About

I am Tessa Lindqvist. I copyedit technical documentation for a living, mostly for companies that have just discovered their docs are eight years out of date, and I keep Field Notes on the side. The entries are about sentences: the ones I cut, the ones I couldn’t fix, and the small rules I’ve collected from arguing about them for eleven years.

Most of it starts as a note typed on my phone on the 14 tram, gets rewritten twice in a text editor, and ends up here a week later at about half the length.

Field Notes is deliberately small: a folder, some Markdown files, and a build step that turns them into a website. I don’t run analytics on it and I’d rather not know how many people bounce.

This site is also the starter example for Overprint, the app I write it in. If you opened this folder to learn how Overprint works, start with the welcome post and read forward. The three published posts cover the folder layout, the five fields at the top of every file, and how drafts behave.

The best sentence I cut last year was eleven words long and did nothing. I think about it more than I should.