August 2, 2024
While these essays may be stylistic, there’s another, maybe, more important dimension of goodness in writing. It reveals itself when we have (actual) ideas to share, or, more importantly, when the goal for these ideas is that they are sold. As with any commodity or thing to be sold; presentation matters, but maybe even more importantly, so does function. To sharpen my tools, I thought to myself that I had to be a cracked writer. I needed to one day be capable of moving man to tears at cultural revolution’s notice. Beyond basic grammar, which I would have to refresh, and beyond meeting deadlines; I had to actually try, and improve, and get good.
So, here’s how we’re doing it.
First, I had to learn the practice of intentionality. With my blog, the goal is pretty much prosaic journal entries. Ramblings. I cache my thoughts on this ever-evolving site, and excitingly I have enough content on here, that I now can come back and read. And with the oldest content I can do so with relatively fresh eyes. I also have friends that read these posts and we’ll talk about them; and, people who I don’t know, or people who I have recently come to know can come to this site: get a free peek into my soul, be affirmed that I have one—which is nice. Regardless, because I come back to these posts, they should be enjoyable for her, or my future self, to read.
The heuristic for style is to write as you speak. I write like my most polished self speaks, keeping the quirks of my personality, playing with language, rhythm, and the freedom of this site. Or, at least I try.
Beyond a blog, let’s discuss policy writing. I'm still not great at this. My first piece definitely made me very okay with a river of colored strikes and comments that went well past the end of the document. Santi, the beloved, helped a lot. I also should have read the style guide, much, much sooner. At IFP, my main output, or at least I think, has been coming up with some idea, doing a kind of crude literature review, and then turning that into something readable and useful. My audience is a congressional staffer, and more frankly, the internet—we love a Twitter thread piece drop.
I was at the UK Day One Project and anchored to the writings of the FAS Day One Project, but they wanted stand-alone pieces, which makes sense, the proposals were their core output—no context was to be assumed—that was something I learned. I got critical, but good feedback and it led to the spree of improvement that I put upon myself for the summer.
For more academic writing, I think my approach is best described as taking the essence of the two types of writing above and throwing up whatever that comes out to be. In academic writing, we communicate findings and insights. So, honestly, if the time comes to write up results for an experiment or study, and our starting point are a set of terse bullet points—then what tends to work pretty well is prepending a few transition words, throwing in motivations for certain choices, and defining terms. Oh, and don’t forget the active voice. To add, I will say that I have read some really nice papers and there appears to be a lot of intention and creative liberty the researchers seem to take, but for a noob like myself; there’s still a formula that seems, or has been, pretty tractable to crack.
Okay, so now for the question of the night, how did I get better? Or rather, how am I trying to. So there’s a less systematic approach to this, it’s more virtuous, maybe more principled—in it, I just elusively read a lot and write more—but let’s throw that away for a minute. I needed structure, I needed results: I need structure, and I need results.
A “training plan” would come from an article on this site called the Art of Manliness: they propose a straightforward intervention—copying. Yes, copying. Like grabbing a sheet of paper or an iPad, or whatever, and then just copying what is written in front of you. As straightforward as this is, there are still some unknowns. One, what do I copy? Two, when do I stop? In response to the first question, I realized that attempting to answer this question was a good practice in itself. I love Substack, I’m quite chronically online, but to crack this code, you need to go to works that were written by people who wanted to make artifacts, make something that could and would subsist as a grand, significant thing. It feels weird to write this as motivation because it takes some feeling of self-importance to admit, but for me, I think it’s been an interesting mindset to adopt: a mindset where you care for what will outlast you, and respect it as such. It wouldn’t make sense to copy people who were writing essays in the same vein that I write on my blog. I learned this pretty late. I hit up the classics; there’s no shame, I know there's no shame, but it’s questionable this wasn’t my first instinct. I copied papers that I was reading for projects, paid special attention to the charm of the author, if I’d heard their name before, and so on. I relied on imperfect, but still pretty solid heuristics. Lawyers write well, I think, so I copied them too.
With this, there’s some genuineness (in what I could write) that I care about, it is something that this “training plan” seems to toss away. But when I come to think of it, the first question is once again really important, and helps to remedy what seems to be lost. Because in choosing who to copy, or imitate: authors in this S-tier, I still have choice. And it is still up to me and my taste to lead the way: I don’t have all the time in the world so I have to choose one author over the other. And in trying to imitate, my new style is the blend of these people that I admire—based on a sense of taste that I can say with some confidence is uniquely mine. I lightly subscribe to the combinatorial theory of innovation, where we describe novel invention as just a mixture of what preceded it. So maybe we are doing something new here? Maybe.
There was an ego loss here, in pursuing this training plan, where I realized I couldn’t trust my intuition for what was good. Apart from school, I never really dug into the classics and tried to understand why they were as revered as they were; as expected, and for the most part, I did not come to respect the hype. I didn’t have a reading habit until lately, so I kind of internalized that everyone was faking it: their enjoyment, I mean. But now when I read, and more frequently at that, I have another dimension to notice: the sentences, the cadence, the vernacular. I now also just think books are cool. Anyway, to start I just deferred. I didn’t rely on what I thought was good, I scouted out what others thought were good, listened to that. This deference was probably the largest source of improvement, slowly, I could delineate things that were better written than others, whereas before they would all be “good.”
With this, this post isn’t necessarily an invitation for you, my dear reader, to give your takes on my written evolution, but I don’t mind! While this blog will likely and maybe indefinitely remain a home to my ramblings, I’d like to think they’re better structured now. I think copying other people, blatantly, and honestly painfully—as you can maybe imagine, it can get pretty boring doing the near-equivalent of elementary-school busy work—means I’ve picked up relatively solid habits.
[1] So yes, the biggest takeaway is do the unsexy things to improve, copy a lot. Honestly, this post is (kind of) troll. I think the whole copying hundreds of words a day was surprisingly effective. The whole, how do I say this thing and fumbling over the indecision has begun melting away. I can be faster which is good, but yeah I don’t sound like this, it’s important to step out of the frame though, and I think the whole copying schtick, is really good.
[2] The Electric Typewriter is a great website for finding curated, amazingly-written articles and essays.
[3] Anyway, byeeee.