Transcription
Over the past year, I've tweeted hundreds of different writing tips, but the 15 that I'm about to share with you have accumulated over a million views and thousands of likes and comments. So here they are, all in one place.
Writing tip number one: Make the first and last sentences the most important sentences in the piece, and make the last word in the sentence the most important word in the sentence. So, really small thing, but you'll recognize it immediately. So, for example, if I say, "You knew who the first president was," the last word in that sentence is "was," and that is not the most important word in that sentence. So it doesn't end with emphasis. You can fix this by just changing the order of the words and saying, "You knew the name of the first president." "President" is the most important word in that sentence. So when you make the last word of the sentence the most important word, now it has emphasis. And so this is true both on a sentence level, but it's also true on a piece level. So the very first sentence of your piece and the very last sentence of your piece should be the two, ideally the two strongest sentences in the piece, because you want to open with something very declarative, and you want to end with something very declarative. That creates that bookend feeling for the reader.
Writing tip number two: You can increase reader engagement by increasing the rate of revelation. So if you've never heard this term before, rate of revelation is how quickly you introduce new information to the reader. So, low rate of revelation, for example, would be one idea stretched across hundreds of pages. A very high rate of revelation would be lots of ideas compressed into one page. Right? So a video like this is a great example here. 15 writing tips, right? I'm not spending 45 minutes talking about one writing tip. That would be sort of a slow, be a very slow rate of revelation. Instead, high rate of revelation. I go, "I'm going to take lots of writing tips and compress them into one video or one podcast." Right? So a really great writing technique, especially in the digital age, is to always ask yourself, "How can I increase the rate of revelation? How can I reveal new information as quickly as possible to the reader?"
Writing tip number three: Practice writing in different interfaces, so both analog and digital. So don't just write on your laptop. You know, write in a physical journal, write on napkins at a bar, write on loose leaf paper. You know, write short-form LinkedIn posts, write long-form Medium articles. Every time you change the medium, and I noticed there's something that happens whenever you, you are writing within a different UI, you know, whenever you're in some sort of different user interface, you think about language differently. Like, one of my favorite writing exercises I ever did in college was, uh, our teacher said, "Write a story using your non-dominant hand." And it was such a revealing exercise because I, it made you realize that because you couldn't write with your non-dominant hand, writing every single word was so painful, it took so long, that I found myself inherently picking different words and shortening the things that I was trying to say. I was, I wasn't being long-winded because it was so painful and annoying for me to write every single word. So it changed the way that I was writing. And I've noticed this over the years too. Like, when I write in a Google Doc, something, it's like I view the words differently than if I write it in Notion, which is different than when I write it in Medium, which is different than when I write it on my phone. So you always want to be looking for and practicing in these different mediums. Or a really great editing technique is to take something that you've written in one domain and then read it, uh, on a different device or in a different domain. So something I do all the time is I'll write on my laptop, but then when I'm rereading it later, I'll send it to my phone and I'll read it on my phone because there's just something about reading it in a different UI that makes you notice things differently.
Writing tip number four: I call this the tequila test. So if you ever want to ask yourself how to differentiate your content, you do the tequila test. And the way I like explaining this is, if I were to ask you and say, you know, "Go write an article about how to build or have an effective morning routine." Well, a lot of the things that you've heard are probably going to spring to mind. You're going to be like, "Well, to have an effective morning routine, you should wake up early, set an alarm, you should stretch, you should drink a gallon of water, you should have some coffee, you should, you do, do your morning mantras." Like all of the things that people talk about with morning routines. Okay? So how do you differentiate your content? Well, you take that list of all the things that you've heard other people say, and all the things that you could possibly say on this topic, and now you can't say anything on that list. So now what do you say? And it's in that moment that you have the opportunity to say something different. Right? So you have to first make a list of all the things that people normally say, and then you can't say any of them. Now what? And I call it the tequila test because, for example, if I wanted to go differentiate a morning routine article, every reader is used to, "Oh, you got to wake up early, you got to set an alarm, you got to have some coffee, you got to stretch." Right? They're used to reading all of those things. But if I come along and I say, "Hey, effective morning routine, step one, soon as your alarm goes off, roll over, take a shot of tequila." Well, because they've never seen or heard that before, the content is immediately different. And so I like using that as an example to show how you become differentiated as a writer is you should constantly be asking yourself the question, "How can I say things that haven't been said before?" And the only way that you can really do that is to first start with a list of all the things that most people currently say, and now you can't say any of them.
