Essay

When someone says your writing lacked substance do they mean that you didn’t write enough? Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Published author, lifelong reader. Updated Nov 2, 2014 I agree with others that it usually means lack of depth or import. Here’s an example: let’s say I’m writing about how to be happy…

There’s so much sadness in the world. We need to find the joy in our lives. Too many of us wallow in misery when we should be reveling in this beautiful world. So don’t dwell on the bad stuff! Think positive!

What have I actually said there? That too many people are too often sad, and that they think sad thoughts instead of happy ones? Well, as Queen Victoria said to the chimney sweep, “No, duh!”

When our thoughts are dark, we should try to make them merry? Okay, but that’s just a restatement of the problem. How can we get rid of the bad thoughts and focus on the good ones? Riddle me that, Batman!

Instead of giving readers anything surprising, challenging, entertaining, or useful to chew on, I’ve fobbed them off with five sentences that are writerly equivalent of styrofoam peanuts. Readers dig through the box, tossing packaging onto the floor, looking for the actual contents, and find … nothing.

It’s not a matter of length. Tell it to me long; tell it to me short; just tell me something I didn’t know!

I think, like most things about writing, the answer lies on a continuum. I think the interesting question is, how much violence do you do to the piece if you reprise it in a three-act . . . a three-part structure.

A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel… It’s interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument, and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes… If one did it deftly, one could in a one-paragraph opening grab the reader, state the terms of the argument, and state the motivation for the argument. I imagine most good argumentative stuff that I’ve read, you could boil that down to the opener.

The middle should work… It lays out the argument in steps, not in a robotic way, but in a way that the reader can tell (a) what the distinct steps or premises of the argument are; and (b), this is the tricky one, how they’re connected to each other. So when I teach nonfiction classes, I spend a disproportionate amount of my time teaching the students how to write transitions, even as simple ones as howeverand moreover between sentences. Because part of their belief that the reader can somehow read their mind is their failure to see that the reader needs help understanding how two sentences are connected to each other — and also transitions between paragraphs. […]

An argumentative writer [should] spend one draft on just the freaking argument, ticking it off like a checklist, and then the real writing part would be weaving it and making the transitions between the parts of the argument — and probably never abandoning the opening, never letting the reader forget what the stakes are here… Never letting the reader think that I’ve lapsed into argument for argument’s sake, but that there’s always a larger, overriding purpose.

I’m thinking of the argumentative things that I like the best, and because of this situation the one that pops into my mind is Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” If you look at how that’s put together, there’s a transition in almost every single paragraph. Right? Like, “Moreover, not only is this offense common, but it is harmful in this way.” You know where he is in the argument, but you never get the sense that he’s ticking off items on a checklist; it’s part of an organic whole. My guess would be, if I were an argumentative writer, that I would spend one draft on just the freaking argument, ticking it off like a checklist, and then the real writing part would be weaving it and making the transitions between the parts of the argument— and probably never abandoning the opening, never letting the reader forget what the stakes are here. Right? Never letting the reader think that I’ve lapsed into argument for argument’s sake, but that there’s always a larger, overriding purpose. Why are transitions so important? swing a golf club or shift a standard transmission, things we want to be able to do automatically. So we have to pay attention and learn how to do them so we can quit thinking about them and just do them automatically.

