“I was having a cheeseburger with my friend and mentor, the writer and documentarian Norm Stahl. I was trying to start my first novel at the time, and I was dazed, confused, baffled, stumped, lost, perplexed, and desperate. Norm happened to have a pad of yellow legal-sized foolscap paper in his briefcase. He took it out and set it on the table between us. “Steve,” Norm said, “God made a single sheet of yellow foolscap to be exactly the right length to hold the outline of an entire novel.” At one stroke, Norm knocked 99.99% of the preciousness out of me. He gave me a key to transforming myself from an amateur to a pro.”
– Steven Pressfield, The Daily Pressfield, location 994
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I have started to use this for everything: lesson plans, book summaries, writing summaries. Its a wonderful example of a the theory of constraints. The limitation creates the method. If you can’t summarise your idea, project or lesson in one page of A4 then perhaps you don’t know what you’re talking about or want to write about.
This method is about simplification. It reminds me of Richard Feynmann’s technique for learning: can you explain it to a child? Children don’t like dense text and big words. They are captivated by good stories and respect those who respect their limited attention span.
One page of A4 is enough to summarise anything
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I have just read the following sentence by Scott Adams. I love it when my quotations start having conversations with each other:
“Write at a Sixth-Grade Level For most kinds of writing—from humor to business—the best sentence is the simplest one that gets the message across. If you use words that a twelve-year-old would understand, you will sound like the smartest person in the conversation. As a bonus, your ideas will stand out more since they’re not buried in word debris. Simple sentences are better in every way. They are more persuasive, easier to remember, and easier for others to consume. Don’t fall into the trap of mistaking long sentences and brainy jargon for genius-level insight”
Scott Adams, Reframe Your Brain, p.73
Conversations With Quotations 