How to Write Usefully

[How to Write Usefully]

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| 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 be useful.To start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enough
merely to be correct. It's easy to make a statement correct by
making it vague. That's a common flaw in academic writing, for
example. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can't go
wrong by saying that the issue is a complex one, that there are
many factors to be considered, that it's a mistake to take too
simplistic a view of it, and so on.Though no doubt correct, such statements tell the reader nothing.
Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made
without becoming false.For example, it's more useful to say that Pike's Peak is near the
middle of Colorado than merely somewhere in Colorado. But if I say
it's in the exact middle of Colorado, I've now gone too far, because
it's a bit east of the middle.Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. It's easy to
satisfy one if you ignore the other. The converse of vaporous
academic writing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of demagogues.
Useful writing is bold, but true.It's also two other things: it tells people something important,
and that at least some of them didn't already know.Telling people something they didn't know doesn't always mean
surprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something they
knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may
be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more
fundamental.Let's put them all together. Useful writing tells people something
true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them
as unequivocally as possible.Notice these are all a matter of degree. For example, you can't
expect an idea to be novel to everyone. Any insight that you have
will probably have already been had by at least one of the world's
7 billion people. But it's sufficient if an idea is novel to a lot
of readers.Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four
components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score
for usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, but
nonetheless true._____
How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and
important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. I
learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying
anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure
it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him,
but when you do, they're usually right.Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write
a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again.
Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes
a whole essay.You can't ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can
ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the
ones that aren't.In the sciences, this is called publication bias, and is considered
bad. When some hypothesis you're exploring gets inconclusive results,
you're supposed to tell people about that too. But with essay
writing, publication bias is the way to go.My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an
essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting
it very carefully.I've never tried to count how many times I proofread essays, but
I'm sure there are sentences I've read 100 times before publishing
them. When I proofread an essay, there are usually passages that
stick out in an annoying way, sometimes because they're clumsily
written, and sometimes because I'm not sure they're true. The
annoyance starts out unconscious, but after the tenth reading or
so I'm saying "Ugh, that part" each time I hit it. They become like
briars that catch your sleeve as you walk past. Usually I won't
publish an essay till they're all gone � till I can read through
the whole thing without the feeling of anything catching.I'll sometimes let through a sentence that seems clumsy, if I can't
think of a way to rephrase it, but I will never knowingly let through
one that doesn't seem correct. You never have to. If a sentence
doesn't seem right, all you have to do is ask why it doesn't, and
you've usually got the replacement right there in your head.This is where essayists have an advantage over journalists. You
don't have a deadline. You can work for as long on an essay as you
need to get it right. You don't have to publish the essay at all,
if you can't get it right. Mistakes seem to lose courage in the
face of an enemy with unlimited resources. Or that's what it feels
like. What's really going on is that you have different expectations
for yourself. You're like a parent saying to a child "we can sit
here all night till you eat your vegetables." Except you're the
child too.I'm not saying no mistake gets through. For example, I added condition
(c) in "A Way to Detect Bias"
after readers pointed out that I'd
omitted it. But in practice you can catch nearly all of them.There's a trick for getting importance too. It's like the trick I
suggest to young founders for getting startup ideas: to make something
you yourself want. You can use yourself as a proxy for the reader.
The reader is not completely unlike you, so if you write about
topics that seem important to you, they'll probably seem important
to a significant number of readers as well.Importance has two factors. It's the number of people something
matters to, times how much it matters to them. Which means of course
that it's not a rectangle, but a sort of ragged comb, like a Riemann
sum.The way to get novelty is to write about topics you've thought about
a lot. Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in this
department too. Anything you notice that surprises you, who've
thought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise a
significant number of readers. And here, as with correctness and
importance, you can use the Morris technique to ensure that you
will. If you don't learn anything from writing an essay, don't
publish it.You need humility to measure novelty, because acknowledging the
novelty of an idea means acknowledging your previous ignorance of
it. Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but in
this case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble.
If you know you're an expert on some topic, you can freely admit
when you learn something you didn't know, because you can be confident
that most other people wouldn't know it either.The fourth component of useful writing, strength, comes from two
things: thinking well, and the skillful use of qualification. These
two counterbalance each other, like the accelerator and clutch in
a car with a manual transmission. As you try to refine the expression
of an idea, you adjust the qualification accordingly. Something
you're sure of, you can state baldly with no qualification at all,
as I did the four components of useful writing. Whereas points that
seem dubious have to be held at arm's length with perhapses.As you refine an idea, you're pushing in the direction of less
qualification. But you can rarely get it down to zero. Sometimes
you don't even want to, if it's a side point and a fully refined
version would be too long.Some say that qualifications weaken writing. For example, that you
should never begin a sentence in an essay with "I think," because
if you're saying it, then of course you think it. And it's true
that "I think x" is a weaker statement than simply "x." Which is
exactly why you need "I think." You need it to express your degree
of certainty.But qualifications are not scalars. They're not just experimental
error. There must be 50 things they can express: how broadly something
applies, how you know it, how happy you are it's so, even how it

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