September 2004  Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.  Oy. So I’m going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.  Mods  The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.  With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.  How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a thousand years. Around 1100, Europe at last began to catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call “the classics.” The effect was rather as if we were visited by beings from another solar system. These earlier civilizations were so much more sophisticated that for the next several centuries the main work of European scholars, in almost every field, was to assimilate what they knew.  During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great prestige. It seemed the essence of what scholars did. As European scholarship gained momentum it became less and less important; by 1350 someone who wanted to learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own era. [1] But schools change slower than scholarship. In the 19th century the study of ancient texts was still the backbone of the curriculum.  The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts? The answer, of course, is that the original raison d’etre of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaeology that does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer. The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least working on problems of minor importance.  And so began the study of modern literature. There was a good deal of resistance at first. The first courses in English literature seem to have been offered by the newer colleges, particularly American ones. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s. But Harvard didn’t have a professor of English literature until 1876, and Oxford not till 1885. (Oxford had a chair of Chinese before it had one of English.) [2]  What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach. This idea (along with the PhD, the department, and indeed the whole concept of the modern university) was imported from Germany in the late 19th century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the new model spread rapidly.  Writing was one of the casualties. Colleges had long taught English composition. But how do you do research on composition? The professors who taught math could be required to do original math, the professors who taught history could be required to write scholarly articles about history, but what about the professors who taught rhetoric or composition? What should they do research on? The closest thing seemed to be English literature. [3]  And so in the late 19th century the teaching of writing was inherited by English professors. This had two drawbacks: (a) an expert on literature need not himself be a good writer, any more than an art historian has to be a good painter, and (b) the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that’s what the professor is interested in.  High schools imitate universities. The seeds of our miserable high school experiences were sown in 1892, when the National Education Association “formally recommended that literature and composition be unified in the high school course.” [4] The ‘riting component of the 3 Rs then morphed into English, with the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to write about English literature– to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before.  It’s no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because we’re now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.  No Defense  The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn’t take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins.  It’s often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. In fact they were more law schools. And at least in our tradition lawyers are advocates, trained to take either side of an argument and make as good a case for it as they can. Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded early universities. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. [5] And after the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation. This is at least nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense: most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.  Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it’s not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It’s not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can’t change the question.  And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion– uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of “essay,” you can see where the conclusion comes from. It’s the concluding remarks to the jury.  Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by cutting. But I don’t try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.  At the very least I must have explained something badly. In that case, in the course of the conversation I’ll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have to change what I was saying as well. But the aim is never to be convincing per se. As the reader gets smarter, convincing and true become identical, so if I can convince smart readers I must be near the truth.  The sort of writing that attempts to persuade may be a valid (or at least inevitable) form, but it’s historically inaccurate to call it an essay. An essay is something else.  Trying  To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.  Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.  If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.  In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud.  But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I’ve written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.  Many published essays peter out in the same way. Particularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines. Outside writers tend to supply editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel obliged to write something “balanced.” Since they’re writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which– because they’re writing for a popular magazine– they then proceed to recoil in terror. Abortion, for or against? This group says one thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the question is a complex one. (But don’t get mad at us. We didn’t draw any conclusions.)  The River  Questions aren’t enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don’t always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don’t publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn’t already know.  But what you tell him doesn’t matter, so long as it’s interesting. I’m sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you’re not concerned with truth. You already know where you’re going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But that’s not what you’re trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn’t meander.  The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn’t do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. [6]  The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can’t have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.  This doesn’t always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction.  Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought– but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don’t change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.  Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It’s not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don’t find it. I’d much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.  Surprise  So what’s interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.  I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel vicariously. When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn’t just out of politeness that I asked what they saw. I really wanted to know. And I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn’t even know they were recording.  Surprises are things that you not only didn’t know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they’re the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They’re like a food that’s not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you’ve already eaten.  How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. (The other half is expressing yourself well.) The trick is to use yourself as a proxy for the reader. You should only write about things you’ve thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who’ve thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.  For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows who the best programmers are overall. I didn’t realize this when I began that essay, and even now I find it kind of weird. That’s what you’re looking for.  So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: a few topics you’ve thought about a lot, and some ability to ferret out the unexpected.  What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn’t matter– that anything can be interesting if you get deeply enough into it. One possible exception might be things that have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them, like working in fast food. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working at Baskin-Robbins? Well, it was interesting how important color was to the customers. Kids a certain age would point into the case and say that they wanted yellow. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon? They would just look at you blankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines ‘n’ Cream was so appealing. (I think now it was the salt.) And the difference in the way fathers and mothers bought ice cream for their kids: the fathers like benevolent kings bestowing largesse, the mothers harried, giving in to pressure. So, yes, there does seem to be some material even in fast food.  I didn’t notice those things at the time, though. At sixteen I was about as observant as a lump of rock. I can see more now in the fragments of memory I preserve of that age than I could see at the time from having it all happening live, right in front of me.  Observation  So the ability to ferret out the unexpected must not merely be an inborn one. It must be something you can learn. How do you learn it?  To some extent it’s like learning history. When you first read history, it’s just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto– which means you accumulate knowledge at what’s colloquially called an exponential rate. Once you remember that Normans conquered England in 1066, it will catch your attention when you hear that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time. Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and take note when a third book mentions that Normans were not, like most of what is now called France, tribes that flowed in as the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings (norman = north man) who arrived four centuries later in 911. Which makes it easier to remember that Dublin was also established by Vikings in the 840s. Etc, etc squared.  Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you’ve seen, the more easily you’ll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They’re just mistaken.  When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer. But (as with wealth) there may be habits of mind that will help the process along. It’s good to have a habit of asking questions, especially questions beginning with Why. But not in the random way that three year olds ask why. There are an infinite number of questions. How do you find the fruitful ones?  I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel? There’s a whole essay’s worth of surprises there for sure.  If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you’ll find a degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we’re only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be. For example, everyone I’ve talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes– that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren’t getting.  I have a hunch you want to pay attention not just to things that seem wrong, but things that seem wrong in a humorous way. I’m always pleased when I see someone laugh as they read a draft of an essay. But why should I be? I’m aiming for good ideas. Why should good ideas be funny? The connection may be surprise. Surprises make us laugh, and surprises are what one wants to deliver.  I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I’ve written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head.  People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is nil admirari. When you’re mistaken, don’t dwell on it; just act like nothing’s wrong and maybe no one will notice.  One of the keys to coolness is to avoid situations where inexperience may make you look foolish. If you want to find surprises you should do the opposite. Study lots of different things, because some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields. For example, jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. And so were books and paintings.  Whatever you study, include history– but social and economic history, not political history. History seems to me so important that it’s misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is all the data we have so far.  Among other things, studying history gives one confidence that there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses. Swords evolved during the Bronze Age out of daggers, which (like their flint predecessors) had a hilt separate from the blade. Because swords are longer the hilts kept breaking off. But it took five hundred years before someone thought of casting hilt and blade as one piece.  Disobedience  Above all, make a habit of paying attention to things you’re not supposed to, either because they’re “inappropriate,” or not important, or not what you’re supposed to be working on. If you’re curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. If there’s something you’re really interested in, you’ll find they have an uncanny way of leading back to it anyway, just as the conversation of people who are especially proud of something always tends to lead back to it.  For example, I’ve always been fascinated by comb-overs, especially the extreme sort that make a man look as if he’s wearing a beret made of his own hair. Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to be interested in– the sort of superficial quizzing best left to teenage girls. And yet there is something underneath. The key question, I realized, is how does the comber-over not see how odd he looks? And the answer is that he got to look that way incrementally. What began as combing his hair a little carefully over a thin patch has gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity. Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too: just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to plan such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created. You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could you do the same thing in painting, or in a novel?  See what you can extract from a frivolous question? If there’s one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don’t do as you’re told. Don’t believe what you’re supposed to. Don’t write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don’t write the way they taught you to in school.  The most important sort of disobedience is to write essays at all. Fortunately, this sort of disobedience shows signs of becomingrampant. It used to be that only a tiny number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays. Magazines published few of them, and judged them less by what they said than who wrote them; a magazine might publish a story by an unknown writer if it was good enough, but if they published an essay on x it had to be by someone who was at least forty and whose job title had x in it. Which is a problem, because there are a lot of things insiders can’t say precisely because they’re insiders.  The Internet is changing that. Anyone can publish an essay on the Web, and it gets judged, as any writing should, by what it says, not who wrote it. Who are you to write about x? You are whatever you wrote.  Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the short story. The Web may well make this the golden age of the essay. And that’s certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.    Notes  [1] I’m thinking of Oresme (c. 1323-82). But it’s hard to pick a date, because there was a sudden drop-off in scholarship just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. The cause may have been the plague of 1347; the trend in scientific progress matches the population curve.  [2] Parker, William R. “Where Do College English Departments Come From?” College English 28 (1966-67), pp. 339-351. Reprinted in Gray, Donald J. (ed). The Department of English at Indiana University Bloomington 1868-1970. Indiana University Publications.  Daniels, Robert V. The University of Vermont: The First Two Hundred Years. University of Vermont, 1991.  Mueller, Friedrich M. Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette. 1886/87. Reprinted in Bacon, Alan (ed). The Nineteenth-Century History of English Studies. Ashgate, 1998.  [3] I’m compressing the story a bit. At first literature took a back seat to philology, which (a) seemed more serious and (b) was popular in Germany, where many of the leading scholars of that generation had been trained.  In some cases the writing teachers were transformed in situ into English professors. Francis James Child, who had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university’s first professor of English.  [4] Parker, op. cit., p. 25.  [5] The undergraduate curriculum or trivium (whence “trivial”) consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Candidates for masters’ degrees went on to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Together these were the seven liberal arts.  The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, where it was considered the most important subject. It would not be far from the truth to say that education in the classical world meant training landowners’ sons to speak well enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.  [6] Trevor Blackwell points out that this isn’t strictly true, because the outside edges of curves erode faster. Thanks to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

