28 slightly rude notes on writing

All writing about despair is ultimately insincere. Putting fingers to keys or pen to paper is secretly an act of hope, however faint—hope that someone will read your words, hope that someone will understand. Someone who truly feelsdespair wouldn’t bother to tell anyone about it because they wouldn’t expect it to do anything. All text produced in de... See more

I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

I probably sound like one of those guys who is always like, “AI will never do this , or I’ll eat my hat!!” and then he has to get his stomach pumped because it’s full of hats.

Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable. My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it.

(William Wordsworth referred to this as “wide... See more

When you learn something about a writer, say, that Rousseau abandoned all of his children, it inflects the way you understand their writing. But even that isn’t quite the right example—it’s not about filling in the biographical details, it’s about realizing that the thing you’re reading comes from somewhere. Good writing is thick with that coming-f... See more

Something moved them, irked them, inspired them, possessed them, and then electricity shot everywhere in their brain and then—crucially—they laid fingers on keys and put that electricity inside the computer. Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring.

This is why it’s very difficult to teach people how to write, because first you have to teach them how to care. Or, really, you have to show them how to channel their caring, because they already care a lot, but they don’t know how to turn that into words, or they don’t see why they should.

Instead, we rob students of their reason for writing by giv... See more

I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they w... See more

loss for words