The Reproof Blog

Humanity is insatiably curious. Libraries and bookstores and Google and even dusty old encyclopedias have their magnetic pull because deep down inside, we all have an insatiable desire to learn more. …

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We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget. Like a hunter/gatherer stashing their prey, the ideas and the links we stumble upon feel valuable, rare, something worth savi…

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There are some things best left unsaid—something oft-forgotten in a world that moves at light speed. You could publish anything on your site, make the boldest claims and grandest promises. You could t…

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Blinking cursor. Blank page. The tyranny of words that won’t get out of your way. There’s something you want to write, need to publish. There’s something else that’s holding you back. Maybe you’re wr…

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People don’t want your product. They sure didn’t want Zapier, an app automation tool, which on its own is about as useful as a gear—indispensable as part of a machine, merely dead weight without the o…

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It all started in 2004 when John Gruber introduced Markdown as "Email-style writing for the web." Computing started with plain text, typewriter-style, with letters and symbols and little else. You cou…

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You don’t want the second best, the runner up, the thing that’s good enough but not quite great. You want the best. So we Google “best this” and “best that.” The teams that answer those questions stan…

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The first thing you make is always terrible. Inevitably, irredeemably, wad-it-up-and-throw-it-in-the-trash bad. You’ll pick the wrong color, write the wrong opening line, add the wrong ingredient, sta…

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☐ Mark Revisions That was all it said, the box that foretold the death of proofreading marks. Nearly a decade into the word processor wars, Microsoft—already in 1989 “the nation’s largest personal sof…

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The first Office tools came on tablets in Mesopotamia. For there, in the cradle of civilization, they “patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet,” as a Sumerian poem related. Mesopotamians d…

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