  1. Define and Frame the problem
  2. Distinguish from other definitions and models
  3. Explain the Theory
  4. Give Intutition
  5. Give Applications
  6. Draw Graphs
  7. Illustrate with Examples

Macroeconomics revision:

Statement in quotes usually has multiple interpretations Have signposts at the start or end of the paragraph to show where you’re leading Simple and Direct English Learn efficient definitions: Pareto efficiency, Subgame Equilibria Everything in your essay should make a real contribution Summarise the assumptions and results (Do not confuse assumptions and simplifying assumptions)  When multiple models, discuss one/two in detail and then briefly compare with the other models

Example: Insurance Question: Simple Model, Assumptions: Two types, competitive insurance (zero profits), risk neutral insurance, risk averse individuals

SlateStarCodex

eople have asked me for advice on writing nonfiction online, so here are some tips:

  1. Divide things into small chunks Nobody likes walls of text. By this point most people know that you should have short, sweet paragraphs with line breaks between them. The shorter, the better. If you’re ever debating whether or not to end the paragraph and add a line break, err on the side of “yes”. Once you understand this principle, you can generalize it to other aspects of your writing. For example, I stole the Last Psychiatrist’s style of section breaks – bold headers saying I., II., III., etc. Now instead of just paragraph breaks, you have two forms of break – paragraph break and section break. On some of my longest posts, including the Anti-Reactionary FAQ and Meditations on Moloch, I add athird level of break – in the first case, a supersection level in large fonts, in the latter, a subsection level with an underlined First, Second, etc. Again, if you’re ever debating more versus fewer breaks, err on the side of “more”. Finishing a paragraph or section gives people a micro-burst of accomplishment and reward. It helps them chunk the basic insight together and remember it for later. You want people to be going – “okay, insight, good, another insight, good, another insight, good” and then eventually you can tie all of the insights together into a high-level insight. Then you can start over, until eventually at the end you tie all of the high-level insights together. It’s nice and structured and easy to work with. If they’re just following a winding stream of thought wherever it’s going, it’ll take a lot more mental work and they’ll get bored and wander off. Remember that clickbait comes from big media corporations optimizing for easy readability, and that the epitome of clickbait is the listicle. But the insight of the listicle applies even to much more sophisticated intellectual pieces – people are much happier to read a long thing if they can be tricked into thinking it’s a series of small things.
  2. Variety is the spice of life This is really closely linked to the last tip. Your brain gets bored if it has to focus on the same thing for too long. But you can get around that by making an activity look like many different things. Sometimes this is as simple and as dumb as putting Roman numeral one, Roman numeral two, etc at natural breaks in the article, and then your brain thinks “Oh, I guess there are two different things here”. But other times you actually have to vary the reading experience. Again, the clickbaiters are our gurus – they intersperse images throughout their content. The images aren’t always very useful, they don’t always add much, but now it’s not just a wall of text. It’s a wall of text and images.

Watch the blue twirly thing until you forget how bored you are by this essay, then continue. Or you can be more subtle. Break your flow. Include links, so that the never-ending stream of black text on white background is broken up with some pretty blue. If you are very desperate, italicize certain words to simulate the stresses of normal speech and turn the visual experience into a visual-auditory experience. Vary the form of your sentences, as per Gary Provost: This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important. (Blockquotes are also a nice way to vary the reading experience) But don’t just vary the appearance of your writing. Vary the tone. If you’re comfortable, shift between registers. When I was talking about SSRIs, I mentioned study after study after study – and then, around the middle, I told a kind of funny story about the time I had a job interview with the author of one of the studies. It was a complete break with the tone of the piece, which is dangerous – but my hope was that after having your mind dulled by twenty different pharmacology studies in a row, a quick first-person aside and silly story would be invigorating and give you the energy to wade through another twenty such studies.

