Over the last month and a half or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that I actually don’t know how to read, which is definitely a jarring realization to be having after over 18 years of formal education.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little bit cheeky here. I am not literally claiming to be illiterate or even functionally illiterate, and it would be stupid of me to do so, since clearly I am writing this blog post and have written many other blog posts where I reviewed books. However, one of the things my high school education didn’t prepare me for, and that my four years of training and education in engineering and computer science have completely failed to teach me, is how to both get through and learn from – “learn from” is the key term here – a large volume of readings on a weekly basis.

A while ago, someone in a Discord server I’m in asked how much of the math behind a system you need to know to implement it. I thought it was an interesting question, and I felt qualified to answer it, so I ended up writing quite a lengthy response. It just occurred to me that it might also be useful to other people, so I thought I would clean it up a little bit and archive it here.

I write across multiple genres, but my main genre is Creative Nonfiction, which writers typically refer to as “CNF” for short. Unfortunately, I always end up having to explain what CNF is to people, because the common view of nonfiction seems to be that it’s entirely comprised of informative texts and academic essays (with maybe the occasional memoir slipped in).

Earlier today I was thinking about this, and I thought it would be really funny to place various types of “nonfiction writing” on a graph with labelled axes to prove my point. I present to you the “Nonfiction Spectrum”. On one axis, we have how “accessible” or easy to understand the text is; on the other, we have how “artistic” the presentation of the text is.

Here’s another roundup of some interesting things I’ve come across lately and would like to talk about! As always, I’m sure there’s some great stuff I read but cannot for the life of me remember.

This one is extremely late, since I’ve been incredibly busy and finding time to write has been hard. I think I looked at some of this stuff back in… November? October? Oops. I’ve decided I want to keep these to only 4–5 items per post, so more posts should be coming shortly! There are definitely other things I’ve looked at that I want to talk about.

I just finished a blog post where I discuss things I’ve recently learned about how to read research papers. I almost included this as a point in that post, but I think it’s important enough to warrant its own article.

Here’s the idea: you absolutely should not be reading the sections of a research paper in order.

It took me a while to learn this one – I can’t remember if I first read this advice somewhere, if someone told it to me, or if I reverse-engineered it from advice I got about how to write papers. It doesn’t matter which one came first, really – my point is that I only found this out in a roundabout way through googling and trial and error and harassing people with questions.