Before writing
- Decide the audience, goal (frame as a question?)
- Ascertain my motivation for writing and consider occam’s razor in light of my argument
- Decide whether explorative or prescriptive
- Form an opinion. People who don’t communicate in an opinionated way are easily ignored, and often resent their lack of influence. Then ask yourself, is this really true? What evidence do I have to support this? And go find the strongest argument or anticipate the strongest position against yours (steelmanning).
- Pick out one person—imagined, or real—and write as if directly to them.
While writing
- Write down all ideas, however incomplete, however unrefined and unprocessed
- Write to be useful, often this involves ideas that have surprised you
- Balance qualifications with certainty, use qualifications in a versatile way to express more than just “experimental error” (but also: how broadly something applies, how you know it, how happy you are it’s so, even how it could be falsified…)
- Focus on the content of the words over the words themselves. This also means, curtail the florid vocab, write simply and conversationally, focus on saying something true over saying something convincingly
- It should flow like a river, this usually means a question answer cadence that flows into natural follow up or entirely orthogonal branches of questions. Don’t constrain your ideas prematurely, nor feel compelled to stay close to the initial question. Meander, and discover.
- Don’t be attached to the words you’ve put down, both emotionally and also intellectually. This has a highly limiting effect on your writing
- Don’t contrive to prove a point, if you feel like you are doing this, perhaps you’ve lost sight of the spark of insight, and have wandered into just writing to say things.
- Write conversationally
- Insert yourself into your writing, tell a story. Conveying thoughts, reflections and insights through storytelling can be incredibly compelling.
Reviewing
- Reread as if you were a neutral stranger
- Seek the strongest opposing positions and criticisms of your stance, and test what you’ve written against them
- Be vigilant against things you’ve written that you aren’t sure are true, or aren’t compelling, or don’t add anything
- Be in evaluative mode, not appreciative mode
- Do not keep something that isn’t right, just because it contains a few bits or costs you a lot of effort