  1. Keep your flow of ideas strong I lampshade my flow of ideas with a lot of words like “Also”, “But”, “Nevertheless”, “Relatedly”, and “So” (when I’m feeling pretentious, also “Thus”). These are the words your eighth-grade English teacher told you never to start paragraphs with. Your eighth-grade English teacher was wrong. If you’re writing three paragraphs that are three different pieces of evidence for the same conclusion that you’re going to present afterwards, make damn sure your readers know this. It could be as simple as: It’s pretty obvious that X is true, and we have lots of converging lines of evidence for this. Some of the best evidence comes from the field of augury. For example: First, A Second, B Third, C Now, some people say that not-A, but that’s totally wrong. It only looks like not-A, because P. Likewise, although Q might make it look like not-B, Q can’t be trusted for several other reasons, for example R. And not-C is too silly to even think about. So despite the objections you always hear, the augurical evidence for X is strong. Even more evidence comes from the field of haruspicy. All four major haruspical schools hold X as a major principle. School 1 says X because of D. School 2 says X because of E. School 3 says X because of F. Andschool 4 says X because of G. So although augury and haruspicy disagree on a lot, on the subject of X they are in complete accord. Notice the underlined words holding up the structure of the argument. Not only is the argument nice and tight, but the role of each part in the whole is telegraphed beforehand. For example, the “now” that comes just after C is saying something like “Take a step back, I’m about to tell you something that might otherwise be controversial, but listen to what I have to say”. And the “likewise” just after P means something like “We just got down talking about not-A because P, here’s another argument with about the same structure”. Before any of the facts are inserted, you already know where they fit into the structure. And you’re able to abstract from the micro-level and get the bigger picture of some fact which is supported by both augury and haruspicy, which was the main point of the argument. I overuse the world “actually” really badly. I’m trying to cut down on it, but I don’t want to stop completely. “Actually” is a great structural word. It distinguishes “Here’s how things look, here’s what’s actually true”. That sentence makes sense even without the “actually”, but I feel like the “actually” holds my readers’ hands through the process and makes the dichotomy better-defined. Defend your flow of ideas at all costs. This might sound paradoxical after section 2, which was about how breaking flows is great. It is kind of paradoxical, and it issort of hard to explain, but it’s the difference between “exciting” and “horrible”. Eating a foreign cuisine can be exciting because it’s so different from your usual fare; eating hot lava is even more different than your usual fare, but no longer fun. Play around with flow and variety, but never break the flow in a jarring way. And if you have to break a flow, make it the flow of your sentence, or the flow of your paragraph, but not the flow of ideas. I agonize a lot about where it is versus isn’t appropriate to break the flow of ideas. Sometimes I use the really ugly solution of having an entire paragraph within parentheses, as if to say “I really wanted to bring this up here, but remember it’s not actually part of the structure of this argument!” (this is a good meta-level example. I used the word “actually” there, and I wanted to point it out as an example of what I was talking about before, but doing that would break the flow of this whole argument about how you shouldn’t break the flow of things. So, in accordance with the prophecy, into a paragraph-long set of parentheses it goes. I’m starting to think maybe I’m not the best person to be giving writing advice…) But sometimes you’ve just got to leave out an observation which would be interesting and helpful but not at that particular part of your argument. I think the phrase is “kill your darlings”.
  2. Learn what should and shouldn’t be repeated. A lot of the medical notes I read look like this: Mr. Smith presents to the ER for evaluation. He is a 24 year old man. He is complaining of chest pain. He was in the shower today when he slipped and fell. He was able to get up and make dinner. He says the chest pain started two hours later. He says has never had chest pain before. He took two aspirin. He says that did not help. He says the pain is 8/10 at this time. He says it is pretty bad, but that the pain of hearing these repetitive sentence structures is even worse. If two sentences in a row start with the same word, it sounds unwieldy. If three or four do, it sounds bizarre. If it’s a whole paragraph’s worth, people start questioning their own sanity and trying to claw their eyes out. A counterexample: what about the paragraph just above, starting with “If two sentences…”? I started with “if” three times in a row, and it didn’t sound bad at all! What’s up? Deliberate use of parallelism is okay and even commendable. Usually this involves using the same structure to call attention to certain differences. You can tell if something is good parallelism by saying it aloud. When I say the paragraph above aloud, I’m using special intonation, especially in the places where the sentences differ (ie “two”, “three or four”, “whole paragraph’s worth”). Here your reader knows what you’re trying to do and it’s interesting. In the medical history example, there’s no deliberate attempt at parallelism in order to compare and contrast. You’re just doing the same thing again and again. But it’s not just about first words of sentences. Consider something like this: China has the largest population of any country in the world. It also has the largest military. Because of China’s powerful military, some of its neighbors are afraid of it. China has reassured its neighbors many times that it’s peaceful, but they’re not convinced. This sounds off to me. The repetition of “largest population” and “largest military” is done clumsily. There are a lot of ways to make it a virtuous parallelism – for example “China has the largest population – and largest military – in the world” or “China has the largest population in the world; it also boasts the largest military” – but as it is, it just sounds weird. When you come to “largest military”, there’s an immediate mental callback to “largest population”, but you’re not sure why and it’s just distracting. Likewise, the repetition of “neighbors” is weird. It could be solved by changing the second use to “those neighbors”, which sort of telegraphs that you know you’re repeating “neighbors” and did it on purpose. Otherwise it has the same unfortunate dull-sounding cadence as the medical history. You could also solve both those problems by just varying the structure enough that the problem goes away. For example: China is the most populous nation in the world. It also boasts the world’s largest military, which has provoked concern among other nations in the region. Although China has tried to reassure its neighbors of its peaceful intentions, they remain unconvinced. This is hard and really deserves a book-length treatment. Without the book, all I can say is to realize that any repetition of words and structures will stand out to your reader, and make sure that their standing-out emphasizes your point instead of just being confusing.
