Day job: English professor, Nonfiction writing coach; Building: Writer Science—Studying the art and science of expert writing, sharing what I learn
Busan, Republic of Korea
Joined March 2021
- Tweets3.6K
- Following800
- Followers862
- Likes9K
Pinned Tweet
A good essay is like a set of instructions: it gives readers the info they need in the places and order they expect to find it.
Here are the five structural locations that readers use to interpret your essay—the places where they expect to find the answers to certain questions.
These reader expectations are unconscious.
But if you anticipate consciously what your readers expect intuitively, then you make your essay much more readable and valuable.
The reader isn’t an output of your writing; they’re an input.
You don’t find your readers. You produce them in the text.
Writing advice almost always comes as a list of rules.
But Paul Millerd would never presume to tell you how to write. Instead, he'll tell you not to copy him, to do it your own way.
So we flipped the genre on its head.
Here are the 6 rules of writing that @p_millerd broke in order to keep his writing free.
Full conversation and transcript available on Writer Science, the free newsletter for writers who care about readers
writerscience.com/show/6-rul…
William Fitzpatrick retweeted
did this cut with claude code
new convo with @WriterScience to youtube asap
Been editing this video all day and just realized I’ve got a booger hanging out.
Can Claude fix this? 😅
Descriptivists like Kamm are just pollsters: they think the only measure of a language choice is whether it’s made by native speakers.
But the relevant question for writers is neither the descriptivist one (is it popular?) nor the prescriptivist one (is it correct?), but the functional one: does it work?
An objective basis for answering that third question is found in psycholinguistics.
If we understand the reader’s experience—the ways in which certain language choices tax or exploit cognitive faculties—e.g.: working memory (how many details a sentence forces you to hold); mental imagery (how readily a phrase can be pictured, versus abstractions in nominalizations); and negation (the extra work required of flipping a negative statement to its positive form)—then we can make the case that certain constructions are not right or wrong but better or worse, regardless of who wrote it.
Had a lot of fun making this video, in which I introduce psycholinguistics as a method for making writing decisions.
Prescriptivists are grammar nazis, enforcing arbitrary rules. Descriptivists are pollsters who refuse to weigh in. Both miss the point.
Instead I use psycholinguistics, basing writing choices on how readers' brains actually process language.
Not what's proper or popular, but what works.
Instagram just makes you hate the people you already like
i deleted instagram about 5 years ago, so i had almost forgotten what it feels like to have it in your life
watching people around me use it now feels strange
you end up checking the daily lives of people you haven’t seen in ten years, people you probably wouldn’t even stop to talk to if you crossed them on the street.
random people from your past become permanent background characters in your mind.
then add the fact that a huge part of instagram is effectively a dating product
if you’re already in a long-term relationship, keeping that constant stream of attention, comparison and other people’s lives in your head has destroyed countless couples
after being off it for years, the whole thing looks much more extreme from the outside.
William Fitzpatrick retweeted
Only skill that matters in business is writing.
Everything is downstream. Writing is the root.
The people that takeover in the next era will be all excellent writers
Each day, I write 15-20 pages.
Either content scripts, trainings, YouTube videos, etc.
The clarity loop that comes from distilling your thoughts is the most valuable thing to spend time on.
If you want to get better at writing, you need to start creating content (that is longer-form and requires articulating your thoughts)
What a week 📈
Just crossed 5k subs on YouTube
Whatever I've achieved, I achieved through writing.
I grew up in a fishing village of 700 people. Writing was my way out.
I wrote my way into the school newspaper. Then the regional newspaper gave me a column.
I didn't have good grades, so I wrote my way into university. Wrote my way through it too.
When I got to Montreal, I didn't speak much French; so I handed out a CV that said I was an English writer. In Quebec, I would have had better chances of finding a job if I was a one-armed paperhanger. Yet somehow, I got a call back, and thus began my first job as a copywriter.
I spent my life learning the craft of writing, because I needed to. Writing wasn't just self-expression. It was a tool that bent the world to my will.
And I spent my career teaching it to people who needed it too.
Then came AI.
Everyone told me, this is it. Pack it up. Writings over. Learn to code.
My students agreed. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't convince undergrads that it was worthwhile to write, because the classroom environment is such an artifice. In the classroom, you can't simulate the conditions that make writing matter.
This channel has been my way to connect with people who understand that writing is thinking (and AI is not).
I think it's incredible that 5,000 of you have rallied around this message. Thank you for being here.
Most of the growth came from this one video. (Or was it the 110 videos that came before it?) xitter.cf/WriterScience/status/2…
This writing tutorial just blew up on YouTube—70k+ views in 7 days.
It features four frameworks that reflect the cognitive patterns readers use to interpret your text.
When you use consciously the patterns that readers expect intuitively, your writing becomes a lot more clear.
Full tutorial available over on Writer Science, the free newsletter for writers who care about readers writerscience.com/show/the-m…
When you're an expert, you use writing as part of your thinking process. You're not merely transcribing thoughts you've already thought before; you're generating new knowledge.
So your thoughts, in this early phase, are a total mess.
Like a set of Christmas lights, the expert writing process begins by untangling the web of ideas in your head into a linear pattern that makes sense to the writer.
But a text that makes sense to an expert writer—one that takes the shape of their thinking—is of little use to a reader. Indeed, the patterns that experts use to think about their subject actively fight against the patterns readers use to understand.
The name of this fight is interference, and it's why experts can't write well.
Full video available on Writer Science, the free newsletter for writers who care about readers writerscience.com/show/inter…
Just crossed 5k subs on YouTube
Whatever I've achieved, I achieved through writing.
I grew up in a fishing village of 700 people. Writing was my way out.
I wrote my way into the school newspaper. Then the regional newspaper gave me a column.
I didn't have good grades, so I wrote my way into university. Wrote my way through it too.
When I got to Montreal, I didn't speak much French; so I handed out a CV that said I was an English writer. In Quebec, I would have had better chances of finding a job if I was a one-armed paperhanger. Yet somehow, I got a call back, and thus began my first job as a copywriter.
I spent my life learning the craft of writing, because I needed to. Writing wasn't just self-expression. It was a tool that bent the world to my will.
And I spent my career teaching it to people who needed it too.
Then came AI.
Everyone told me, this is it. Pack it up. Writings over. Learn to code.
My students agreed. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't convince undergrads that it was worthwhile to write, because the classroom environment is such an artifice. In the classroom, you can't simulate the conditions that make writing matter.
This channel has been my way to connect with people who understand that writing is thinking (and AI is not).
I think it's incredible that 5,000 of you have rallied around this message. Thank you for being here.
Writer Science—for writers who care about readers youtube.com/channel/UCBby5Yp…
