Comp. of Phil. postcript for Aug. 15

I forgot to say anything about how I’m writing this lecture. It will be the same as usual.

Zero and infinity, I have claimed, are the writer’s two worst enemies. I got rid of the infinity part by narrowing down the topic in my own mind, primarily by trying to imagine what sort of audience it will be and what they will likely be interested in hearing about.

For getting rid of the “zero” part, you have to start outlining. I always start small. For roughly a 15-page lecture (they want a half hour of lecture and a half hour of discussion) three sections seems right.

So that was my first step– choose three section topics that will develop nicely in sequence. That’s what I did on the Cairo Metro a couple of hours ago.

The next step is a fairly humble one: simply create a Word document for the lecture! Put the title up there, and put the section titles below it. Giving the lecture a minimal bit of physical reality is a good way to counter “the zero problem”. I haven’t done that yet, but will do it within the next two minutes.