Quick Advice on Writing Essays

post by Niko_McCarty (niko-2) · 2024-05-28T15:02:37.408Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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Writing is difficult. Even writers with 20 years of experience will attest to this. But I recently heard some excellent writing advice from Saloni Dattani, and thought I should share it more widely.

But first, some context. Last September, Saloni wrote a piece about the history of malaria vaccines, and why they took so long to develop. The article is a whopping 9,000 words (if I recall correctly) and it was re-written several times. It took Saloni several months to put the article together.

When you are writing an essay of this length—or any length, really—there is a tendency to become bogged down in the details. I often get a few paragraphs in, read what I’ve just written, and decide that it is crap. Or, in Saloni’s case, you write an entire draft only to realize afterwards that it’s missing an essential ingredient—a certain je ne sais quoi—that renders it unfinished; perhaps the introduction isn’t quite right, or the conclusion feels unsatisfying.

This happens, I think, for a few reasons:

  1. The speed of thought is faster than the speed of writing. When we have an idea and then move to write it down, we often find that the writing failed to capture an essential part of our thoughts.

  2. Our ideas are not generated in the same form as an essay. Ideas rarely pop into our heads “fully formed,” with supporting evidence and a catchy hook. The act of writing an essay is therefore a personal struggle with the fabric of an idea itself. The act of writing requires that we break apart and rebuild ideas into a form that captivates others.

  3. Writing requires multi-tasking. Excellent essays have a good structure, clear prose, and compelling details (among other things.) But each of these ingredients requires deep focus and attention in its own right. When we think about structure, it’s difficult to simultaneously do research to find compelling details. And when we are re-writing a sentence to make it beautiful, we cannot think about the structure! Our mind is not compartmentalized in this way.

Saloni uses a simple strategy to circumvent some these problems. I’ve used her advice to write two draft essays that will soon be published in Asimov Press, and it helped me get to a beautiful draft much faster than is typical for me. Here is my new approach:

  1. Settle the Idea. Essays begin with a compelling idea. This idea should not be too big or too small. An essay about smallpox does not make any sense, because smallpox is a large topic with hundreds of years of history and dozens of characters who contributed to its success. But an essay about Edward Jenner’s 1796 experiment that led to the first smallpox vaccine is focused and narrow enough for an essay. Note that Saloni’s essay is not called, “The History of Malaria Vaccines,” but rather “Why We Didn’t Get a Malaria Vaccine Sooner.” The former is a topic, whereas the latter answers a single compelling question and is therefore addressable in a single essay.

  2. Outline. Once I’ve found an idea, I begin to write out a brief outline. I also list out some of the evidence or key moments I’d like to conclude, while acknowledging that I’ll have to do a lot of research to back up my claims.

  3. Ask Questions. This is where my new writing process deviates from my prior approach. Rather than just start from an outline, which forces me to alternate back-and-forth between research and writing, I create a fresh Google Doc and list out all the questions I’d like to answer in the essay. In Saloni’s case, these questions would presumably be things like:

  1. Answer Questions. Now I do research and answer each of the questions, one at a time. I try to make my answers as “clean” and beautiful as possible, so that I can later copy-paste them into an essay.

  2. Compile the Essay. The final step. I take my answers and arrange them into the essay’s structure. Rather than writing a draft, this process is more akin to composing or compiling a draft.

I think this approach works for a few reasons. The first is that, once you answer the questions, you always have them. In other words, while an essay draft will likely get broken down and rearranged several times before it is published, your answers to these questions will not be. So you can use them again and again to build new versions of the essay. You will not have to start each draft from scratch.

This approach also segregates various parts of essay writing that require deep thought. It allows you to focus entirely on structure first, then focus entirely on research, and then entirely on structure again. This is better than attempting to write a draft from a blank page, which requires instead that one alternates back-and-forth between research, writing and structure.

Book authors presumably follow a similar formula. Erik Larson, the non-fiction author, spends years digging through archives and taking notes before he puts his books together. But I’m not sure how common it is to explicitly list out questions you want to answer before you do the research. Maybe this biases the things that you find, and I’d be curious to hear what others think. This advice is also, presumably, less relevant for fiction.

In any case, this approach was new to me, but may not be new to you. If you already use this technique, I’d be interested to talk to you and learn more.

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