Formats›A trace, in three marks

A trace, in three marks

A reusable format for after an encounter. Take it, fill it, use it again — once per session, whenever you have been present with somebody and it mattered.

What this is for

This is a record of your own presence, not of the other person. After a tutorial, a mentoring session, a difficult conversation, a crit — anything where you were with somebody and something was at stake — you write three marks about how you were, and nothing else.

It is not notes on what they said. It is not an assessment of how it went. Those are useful and this is not them. The subject here is you, the witness is you, and nobody else ever reads it.

The reason for three marks and no more is that the honest version of this practice is small. Anything larger becomes a project, and a project about your own attention consumes the attention it was meant to notice. The size is the format. Two or three minutes, within ten minutes of the end, and then you stop.

Where this comes from: a working practice of mine, kept after a much larger research version of the same question was taken apart — the insight survived and the apparatus did not. The two things it rests on are worked out at the Museum of Vestigial Desire. That presence can be mimicked, that the mimicry achieves only marginal success, and that presence stays stubbornly dependent on actually being present — Presence, 2013. And that knowing anything about yourself means devising strategies to defeat your own narrative-producing mind — On Introspection, 2021, which is why the three marks are written before the account has had time to form rather than at the end of the day.

What it protects against is a specific failure with no symptoms. You can be fully occupied with somebody and not present to them — answering well, saying useful things, and performing rather than attending. From the inside that state is almost indistinguishable from the real one, and it leaves no trace of its own. Writing three marks straight afterwards, before the account has had time to form, catches the difference often enough to be worth doing.

The format

WORD      the quality of your presence, in one word

SHAPE     one of your four, and only ever one of your four
LINE      one sentence on what happened

NOT THIS  what it looks like when the trace has become a report

Three marks, and a name for the way it fails.

What each mark is asking

WORD. The quality of your presence, in one word. Not how the session went and not what the person needed — how you were. Thin. Held. Performing. Absent. Steady. The single word is doing something a sentence cannot: it refuses the qualification that would let you off. A sentence about your presence always ends up explaining it.

SHAPE. One of four, chosen once and then fixed. Decide your four before you need them — ● △ □ ✕ will do, or anything with four positions — and never add a fifth. The fixed alphabet is the whole point of this line. A shape you can invent on the day records your mood about the session; a shape you have to choose from four you already committed to forces a comparison with every previous session, which is the only thing here that accumulates. If none of the four fits, take the nearest and let the mismatch stand. That is a finding.

LINE. One sentence on what happened. One. Not a summary of the session and not a plan for the next one — the thing that actually happened, which is usually smaller than the session and rarely the topic. She said the thing at the door. I filled a silence that was hers. We spent the hour on the second question.

NOT THIS. What it looks like when the trace has become a report. This is written once, at the start, and stays the same at the bottom of every entry, so you read your own failure mode each time. Usually one of two shapes: the LINE grows into a paragraph about the other person, or the WORD becomes an evaluation of the session rather than of you.

The rule that is not a line

When nothing registered, write nothing at all. No entry, no blank, no placeholder. A skipped session is not a gap in the record and it is not a lapse — it is the record saying that nothing was felt, which is information about you and is the thing a completeness habit destroys.

This is the rule most likely to be broken, because a run of entries with a hole in it looks wrong. It is not wrong. A trace archive with an entry for every session is a trace archive that has started reporting.

A worked one

WORD      thin

SHAPE     ✕
LINE      Answered a question she had not asked yet, and she took it.

NOT THIS  If the LINE had read "we discussed her project timeline and
          agreed next steps", this would be minutes of a meeting, and
          nothing in it would be about me.

The WORD and the LINE are doing different jobs and both are needed. Thin is the state; the sentence is the one moment where it showed. Either alone would be unusable a month later — the state without the moment is a mood, and the moment without the state is an anecdote.

How to use it

1. Write it within ten minutes. Not that evening. The account of a session begins forming almost immediately and is a different object from the session; ten minutes is roughly how long you have before you are recording the account.
2. Choose your four shapes once, and write them down somewhere you will see them. Then leave them alone. Changing the alphabet resets the comparison and makes everything before it unreadable.
3. Do not read back for months. The traces are worth reading in a run of thirty, not in a run of three. Read them early and you will start writing for the reader, who is you.
4. Keep it in one file, in order, with the date and nothing else identifying. A first name at most. Anybody's name in a record about your own attention is an invitation to make the record about them.
5. Never show it to anyone. Not the person it concerns, not a supervisor, not a co-teacher. The moment it has a second reader, every entry acquires an audience and the WORD starts being kind.

Three ways it goes wrong

It becomes a record of the other person. The commonest failure and the hardest to see, because notes on a student are obviously useful and these are not obviously anything. If three consecutive LINEs are about what somebody else did, the format has quietly changed subject.

Every session gets an entry. The skip rule is dropped first, usually out of tidiness. What is lost is precisely the distinction the practice exists to make, because a session where nothing registered and a session you did not get round to writing up now look identical.

It grows. A fourth mark is added, then a tag, then a monthly summary. Every addition is individually reasonable and the sum of them is an apparatus. If you find yourself designing a template for it, that is the failure arriving on schedule.

Prayas Abhinav. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.

Take a copy: trace-format.md. Yours to alter.