The Best Articles in Writing

It’s not the end of the world if you use an unnecessary word now and then, write the occasional overlapping sentence, or tell us what you’re doing in a sentence before you do it. But the extra words…

«But your readers don’t necessarily need to follow the journey you took while you were drafting the document. They just need to know where you ended up.»

February 2020What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should…

«Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.»

Even stories that start with brilliant strokes of inspiration too often fizzle out before we reach The End. Use this four-step method to develop your best ideas to their fullest.

«No matter your starting point—a love story, buddy tale, mystery, quest—you can do like the great innovators do: Bend it. Amp it. Drive it. Strip it.»

I long ago stopped reading books on note-taking. They were always too vague and boring, full of platitudes that had little to do with the world outside academia. I especially avoided “how-to” style…

Rules you can use to write anything you want to write — from a book to a tweet

CNET's AI-generated articles appear to show deep structural similarities, amounting to plagiarism, with previously published work elsewhere.

Five lesser-known benefits of thinking out loud

ChatGPT is the most advanced technology of its kind and its popularity is growing fast. Especially among students.

As AI gains traction, writing emails with a human touch becomes more important than ever.

My slow and steady progression to living out the plot of the movie 'Her'

«It can summarize things you’ve said to it in new language that helps you look at yourself in a different light and reframe situations more effectively. »

Measurement was a crucial organizing principle in ancient Egypt, but metrology itself does not begin with nilometers. To understand its place in human culture, we have to trace its roots back furth…

David Byrne, Ernest Hemingway, and the importance of leaving yourself fragments to build on.

«Wherever I stop at the end of the day, I leave myself a little shorthand description of what’s coming next—almost like a bullet points version of the next few paragraphs. That way, when I return to the computer the next morning, I’ve got something to build on, as Byrne puts it.»

When AI is smart enough to write an essay, then what happens? GPT3 is back in the news, because, as expected, it’s getting better and better. Using a simple chat interface, you can easily ask…

«If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.»

While we may think we have moved beyond the censorship of the past, writers' artistic freedoms are still constrained.

My go-tos for reporting, research, and writing

“I’ve been collecting these theories of why writers write because so many writers have written about it.”

Prose style and structure in The Tipping Point

«Tyler Cowen once named The Tipping Point as the 2000s equivalent of The Great Gatsby. George Eliot put social science ideas to work in novels to make them more relatable by giving them context»

We have fallen out of love with good writing

«The paradox of this mystic inner quality is that its depth gets expressed by what we think of as a superficial quality: style.»

Ambiguity in fiction, when done well, is not an escape hatch for the noncommittal writer. It’s an articulation of something otherwise impossible to articulate.

Looking at how to make writing easier to read

«Writing text that can be understood by as many people as possible seems like an obvious best practice. But from news media to legal guidance to academic research, the way we write often creates barriers to who can read it. Plain language—a style of writing that uses simplified sentences, everyday vocabulary, and clear structure—aims to remove those barriers.»