Writing

The opening should focus only on making the reader keep reading

Use AI only for grammar corrections and focus on writing that distills experience.

When writing at length, drafting only the opening sentence of each paragraph is a good way to start shaping the structure. The reason to state the point first is to hold the reader: the text should read easily and still feel carefully made. The worst case is writing that nobody reads and that looks careless.

Writing is like playing an accordion, not in the musical sense but in the way the length expands and contracts. At first you stretch out the flow of thought, but that flow only makes sense inside your own context, so you have to fill in what is missing or prune what is extra. Pruning opens gaps in the logic, and filling the logic lets digressions creep in, so by refining back and forth like an accordion you end up with text where every word carries weight and the whole piece pulls like taffy.

Set the reader

Write in expressions that can hold a wide spectrum of readers, while still grounding the piece in one specific reader group

Always revise at least once

Get feedback from people around you on the draft

Unless it is storytelling, writing short and concise text that delivers the core effectively is best. Understand yourself first so it becomes clear what to write, then write your own text in terms everyone knows. To avoid the curse of knowledge (assuming the reader already knows what you know), show the text to one member of the reader group, or come back to it after some time and rewrite it.

Writing is the process of gradually answering the opening question with logic, so the shape of the argument is also a signal of honesty. People who talk at length or write in a difficult way either want to look smart or are trying to deceive, and a claim that makes no sense needs a correspondingly long preamble because it needs conditions to stand on. Visual aspects such as line spacing and layout deserve the same attention, since they decide whether the logic ever gets read.

Writing Notion

Writing Usages

If you really understood the material, you should be able to write it compressed. Write for people, and be less verbose than the model. As AI automatically generates explanations and documents, needlessly long and jargon-heavy sentences are everywhere. As a result the author does not read the AI output carefully either, and the reader ends up not reading it at all, so communication between people gets worse. Jargon itself is useful because it is compressed expression shared by people in the same field, but the problem is the combination of jargon and long AI text.

Write for people

Something I've noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don't think I stopped being...