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…

Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone’. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?

In search of calm, a writer embraces her musical mediocrity.

Thoughts on slow and diligent writing while balancing the demands of the platform

«We need to be vigilant about how our message is being shaped by our medium, and watch for signs that that shaping is changing our voice beyond our recognition.»

Ever hit the issue where you want numbered items to alphabetically order themselves numerically, so you lead them with zeros, which works until you have more digits than zeros. Leximited notation…

When I was in fifth grade, our class was joined by a boy who had the most exquisite handwriting. It was astonishing to watch, and worse, he had no idea how good he was at it. Penmanship in elementa…

«There is a term used by both educators and forensic analysts, graphic maturity, that refers to the point when our handwriting stops looking childish.»

WGA writers don't want to train AI or clean up AI-generated "sloppy first drafts."

«The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is seeking to restrict the use of generative AI in writing film and TV scripts as part of an ongoing strike, reports Reuters. The concerns come at a time when anxiety over the economic impact of tech like ChatGPT looms large in the minds of many.»

Proprioceptive writing is a self-reflection method combining meditation and writing, two of the most effective ways to tap into the inner self.

«This process combines meditation and writing, two of the most effective ways to tap into the inner self.»

...but the other 10% are worth 1000x

After years of hard work and low pay, the risks I took to work in publishing are finally paying off. But now, I wonder about the price my family paid, and whether it was too steep.

How to flip your can’t-switch to I can, from I’m not good enough to I’m worthy of success.

Fortune cookie companies are outsourcing the labor-intensive process of writing fortunes to artificial intelligence.

The meter-tall stone that has come to be called the Mesha Stele, its smooth, black basalt carved some sixteen centuries before it was unearthed from the packed, red sand of Dhiban, Jordan in 1868, …

“Who Jackie?” has been retold in comedy circles for nearly 30 years — much to the surprise of the Roseanne writer who said it.

Professionals must learn to work with the machines or they will be replaced by them.

«ChatGPT and the Future of the Professions»

Scientific papers are dense, jargon-filled, and painful to read. It wasn’t always this way – and it doesn’t have to be.

«Journals are increasingly seen as a point of friction in science as opposed to what they used to be: a tool to facilitate communication»

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