Writing tip number five: Open your essay articles with the 131 technique. So if you're unfamiliar, this is a huge topic. I talk about in my book, "The Art and Mess of Online Writing." It's something we harp on in Ship 30 for 30. 131. One is this writing cadence where you open with one declarative sentence, you go into three sentences or a small paragraph of description or explanation, and then you end with one declarative sentence. And this 131 immediately injects rhythm into your writing. It's like, you, you have a very easy entry point into the idea, then it sort of builds, and you have some explanation, and then it ends with this nice little checkpoint. And you can repeat 131 all the way down the page, and the reader is going to have no idea. They're just going to sit there and go, "Wow, this writer writes so rhythmically. It's beautiful. I love, I'm just sliding down the page." Right? That's because rhythm is baked into the 131 sequence. And there's all sorts of other sequences I talk about in my book. For example, you could do 12521, you could do 141, you could do 151. Right? There's all sorts of different things you can do. But as a rule of thumb, you always want to keep the bookends one and one, and you want to expand the middle because that's what creates that dynamic flow. So if you want to have readers fall into your writing, especially in the intro, or you want to keep them hooked all the way down the page, you should always be asking yourself, "How could I use this 131 technique?"
Writing tip number six: Ignore word count as a metric. So broadly speaking, I think that word count is a horrible way of measuring value. I, I don't think that it's productive to sit there and go, "Well, my piece is only 800 words. Should it be longer?" Because that's not really what matters. The word count isn't what the reader cares about. What the reader cares about is whether or not you successfully explained the thing that you set out to explain, or whether or not you answered the reader's question. And I lived this when I was building my ghostwriting agency. Uh, we were selling, you know, 800-word thought leadership articles. And something that clients would ask us all the time is, "Well, what happens if we need to do some rewrites? Or what happens if a piece ends up being longer than 800 words? Do we have to charge extra?" And a huge part of our sales pitch is, I would say to them, and I'd go, "Look, if all the piece requires is 700 words, that's what we're going to do. But if the piece requires 1500 words, that's what we're going to do. We're going to do justice to the piece. I don't care what the word count is. I want to make sure that the reader is getting what they need out of the piece." And every time I said that, clients would, it was like music to their ears because they were so used to every other, like, SEO agency being like, "Well, if it's over 750 words, we're going to charge you extra." Right? But who cares? Word count is not the value. The value is whether or not you successfully communicated to the reader. So ignore word count. You can start with it broad. Like, if you're picking a format, you know, you're like, "Oh, I want to write a book." Okay, generally how long is a book? 60,000 words. All right, I'm going to aim for something like that. Right? Or I want to write an article online. What's the average article? Well, it's probably within the ballpark of 700 to 1500 words. So you can aim for that. But the specific word count is not what matters.
Writing tip number seven: Reduce writer's block by prepping the page. So if you've never heard this term before, it's something I talk about a lot. Prepping the page is where you don't start writing by writing. You start writing by shelling out the skeleton of the thing that you're going to write. This is how I write everything. Doesn't matter if it's an email, a Twitter thread, a book chapter. I start by prepping the page every single time. And what this means is, you begin by first putting a working title, and then chunking, segmenting the page by sections. And I tend to do this using headers. So if I'm writing an article, for example, I'll put in a working title, and then I'll go, "Well, what are the main points? What are the things that I'm trying to say?" And I'll write those out as big headers. And then underneath each header, I might just put notes to myself, I might do a bulleted list, or I might just do a couple sentences of pros or explanation. And all I'm doing is, I'm basically shelling out the thing that I'm about to write. And I only sit down to actually write. I only start writing the pros once the skeleton is in place because then I'm, I, it doesn't feel like I'm staring at this blank page and I need, need to go make magic happen. All I have to do is just go section by section and go, "Well, the main idea I'm trying to explain here is this." I already know what the idea is. Now I just need to explain it. So prepping the page is a really, really helpful mechanism for reducing writer's block. And I think one of the biggest mistakes writers make is they sit down to write and they open a fresh Word document and then they start with the first word. And that's like showing up to a forest pitch black outside with a flashlight, and you're like, "I'm going to find my way home." Right? You, you don't want to do that. You want to light the whole forest up first. And the way that you do that is by segmenting the page into pieces.
