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All Quotes tagged Work Strategies(21)

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A famous sonnet by William Wordsworth begins, 'Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; / And hermits are contented with their cells; / and students with their pensive citadels.' Wordsworth's point is that what nuns, hermits, and students do is facilitated rather than hindered by the confines of the formal structures they inhabit; because those structures constrain freedom (they remove, says Wordsworth, 'the weight of too much liberty'), they enable movements in a defined space. If the moves you can perform are prescribed and limited—if, for example, every line in your poem must have ten syllables and rhyme according to a predetermined pattern—each move can carry a precise significance. If, on the other hand, there are an infinite number of moves to perform, the significance of any one of them may be difficult to discern. (This is one of the insights of information theory.) That is why Wordsworth reports himself happy 'to be bound / Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground.' It is a scanty plot because it is bounded, and because it is bounded, it can be the generator of boundless meanings. This, then, is my theology: You shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free.

— Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One

BondariesConfinesInformation TheoryLimitsStructureWork StrategiesDifference In The SameConstraints
DecisivenessWork Strategies
Work Strategies

I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me… My writings constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers… As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory — my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.

— Marshall McLuhan, ucdavis.edu

Pattern RecognitionWork Strategies
LimitsWork Strategies
Work StrategiesAphorismsLong-Term Thinking
DistractionsWork Strategies
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Work Strategies