@WriterScience
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Day job: English professor, Nonfiction writing coach; Building: Writer Science—Studying the art and science of expert writing, sharing what I learn
Busan, Republic of Korea
Joined March 2021
- Tweets3.6K
- Following797
- Followers853
- Likes8.8K
Pinned Tweet
A good essay is like a set of instructions: it gives readers the info they need in the places and order they expect to find it.
Here are the five structural locations that readers use to interpret your essay—the places where they expect to find the answers to certain questions.
These reader expectations are unconscious.
But if you anticipate consciously what your readers expect intuitively, then you make your essay much more readable and valuable.
William Fitzpatrick retweeted
Only skill that matters in business is writing.
Everything is downstream. Writing is the root.
The people that takeover in the next era will be all excellent writers
Each day, I write 15-20 pages.
Either content scripts, trainings, YouTube videos, etc.
The clarity loop that comes from distilling your thoughts is the most valuable thing to spend time on.
If you want to get better at writing, you need to start creating content (that is longer-form and requires articulating your thoughts)
What a week 📈
Just crossed 5k subs on YouTube
Whatever I've achieved, I achieved through writing.
I grew up in a fishing village of 700 people. Writing was my way out.
I wrote my way into the school newspaper. Then the regional newspaper gave me a column.
I didn't have good grades, so I wrote my way into university. Wrote my way through it too.
When I got to Montreal, I didn't speak much French; so I handed out a CV that said I was an English writer. In Quebec, I would have had better chances of finding a job if I was a one-armed paperhanger. Yet somehow, I got a call back, and thus began my first job as a copywriter.
I spent my life learning the craft of writing, because I needed to. Writing wasn't just self-expression. It was a tool that bent the world to my will.
And I spent my career teaching it to people who needed it too.
Then came AI.
Everyone told me, this is it. Pack it up. Writings over. Learn to code.
My students agreed. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't convince undergrads that it was worthwhile to write, because the classroom environment is such an artifice. In the classroom, you can't simulate the conditions that make writing matter.
This channel has been my way to connect with people who understand that writing is thinking (and AI is not).
I think it's incredible that 5,000 of you have rallied around this message. Thank you for being here.
Most of the growth came from this one video. (Or was it the 110 videos that came before it?) nitter.cf/WriterScience/status/2…
This writing tutorial just blew up on YouTube—70k+ views in 7 days.
It features four frameworks that reflect the cognitive patterns readers use to interpret your text.
When you use consciously the patterns that readers expect intuitively, your writing becomes a lot more clear.
Full tutorial available over on Writer Science, the free newsletter for writers who care about readers writerscience.com/show/the-m…
When you're an expert, you use writing as part of your thinking process. You're not merely transcribing thoughts you've already thought before; you're generating new knowledge.
So your thoughts, in this early phase, are a total mess.
Like a set of Christmas lights, the expert writing process begins by untangling the web of ideas in your head into a linear pattern that makes sense to the writer.
But a text that makes sense to an expert writer—one that takes the shape of their thinking—is of little use to a reader. Indeed, the patterns that experts use to think about their subject actively fight against the patterns readers use to understand.
The name of this fight is interference, and it's why experts can't write well.
Full video available on Writer Science, the free newsletter for writers who care about readers writerscience.com/show/inter…
Just crossed 5k subs on YouTube
Whatever I've achieved, I achieved through writing.
I grew up in a fishing village of 700 people. Writing was my way out.
I wrote my way into the school newspaper. Then the regional newspaper gave me a column.
I didn't have good grades, so I wrote my way into university. Wrote my way through it too.
When I got to Montreal, I didn't speak much French; so I handed out a CV that said I was an English writer. In Quebec, I would have had better chances of finding a job if I was a one-armed paperhanger. Yet somehow, I got a call back, and thus began my first job as a copywriter.
I spent my life learning the craft of writing, because I needed to. Writing wasn't just self-expression. It was a tool that bent the world to my will.
And I spent my career teaching it to people who needed it too.
Then came AI.
Everyone told me, this is it. Pack it up. Writings over. Learn to code.
My students agreed. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't convince undergrads that it was worthwhile to write, because the classroom environment is such an artifice. In the classroom, you can't simulate the conditions that make writing matter.
This channel has been my way to connect with people who understand that writing is thinking (and AI is not).
I think it's incredible that 5,000 of you have rallied around this message. Thank you for being here.
Writer Science—for writers who care about readers youtube.com/channel/UCBby5Yp…
Nobody asked for disclosures with Grammarly or autosuggestions, so who cares anymore. Discerning readers and writers who give a damn know the difference between slop and value. For everyone else, it doesn’t matter whether they use AI or chisel every word into stone tablets because nobody is reading them
How about instead of normalizing AI detectors like they are Geiger Counters revealing a hidden radioactivity of contamniated text, we instead normalize a detailed and helpful explanation of exactly HOW you used AI in the Methods section, ideally an explanation that open sources generally useful processes, tradecraft and discoveries.
William Fitzpatrick retweeted
write once, publish everywhere
your personal site should be the source of truth
You don't ask a fish how to catch a fish.
You don't ask a woman how to get her to fall in love with you.
And you don't ask a reader how to improve your writing.
Here's what readers actually want:
"If you say to writers 'Never use the passive voice,' you're an idiot. Sometimes the passive voice is exactly what you want." —DF Wallace
Languages are organisms. They shed forms that lose their function.
Compare modern English to Olde English: it's shed countless forms—grammatical gender, the case system, "thou," most of its verb endings.
Yet it kept the passive voice.
That should be a clue that the passive voice serves an important function (and that those who advise to cut the passive in favor of the active don't know what they're talking about)
William Fitzpatrick retweeted
There's writing, and there's journalling. The latter is expressive, the former communicative.
William Fitzpatrick retweeted
Writing is a relationship with your reader. The writer and the reader both invest in that relationship.
A writer who publishes something generated by AI betrays that relationship. They’re not investing in it. They want the benefits of the relationship without actually being in it.
Relationships develop when both parties put skin in the game.
Many of us were trained to write by a strange kind of reader: the teacher.
These readers are strange because, unlike real readers, teachers are actually interested in the contents of your skull.
From the teacher’s perspective, your idea is already valuable—not because it's useful or interesting or because it contributes to an ongoing topic of inquiry, but because the teacher is paid to care about your idea.
The teacher gives students writing assignments because, in order to care about your idea, she needs to see it written down. The purpose of writing, for the teacher, is to express your idea.
Expressive writing fails in the real world because readers don't care about your ideas. They care about their ideas. They want to use your text to better understand something that they want to understand well.
Writers who ignore readers may succeed at expressing their ideas, but they fail to get readers to care about those ideas. They fail, in other words, at actually being read.
Position your ideas as the solution to a problem that readers care about—one that either imposes an intolerable cost on the reader (or someone they care about) nitter.cf/WriterScience/status/2…