Writing tip number eight: Don't use semicolons. This is a short and simple one. Most people have no clue what a semicolon does. Most writers use them incorrectly, and most readers have no clue what it means. So just don't use semicolons because you're probably using it incorrectly. And even if you do, the reader is not going to know because most people didn't do very well in English class, and most people don't even know what a semicolon does.
Writing tip number nine: Cut all the tiny word chunks. So after you've written a draft, you want to go back and look for wherever you see in sentences a bunch of little words next to each other. So this usually manifests as something like, "And so, as I was saying, right?" Or, "It, uh, it is, so for example," or "If it is that," or "Is it that?" Like whenever you see lots of two or three words back to back to back, almost always there is a more economical way of of saying that. And so when you're writing your first draft, it's okay. This is just, you know, most people write like they speak, and so you have all these little words thrown in there. But as you reread it back, you want to train yourself to look for these little word chunks. And in most cases, you can just remove all of them. And and in other cases, it's just a matter of compressing them into one word or rewording the sentence so that you don't need as many of them.
Writing tip number 10: Delete adverbs. So this was one of Hemingway's favorite writing rules. Adverbs are usually unnecessary. They're used for description, but the reality is they, they make your writing less declarative. And something, you know, Hemingway was a great example of this. Great writing is declarative. And so when you have words like excitedly, or delicately, or finely, or carefully, or subtly, right? Yes, you're adding a little bit of description, but in another sense, you're reducing the declarative nature of that sentence. And I find that most great writing uses very few adverbs. So again, in your first draft, or when you're writing something the first time, it's okay. You're going to talk that way, you're going to write that way. But one of the things that I tend to edit for whenever I'm going back through something is I'm always looking for the adverbs, and I always just ask, most of the time, my first impulse is, "Oh, I need that adverb." And then when I sit with it for three seconds, I go, "Oh, I don't actually need that adverb."
Writing tip number 11: Use bulleted lists. So whenever possible, I'm always asking myself, "How can I break up prose?" So especially if I have, you know, a long paragraph or multiple long paragraphs back to back, I want to find other ways to make the writing more skimmable and then to sort of give the reader a break. Remember, reading in the digital age is hard. You know, there's always TikTok, there's always Instagram, there's always something easier that the reader could be doing. So I always like to ask the question, "How can I make this easier and easier for the reader?" And one of the best ways that you can do that is to utilize bulleted lists because bulleted lists are very skimmable. They, they require very little cognitive load, right? And so whatever you're trying to say in a paragraph, you want to ask yourself, "Huh, could this actually be a bulleted list instead of a paragraph?" And it's one of those things, like, you don't want huge paragraphs back to back, and you also don't want an entire piece of just bulleted lists. So what I like to do is just a good rule of thumb is, if I have a paragraph of prose, one or two pars later, I want it to be a bulleted list. And then once I have a bulleted list, I want to go back to prose. And then after some prose, I want to go to a bulleted list. If you've read, I mean, it's all over "The Art and Business of Online Writing." I use bulleted lists all, all over the place in there. But actually, "The Art and Business of Ghostwriting," which I wrote after a lot of these frameworks started to really crystallize for myself, that book is a prime example of how to alternate between long paragraphs and bulleted lists. That's how the entire book is written and structured. And it's almost so much so that now when I read, look back and read it, I'm like, "Okay, maybe I did it, maybe it was overkill, maybe I didn't need to do it that much." But I like to err on the side of more bulleted lists rather than less, just because it makes it so skimmable for the reader. It's such an effective technique.
