Larry Mcenerney's lectures on how to write effectively are gold for getting better at writing.
There's a lot packed in his lectures, but a big core idea is that you should use writing to help you do your thinking. With complex subject matter, writing is thinking. The thing that we've been taught is writing is more akin to publishing (i.e. the editing you do to share your thoughts with other people after you've finished writing and thinking for yourself).
If you've got more time, you should watch the whole thing, it's a masterclass in understanding what writing actually is, and what it does for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
The twitter link only shows one snippet for me. Do you have the others?
He mentions being forced to write an outline before the essay, and doing it the other way around. I've heard this so many times that it makes me wonder, why is that even a thing? Like, where did that practice come from, and why are we still using it in schools?
Are there really people who prefer to do it that way? Is it even possible to do it that way? It sounds like, first you come up with the software architecture, and then you write the software, and of course the architecture is perfect the first time! Whereas, in reality, any time you build something nontrivial, the process of building it inevitably reveals flaws in your initial best guess about how to build it... just as nontrivial writing will reveal gaps in your knowledge, or flaws in your logic.
Regarding outlines, when I was younger, I was always frustrated by the idea that I should somehow be able to summarize something I hadn’t written yet. It just did not compute.
In my professional life, I’ve found that I do start with outlines, but only for specific forms of writing. I spent a bunch of time writing instructional/tutorial content. Stuff like “How to achieve <outcome> using <feature(s)> in <product>”.
I was starting from a position of having expert product knowledge and having to boil that down into a useful post for people who were either beginners, or had knowledge of the product, just not how to achieve <outcome>.
Starting with outlines helped me think about what things this audience would find most useful before diving into the writing process. But that was just a starting point, and the outline would evolve quickly as I got into the actual writing process.
Outside of this, I’ve never found outline-before-writing useful, and see this as an iterative or post-writing exercise if I want to see a high level overview/arc of the content.
Great video. I especially appreciated how much does his point about "instability" has in common with what Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park creators) said about storytelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDJEjT2kKqY
Good writing is one of the hardest things to do, I have found. Writing tips are not that helpful because it's so situational and unpredictable in terms of the audience and how the work is received, and it's hard to generalize any specific methods that work especially well. Thank god I can make money with Nvidia and other tech stocks easily without having to make a living wit writing .sounds like the hardest ways to make a living. With investing, I don't need to worry about what other people think; just ride the trend.
Heh. It's funny how the brain works. Writing, to me, is something that just comes so naturally it's as if it doesn't take any real effort - it just flows from brain to hand, as if my thoughts are just manifesting themselves into text. The right words just appear.
Conversationally, however, I'm the opposite - I often need to be very comfortable with someone to achieve anything even approximating that level of flow, and if I'm with people I've just met, then I overanalyse and second guess my words to the point where it can sometimes just gum up the works entirely and I mostly sit out of the conversation. And leading the conversation, thinking of something to say, new topics to talk about - at best I can hope to keep that up for half an hour, after a few drinks, if it's a situation like a date where failure is not an option (well, not a good option).
I envy people who have a high level of conversational fluency, wit, and charm. It's as if it just comes so naturally to them that it doesn't take any real effort.
I have so many "in-progress" essays about topics where I keep circling back, adding on one bit or another. I've been working on one which, vaguely put, concerns the more unusual aspects of a variable, from start to finish. I suspect that I am not enough of a logician to really consider everything, but I believe that just spending time on the topic, whether or not an essay results, might be valuable to me in some capacity.
Personally I think when I'm in doubt and doing the circling you describe, I'm closer to the truth then when I think my arguments are water tight. Too often I've been so sure, only to be thrown off later.
I also think that making a convincing story is more about retorica then logic.
It seems obvious when you don't need to write things down when you don't feel you have anything to say, but growing up I was always annoyed at how essay-type homework and exams were structured, which values form over substance, because there cannot be much substance when you throw a random topic at a teenage and ask them to care in 90 minutes.
It's much easier to write better essays when you care a lot about something, really want to make it convincing and spend effort polishing your technique based on actual reader feedback. Even the "form" taught at school doesn't really matter because different audiences and topics require different arguments and require you to focus on different details, so the best kinds of essays often look nothing like say full score GRE writing test essays.
I wish I could vote this comment up 100 times. I feel like the writing taught in high school set me back 10 years; it took sustained contact with actual literature while in college just to recover somewhat.
A finer point: the five-paragraph essay that was popular -- no, required -- in my 90s-era American high school is a great format for creating forgettable text. It's a succinct recipe for making an outline slower to read. Thankfully, we have ChatGPT for that now. But still, real writing can aspire to something more visceral, or raw, real, or just damned interesting.
(For the record, I had excellent English teachers... but the tyranny of the prescribed essay spares no one. No slights, Mr(s). Neely, Vosovic, Dewar, and Green!)
Understanding the forms is also a necessary part of being able to write a good essay. Someone writing down a stream of consciousness of the best ideas about a topic isn't going to do as good a job at conveying those as someone who's able to organize those into an essay which methodically guides the reader through those ideas to their conclusions.
Of course there is no one true best form for essays of all kinds, so in some cases a less common structure should be used. Even then, at least a familiarity with some of the most common high-level structures of introduction, extrapolation, and conclusion can provide a starting point for adapting that basic style to the circumstances at hand. In the same way a pianist studies scales early in their learning not because scales are beautiful music, but because it provides a baseline of skills that can help them to make beautiful music upon.
Link to snippets of his talk if you're short on time: https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1668446029610352641
If you've got more time, you should watch the whole thing, it's a masterclass in understanding what writing actually is, and what it does for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM