writing advice

Bilingual

Write the first damn draft yourself
2 months ago
- Using LLMs for professional writing can harm your career, especially early on, as experienced readers can detect AI-generated content.
- Delegating writing to AI means delegating critical thinking, which is essential for career advancement.
- The excuse of being a bad writer is like avoiding the gym because you're unfit; you must practice writing yourself.
- Write the first draft yourself, then use AI for feedback on errors and suggestions, not for rewriting.
- Relying on AI for writing is like binge-watching short videos or eating junk food—short-term pleasure but long-term dependence.
- Three key tips from Dr. Sam Illingworth: AI agrees with you, confidence is not evidence, and AI rounds to the middle.
How to Write Usefully
2 months ago
- Essays should aim to be useful rather than merely persuasive.
- Useful writing is correct, important, novel, and stated as strongly as possible without being false.
- Precision and correctness require balance; vague statements are correct but useless.
- The Morris technique: only publish what you are sure is worth hearing.
- Write a loose first draft, then carefully revise and delete anything unsatisfactory.
- Importance can be gauged by writing about topics that matter to you, as a proxy for readers.
- Novelty comes from writing about topics you've thought deeply about; insights that surprise you will likely surprise readers.
- Strength involves thinking well and using qualification to match confidence level.
- Simplicity helps ensure correctness and respects the reader.
- Useful writing can provoke anger because novelty challenges cherished beliefs.
- Misinterpretations are common; address honest ones but avoid overprotecting against dishonest ones.
- Practice by narrowing topics or writing without publishing to build skill.
- The internet has made essay writing accessible; many essays and ideas remain undiscovered.
How to Write English Prose
2 months ago
- David Bentley Hart praises Sir Thomas Browne's prose as a perfect gem of English, particularly citing passages from 'On Dreams' and 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' that exemplify Browne's range from glowing beauty to flamboyant density.
- Hart contrasts Browne's ornate style with the King James Bible's simplicity, arguing both represent a continuum from the beautiful to the sublime in pre-Kantian terms, not a simple opposition.
- He claims great prose develops later than poetry, requiring a mature language; English achieved its zenith in the 17th century, enriched by a vast vocabulary mixing Teutonic and Latin elements.
- Hart criticizes 20th-century trends toward simplification and minimalism in prose, calling them an 'official dogma' that produces dull, anonymous writing, and advocates for balancing beauty and sublimity.
- He lists five exemplary prose writers—Robert Louis Stevenson, Sylvia Townsend Warner, J.A. Baker, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Vladimir Nabokov—with passages illustrating rich, evocative style.
- Hart offers 33 rules for writing, emphasizing precise vocabulary (e.g., 'ultracrepidarian,' 'hyaline,' 'pogonotrophy'), elegance over clarity, and rejecting Orwell's and Strunk & White's simplistic advice.
- He champions the semicolon and dash as subtle punctuation tools, advises ignoring unaccomplished critics, and urges writers to aim for posterity, knowing the magic of language to create worlds.
- Hart concludes with personal moments of writing satisfaction, emphasizing that achieving one's intended effect makes all hard work worthwhile.

writing advice

Write the first damn draft yourself

How to Write Usefully

How to Write English Prose