February 2020What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That'swhat a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we canaim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.To start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enoughmerely to be correct. It's easy to make a statement correct bymaking it vague. That's a common flaw in academic writing, forexample. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can't gowrong by saying that the issue is a complex one, that there aremany factors to be considered, that it's a mistake to take toosimplistic a view of it, and so on.Though no doubt correct, such statements tell the reader nothing.Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be madewithout becoming false.For example, it's more useful to say that Pike's Peak is near themiddle of Colorado than merely somewhere in Colorado. But if I sayit's in the exact middle of Colorado, I've now gone too far, becauseit's a bit east of the middle.Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. It's easy tosatisfy one if you ignore the other. The converse of vaporousacademic writing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of demagogues.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.Telling people something they didn't know doesn't always meansurprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something theyknew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those maybe the more valuable insights, because they tend to be morefundamental.Let's put them all together. Useful writing tells people somethingtrue and important that they didn't already know, and tells themas unequivocally as possible.Notice these are all a matter of degree. For example, you can'texpect an idea to be novel to everyone. Any insight that you havewill probably have already been had by at least one of the world's7 billion people. But it's sufficient if an idea is novel to a lotof readers.Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the fourcomponents are like numbers you can multiply together to get a scorefor usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, butnonetheless true.How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel andimportant? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. Ilearned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of sayinganything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sureit's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him,but when you do, they're usually right.Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you writea bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again.Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimesa whole essay.You can't ensure that every idea you have is good, but you canensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing theones that aren't.In the sciences, this is called publication bias, and is consideredbad. When some hypothesis you're exploring gets inconclusive results,you're supposed to tell people about that too. But with essaywriting, publication bias is the way to go.My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of anessay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewritingit very carefully.I've never tried to count how many times I proofread essays, butI'm sure there are sentences I've read 100 times before publishingthem. When I proofread an essay, there are usually passages thatstick out in an annoying way, sometimes because they're clumsilywritten, and sometimes because I'm not sure they're true. Theannoyance starts out unconscious, but after the tenth reading orso I'm saying "Ugh, that part" each time I hit it. They become likebriars that catch your sleeve as you walk past. Usually I won'tpublish an essay till they're all gone — till I can read throughthe whole thing without the feeling of anything catching.I'll sometimes let through a sentence that seems clumsy, if I can'tthink of a way to rephrase it, but I will never knowingly let throughone that doesn't seem correct. You never have to. If a sentencedoesn't seem right, all you have to do is ask why it doesn't, andyou've usually got the replacement right there in your head.This is where essayists have an advantage over journalists. Youdon't have a deadline. You can work for as long on an essay as youneed to get it right. You don't have to publish the essay at all,if you can't get it right. Mistakes seem to lose courage in theface of an enemy with unlimited resources. Or that's what it feelslike. What's really going on is that you have different expectationsfor yourself. You're like a parent saying to a child "we can sithere all night till you eat your vegetables." Except you're thechild too.I'm not saying no mistake gets through. For example, I added condition(c) in "A Way to Detect Bias" after readers pointed out that I'domitted it. But in practice you can catch nearly all of them.There's a trick for getting importance too. It's like the trick Isuggest to young founders for getting startup ideas: to make somethingyou yourself want. You can use yourself as a proxy for the reader.The reader is not completely unlike you, so if you write abouttopics that seem important to you, they'll probably seem importantto a significant number of readers as well.Importance has two factors. It's the number of people somethingmatters to, times how much it matters to them. Which means of coursethat it's not a rectangle, but a sort of ragged comb, like a Riemannsum.The way to get novelty is to write about topics you've thought abouta lot. Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in thisdepartment too. Anything you notice that surprises you, who'vethought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise asignificant number of readers. And here, as with correctness andimportance, you can use the Morris technique to ensure that youwill. If you don't learn anything from writing an essay, don'tpublish it.You need humility to measure novelty, because acknowledging thenovelty of an idea means acknowledging your previous ignorance ofit. Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but inthis case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble.If you know you're an expert on some topic, you can freely admitwhen you learn something you didn't know, because you can be confidentthat most other people wouldn't know it either.The fourth component of useful writing, strength, comes from twothings: thinking well, and the skillful use of qualification. Thesetwo counterbalance each other, like the accelerator and clutch ina car with a manual transmission. As you try to refine the expressionof an idea, you adjust the qualification accordingly. Somethingyou're sure of, you can state baldly with no qualification at all,as I did the four components of useful writing. Whereas points thatseem dubious have to be held at arm's length with perhapses.As you refine an idea, you're pushing in the direction of lessqualification. But you can rarely get it down to zero. Sometimesyou don't even want to, if it's a side point and a fully refinedversion would be too long.Some say that qualifications weaken writing. For example, that youshould never begin a sentence in an essay with "I think," becauseif you're saying it, then of course you think it. And it's truethat "I think x" is a weaker statement than simply "x." Which isexactly why you need "I think." You need it to express your degreeof certainty.But qualifications are not scalars. They're not just experimentalerror. There must be 50 things they can express: how broadly somethingapplies, how you know it, how happy you are it's so, even how itcould be falsified. I'm not going to try to explore the structureof qualification here. It's probably more complex than the wholetopic of writing usefully. Instead I'll just give you a practicaltip: Don't underestimate qualification. It's an important