  3. Use microhumor You’ve heard of microaggressions. Now try microhumor. It’s things that aren’t ajoke in the laugh-out-loud told-by-a-comedian sense, but still put the tiniest ghost of a smile on your reader’s face while they’re skimming through them. I learned this art from Dave Barry and Scott Adams, both of whom are humor writers and use normal macrohumor, but both of whom pepper the spaces in between jokes with microhumor besides. Your best best is to read everything they’ve written, your second best bet is to listen to me fumblingly try to explain it. Here’s a paragraph from my “about” page: Topics here tend to center vaguely around this meta-philosophical idea of how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs, and especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all. There are a couple of things here that might qualify as microhumor. Take “especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all”. It’s not really a joke. If I were a comedian and recited that sentence, you wouldn’t start laughing. But it’s kind of funny to be starting with what sounds like a pretty dry academic idea (“how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs” and whether the process is broken), and then confound expectations with an exaggerated (well, maybe) warning about it dooming us all. The phrase “may or may not doom us all” does the same thing on a smaller scale: “may or may not” is a pretty reserved, careful sounding phrase, whereas “doom us all” is obviously the opposite of reserved (I also like the similar construction “it might have sort of kind of been the worst idea ever”). You can actually go a long way toward microhumor just with hedge words (“vaguely”, “sort of”), exaggerations (“the worst thing ever”, “doom us all”), and sometimes the combination of the two. I think this microhumor stuff is really important, maybe the number one thing that separates really enjoyable writers from people who are technically proficient but still a chore to read. Think about it with a really simplistic behaviorist model where you keep doing things that give you little bursts of reward, and stop doing things that don’t. There are only a couple of sources of reward in reading. One of them is getting important insights. Another is hearing things that support your ingroups or bash your outgroups. And a third – maybe the biggest – is humor. Who ever had trouble slogging through a really hilarious book of jokes? Nobody can be super funny all the time, and an article on the economic crisis filled with man-walks-into-a-bar-style jokes would be jarring and weird. But micro-humor really works. It works at a background level where people don’t notice it working, and it makes people keep coming back for more. Humor is also disarming. It’s hard to hate somebody who’s making you laugh. I don’t mean somebody who’s making bigoted jokes that offend you, or writing political cartoons about how awful your ingroup is. Those people are easy to hate. I mean somebody who’s making you laugh, right now. If you can make people laugh while challenging their cherished beliefs, you’ve got a tiny bit more good will than usual.
  4. Use concrete examples Consider the following proposition: In a study measuring whether implicit attitudes determine an outcome, you need to make sure the implicit attitudes aren’t serving as accurate proxies for underlying fundamentals. This is the thesis of one of my more popular posts, Perceptions Of Required Ability Act As A Proxy For Actual Required Ability, but I don’t present it like that. Instead, I start by saying: Imagine a study with the following methodology. You survey a bunch of people to get their perceptions of who is a smoker (“97% of his close friends agree Bob smokes”). Then you correlate those numbers with who gets lung cancer. Your statistics program lights up like a Christmas tree with a bunch of super-strong correlations. You conclude “Perception of being a smoker causes lung cancer”, and make up a theory about how negative stereotypes of smokers cause stress which depresses the immune system. The media reports that as “Smoking Doesn’t Cause Cancer, Stereotypes Do”. Whether or not you understood or agreed with the abstract version thesis, you (hopefully) find the problems with the nicotine example intuitively obvious. Now if I give you the principle “in a study measuring whether implicit attitudes determine an outcome, you need to make sure the implicit attitudes aren’t serving as accurate proxies for underlying fundamentals”, that principle makes sense and you will tend to agree with it. Now we can move on to harder problems, like the actual study in the post, where it’s not as obvious and where a lot of people thought they’d proven that the implicit attitude determined the outcome. If you’re going to be making a complicated point, start with a concrete example. If you’re going to be making a very complicated point, start with a lot of concrete examples. When I wrote Meditations on Moloch, probably the most complicated point I’ve ever tried to express on this blog, I began with fourteen different examples before I even started trying to express the underlying principle. I hoped that readers would be able to triangulate my point by finding what all fourteen examples had in common, and most of them did. This is related to an idea I keep stressing here, which is that people rarely have consistent meta-level principles. Instead, they’ll endorse the meta-level principle that supports their object-level beliefs at any given moment. The example I keep giving is how when the federal government was anti-gay, conservatives talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and liberals insisted on states’ rights; when the federal government became pro-gay, liberals talked about the pressing need for federal intervention and conservatives insisted on states’ rights. So if you want to convince someone of a meta-level principle, you need to build it up from examples that support it. And if you want the principle to be well-founded and stable under reflective equilibrium, you also need to present the examples that don’t support it and explain why you didn’t make your principle out of those instead. And if you want to convince somebody that their meta-level principle is wrong, the quickest and most effective way to do it is to show that it proves too much, then provide them with a better principle that preserves the things they want but doesn’t prove things they don’t want. But my point is that all of this has to be done on the object-level, with the excursions to the meta-level level being few, far-between, and justified with extensive application to the object-level. Otherwise you’re too likely to shoot off into the entirely abstract and end up sounding like Hegel: The good is the idea, or unity of the conception of the will with the particular will. Abstract right, well-being, the subjectivity of consciousness, and the contingency of external reality, are in their independent and separate existences superseded in this unity, although in their real essence they are contained in it and preserved. This unity is realized freedom, the absolute final cause of the world. Every stage is properly the idea, but the earlier steps contain the idea only in more abstract form. The I, as person, is already the idea, although in its most abstract guise. The good is the idea more completely determined; it is the unity of the conception of will with the particular will. It is not something abstractly right, but has a real content, whose substance constitutes both right and well-being. Please don’t end up sounding like Hegel. And a free tip for this: use words like “me” and “you” instead of “a person” or “someone”. Compare: “If someone does the calculations with this methodology, the result will probably be nonsense.” Versus: “If you do the calculations with that methodology, you’ll probably end up with nonsense.” I think the second sounds snappier and more concrete.
