Friday, March 18, 2016

Control-A (03/18/16)

File- New- Blank Template.
Write a paragraph or two.
Have a brand new idea that requires you to start over again.
Ctrl A. Ctrl X.
It's gone. It's that easy.

Keyboard commands are very useful for certain projects. If you write as much as I do, you start to pick up on the little things you can do. I just press a few keys to use italics in the middle of a sentence without having to move your mouse. If you have a conversation inside a character's head that you use italics for, this becomes very useful very quickly. 

This includes Ctrl A. It's the command for "select all". I find this one useful for moving an entire document on Google Drive to another format or selecting an entire work that I decide I don't like to easily delete.

I'm sure most of us would appreciate a lot of these commands in real life. Put a phrase in a conversation in bold lettering so the person you're talking to realizes how important it is to you. Undo the last thing you said to someone. Redo something that you just got rid of because you changed your mind and you want it back. Delete the spiderwebs in your house's attic so you don't have to keep finding your way through them. Intentionally save a certain phrase or idea in your brain so you make sure you won't forget it.

Ctrl A, however, is a little different. There isn't an obvious use for just selecting all of something- you'd need to do something else with it. You could select the entire universe, but that wouldn't make you the ruler of it all. You could select every word in the dictionary, but that doesn't mean you'd know them all. It wouldn't even help your cause in a vote because the person you'd end up supporting everyone, even those you don't like. It would be a rebellion against the system- Them: "Choose one."  You: "I choose all!". Also, if it's a competition in which you want to support everyone, like a drawing contest for kids, you could make everyone feel appreciated.

If you think a little less literal and take Ctrl A as an analogy, you still wouldn't have a good use for it. People don't like being generalized into stereotypes, so selecting all of a certain crowd and expecting all of them to work together would be disastrous. We actually do this in real life fairly often. We don't support one person with a certain job, hobby, or set of genes, and we select all people with that same job, hobby, or set of genes and make generalizations about them. It's human nature.

So... yeah. Food for thought. Any moral of this you can probably come up with on your own. Then again, I may be generalizing about people who read this, and now we're back to where we started. Literally.

File- New- Blank Template.
Write a paragraph or two.
Have a brand new idea that requires you to start over again.
Ctrl A. Ctrl X.
It's gone. It's that easy.

4 comments:

  1. I love this! Not sure if I used this idea when you were there or not, but once had my students pick one button to use on their lives: rewind,fast forward, pause, record...made for some very critical thinking! Love the idea of being able to apply Ctrl-Z!

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    1. I don't think I was old enough to write one, but I do remember seeing them hanging up in the hallway for some time.

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  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    1. I don't think you noticed, but it had the same comment twice.

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