🔔💪🏻🏋️ Ring in the New Year

"Ring" in the New Year literally comes from ye olden days when the church bells would ring to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck.

During the Victorian era (01837-01901), bell-ringing competitions grew in popularity. Practicing ringing a multi-ton metal bell by pulling on ropes created noise and confusion. The solution was to replace the bells with logs. These stand-ins were called "dumbbells", which we still use today.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/dumb-bell

Q4 Writing

In Q4, we published one article, two weeknotes and maintained our newsletter schedule with one ◍ Quarternotes and a ⪮ Good Morning episode each month.


On Newsletter Publishing
https://optional.is/required/2024/12/18/on-newsletter-publishing/

⪮ Good Morning Newsletter Season 3

⁉️🤔 That's Interesting!

We were listening to an interview about copywriting when they mentioned a 01971 paper by Murry S. Davis called That's Interesting!

We tracked down the PDF online. It's pretty academic, but he explains how to make your theories interesting!

We've all been taught about the inverted pyramid method of writing - going from specific to broad, but that doesn't make something "interesting".

"An interesting proposition is one which denies some aspect of the assumption-ground of its audience."

Davis argues that to be interesting, take long-held common knowledge and show how the opposite is true.

📰✍🏻 Betteridge's law of headlines

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

This is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have phrased the headline as a statement. By presenting it as a question, they avoid accountability for its accuracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

See Also: Clickbait

🏢 🕰 Office Hours

Over the last year, we’ve made use of people’s gracious open office hours. We’ve booked sessions with people we admire and had some amazing and informative chats.

Our open office hours are:

• Monday evenings: 21-22:00 UTC for the Americas
• Friday mornings: 9-11:00 UTC for Europe

Hopefully, we’ll be able to reconnect with more old friends, meet new folks, and have more interesting and engaging conversations.

Merch