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?

Fed-up applicants are letting bots handle their job searches.

A dozen things that drive my writing, research, thinking & actions

«battle against the constant pressure from powerful forces to narrow and constrain my life»

Although the very first step in the lifecycle of a creative project, it’s always easy to fall at the first hurdle of understanding the brief. With AI tools now available, is this new collaborator a…

Why do public intellectuals condescend to their readers?

“Rushing from stove to typewriter like a mad hen...”

Sep 26, 2023 SHARE ↓ A few thoughts I have about writing: Writing is an art, and art is subjective. Novelist William Maughan said there are three rules to good writing. “Unfortunately no one knows…

«Most good writing is a byproduct of good reading. You’ll never meet a good writer who doesn’t spend most of their time reading. Not some. Most.»

Huxley was a very special kind of expert witness to his own unusual states of consciousness, which he actively cultivated in the service of his writing.

Someone recently asked me – “how do you deal with writing in public? People on the internet are such assholes!” I’ve often heard the advice “don’t read the comments”, but actually I’ve learned a huge…

«When I share stories about problems I solved, the comments really help me understand how what I learned fits into a bigger context»

I'm the author of two books, but I'm used to writing on the side of other jobs. Maybe that means it's a hobby—or maybe it's what knits my whole life together.

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.»

While AI can speed up the writing process, it doesn’t optimize quality — and it endangers our sense of connection to ourselves and others.

«Good writers assess the rhetorical context for their writing and make deliberate decisions about where to conform and where to stray»

We looked at over 1,400 romance novel covers featured in Publishers Weekly from 2011 to 2023 and evaluated each cover based on its raunchiness (or level of undress), art style, and representation of…

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, …

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

«I encountered Joan Didion’s famous line about why she writes—“entirely to find out what I’m thinking”»

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»