Usually, we try to teach motive by asking: “Why should I, the reader, care about this?”

This is reasonable advice, but it’s also wrong. You, the writer, don’t know me. You don’t have a cluewhat I care about. The only reasons you can give me are the reasons you could give to literally anyone. “This issue is important because understanding it could in... See more

All emotions are useful for writing except for bitterness .

Good writing requires the consideration of other minds—after all, words only mean something when another mind decodes them. But bitterness can consider only itself. It demands sympathy but refuses to return it, sucks up oxygen and produces only carbon dioxide. It’s like sadness, but stuck e... See more

We’ve got a once-in-the-history-of-our-species opportunity here. It used to be that our only competitors were made of carbon. Now some of our competitors are made out of silicon. New competition should make us better at competing—this is our chance to be more thoughtful about writing than we’ve ever been before. No system can optimize for everythin... See more

lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.

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

Some people think that writing is merely the process of picking the right words and putting them in the right order, like stringing beads onto a necklace. But the power of those words, if there is any, doesn’t live inside the words themselves. On its own, “Love the questions” is nearly meaningless. Those words only come alive when they’re embedded ... See more