Writing advice

created: ; modified:

People often ask me for writing advice. This is the advice I give them.

  1. Punch your reader in the face. If they’re not feeling it, they’re not going to keep reading.
  2. Write what you talk about. If you keep talking to people about something, that’s a good sign it’s interesting. It’s also the easiest way to overcome the empty page syndrome.
  3. Write complete sentences immediately even when you’re writing bullets. You’ll forget details if you write half-finished bullets. Don’t put off finishing sentences onto your future self. You’ll end up with more thoughts this way as well.
  4. Keep editing until you love what you wrote. If you find yourself skipping words or sentences, then your readers will too. If you don’t love what you wrote, who will?
  5. Don’t write on stimulants. You feel much more productive with them, but you lose your taste. This is how you get Ayn Rand-style 30 page-long monologues (she loved amphetamines)
  6. Context is that which is scarce. A movie director can bore their viewer for 10 minutes, but a TikTok creator can’t bore their viewers for 10 seconds. A book author can afford to bore their reader for a page, but a blogger can’t afford to bore their reader for a paragraph. Different mediums create different constraints. You must respect your context.
  7. Write the way you speak.
  8. If you are writing something that needs a table of contents, try out several completely different tables of contents. Quite likely there’s a better one than whatever you came up with initially.
  9. Ask people for feedback. Show what you wrote to at least one person before publishing and discuss it with them.
  10. Don’t think about impact. Nobody knows what’s the long-term impact of anything.
  11. Don’t think about novelty. It doesn’t matter whether it’s original or not. I suspect nothing is really original at all.
  12. Stay true to yourself.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sean Shelley-Tremblay, Jonas Vollmer, Amanda Geiser, and Niko McCarty for feedback.

Other people’s writing advice

Tyler Cowen

Writing tips:

Every day, stop writing just a short while before you really want to quit. The next day you will be very keen to get going again. For most mortals, your real enemy is the number of days when you get nothing written. Getting “not enough” done each day is a lesser problem.

Simple advice for academic publishing:

Care about what you are doing. This is ultimately your best ally.

Scott Adams

From How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:

I never took a writing class in high school or in college. I learned the basics in English classes and that seemed good enough. I could write sentences that people understood. What else did I need?

I did notice that some people in the business world wrote with an impressive level of clarity and persuasiveness. But I figured that was just because those people were extra smart. It never occurred to me that there was some technique involved and that we unwashed citizens could easily learn it.

One day during my corporate career I signed up for a company-sponsored class in business writing. This was part of my larger strategy of learning as much as I could about whatever might someday be useful while my employer was willing to foot the bill. I didn’t have high hopes that the class would change my life. I was just looking for some tips and tricks for better writing.

I was very wrong about how useful the class would be. If I recall, the class was only two afternoons long. And it was life altering.

As it turns out, business writing is all about getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise. You think you already do that in your writing, but you probably don’t.

Consider the previous sentence. I intentionally embedded some noise. Did you catch it? The sentence that starts with “You think you already do that” includes the unnecessary word “already.” Remove it and you get exactly the same meaning: “You think you do that.” The “already” part is assumed and unnecessary. That sort of realization is the foundation of business writing.

Business writing also teaches that brains are wired to better understand concepts that are presented in a certain order. For example, your brain processes “The boy hit the ball” more easily than “The ball was hit by the boy.” In editors’ jargon, the first sentence is direct writing and the second is passive. It’s a tiny difference, but over the course of an entire document, passive writing adds up and causes reader fatigue.

Eventually I learned that the so-called persuasive writers were doing little more than using ordinary business-writing methods. Clean writing makes a writer seem smarter and it makes the writer’s arguments more persuasive.

Scott Alexander

Nonfiction writing advice:

  1. Divide things into small chunks
  2. Variety is the spice of life
  3. Keep your flow of ideas strong
  4. Learn what should and shouldn’t be repeated.
  5. Use microhumor
  6. Use concrete examples
  7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals
  8. Anticipate and defuse counterarguments
  9. Use strong concept handles
  10. Recognize that applying these rules will probably start disastrously

Paul Graham

Writing, Briefly

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

As for how to write well, here’s the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don’t (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don’t try to sound impressive; don’t hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don’t feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won’t read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you’ll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.