I have benefited over the years from others who have documented their writing setups, and so I feel some obligation to pay the favor forward by doing so with my own. The stack I’ll describe here is one I’ve been iterating on for about twenty years, starting from when I began discovering the pleasures of plain-text writing. Every aspect of it has changed over that period, but the some basic goals and flows have been with me through the writing of my college thesis, five books, and hundreds of articles. I am quite happy with where I am, and others might benefit from what I’ve come up with.
On Writing #3
Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.
An open letter to Grammarly and other plagiarists, thieves and slop merchants
To everyone at Grammarly, I am writing a book right now, a really challenging endeavor that no doubt someone in Silicon Valley will think it’s fine to steal the day it’s published. I’ve been a professional writer for decades, even though the number of ways to make
Protocolized Writing Workshop
Your chance to race to the frontier of modern AI-forward writing and publishing
Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Welcome. I’m a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I direct the Media Economies Design Lab and teach and learn from our students. I’ve written a book each on online democracy, cooperative enterprise, the Occupy movement, and God, and I’ve edited ones about solidarity economies, crypto, and co-ops. Reporting articles for both magazines and academic journals keeps my notebooks filled. Working with others to build a democratic economy keeps me accountable.
Hi, I'm David Perell.
I write, host a podcast, and run a writing school called Write of Passage.
Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation
Reading augmentation systems increasingly help readers process text at scale. While these tools address real constraints of time and cognitive load, they often implicitly frame reading as information transmission, or "reading to discard," delegating interpretation and effort to the machine. Yet this delegation changes the outcome of reading. For example, in scholarly reading, deciding what a research text implies and why it matters is central to the work of scholarly production. We propose creative reading as an alternative goal: reading augmentation that supports readers in creating both readings and themselves as readers. By putting literary and narrative theories into conversation with scholarly sensemaking and creativity support, we present a provocation-oriented design space for valuing the process of reading as a way of preserving a plurality of readings and transforming readers over time.
Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation
Reading augmentation systems increasingly help readers process text at scale. While these tools address real constraints of time and cognitive load, they often implicitly frame reading as information transmission, or "reading to discard," delegating interpretation and effort to the machine. Yet this delegation changes the outcome of reading. For example, in scholarly reading, deciding what a research text implies and why it matters is central to the work of scholarly production. We propose creative reading as an alternative goal: reading augmentation that supports readers in creating both readings and themselves as readers. By putting literary and narrative theories into conversation with scholarly sensemaking and creativity support, we present a provocation-oriented design space for valuing the process of reading as a way of preserving a plurality of readings and transforming readers over time.
A home for the writing you love · Standard Reader
New writing from the standard.site publications you subscribe to — calm, chronological, and yours to take anywhere.
Libra Season: iPhone Modernism by Travis Diehl
The shock-of-the-new is back in literature, rebooted for screen time – and with it, the question: To what end should writing reflect our networked selves?
Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Read the free, open access editionBuy: Amazon, Bookshop, Narrow Gauge Book Co-op, UC Press
Introducing recommendations: simple cross-promotion for writers
A new way for writers on Substack to recommend each other and discover more great work
Good Taste — ADVICE TO WRITERS
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But you
Weaver - Long-form writing
I grew up, like a lot of people on Bluesky, in the era of the internet where most of your online social interactions took place via text. I had a MySpace account, MSN messenger and Google Chat, I first got on Facebook back when they required a school email to sign up, I had a Tumblr, though not a LiveJournal. I was super into reddit for a long time. Big fan of Fanfiction.net and later Archive of Our Own.
Manuscript — an imagined editor for research writing
A walk through an imagined product for academic writing, mocked up by Claude Design.
blog-to-atproto
resources and blogs for publishing your writing to standard.site, where it becomes searchable across several platforms and affords you a fancy link on Bluesky
Pushing this blog to ATProto through standard.site
Making a Ghost Blog a Valid standard.site Publication
standard.site validator
Publishing My Eleventy Blog to the ATmosphere with Standard.site
Publishing on the Atmosphere with Standard.site
Publishing · Standard Reader