On Writing (or not): Part One

Writing Is Thinking

When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you. Done well, this kind of sharing means you’re contributing signal, instead of noise. But writers are made, n…

Why AI writing is mid

How the current way of training language models destroys any voice (and hope of good writing).

The Breath of the Author

The palpable presence of someone else's mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text

About Pckt Notes & Writers Block - Brookie’s Blog

I'm feeling bad at writing lately. I think that's okay sometimes, not everything has to be perfect... And it's not really perfection that I'm seeking, but it ca...

The Published Voice: Whose Voice Are We Really Reading? - The Scholarly Kitchen

What happens then to “author voice,” which has always been an important consideration to authors and reviewers alike, if AI is helping researchers with their writing?

How to write well with AI

Why people who pledge never to write with AI are telling on themselves

Writers Who Use AI Are Not Real Writers

Dorothy Parker famously (but probably not really) said, “I hate to write, but I love having written,” which is a sentiment I don’t largely understand or agree with in the broader …

Why You Should Write Pseudonymously - David Perell

David explores the benefits of writing pseudonymously. Read here.

Writing is Thinking: Learning to Write with Confidence

Learning to write is learning to think, because writing is thinking. They are two peas in a powerful pod. This article goes over my writing process, focused on minimizing the activation energy to get started.

Wherein I Find Myself Writing About Writing

Most everyone finds writing to be challenging (especially those who say they enjoy it). This is because writing is an intentional, thoughtful act. This is as it should be, but “AI” has recently exacerbated the misbelief that writing is simply an output. In fact, it's a creative process that has merit in and of itself.

The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer - T.R Napper

I’m obsessed with the craft of writing. I write every day, I read about the craft often, and in my...

Robert Hanks · On Putting Things Off

Job gone, I sat around trying to write, managing bits and pieces, but earning very little. And then my marriage drifted away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the LRB commissioned me to write about Richard Hughes, who wrote A High Wind in Jamaica. I like Hughes and it seemed like a job I could get on with. I cheerfully settled to the research, reading the novels I hadn’t read, rereading the ones I had. Then I started writing, or that’s what I told myself: some paragraphs, some sentences, a sketch of a plan, then some rewriting, rearranging, scrubbing, more rewriting, more scrubbing, pauses to reconsider. Then I did some more research: the short stories, the children’s stories, the poems and plays, the journalism, Richard Perceval Graves’s biography, then back to the rewriting …

Prompting Claude Opus 5

Behavioral differences and prompting patterns for Claude Opus 5, covering response verbosity, agentic narration, task scoping, subagent delegation, self-correction, and output artifacts when thinking is disabled.

How to take things less personally and avoid mind reading | Psyche Guides

Always blaming yourself or assuming others think ill of you? A CBT therapist shares ways to break these self-critical habits

Childhood and Education #22: Voice Without Exit

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school.