Use your sharp knife
Let curiosity make the meal
Some of us have a Zoodler in our kitchen. A single-use tool that turns a sturdy zucchini into a springy pile of vegenoodles. A zoodler is what Food Network star Alton Brown used to call a “unitasker”: a tool built to produce one specific outcome.
Unitaskers bring the promise of convenience, ease, dependability, and saving time (so we can spend it elsewhere). To give us this time, they remove something else: freedom. Unitaskers leave little room to stray from their intended use. They also ensure that the output will be uniform.
Writing tools can be like this. Frameworks, templates, and style guides increase convenience and uniformity. They ensure consistency when writing for global audiences. They enable a large team of writers of varying skills to speak in a unified voice. In these respects they are great, and deserve an easy to reach spot in your content kitchen.
But, on the other hand, these tools remove possibilities too. They enable speed by giving you the answers up front. When you use tools that automate your output, you rely less on the skills that make you a writer.
Writing is an act that takes your whole body.
As writers and guides, the thing that keeps your knife sharp is curiosity. Curiosity led a writer to add the words, “Your photos will appear here when you save them” to an empty screen, instead of leaving the screen blank. With that leap, a new UX pattern was born for empty states. Curiosity leads us to examine if words alone can solve bad designs (it can’t). It helps us propose a pivot - to use language and information design in a new way.
It’s hard to be curious when you already know the outcome.
When you want to be present with the work you must put down the plastic spiralizer and pick up your sharp chef’s knife. Your sharp knife can tackle any writing challenge, while a template can only handle a certain size-and-shaped input. Your sharp knife requires more skill, time, and trust but it can do unimaginably inventive things. It can turn a carrot into a rose. It can turn gunk into prose.
Your skills sharpen the more you press them to the whetstone and grind, but your unitaskers grow obsolete quick. So, use the Zoodler when you need to crank out a certain end result. For everything else, let your skills, your innovative thinking, and your powerful perspective take you to places you might not expect.
Use your sharp knife.
Excellent! 👌🏻