The Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki
For people who'd like to post to this wiki, here are some guidelines for how to participate:
| • | This probably goes without saying, but please actually read Personality Type: An Owner's Manual. |
| • | See Exegesis Basics. |
| • | Edit to make pages more interesting, more clear, more thought-provoking. Do you think that sticking an opposing idea into the middle of a paragraph as if it's part of the original idea makes it clearer***? Me, neither. Develop each idea as clearly and persuasive as you can, usually separately from other ideas. Note that the clarity and interestingness of a page is different than whether you agree with it. "Edit to make pages clearer" is not the same as "edit to make pages say only things you agree with." See below for basic good writing tips. |
| • | Avoid writing in the first person (first-person declarations). Make your comments about the subject matter and not about yourself. For example, "Hypothesis: XYZW types tend to do ABC" is better than "I think XYZW types tend to do ABC." Ideas about Lenore Thomson's stuff are on topic; declarations that you think them are not. Without first-person writing, everyone can offer pros and cons of each hypothesis and we are all doing it cooperatively instead of forcing anyone to back down off of a claim they made. Here there is no shame in proposing a hypothesis that ultimately turns out to be wrong. Your job is not to be right, it's to say something interesting. Exception: First person is OK if you're relating an anecdote or expressing uncertainty (like asking someone else for clarification). |
| • | Please avoid making remarks about the other participants, especially what you think their type is. It's hard enough to share ideas about this topic without getting into arguments about who is what and trying to paint each other one way or another. The host (Ben Kovitz) will delete type guesses about participants on this wiki. Making type guesses about famous and fictional people is eagerly encouraged, though! |
| • | Put short remarks, small disagreements, tangents, and back-and-forth conversations toward the end of a page. Keep the beginning of each page coherent so it can develop a single idea in full, without interruption. |
| • | It's OK to let a page get a bit messy and to occasionally violate the rules above. When a page gets too messy, you or someone else can have the joy of cleaning it up. You often learn a lot this way, even just converting first-person prose to prose that's only about the subject matter. Then again, some pages will just permanently suck, and that's OK, too. |
Your home page:
| • | Please make a page about yourself, with your own name as the title (for example, Ben Kovitz). On your home page, you are invited to write in the first person and to say how much you like or dislike other people's writing, or anything you want to tell about yourself. We especially invite you to post your email address (possibly in a spammer-proof form) so people can talk with you off-wiki. |
| • | Using your real name is preferred, including both first and last name. This is a friendly and scholarly forum, and we're all adults here no matter our chronological age. If you must use an alias, try to make it sound like a real name. |
Disagreements:
| • | When there is a disagreement, we resolve nothing. We leave both ideas stated as clearly and persuasively as possible. Doing the best possible job of expressing each idea may require putting them in separate sections on a page or on separate pages. |
| • | Remember, this is a collaborative writing forum. We try to fill pages with interesting ideas, written up clearly and persuasively. If you read something you disagree with, that means that you have a new idea to post--somewhere else. Resist the temptation to interfere with the expression of ideas that you think are wrong (e.g. by interrupting the flow of thought in a paragraph or page). Let the wrongness of the idea lead you a new and better idea, and to an enlightening way of expressing it. Focus more on presenting ideas than on refuting them. |
| • | When you give an opposing idea or reasons against an idea, label that somehow with a heading: "Against this hypothesis," "An alternate hypothesis," etc. |
| • | If you can find a clearer, more persuasive way to write something that's already been posted, edit it to make it clearer and more persuasive. Sometimes two very different ways of expressing the same idea works best: one after the other, or each on a separate page. |
| • | If you have a dispute not about the subject matter but about how best to express it, work it out with the other person. Use email, even. You may have to compromise. Nothing you post here is "yours"; anyone may edit it. Sometimes that means text will get a little worse than if you wrote it all yourself, but oh well, that's the price of collaboration. |
Basic good writing tips, particularly appropriate to our topic:
| • | When you use Terms with Nonobvious Meanings, flesh them out with concrete examples. "ESTJs who don't develop their secondary function are in danger of falling into inferior introverted feeling" is gibberish on its own, and it's virtually impossible, without clarification by example, to tell if your interpretation of that matches someone else's. Your own understanding of what you're saying might even become clearer if you write more concretely. Let's always aim for clear, sharp prose even if we don't always succeed. |
| • | In the words of G. Polya, "The first rule of style is to have something to say. The second rule of style is to control yourself when, by chance, you have two things to say; say first one, then the other, not both at the same time." |
--Your host, Ben Kovitz
See also: Type Guess, Type Guesses and the Definition Problem.
(Please don't edit the above text. If you'd like to complain or comment, please post it below or email me (mailto:bkovitz@acm.org), so people don't get confused about what the host has requested vs. what other people have requested.)
Hi Ben. Great site, and I hope to contribute off and on. However, I don't know the technical means of contributing new pages, and more specifically, how to create my own homepage, as you suggest. How does one create a 'new' page? Have I missed an obvious link? --Michael J Pastor
Glad to have you with us, Michael. Check out the Sandbox for the answer to your question. --James
Hi, Michael! One way to create a new page is to just type into your browser the URL that the page would have if it existed. Whenever someone tries to access a page that doesn't exist, the wiki just displays an "edit" page for them to create it. Another way is to edit an existing page and add a link to the new page, like this: Michael J Pastor. Save that page, click the link, and (in effect) you are entering the URL of a page that doesn't exist, so the wiki shows a blank edit page. Have fun! --Ben Kovitz
*** Yes, actually I sometimes do. Dialogical critique (Plato, etc...) and related styles of communication (margin notes, etc....) do sometimes help, especially when they are immediately responsive (critically, or not) to that paragraph. Breaking out the information would be contra-productive (getting lost in links or misremembering what it's supposed to be a response to). --Robert Evans
Yeah, it can be tough to explain an opposing idea and keep the relation to the original idea clear. This is part of the challenge of collaborative writing.
One technique is to briefly summarize the idea that you're opposing. Summaries are much better than direct quotations (or interruptions) because they provide a check that what you think you're arguing against is what the other person was trying to say. Even better than that, though, is to just explain your idea without referring to or summarizing the idea you're opposing. Make your new idea interesting and persuasive on its own.
The *** technique that you just invented sounds like a good idea, too, though!
P.S. I've been thinking about adding a marginal-notes capability to the wiki. That might help. No promises about when I'll put it in, though. I'm completely swamped with math classwork at the moment (24-Feb-2005).