1. The curse of knowledge is the biggest threat to clear writing.
2. It can be harder to write about a topic you're an expert in because it's so easy to forget what it's like to not know something, which makes you overestimate what the reader knows.
3. The easiest way to fight this curse of knowledge is to show drafts of your writing to people outside your field.
4. Shakespeare said: "Brevity is the soul of wit." The point is that saying something in fewer words will almost always make it better because it requires less cognitive load for the reader to understand.
5. Ok, let's try again: Saying something in fewer words will almost always make it better.
6. Ok, one more time: Remove needless words.
7. One reason why writing is harder than speaking is there's no real-time feedback. You have to imagine the audience's reaction.
8. The best thing you can say about how LLMs write is that the sentence structure is sound. But the downside is how generic and banal the outputs are.
9. 18th and 19th century writing is more vivid because the abstractions that modern writers use hadn't been invented yet. Calling somebody "pathologically aggressive" isn't nearly as vivid as saying: "They grabbed me by the throat."
10. Generalizations without examples are useless, and examples without generalizations are pointless. You need to marry them both. Generalizations show the big picture. Examples make them concrete.
11. The more vivid a piece of writing, the more people can form a mental image of what you're saying. Avoid abstractions: frameworks, paradigms, concepts. All those things. Get concrete, so people can see what you're actually talking about. For example, don't talk about a "stimulus that awakened your senses" when you can say: "I got excited because I saw a cute bunny rabbit."
12. Academic writing should be clear. I mean... if the taxpayers are funding most of the research, shouldn't they be able to understand it?

1. Avoid things that dilute your sense of wonder.
2. Children are wondernauts. They continually voyaging in jay-dropping astonishment because of the freely given miracle of this world.
3. Raid old dialect glossaries in regional libraries for words that are precise, lyrical, and sometimes absurd. Take rionnach maoim, a Gaelic word for "the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day."
4. Why Robert loves the em dash: It's liquid punctuation that flows both ways, unlike the hard bookend of a full stop period. Meaning can move against the current, eddy back up the sentence, or flow down. It's your most beautiful, fluid piece of traffic control for meaning.
5. Resist over-explanation. Sometimes, it's okay to leave gaps in your writing so your readers can become your cowriters.
6. Don't use big words to sound impressive. Use them to be precise. Sometimes, you can say more with the right four-syllable word than you can in four sentences.
7. For those raised on rationality, ask yourself: Has this become a prison? What can't I see because of the blinders of rationality?
8. Take lots and lots of notes. You don't need to write much. Just enough for little fragments to become threads of memory you can pull from to summon entire scenes once you return to your computer.
9. Don't be scared of writing nonlinearly. You can build your books out of mosaics and edit by jumping up and downstream.
10. Edit your writing by reading it out-loud: the tongue trips on what the eye glides across, and the ear hears things that escape the usual systems of vigilance.
11. Abandon the goal of trying to "capture" your experience of nature. Lean into your perception of it instead and write about how you perceived it, not what it actually was.
12. How can you do it? Metaphor. Yes, metaphors are fundamentally about distorting reality but they can evoke something far richer than what people can see on their own.
13. His advice to writers: Ass in chair. Show up for work, every day, and put the time in. Yes, it can be "brain hurty" work but don't run away from it.
14. When you end a day's writing, always know what the next sentence will be. It's like pushing off on a bike: you can wake up tomorrow with momentum instead of trying to start all over again.
15. In songwriting you learn to let language cross-pollinate in weird ways, which creates uncanny connections.
    What seems like a glitch becomes precisely the feature you need.
16. Rhythm in nonfiction does what fiction has always known. It works on the mind's ear. We expect poetry to be rhythmic, but prose can use these same sonic tools to reach deeper down forms of knowing that bypass the analytical mind.
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"WRITE EVERYDAY" is not good advice. to learn to write well you must first understand the basics of writing. You shouldn't just write everyday. While you might fill up your journal or notebook with thousands of words, you don't actually get better.

It's counterproductive activity that seems like progress on the surface level. Your goal slowly beomes to fill up a page with words rather than learning, understanding and improving.

Writing for your journal isn't the same as writing for publication or writing to simply learn to write.

In this case, practice doesn't make perfect but perfect practice makes perfect.

1. Several short sentences on writing - Verily Klinkenborg

2. Readings for Writers - E Suzanne Ehst, Emily Wegemer

3. On Writing Well - William Zinsser

4. On Writing Ernest Hemingway

5. The Art of Personal Essay - Philip Lopate

6. A swim in a pond in the rain - George Saunders

7. How to read literature like a professor - Thomas C Foster

8. Madness, Rack, and Honey -

9. Make transient notes — This is a great way to capture fleeting ideas and rough thoughts quickly. It's widely advised to jot down ideas as they come to avoid losing them.

10. Make literature notes — Taking notes directly from your reading sources helps keep track of valuable information, references, and arguments, which is essential for grounding your work in research.

11. Make evergreen notes — Creating permanent notes or “evergreen” notes that distill insights in your own words is a recognized best practice. These notes form the building blocks of original content and thinking.

12. Publish as essays — Sharing your ideas early as essays or blog posts helps to test your thinking, get feedback, and build an audience, which is encouraged by many contemporary writers.

13. Decide on a topic from what you've written/published — Choosing a focused topic from your existing essays is a practical approach and aligns with how many writers refine their ideas progressively.

14. Turn your essays into a draft — Compiling essays into draft form is a logical next step towards manuscript creation.

15. Edit and Proofread — Essential steps for clarity, coherence, and polish, consistent with standard writing processes.

16. Make a book/manuscript — Finalizing your work into a cohesive book or manuscript completes the process.