Michael Dean

How do you syncopate a sentence?

The scoring system for Essay Architecture serves as: 1) a checklist in your own editing process, 2) as a way to analyze the overall quality of a draft, 3) as a way to track progress over time.

Check out the English Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It is set of one billion words that is considered to be the best cross-section of usage in the English language. It has 8 domains—blogs, websites, movies, speeches, fiction, magazines, newspapers, academi research—that each cover ~125 million words. Bigger corpus’s do exist—the s

There’s definitely a place for stream of consciousness. My sense is that the more analytical, slow, and entrenched my editing process for long form is, the better my one-take typewriter essays are. There’s a world in which the patterns of the craft become automatic, and over 50% of what you make is ready to go. I think it’s extremely rare to start

I still don’t think people realize how reading the dictionary and immersing yourself in language can be, 1) inherently fun, and 2) good for a writer. I get funny, ranged reactions when I mention this new hobby to people.

You have two 10s in black jack. Hit! “Why can’t you play your hand?” Look up! This is just one hand, and I’ve suddenly become conscious inside of a casino. I don’t need to win this hand, and I don’t even need to play this game. Walk up, walk outside. There’s air out there. There’s a whole world outside this casino. And even the city around you is a

An interstitial journal gives you a real ‘change log’ for debugging, and it’s format lets you observe and act from the Tao—where the energy actually is—instead of using will power to chip away at an abstract task list.

What if mindless scrolling wasn’t possible? What if you had to actively engage with 1 post at a time through a Tinder-like format (swiping left or right on a piece onf content)? By saying “yes” to something, it’s a vote to curate your feed, and also a public like. To say “no” (or, to not publicly endorse it), it means you want less of this in your

Real-time stereotype inversion: as situations come into play, try to shape a stereotype as fast as you can, WHILE ALSO forming the inverse of that stereotype. See a person, situation, appearance, or etiquette as a set of opposites that are both true at the same time. That guys not rudely blasting shit music in a quiet neighborhood. It’s a party! Et

When you dive into complexity, it’s so off the trail (in the thickets) that you’re forced to invent & touch the source of language to share it.