Writing

How to generate hooks

You create hooks by finding questions you want answers to then posing those questions in your introduction:

1. Ask yourself, “If someone else wrote my intro, what are the most captivating questions they could pose to make me excited to read this?”


2. Write those questions down. Even if you lack the answers.


3. Rank your questions by how

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To uncover interesting ideas, continuously make yournext point whatever interests you most. Skip everything that bores you.

When something bores you, it probably bores your readers too. And if something entertains you, it probably entertains them too. You're a proxy for your die-hard readers.

That’s the irony of self-indulgent writing: writing for y... See more

My favorite writing trick is to only write my introduction then ask friends who represent my audience this question:

"After reading only this intro, what are the most interesting ideas I could possibly cover in the rest of the post?"

I pick and choose the responses that resonate with me. This is how I de-risk my post from lacking novelty: Am I headed... See more

I recommend writing a terrible first draft as quickly as you can. Your goal is to speedrun—to blast through the laziness and the blockers to just get garbage onto paper. This shortcuts you to the rewriting phase, which most people find far less painful. It's strange how well this works.

That's why, in my bad first draft, I use placeholders any time ... See more

Examples convey the significance of an idea by relating it to real-world situations. They also help readers learn concepts in the context of what they're familiar with, which aids in recall. Examples are what make abstract ideas specific .

Tips for providing examples:

1. Don't just provide good examples, also provide bad examples. Before-and-after compa

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To engage a reader's senses, you can do more than just add vivid details. You can also swap plain phrases for more engaging ones.

Pay attention to the bold words, which now create metaphors:

• “Make me an instrument of your pain.”


• “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”


• “Where there is hatred, let me

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You only fully understand the context of a sentence when you're done reading it. So, the longer the sentence, the more details you hold in your head at once. That makes understanding already complex points even harder.

Ask for feedback from the audience you’re writing for. Here’s a template:

It would be helpful if you read my article slowly to transcribe the reactions you have while reading it. For example:

1. Tell me what to delete — When you notice your interest is fading, you can say “I'm drifting here. This isn’t compelling and it isn’t adding value. Get to the

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Grammatical simplification such as this doesn't make your writing worse. The complexity of your writing should emerge from the strength of its ideas, not from how those ideas are worded.