Giving the Work an Address

A piece of writing can be quite specific while its name tells us almost nothing. The paragraphs hold an evening, a conversation or an observation we wanted to keep. At the top of the document, though, it still says Untitled. Beside it are several other files with equally unhelpful names. Each contains something different. From the outside, there is very little to distinguish them.

Suppose a short journal entry describes an evening when the power went out. There are voices from the street, the sudden absence of the refrigerator’s hum, a window upstairs lighting up before the rest of the building. The writing may already hold everything its author wanted to record. Months later, remembering that evening would not necessarily help them recognize which of several unnamed documents contains it.

A title as plain as October evening, power out gives the entry an address. It brings together words someone might remember when looking for it. The title does not need to be the most interesting sentence in the piece. It has a different job from the sentences inside. A reader can arrive by way of the outage and find that what matters most to them now is the sound of those voices outside.

The Library of Congress makes a practical distinction in its guidance on scanning and saving personal photographs: renaming a file does not change its contents. Descriptive names can help us find files later, and dates in names can help put them in order. The photograph itself remains the same. That distinction is useful for writing too. We can give an entry a clearer name without revising the experience it records.

There can still be some hesitation in choosing one. A page may contain several things we care about, and naming just one can feel like giving the others less importance. Yet a title can be accurate without being exhaustive. The outage may be the easiest way to recognize the entry, even if the writing is also about neighbors, unfamiliar quiet or the shape of a building at dusk. Those details remain available inside it. None has to disappear because another detail helps us find the page.

Day 5 in SineDay is Productivity, with an emphasis on doing, finishing and closing loose ends. Sometimes the useful work left to do is quite small: giving something already made a name that belongs to it. There may be no new paragraph to show for the effort. The value is in being able to tell this piece of writing from the others without opening each one. For a private journal, that distinction may matter only to the person who wrote it.

The entry can keep its ordinary title for years while the reasons for reading it change. Someone might first look for the date of the outage, then linger over a detail they had forgotten writing down. The name has brought them to the right place. Inside, the voices are still in the street, the refrigerator is silent, and one upstairs window has begun to glow.