  5. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals Your role model in this (and in nothing else) should be Donald Trump. Think about it. He supports Planned Parenthood, doesn’t want to cut entitlement programs, condemns Dubya and the Iraq war, supports affirmative action, supports medical marijuana, etc. If somebody were to tell you last year that a man with those policy positions would not only be leading the Republican primary, but leading even among the most conservative voters, you’d think they were crazy. The rest of the country has been trying to convince conservative Republicans to be more comfortable with those positions for decades, and we’ve failed miserably. Now Trump just waltzes in and everyone is like “Yeah, okay, sure”? The secret of Trump’s success is that most conservative Republicans don’t really care about medical marijuana (or whatever) for its own sake. They care because opposing medical marijuana symbolizes membership in their tribe, they feel like their tribe is persecuted, they have a fierce loyalty to their tribe, and darned if they’re going to support somebody who doesn’t use the right shibboleths. Trump throws them a bone. He says things like “illegal immigrants are rapists” that no moderate or liberal would ever say, things that would horrify them. He uses all the affectations of being working class. He may not quite prove he’s “one of us”, but he very effectively proves he’s not Just A Typical Outgroup Member. When Trump says “Legalize medical marijuana”, they don’t hear “I’m yet another RINO liberal pansy who hates Christian values and wants everybody to become reefer-smoking hippies”. So they only hear something boring about the regulations around pain relief medication – and who cares about those? Trump’s Law is that if you want to convince people notorious for being unconvinceable, half the battle is using the right tribal signals to sound like you’re one of them. For example, when I’m trying to convince conservatives, I veer my signaling way to the right. I started my defense of trigger warnings with “I complain a lot about the social justice movement”. Then I cited Jezebel and various Ethnic Studies professors being against trigger warnings. Then I tried to argue that trigger warnings actually go together well with strong versions of freedom of speech. At this point I haven’t even started arguing in favor of trigger warnings, I’ve just set up an unexpected terrain in which trigger warnings can be seen as a conservative thing supported by people who like free speech and don’t like social justice, and opposition to trigger warnings can be seen as the sort of very liberal thing that people like Jezebel and Ethnic Studies professors support. The important thing isn’t that I convince anyone that trigger warnings are really on the right – that’s a tall order – but that the rightists reading my argument feel like I’m working with them rather than against them. I’m not just another leftist saying “Support trigger warnings because it’s the leftist thing and you should be leftist and everyone on the right is terrible!” My reward was seeing a bunch of hard-core anti-social-justice types trip over themselves in horror at actually being kind of convinced, which was pretty funny. On the other hand, when I’m trying to convince feminists of something, I start with a trigger warning – partly because I genuinely believe it’s a good idea and those posts can be triggering, but also partly because starting with a trigger warning is a tribal signal that people on the right rarely use. It means that either I’m on their side, or I’m being unusually respectful to it. In this it’s a lot like Trump saying illegal immigrants are rapists – something the outgroup would never, ever do. (And that’s not just my theory – I’ve gotten lots of angry comments about the trigger warnings from people further right than me, saying that using them makes me an idiot or a pushover or a cuck or something. I am always happy to get these comments, because it means the signaling value of using trigger warnings remains intact.) Crossing tribal signaling boundaries is by far the most important persuasive technique I know, besides which none of the others even deserve to be called persuasive techniques at all. But to make it work, you have to actually understand the signals, and you have to have at least an ounce of honest sympathy for the other side. You can’t just be like “HELLO THERE, FELLOW LIBERALS! LET’S CREATE INTRUSIVE BIG GOVERNMENT AGENCIES TOGETHER! BUT BEFORE WE DO, I HAVE SOMETHING I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE SECOND AMENDMENT…” Which I guess means that being able to consider both sides of an issue sort ofgives you superpowers. That’s pretty encouraging.
  6. Anticipate and defuse counterarguments Here’s something I’ve noticed. Something like: Alice: We need to invade Syria. I know that there’s always the risk of creating a Iraq-style power vacuum in these situations, but the threat from ISIS is too great. Sounds a whole lot better than something like: Alice: We need to invade Syria. Bob: But isn’t there a risk that will create a Iraq-style power vacuum? Alice: The threat from ISIS is too great. The second one sounds too much like Alice hadn’t really thought about the power vacuum thing, Bob called her on it, and she kind of blew him off with a tangentially related point. The first one sounds more like Alice is a careful thinker who has weighed all the risks and benefits and finally decided in favor of invasion. This is true even though Alice’s reasoning is the same in both situations. Or what about this: Alice: We need to invade Syria. I know that there’s always the risk of creating a Iraq-style power vacuum in these situations, but the threat from ISIS is too great. Bob: I know the threat from ISIS is serious, but I’m still really worried about that power vacuum thing. Bob sounds kind of weak here. Come on, Bob. Alice already raised the power vacuum issue! We’re done with that! The moral of the story is that you sound a lot more credible, and your opponents a lot less persuasive, if you’re the one who brings the possible counterarguments up yourself. This is true regardless of how effective your countercounterarguments are. There’s also a visibility advantage. Suppose Alice puts her argument on her blog. Bob quotes her and puts his counterargument on his blog. Maybe the readers of Bob’s blog won’t read Alice’s blog where they can see her countercounterargument. Maybe they don’t even read the comments of Bob’s blog. If Alice addressed the obvious counterarguments in her first post, Bob has been preempted from blogging about them separately, or at least has lost his low-hanging fruit and has to stretch further before he finds something he can talk about. And if he does quote Alice, all the countercounterarguments against his point will be right there for his readers. This isn’t just good rhetorical practice, it’s good epistemic practice. A lot of Internet arguments are the same ten or twenty issues re-examined time after time after time after time. If you’re arguing in favor of gun control, you have no excuse not to realize somebody will bring up “But don’t guns save lives by helping people with self-defense?”