Which actually leads to writing tip number 12. I recommend starting most things that you're trying to write with a bulleted list. Lists are everywhere. Everything in life is a list. And if you can't write the bulleted list version, it's very hard to write the prose version. And so whenever I'm sitting down to write, one of the first things that I do is I just start with a bulleted list of, well, what, what are all the things I want to say about this topic? Right? How would I outline a book? Well, I wouldn't start outlining a book by writing prose. I would outline a book with a bulleted list of, "What are all the big topics I want to cover?" Right? Which you can take that same technique and bring it all the way down to the tweet level or the atomic essay level. It's like, "I want to write a really short-form post about, you know, three things you can do to get your first ghostwriting client." That's a list. So everything in life is a list. And every time I explain this, people think, "Oh, that's clickbaity stuff, and that's, that's really low-quality writing." Okay, what do you think a Pulitzer or prize-winning novel is like? Open up any page of any Pulitzer or prize-winning novel, and it's just description after description after description. What is that? Well, if we were to really break it down, that's just one giant list of things in a room, right? Or things you notice about a person. It's just they took the list and then they changed it to prose. Right? So everything is a list, and every creative writing exercise is a list. So it's a great skill to build. And I think it's much more helpful to begin with, "What's a list of all the things that I'm trying to say?" rather than starting the writing by actually writing.
Writing tip number 13: Delete opening "I" phrases. So things like, "I think, I believe, I've learned, I conclude." I had a teacher in college who pointed this out to me because I used it all throughout this essay, and he circled every single one and he said, "You're the author, which means everything in this essay are the things that you think, and you believe, and you've concluded, and you've learned. So you don't need to tell me. I know that these are all coming from you." And as soon as he pointed that out, I changed my writing forever. So I'm hoping to point it out here for you as well. You don't need all of these "I think, I believe, I conclude" phrases. And a lot of times when you remove them, the writing becomes more concise, the writing becomes more declarative.
Writing tip number 14: This is a painful one, and I am sure you're going to hear it, and you're going to be like, "That makes sense," and then you're not going to do it. But I'm going to share it anyway, which is, instead of trying to tweak an existing draft of something, so instead of doing the rewriting inside an existing draft, take the draft, put it aside, don't look at it, and then rewrite that same thing without looking at the first version. And the reason I love this, this is, this is how I did all of the rewrites of my first book, by the way. "Confessions of a Teenage Gamer." I rewrote that book so many times. I mean, front to back, four times. There are some chapters in there that I rewrote a hundred times. And the way that I went about the rewriting process was, I would take the thing I originally wrote, I would read it, and then I would put it aside, and then I would rewrite it completely from scratch without looking at it again, again. And what I noticed, and it's an, it's an amazingly frustrating exercise because all of the details that are really important are going to get repeated. You're going to say them again. But all of the details that are unimportant, your brain is automatically going to filter out. It's going to forget them. And that is what makes the rewrite so powerful. And what you'll notice, you'll notice your brain just starts making new decisions or ignores old decisions, just very intuitively. And so I love just starting with a blank sheet of paper and seeing, you know, what does my unconscious prioritize, and what does my unconscious deprioritize? And then I can always just hold the two drafts up side by side and and go, "Well, I like these things from the first one, and I like these things from the second one," and then I can tweak from there. But I find it's a much harder way of going about the rewriting process, but I find that it leads to a higher quality end product.
And writing tip number 15: Before you start doing some intentional writing, I really encourage you to do some unintentional writing. So something that I've done for the past 15 years is every single day before I sit down to write, I journal for 5, 10, 15 minutes. And I do it for a couple of reasons. One, I just want to get my fingers warm. I just want to get my brain turned on. I just want to get some of the gunk out. You know, whenever you sit down to write, you're just usually, you got a bunch of random things floating around your head. I just want to get some of that stuff out. Second is, I like to trick myself into feeling like I'm already in the writing flow. So I don't start with something that I'm expecting to be very good. I start with something that's essentially just a coloring book for my thoughts. And so I'm just getting my fingers moving, and I'm just sort of tricking myself into making progress, quote unquote. And when I do that, I find that then when I open the, the a new doc and I start writing the thing that I actually wanted to write that day, I'm starting from just a clearer, crisper place. I've already warmed up. It's, it's the mental equivalent of if you go to the gym, you want to stretch before you know, you want to go play basketball, you should stretch before. And so before you go play the game, you want to let your brain stretch out a little bit. And so I really encourage, even if it's five minutes, even if it's 10 minutes, this is one of the biggest reasons I'm, I'm an avid supporter of of journaling is I would just let yourself go. Don't censor yourself. Just let the words flow. Write about whatever comes to mind. It, it, the words themselves aren't even what matters. What matters is that you're just getting your brain moving, and you're getting your fingers moving. And then after you do that for 10 minutes, open the thing that you actually want to write, and you'll just start from a cleaner place.