good night dear prince
I am writing well
One of the main reasons I maintain this blog is to become a better writer. I really appreciate when someone’s writing sounds spontaneous. Whether it’s in a book, an article, or even a technical document – communicating effectively is a fine art. I’m not there yet, but I enjoy the process of improvement.
My style has definitely improved since my early days of writing. Reading my old stuff is painful. I would use too many qualifiers and verbose phrases. This was a direct translation of the way I spoke, which is a poor strategy for how you should write. If your goal is to have other people read and hopefully enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
Here’s a sample of the useless phrases I would add to the beginning or end of almost every sentence:
- I think…
- I feel…
- I believe…
- For me,…
- it feels like…
- It seems that…
- In my opinion…
This was my worst habit when I started. It’s just the pretense that makes it tiring to read. It makes no sense to say “I think” here. Any Indicate in an opinion piece.
Think about all this to yourself, friend
Using this “careful” language softens your thoughts to the point that they become unambiguous. If you start a sentence with “I think…” then no one can dispute anything that comes after that, because it’s just your feeling. This is boring to read.
Writing a blog, or anything really, is your contribution to the public discussion. Sure, this blog only averages 10 page views per week (9 are bots and 1 is me) but I’m still putting my thoughts out into the digital ether. If you’re publishing something on the Internet, you can stand behind your words and wait for someone to say nonsense.
Using multiple adjectives is another bad habit I’ve struggled with in the past. Phrases like:
- …interesting and thought provoking…
- …wide, wide…
- …detailed and well written…
These are unnecessarily descriptive and, more often than not, unnecessary. just use one really good Punctual adjective instead. Open a thesaurus if you need to.
Now my goal is to use fewer words to express an idea. Everyone’s interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will confuse your thoughts. To use a metaphor from electronic communications – there is so much noise in the channel that modulating your signal does not add any additional information.
writing process
The writing process must be highly iterative—requiring several drafts before arriving at something you’re happy with. Taking time between drafts can also help, so you come back with a different perspective on what you’ve written. If we’re talking about a blog, there’s really no strict deadline for putting out a piece of content, so when you choose to publish is up to you. Even after publishing, there’s nothing that stops you from updating the content later.
When you have ideas you should write them down. Literally, I wrote the origin of it it Paragraph while in bed at 5am in January. You never know when inspiration will strike, so I think it’s best to get an idea early and then expand on it later.
This really helps make the ability to write as accessible to you as possible. For example, I now use Obsidian for all my drafts. It has cross-device support with cloud syncing, so “writing from anywhere” (mostly my phone) is now easy.
Now I can publish my smart toaster reviews straight from my smart toaster
usefulness of writing
There is much discussion about the importance of “manual” writing in the age of generative AI. GenAI, especially large language models, can be thought of as calculators for writing; They can quickly generate coherent written ideas from any input. So just like no one does long division by hand anymore, perhaps one day people will no longer write by hand.
The introduction of GenAI has essentially increased the surplus of written content to infinity. Hence, from the viewpoint of economics, the value of the written word has been reduced to zero without any resource constraints. But Is Does man-made writing still have any value? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I am not sure. However I think there is a lot of personal value in writing.
For example, book reviews are essential for gaining a better understanding of what you read. This helps crystallize knowledge in some way and integrate it into your mental map of the world. The content of the reviews I post varies – sometimes it’s a criticism, or a summary, or an extrapolation of a concept from the book that I’ll do additional research on. Either way, this process helps remember something about the book for a long time.
I think of it like breathing but for thoughts. We read a lot all day long – there has to be a natural balance between producing words as well. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale…
wrapping up
And I’m still not a great writer by any means. There are many ways to improve, which motivates and excites me to keep writing.
I often write “too much” and really struggle to condense my thoughts into a sharp essay. Most of my posts are over 2000 words…these days I try to limit myself to 1000 words. The range forces me to really think about the core idea I want to share.
*checks word count*
Thanks for reading!
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