In November 2015, I started a blog on Blogger. My first post was a book review of The Martian by Andy Weir. 10 years and a couple of blog migrations later, I'm still writing. I wanted to share some thoughts and learnings I picked up throughout this time. Some of it is specific to writing a blog, but some is generally applicable to writing in any format.

goodnight sweet prince

writing well

One of the main reasons I maintain this blog is to become a better writer. I really appreciate when someone's writing feels effortless. Whether it's in a book, an article, or even a technical document—communicating effectively is a fine art. I'm not there yet, but I enjoy the process of improving.

My style has certainly improved since my early days of writing. Reading my old stuff is painful. I would use too many qualifiers and verbose phrases. It was a direct translation of the way I spoke, which turns out is a bad strategy for how you should write. If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.

Here's a sample of the useless phrases I would add to the start or end of almost every sentence:

• I think...
• I feel...
• I believe...
• To me,...
• It feels like...
• It seems that...
• In my opinion...

This was my worst habit when I started. It's just fluff that makes it exhausting to read. It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.

keep all that pondering to yourself buddy

Using this "careful" language just softens your ideas to the point of being inarguable. If you start a sentence with "I feel..." then no one can dispute anything that follows, since it's just your feeling. This is boring to read.

Writing a blog, or anything really, is your contribution to public discourse. Sure, this blog only averages 10 page views a week (9 are bots and 1 is me) but I'm still throwing my ideas out there into the digital ether. If you're publishing something on the internet, you might as well stand tall behind your words and wait for someone to call bullshit.

Using multiple adjectives is another bad habit I struggled with in the past. Phrases like:

• ...Interesting and thought-provoking...
• ... broad, wide-ranging...
• ...detailed and well-written...

These are unnecessarily descriptive and, more often than not, redundant. Just use one really good punctilious adjective instead. Open a thesaurus if you need to.

My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea. Everyone's interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will just muddle your ideas. To use a metaphor from electronic communication—there's so much noise in the channel that modulating your signal doesn't provide any extra information.

the writing process

The writing process should be highly iterative—many drafts are needed before you arrive at something you're happy with. Taking time between drafts can help too, so you come back to it with a different perspective on what you wrote. If we're talking about a blog, there's really no strict timeline for getting a piece of content out, so when you choose to publish is up to you. Even after publishing, there's nothing that stops you from updating the content afterwards.

You should write down ideas when you have them. Literally, I wrote the genesis of this paragraph while in bed at 5am in January. You never know when inspiration will strike, so I find it best to get the thought down quickly and then expand on it later.

It really helps to make the ability to write as accessible to you as possible. For example, I use Obsidian for all my drafts now. It has cross-device support with cloud syncing, so "writing from anywhere" (mostly my phone) is easy now.

I can now publish my smart toaster review directly from my smart toaster

the usefulness of writing

There's a lot of talk about the value of "manual" writing in the age of generative AI. GenAI, specifically Large Language Models, can be thought of as calculators for writing; they can generate coherent written ideas instantly from any input. So just like how nobody does long division by hand anymore, maybe people won't do much writing by hand one day.

The introduction of GenAI has increased the surplus of written content to infinity, essentially. So from an economics standpoint, without any resource scarcity the value of written words has been reduced to zero. But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.

Book reviews, for example, are essential for gaining a better understanding of what you read. It helps crystallize the knowledge in some way and integrates it into your mental map of the world. The reviews I post vary in content—sometimes it's a critique, or a summary, or an extrapolation of a concept from the book I'll do additional research on. Either way, this process helps to remember something about the book long-term.

I think of it like breathing but for ideas. We do so much reading all day—there should be a natural balance with producing words too. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale...

wrapping up

And I'm still not a great writer by any means. There's a lot of ways to improve, which is kind of motivating and excites me to keep writing.

I often write "too much" and struggle to really condense my thoughts into a sharpened essay. Most of my posts are 2000+ words...nowadays I'm trying to restrict myself to 1000 words. The limit forces me to really think about the core idea I want to share.

*checks word count*

Thanks for reading!