Writing
Writing is how you find out what you think. Reading brings in other people's thoughts; writing forces yours into a form clear enough to examine.
“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.” — Kurt Vonnegut
Writing is how you find out what you think.
Reading brings in other people’s thoughts; writing forces yours into a form clear enough to examine. The two work together: reading without writing is consumption without digestion; writing without reading is output without input. Between them, they are the most efficient tools available for improving how well your mind works.
What an Essay Is
The word “essay” traces back to Montaigne, who published his Essais in 1580. He chose the name because essayer in French means “to try” — to attempt. An essay is not a demonstration of what you already know. It’s an attempt to figure something out.
High school inverts this. It asks you to persuade before you understand, to defend a position before you’ve formed one. The result is writing as performance: gaming what the teacher wants to hear, not discovering what you actually think. Most people carry these habits into adulthood.
What Good Writing Is
Paul Graham’s framework for useful writing is the best I know. Good writing is:
- Correct: it makes claims that are true
- Precise: it makes those claims as strong as they can be without becoming false
- Novel: it tells the reader something they didn’t already know — or makes explicit something they knew but had never articulated
- Important: it tells them something that matters
Academic writing fails on precision — it makes itself correct by making itself vague. Demagoguery fails on correctness — it’s bold but false. Good writing is bold and true.
The test is whether someone finishes your piece knowing something they didn’t before.
Style
Steven Pinker identifies classic style as the mode of good writing. Classic style presents the world rather than arguing for a position. Your goal is to show the reader something — to help them see it — and then let them decide what to make of it. You are not running a marketing campaign for your worldview.
The opposite is oracular style: keeping understanding out of the reader’s head rather than weaving it in, signalling intelligence through obscurity. It treats the reader as a dunce.
Equally bad is self-conscious style — the writing of the anxious, hedging every claim: “relatively,” “in some ways,” “to an extent,” “so to speak.” This style is written for the author’s protection, not the reader’s comprehension.
Classic style trusts the reader. Concrete examples make the implicit explicit and give the reader something to hold onto. Clarity is not dumbing down — it’s respect.
Complexity Is a Structural Problem
Complex ideas can be written clearly. The failure to do so is almost always a structural failure, not a gap in the reader’s intelligence.
Think of it as an on-ramp. Every reader has a top speed of comprehension, but what determines whether they can access your writing is how fast they’re required to accelerate to reach it. A well-structured piece builds gradually, giving the reader what they need to understand the next paragraph in the paragraph before it. A poorly structured one expects them to arrive at full speed from a standing start.
Your job is to build the longest, most gradual on-ramp you can. Feynman could explain atomic structure to a layperson within four pages not because he simplified the physics, but because he constructed each step of the reader’s understanding before asking them to take the next one. Start from common ground and carry the reader forward.
Why Writing Is Hard
There are two distinct hurdles.
The first: you have to actually understand the topic. Poor writing is, more often than not, the symptom of shallow thinking. If you can’t write a clear sentence about something, you probably don’t understand it as well as you think. The discipline of writing forces honesty about what you actually know.
The second hurdle, once you’ve cleared the first: the curse of knowledge. The better you understand something, the harder it is to remember what it was like not to. You forget which steps you took. You start skipping them, and the reader can’t follow.
Good writing requires both: deep understanding and the ability to reconstruct the path you took to get there, step by step.
How to Write Better
Write a fast first draft. The enemy of a first draft is the internal editor who wants every sentence to be good before moving to the next. Turn it off. Get the ideas out — broken, incomplete, disorganised. Graham spent 23 minutes writing a short piece and 44 minutes rewriting it. The ratio is about right. Write fast, then slow down and fix what came out.
Start with a question. A good essay moves from a question toward an answer. If you don’t have a question, you have a collection of statements. The question doesn’t need to appear in the final piece, but it needs to be real to you while you’re writing.
Edit after a delay. When you’re inside a draft, everything in it seems necessary. Step away for a day — even a few hours — and you’ll see it as a reader does. The redundancies become obvious. The weak sentences reveal themselves. Distance is a form of objectivity.
Read it aloud. If a sentence sounds wrong when you read it aloud, it is wrong. Your ear catches rhythm and clarity that your eye skips. It’s also the fastest way to locate a problem you’ve sensed but can’t place.
Read widely. Writing and reading are synergistic. You absorb the habits of good writers without consciously noticing. Read writers who are better than you and your prose will move in their direction.
Write consistently. Consume new ideas. Process them. Publish and listen to feedback.
Repeat.
The difficult part isn’t knowing the steps — it’s doing them on a day without inspiration. Writers who produce work worth reading are mostly writers who showed up when they didn’t feel like it, and edited what came out.