Rishita Chaudhary

I’m often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”

Practical things you can do to make your text clearer.

Open two copies of the same document and put them side-by-side. Edit in one, while referring to the other.

Rewrite your first draft using this rule: no significant words from the first draft are allowed in the second draft.

If your sentence has more than two commas in it, it’s probably too long.

I... See more

My dear Cara,

You see I have let the weeks go by—thinking of you, but not writing to you. I believe you are one of the few who can understand that in certain crises, direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy. If I could have been with you in bodily presence, I should have sat silent, thinking silence a sign... See more

And indeed the sense that we are are unfinished — as individuals and as a species, in our personal development and our interpersonal relations and our evolutionary trajectory — may be the single most hopeful thing about being alive, the truest grounds for faith.

You have no idea how much life success comes from having the raw audacity to ask for things and just working with a diligent focus to be competent.

People inherently respect those traits so much that they feel a moral obligation to provide opportunities for you.

I think it’s also important to admit, to attest to, and to [bear] witness to the violence of the archive of slavery, which is about erasure. There are tick marks instead of names; it’s all about the slave’s relationship to the accumulation of wealth for another. The archive doesn’t tell us the story of someone’s life.

Who gets to write shapes what gets to be written, which shapes what is remembered — that is the making of the collective selective memory we call history, and it is made of words. We invented words to name the world and invented power to apportion the named. It is our inventions that tell the fullest story of our nature. The range of them — the... See more