How to Write Usefully
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Highlights
- Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.
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Precision and correctness are like opposing forces.
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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.
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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.
- 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.
- Mistakes seem to lose courage in the face of an enemy with unlimited resources.
- 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.
- The way to get novelty is to write about topics you’ve thought about a lot.
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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.
- And indeed, if you’re looking for novel ideas, popular but mistaken beliefs are a good place to find them. Every popular mistaken belief creates a dead zone of ideas around it that are relatively unexplored because they contradict it.
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The exciting thing is not that there’s a lot left to write, but that there’s a lot left to discover. There’s a certain kind of idea that’s best discovered by writing essays. If most essays are still unwritten, most such ideas are still undiscovered.