There are many great suggestions in the comments, which are good advice if I were trying to solve the problem of the limits imposed by my antique tablet.
But that's not quite my point.
The comments helped my realize that I actually had a point I was trying to make. And I believe it's a point worth making, if not exactly a point worth reading... Well, anyway the point is:
_Always write to someone._
1. Be the person who is listening
2. and then begin to write
3. Read what you just created, as the person who is listening
_Close the loop._
I've been creating web things since 1995, and it always astonishes me, how rarely anyone tests thier end product. Individuals, small business, contracts, major international brand campaigns -- at every level. It's not 100%, and the tech term of art "eat your own dog food" comes from this, so there's the ability to imagine otherwise, but all too often, we just toss it over the wall and hope it lands somewhere.
Two examples that will stick with me forever:
It's 1998, and we're doing a major corporate brand website. The target demographic is low to mid income pet owners, rural and urban alike. It's literally dog food. The design is done in a gorgeous glass high rise office tower, using $10,000 Macintosh computers with 20-inch displays. The target demographic uses Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, at best 640 x 480 VGA 256 colors, often 32-color palette. There is a testing lab closet with some old beater PCs running Mosaic and AOL, but no one goes in there, Windows is scary those machines are junk! I go in there. I try it. The site is a hypnagogic vomit of color on the limited palette display.
It's 1997, and we're building a technology to create web sites that can be downloaded over a slow dialup overnight, then browsed offline. Look up Marimba Castanet. This isn't that product, but that's the idea... The team works for months on this. In an office. In Silicon Valley. With 100 Mb/s network connections. I'm the only person on my team to go home, dial up at 9600 baud, and give it a shot.
We write for many reasons. How do we switch from writing to organize our thoughts, to writing as compassionate communication? Because they are two different things, and I've been all too often doing the one when I think I'm doing the other.