From Dwarkesh Patel:
Unreasonably effective writing advice:
“What are you trying to say here?
Okay, just write that.”
Writing effectively is notoriously hard. Even once you get past writers block and are actually writing words on the page, organizing those words coherently is challenging.
One virtue I’ve come to value in writing is simplicity. That is, writing in a way that can be understood while minimizing the cognitive load on the reader. I find this virtue most useful in technical design proposals, where there is a high premium on saying precisely what you mean with minimal overhead.
A 40-page design doc can look superficially impressive, but I tend to be more impressed by the ones that are 3-5 pages, and yet are so crisp that they have an “airtight” quality to them.
I’ve tried to keep this dictum in mind when writing recently. This advice is particularly helpful when you’re drawn to fluffy or hedging language. Hedging language often indicates that you haven’t fully figured out what you want to say. Fluffy language can be a symptom of working on a piece of writing for too long, and forgetting to have empathy with uninitiated readers. The goal: skip all the extra baggage that inflates or deflates the message you’re trying to convey. Just write the message in the simplest possible way for your audience.
Writing has a nearly endless set of failure modes: too jargon-heavy, too vague, too detached from reality, too focused on irrelevant details, too long for readers to find the core point, and many, many more.
Simple writing gets you at least one thing: brevity. Simple writing may still be bad, but it will be bad in a way that can be easily critiqued. Yes, simple ideas often need nuanced explanations. But start with the simple explanation and expand only for readers that care. This is, for example, why “TLDR”s have been so widely adopted.
What I like about “What are you trying to say? Just write that” is that it nudges you to articulate the core of your message. Cut out the hedging, cut out the fancy jargon, just: what is the actual pitch? And then, well, just write that. You can still go on from there to polish, add nuance where appropriate. The core message must come first though; all the polish and wordsmithing in the world can’t save a piece of writing that doesn’t know what it’s actually trying to say.