skill inits own right, not just a sort of tax you have to pay in order toavoid saying things that are false. So learn and use its full range.It may not be fully half of having good ideas, but it's part ofhaving them.There's one other quality I aim for in essays: to say things assimply as possible. But I don't think this is a component ofusefulness. It's more a matter of consideration for the reader. Andit's a practical aid in getting things right; a mistake is moreobvious when expressed in simple language. But I'll admit that themain reason I write simply is not for the reader's sake or becauseit helps get things right, but because it bothers me to use moreor fancier words than I need to. It seems inelegant, like a programthat's too long.I realize florid writing works for some people. But unless you'resure you're one of them, the best advice is to write as simply asyou can.I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty +correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay. But I shouldwarn you that it's also a recipe for making people mad.The root of the problem is novelty. When you tell people somethingthey didn't know, they don't always thank you for it. Sometimes thereason people don't know something is because they don't want toknow it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief. Andindeed, if you're looking for novel ideas, popular but mistakenbeliefs are a good place to find them. Every popular mistaken beliefcreates a dead zone of ideas around it that are relatively unexplored because they contradict it.The strength component just makes things worse. If there's anythingthat annoys people more than having their cherished assumptionscontradicted, it's having them flatly contradicted.Plus if you've used the Morris technique, your writing will seemquite confident. Perhaps offensively confident, to people whodisagree with you. The reason you'll seem confident is that you areconfident: you've cheated, by only publishing the things you'resure of. It will seem to people who try to disagree with you thatyou never admit you're wrong. In fact you constantly admit you'rewrong. You just do it before publishing instead of after.And if your writing is as simple as possible, that just makes thingsworse. Brevity is the diction of command. If you watch someonedelivering unwelcome news from a position of inferiority, you'llnotice they tend to use lots of words, to soften the blow. Whereasto be short with someone is more or less to be rude to them.It can sometimes work to deliberately phrase statements more weaklythan you mean. To put "perhaps" in front of something you're actuallyquite sure of. But you'll notice that when writers do this, theyusually do it with a wink.I don't like to do this too much. It's cheesy to adopt an ironictone for a whole essay. I think we just have to face the fact thatelegance and curtness are two names for the same thing.You might think that if you work sufficiently hard to ensure thatan essay is correct, it will be invulnerable to attack. That's sortof true. It will be invulnerable to valid attacks. But in practicethat's little consolation.In fact, the strength component of useful writing will make youparticularly vulnerable to misrepresentation. If you've stated anidea as strongly as you could without making it false, all anyonehas to do is to exaggerate slightly what you said, and now it isfalse.Much of the time they're not even doing it deliberately. One of themost surprising things you'll discover, if you start writing essays,is that people who disagree with you rarely disagree with whatyou've actually written. Instead they make up something you saidand disagree with that.For what it's worth, the countermove is to ask someone who doesthis to quote a specific sentence or passage you wrote that theybelieve is false, and explain why. I say "for what it's worth"because they never do. So although it might seem that this couldget a broken discussion back on track, the truth is that it wasnever on track in the first place.Should you explicitly forestall likely misinterpretations? Yes, ifthey're misinterpretations a reasonably smart and well-intentionedperson might make. In fact it's sometimes better to say somethingslightly misleading and then add the correction than to try to getan idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can alsomodel the way such an idea would be discovered.But I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentionalmisinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place tomeet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by puttingbars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The placeto protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes.But don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingeniousat misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want tohear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things theywant to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill.As with most other things, the way to get better at writing essaysis to practice. But how do you start? Now that we've examined thestructure of useful writing, we can rephrase that question moreprecisely. Which constraint do you relax initially? The answer is,the first component of importance: the number of people who careabout what you write.If you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find somethingyou're an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you onlyhave ten readers who care, that's fine. You're helping them, andyou're writing. Later you can expand the breadth of topics you writeabout.The other constraint you can relax is a little surprising: publication.Writing essays doesn't have to mean publishing them. That may seemstrange now that the trend is to publish every random thought, butit worked for me. I wrote what amounted to essays in notebooks forabout 15 years. I never published any of them and never expectedto. I wrote them as a way of figuring things out. But when the webcame along I'd had a lot of practice.Incidentally, Steve Wozniak did the same thing. In high school hedesigned computers on paper for fun. He couldn't build them becausehe couldn't afford the components. But when Intel launched 4K DRAMsin 1975, he was ready.How many essays are there left to write though? The answer to thatquestion is probably the most exciting thing I've learned aboutessay writing. Nearly all of them are left to write.Although the essay is an old form, it hasn't been assiduouslycultivated. In the print era, publication was expensive, and therewasn't enough demand for essays to publish that many. You couldpublish essays if you were already well known for writing somethingelse, like novels. Or you could write book reviews that you tookover to express your own ideas. But there was not really a directpath to becoming an essayist. Which meant few essays got written,and those that did tended to be about a narrow range of subjects.Now, thanks to the internet, there's a path. Anyone can publishessays online. You start in obscurity, perhaps, but at least youcan start. You don't need anyone's permission.It sometimes happens that an area of knowledge sits quietly foryears, till some change makes it explode. Cryptography did this tonumber theory. The internet is doing it to the essay.The exciting thing is not that there's a lot left to write, butthat there's a lot left to discover. There's a certain kind of ideathat's best discovered by writing essays. If most essays are stillunwritten, most such ideas are still undiscovered.Notes[1] Put railings on the balconies, but don't put bars on the windows.[2] Even now I sometimes write essays that are not meant forpublication. I wrote several to figure out what Y Combinator shoulddo, and they were really helpful.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, andRobert Morris for reading drafts of this.
