The Craft of Writing Effectively: A Distillation of The Internet's Best Lecture About Writing

Feb 03, 2022

Dear Friends,

The internet’s best lecture about writing is “The Craft of Writing Effectively,” a talk delivered by Larry McEnerney, former Director of Writing Programs, at The University of Chicago.

I distilled the 80-minute lecture to its essence (and rewrote some sentences for clarity). The talk is self-exemplifying because it changed the way I see the world.

It's insane I wrote professionally before internalizing these truths.

The Craft of Writing Effectively

If you've been writing in school, you haven't been writing at all. You’ve been writing for people who are paid to care about you.
Learning to write in a system where people are paid to care about you doesn’t just leave you with neutral habits, it leaves you with terrible habits.
You get used to the idea that people are going to read whatever you write. In the real world, no one is paid to care about you. Your readers don’t trust you and they think you're going to waste their time.
To write well in the real world, you don’t need a remedial writing course and you don’t need rules for writing. You just need to think about how readers read. And you just need to give people value.
Everything having to do with writing is dominated by the issue of value. Writing isn’t about demonstrating what you know and how. It’s about making what you know valuable for other people in their reading process.
Writing has the function of helping people understand better something they want to understand well. Effective writing changes the way people see the world, and it moves conversations forward. It changes what people think, what they do, and how they decide.
When people aren’t reading what you write, sometimes it's because your writing isn't clear...sometimes it’s because it’s not organized...and sometimes it’s because it's not persuasive. But overwhelmingly, it's because it's not valuable.
Yes, your writing needs to be clear and organized and persuasive. But more than anything else, your writing needs to be valuable. Because if it's not, nothing else matters.
Rule-based writing is useful for people writing low value things. People writing high value things stop thinking about rules and start thinking about readers.
Writing according to rules is a fundamental misunderstanding of language. Language is social. It’s a relationship between people. Which is why effective writing starts with people in mind.
When your writing interferes with the way people read, first they slow down. Second, they don't understand. Third, they get annoyed. Fourth, they stop.
While we're on the subject of writing, write for specific people, not generic readers. Writing for generic readers is disastrous because it teaches you not to think about the differences between people and what they value.
It's not enough to know a subject. You must know specific groups of people and what they doubt. If you can’t predict what people doubt, you’re unlikely to persuade them.
When you're writing, your job isn’t to reveal what’s in your head, it’s to change what’s in other heads. And the only way to do that is to know what’s in other heads to begin with.
Teachers care if you understand something. Readers just want to understand something themselves. Don't think about writing as “revealing yourself.” Instead, think about how people read when they're trying to learn.
You think writing is about conveying your ideas to your readers? Writing is not about conveying your ideas to readers. It’s about changing their ideas.
When you write, your job isn’t to reveal the inside of your head. It’s to change what's going on in the space between heads.
Anytime somebody gives you advice about writing, say, “For which readers and what purpose?” No advice about writing makes any sense unless you've clarified who's reading it and why.
Rules about writing aren't rules. Language doesn’t follow rules and you shouldn’t either. When people are serious about learning something, rules don’t matter. (Btw, if you're thinking about rules when you’re writing, you're probably writing badly.)
Effective writing informs the thinking process and controls the reading process at the same time. Is your writing a way for you to participate in the world?
Yes, but not by sharing your thoughts. You participate in the world by changing the way others participate. They do the same, and so on.
From your first sentence to your last, think about your readers and what they value. Know what they need and give it to them. The value of your writing lies in people, not paragraphs.