The Good Patrons of 750 Words

6 cups

In celebration of my Pterodactyl badge, I’ve decided to take a moment and leave a short note about how important 750words has become to my workflow.

I am a graduate student working on a dissertation in philosophy. I am the sort of person who needs to write to think. In some of my earlier work, this meant writing endless drafts of papers as I worked out my ideas. This was cumbersome though, as I wrote as if I were writing a paper, and so held myself back from more aggressive claims, worried a lot about sentence structure, etc. The whole point of the exercise was to think, not to write and that processed confused the two.

Writing my Daily 750 has been very helpful precisely because it allows me to distinguish these. When I write about an idea I have, a paper I’ve read, a problem I’ve encountered, or a teaching question I’m wrestling with, I can write freely and unencumbered by style. I write to work out ideas, and getting into the habit of doing this every day has helped me develop ideas that might have been lost on a scrap of paper before, and helped me clarify my positions and arguments before committing them to a chapter draft.

So I raise a cup (or six!) to 750words and to another 200 day streak!