Writing

This week’s Trek West 5 podcast will be discussing The Measure of a Man, which contains a (brief) mention of this sonnet, one of the few I’ve actually memorized. Here it is in its entirety:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

I’ve been incredibly under-the-weather the past few days, and just haven’t the energy tonight to put together something interesting, so instead I’m going to punt on this post and give you Philip K. Dick’s How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later – which contains one of my favorite PKD quotes ever:

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Looking online for articles on how to write Executive Summaries (for the content of the previous post), I came across a lot of references regarding the “Executive Summary” section of Business Plans. I’ve included some of them below for future reference:

captureplanning.com had a couple of articles that seemed useful:
‘Executive Summary’ Category at captureplanning.com
The Three Uses of Executive Summaries
Questions to Answer

Executive Summaries in a Nutshell

The one that I finally ended up using to frame my own summary:
How to Write an Abstract

Perhaps the most amusing part about the whole thing is that, upon delivering the 8 page article and the summary I had just sweated over, one member of the audience glanced at it and then said “give me the highlights” – at which point I condensed it even further to the point of a single, spoken paragraph. On the one hand, it made me feel as if I may have wasted some time writing the summary – on the other, if I hadn’t just spent that time putting the summary together, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to summarize the article on-the-spot as well as I did.