. And in fact, if you’re arguing in favor of gun control, you had better have thought long and hard yourself about whether or not guns save lives through self-defense. If you’ve never considered that, you have no business having an opinion. But if you have considered and rejected that, then you might as well run your audience through your thought process now (and sound more convincing) now rather than wait until some pro-gun person brings it up (and be caught flat-footed like Alice in the second example). The logical conclusion of this process is that you address all the arguments, counterarguments, and countercounterarguments in the space you’re covering, nobody can disagree with you, and you’re self-evidently right. Sometimes this takes a lot of text, but better a long argument which is accurate and convincing than a short snappy argument which might be wrong or unpersuasive. Besides, by this point you’ve absorbed all these other tips and hopefully write in an engaging way that makes your readers want to keep going no matter how many levels of countercountercountercounterargument you spring on them. (Your other option here is just to put this stuff in footnotes and let your readers decide whether or not to go through them. It’s very satisfying to answer somebody’s stupid objection with “Actually, I think you’ll find I disproved that in footnote 17.”) There’s a special variant of this you need when you’re in shark-infested waters, debating very controversial things with very hostile people. Here the “counterargument” is going to take the form of trying to destroy your reputation by using one of your comments, taken out of context, to prove you’re a bad person with unconscionable beliefs who should never be listened to. For example, suppose I’m trying to explain some social phenomenon and I mention that rich people get better grades in school than poor people. A hostile opponent could accuse me of making a stupid stereotype and saying that all rich people are better than all poor people; then he could condescendingly “correct” me by saying that actually the within-class differences are larger than the between-class ones. Or might say that I need to realize school grades aren’t the only thing and there are much more important determinants of people’s worth as a human being. Or he might accuse me of being a Social Darwinist, and “correct” me by saying that maybe this is because of the stresses of poverty. Now, in fact I neither said nor meant any of those things. But if somebody accuses me of them, and I have to plead that I really didn’t mean it that way, honest – then they can double down and say that my protests of innocence are the surest sign of my guilt. Whether they succeed or not, I’m on the defensive. We’ve shifted from debating whatever point I wanted to make in the first place, to debating whether Scott is a monocle-wearing Social Darwinist who believes all poor people deserve to starve on the street. The solution is really simple: anticipate and defuse counterarguments. If I wanted to make the class/grades point, it would go something like this: According to [study], students from families earning >$100,000 score have an average high school GPA X points higher than students from families earning < $20,000. This obviously doesn’t mean all rich people do better than all poor people, and it doesn’t rule out causes like the stress of poverty hurting people’s brains. But it does suggest a possible explanation for [whatever phenomenon I was trying to use this to explain]. A related note: when talking about controversial things to a potentially hostile audience, look through every single sentence of your work and imagine how it would sound if it were quoted out of context and used as a summary of who you are as a human being. If you don’t, eventually someone will try this and you’ll be unprepared.
  7. Use strong concept handles The idea of concept-handles is itself a concept-handle; it means a catchy phrase that sums up a complex topic. Eliezer Yudkowsky is really good at this. “belief in belief“, “semantic stopsigns“, “applause lights“, “Pascal’s mugging“, “adaptation-executors vs. fitness-maximizers“, “reversed stupidity vs. intelligence“, “joy in the merely real” – all of these are interesting ideas, but more important they’re interesting ideas with short catchy names that everybody knows, so we can talk about them easily. I have very consciously tried to emulate that when talking about ideas like trivial inconveniences, meta-contrarianism, toxoplasma, and Moloch. I would go even further and say that this is one of the most important things a blog like this can do. I’m not too likely to discover some entirely new social phenomenon that nobody’s ever thought about before. But there are a lot of things people have vague nebulous ideas about that they can’t quite put into words. Changing those into crystal-clear ideas they can manipulate and discuss with others is a big deal. If you figure out something interesting and very briefly cram it into somebody else’s head, don’t waste that! Give it a nice concept-handle so that they’ll remember it and be able to use it to solve other problems!
  8. Recognize that applying these rules will probably start disastrously There’s a pattern across almost all skills, where people start off doing things half-baked but sometimes with a bit of native talent. The experts teach them The Right Way To Do Things, and they switch to doing it in a stilted formulaic way that makes everybody else cringe. Eventually they become better and better. Finally, they do things that completely contradict the rules they were taught, and it works great. I think it was in the context of poetry that somebody said “Learn the rules first, then you can break them as much as you want.” Untrained natural writing is often bad, but at least honestly bad. Untrained writing that tries to force itself to do something because somebody told them it was a good idea is much worse. Think of the old adage “If you’re giving a speech, start out with a joke.” It’s great advice when done right. Now imagine all the ways it could go wrong – terrible jokes, inappropriate jokes, forced jokes, speeches that absolutely shouldn’t start off with jokes, et cetera. A speech that doesn’t start off with a joke is often good; a speech that shouldn’t start out with a joke but has been forced into doing so never is. Eventually you end up shouting “Just use your instincts!” at people who do not actually have instincts. Use the advice in this post wrong, and you end up transforming the famous quote from the Declaration of Independence into something like: Although we agree King George has many good qualities, we nevertheless hold these truths to be more or less self-evident. Truth number one, that all men are created equal. For example, they should all be equally allowed to speak freely about important issues like taxes. It’s possible that there might be some times they shouldn’t be equal, like children having fewer rights than adults, but this are just minor exceptions. [insert picture of Liberty Bell here] Truth number two, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights… Almost the only good advice in any discipline is “develop instincts, then use them”. While you’re waiting for the instincts to develop, or in order to push them along, it’s sometimes helpful to hear some other people’s advice. But do. not. force. it. George Orwell ended his own list of writing advice with “Break any of these rules rather than say something outright barbarous”. As usual, George Orwell is right. I also like Piet Hein’s commentary: There is one art, no more, no less: to do all things with art- lessness.

