Just a quick one today. I spent the morning making sure my audio equipment was working for a lecture capture I was doing and it ended up taking up my writing time. As I said on Monday, under ordinary circumstances I would just let it go and not write at all today. But the whole point of this exercise (for me) is to loosen things up a bit. So I’m just going to jot down the little idea I had thought to write about. I may expand tomorrow.

In order to develop my empathy for people who are learning how to write effectively, I’ve given myself two things I’m not good at to do with my hands on a regular basis. I’m composing a short piece of music on the piano and practicing it, and I’m drawing a picture of my hand in various positions. I spend only a few minutes every day on each and, in addition to the little improvements I’m making, it is developing my sense of the difficulty people have when training their skills. Like I say, I’ll write some more about this later, but, today, I just want to say that it’s a good idea to work at a manual skill every day. It’s good, I think, for the brain too.

There must be some science that supports this somewhere. But for now I’m happy to assert it on the basis of a hunch.