the Graduation Speech
I wrote this speech differently from the way I’ve written most essays. I obviously put more effort into getting it right than I usually do, but the techniques I used were also different. Most of the time I put a lot of effort into each paragraph as I write it and then barely revisit my earlier paragraphs as I finish the later ones. If I revise them, I usually only reword the sentences. This time, I treated it more like a program. I wrote a draft of each paragraph as quickly as I could, to get something readable quickly. Then, I went back and rewrote whole paragraphs at a time. It seemed to work at least as well, and I wound up with something of a history of what I wrote.
Since I’ve been studying Category Theory recently, I procrastinated by thinking of a mapping between essay-writing and categories. Sort of a category of essays. To specify a category, you have to say what the objects are and what the arrows are. The objects are audience mental states. Or maybe sets of audience mental states. The arrows in the essay category are sentences. They compose into paragraphs. This is true because any given sentence or paragraph needs the audience to be thinking certain things in order for it to make sense, and leaves the audience with some new thoughts. We can replace one sentence with another, or one paragraph with another, as long as they still type-check. Effectively, when we write an essay or a speech, we have some audience we expect, giving us the source of the arrow, and we have some new thoughts we want the audience to be thinking afterward, giving us the target. The work of writing an essay is to find an inhabitant of that type.
I also sent drafts of the speech to a lot of people to critique. Comments that I agreed with, I accepted immediately; ones I didn’t, I argued with. I worry a little that my arguing makes those people less likely to give me possibly-negative comments in the future. On the other hand, I don’t think I could do anything differently. If I don’t argue, I can’t simply accept the proposed changes since I don’t believe in them. I can’t just ignore them because they might have been correct. So the net result is that I argue strongly with some suggestions, I may finish the conversation with the other person thinking I’m annoyingly obstinate, and then I may very well wind up accepting the suggestion the next day. I’m happy to hear suggestions on how to do this better, but it may just be how my brain works.
