Extremely Concrete Writing Advice
How to write better
Most writing advice is vague and nebulous. It tells you what kind of frame of mind to inhabit or what to broadly aim at. I generally find that sort of thing generally unhelpful. But there are a lot of fairly low effort ways to write better.
Why am I the guy to listen to on this? I am not naturally a good writer, as my old blog posts definitively show. But I have done an unusually large amount of writing, having produced about 2 million total words across ~1,300 blog posts. As a result, my writing has improved considerably. In general, the people to listen to aren’t those who are naturally great at something, but those who are naturally mediocre and have improved a lot.
1 Write short sentences
There are lots of writers I enjoy. One commonality across many of them is that their sentences tend to be fairly short. Michael Huemer is a good example of this; even when he is talking about something complicated, his sentences are not long.
There’s an obvious reason to prefer short sentences. If a sentence is long, it has more total information. The more information is contained in one sentence, the easier it is to get lost. Few get lost reading Harry Potter. A big reason is that Rowling’s sentences average twelve words. In contrast, people get lost all the time reading works of continental philosophy. Partly this is because continental philosophers write nonsensical things using lots of jargon. But it’s also partly because they write very long sentences.
A good heuristic: if a sentence is more than 25 words, try very hard to trim it.
You shouldn’t only write short sentences though. Variety is the spice of life. If all of your sentences are five words, then your writing will be boring. So you should mix short, sharp sentences with somewhat lengthier digressions that unpack a point in more detail—and help the reader feel that they’re reading prose rather than bullet points.
2 Write clearly without too much hedging
Lots of writing is very hedged. People add needless qualifiers to communicate that they are not very confident. They’ll say things like “it isn’t so crazy to suppose that,” “plausibly,” or “I think.” Hedging is sometimes appropriate, but people do it too much. You don’t need a million qualifiers. EA writing is especially overhedged.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” It would not be an improvement if she had instead written:
It has been wondered by a number of people in the literature (see Vaxman, 2018; Soreass, 1997; Belchik, 2022) how, if at all, I love anyone and if so, you. Plausibly, in order to enumerate this, one would need to count the ways (though for objections to counting, see Taurek, 1977 and for objections to ways, see Unger, 1994.)