Figure out what you’re going to say about the subject. You can do this by writing a rough draft (without the opening paragraph) or by making a list:

Children Should Be Consumed As Food

If you’d rather just start writing than make lists, that’s fine. Write everything you can think of about the subject. Let it ramble. Don’t worry about organization. Then, when you’re done, compile a list from it. Put each sentence in a category. 

Then, knowing what you have to say, go back and write your opening paragraph, explaining your subject and, in broad strokes, how you’re going to approach it:

“You may flinch at the idea of shoving your son or daughter into a preheated oven, but before you reject the idea, consider this: children are nutritious, and by eating them, you’ll reduce the population. By eating naughty children, you’ll send a message. Kids who haven’t yet become pies, casseroles, and sandwiches will think twice before torturing the cat or tramping all over your lawn.”

It’s fine if you later add something (“Children are so annoying on airplanes”) or make a cut (“Maybe they’re not so nutritious.”) Writing is–or should be–a fluid activity. Expect to make many drafts before you’re done. 

Try to be as sensual as possible. That is, try to cause sights, smells, tastes, sounds, movements, and textures to come into the reader’s mind, so that he feels or  experiences what you’re writing about. I often have to make multiple drafts to achieve this. My first will be a sort of “just the facts ma’am” info-dump:

“The perfect murder is hard to pull off. Policing has become extremely advanced, what with fiber analysis and DNA testing. There are security cameras everywhere, and we’ve all given away too much information about ourselves online. The professional killer needs to plan ahead and watch his back.”

Okay. What can I do to make that paragraph more effective? The more sensual I make it, the more the reader is likely to think about it and remember it. 

Let’s look at the first sentence. “… hard to pull off” is boring. It’s vague. It doesn’t evoke an image. So I riff for a while. I usually press return multiple times between that sentence and the next–or use a blank sheet of paper–and brainstorm:

” The perfect murder is hard to pull off.

really difficult harder than calculus you need a genius IQ more difficult than solving Rubik’s Cube …

Policing has become … “

Maybe I’ll settle on something; maybe I’ll draw a blank and come back to it later. Often, if I sleep on it, a good idea will come to me. So if I get bogged down or blocked, I move on to the next sentence and come back to this one later. 

In the end, maybe I come up with something like this. (Or, hopefully, by putting more time into it, something better than this.)

“You haven’t cured cancer or calculated pi to 1,000 decimal places, so what makes you think you can commit the perfect murder? Are you smarter than the cops? They can track you by the smallest thread from your coat; they can nab your DNA from a flake of skin and, ten minutes later, be beating down your door. Can avoid all those security cameras, the ones propped on mantlepieces, hidden inside teddy bears, tucked inside innocuous-looking picture frames? Murder is not a game for the average dummy–or even the average smarty.”

Remember to read everything you write out loud! You will hear problems more easily than you will see them. 

How To Write An Oxford Essay by Bill Mander

I write a list of my ideas and responses to the question, researching when necessary and adding relevant facts and quotations to the list. If the question was “Why does Hamlet avoid killing Claudius?” the list might look like this:

When I can’t think of anything to add to the list, I begin writing full sentences and paragraphs, arbitrarily picking a list item to flesh out, pushing others further down on the screen:

We never hear of Hamlet having killed anyone. All we know is that he’s a Prince and university student. He does talk about practicing with a sword, but there’s no evidence in the test that he has military experience…

I left the “no experience killing people” item in the draft, above, so that you could see its relationship with the text below it, but in real life I delete items as I write about them.

When new ideas will occur to me, I add them to the list, so that I can keep on writing the current section but recall the new idea later:

We never hear of Hamlet having killed anyone. All we know is that he’s a Prince and university student. He does talk about practicing with a sword, but there’s no evidence in the test that he has military experience…

I keep refining the list as I write, sometimes adding to it, sometimes removing items that no longer seem relevant, or that I realize I’ve covered already.

I don’t always start with a list. Sometimes I begin by writing prose, but I almost always build a list as I write. I have terrible memory, and if I don’t write things down as they came to mind, I’ll forget them. The list allows me to safely forget. I can focus on the current section, knowing the list will jog my memory, later.

My first draft is done when it’s all prose and no list. At which point I read it aloud. This is the most important step. Without reading aloud, I can’t gauge how it sounds. My goal is to make it as clear and conversational as possible.

I edit and rewrite focusing on, amongst other things, accuracy, rhythm, sensuality, overuse of modifiers, unnecessary words and phrases, cliches, typos, and the distance between subject and verb. When they’re far apart, my sentences tend to be hard to read.

I make a couple of passes this way–more if I wind up making lots of changes. At some point, I feel confident enough to post or I let it sit, as a draft, and come back to it later. I finish some drafts days, weeks, or months later. Some I abandon.

What steps do most viewed writers take to write a Quora answer after reading the question?

Do you believe the final sentence’s idea should be introduced earlier in this paragraph? This question previously had details. They are now in a comment. Profile photo for Marcus Geduld Marcus Geduld , Published author, lifelong reader. Answered Aug 17, 2014 “Should” implies either ethics or utility: “You should help the poor.” “You should use sharper scissors to cut that fabric.”

I can’t imagine how it’s ethically wrong to bring up an new idea at the end of a paragraph. When you do that, you’re not sexually harassing someone, stealing his wallet, or forcing him to watch “America’s Got Talent.”

It might be useful in some cases, for instance, if you want to foreshadow and idea or pound one into the reader’s head:

Never feed cake to a llama. They love the taste, but can’t digest it. As their stomachs bloat, they’ll start growling, and soon the growl will become a howl. It won’t stop until they empty their bowels, in an explosion of diarrhea, the stench of which will cloak every man, woman, child, and building within a mile radius in a greasy foulness, impervious to hot water, soap, or even bleach. Which is why you should never even consider feeding cake to a llama!

At other times, you may want to surprise the reader with a revelation at the end. Forecasting it will ruin the effect:

When I was nineteen, I almost had an affair with a famous Hollywood actress. She pulled up next to me on her motorcycle, as I was strolling to the 7-11. “Hey, handsome.” She patted the seat behind her, and I didn’t think twice. We zoomed to her mansion, where she grabbed me by the collar and yanked me onto her bed. I wriggled out of my clothes and was about to plunge into her embrace. Then my penis fell off.

The only “shoulds” in writing are these:

If you’re following dogmatic rules, you’re doing it wrong. There are no rules, just things you can do which will have various effects. What effects are you after?

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23 March 2019