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reading from w.l.y ——2026.5.20

The Prologue Section has been omitted.

Good Writing

• Good writers are avid readers.
• Writers acquire technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.
• The habit of lingering over good writing wherever you find it and reflecting on what makes it good.
• Summary from w.l.y——
• Though the quest for improvement may be informed by lessons and honed by practice, it must first be kindled by a delight in the best work of the masters and a desire to approach their excellence~

• Good writing starts strong.
• Parallel wording is a powerful trope.
• Summary from w.l.y——
• A reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic~

• The categories of grammar reflect the building blocks of thought: time, space, causality, and matter.
• Good writing is understood with the mind's eye.
• A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer's perspective on an ongoing story.
• A skilled writer can enliven and sometimes electrify her prose with the judicious insertion of a surprising word.
• The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation.
• Good writing finishes strong.

• Practices:
• An insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary;
• An attention to the readers' vantage point and the target of their gaze;
• The judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs;
• The use of parallel syntax;
• The occasional planned surprise;
• The presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement;
• The use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.

• Attitude:
• They do not hide the passion and relish that drive them to tell us about their subjects. They write as if they have something important to say. But no, that doesn't capture it.
• Importantly,
• They write as if they have something important toshow.

A Window onto the World

• The written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond.
• The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you're pretending to communicate.
• The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world.
• Its motive is disinterested truth.
• The proof of success is clarity and simplicity.
• Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it.

• Two experiences:
• Showing the reader something in the world;
• Engaging her in conversation.
• There is something to see.

• The differences between classic style and other styles:
• How the writer imagines himself to be related to the reader;
• What the writer is trying to accomplish.
• A writer tries to share his idiosyncratic, emotional, and mostly ineffable reactions to something.
• The writer has the gift of being able to see things that no one else can, and uses the music of language to unite an audience.

• The writers' goal is to satisfy the reader's need.
• Practical style:
• A fixed template, it is brief because the reader needs the information in a timely manner.
• Classic style:
• Whatever form and whatever length. The brevity comes from the elegance of his mind.

• Classic style also differs subtly from plain style.
• Truth is available to all who are willing to work to achieve it, but truth is certainly not commonly possessed by all and is no one's birthright.
• The early bird gets the worm, for example, is plain.
• The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese is classic.
• Classic style overlaps with plain and practical styles.
• Self-conscious, relativistic, ironic, or postmodern styles.
• Its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject.

• Academic writing tends to mix practical and self-conscious styles.
• Knowing the hallmarks of classic style will make anyone a better writer.
• What classic style does is explain them as if they were objects and forces that would be recognizable to anyone standing in a position to see them.
• The physics and math behind the theory might be hard for him to explain or for readers to understand. He has the confidence that anyone looking at them will know what they imply, because the examples he has chosen areexact.
• As they are actual instances of the phenomena he is explaining, and they are instances that readers can see with their own eyes.

• The ideal of classic prose is congenial to the worldview of the scientist.
• Most scientists believe that there are objective truths about the world and that they can be discovered by a disinterested observer.
• Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius.
• It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate.

• The confident presentation of an idea in classic style should not be confused with an arrogant insistence that it is correct.
• Even scientists recognize that it's hard to know the truth, that the world doesn't just reveal itself to us, that we understand the world through our theories and constructs.
• Our ways of understanding the world must constantly be scrutinized for hidden biases.
• Good writers don't flaunt this anxiety in every passage they write;
• They artfully conceal it for clarity's sake.

• A writer knows the truth before putting it into words and doesn't use the writing process to organize and clarify his thoughts.
• The goal of classic style is to make itseemas if the writer's thoughts were fully formed before he clothed them in words.
• And the messy work has been done beforehand and behind the scenes.

• Three issues:
• The problem of focusing on a description of professional activity rather than an exposition of subject matter;
• The overuse of apologetic language;
• The disadvantages of excessive hedging.
• And overuse of nominalizations and passives.

• The problem with thoughtless signposting is that the reader has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to, like complicated directions for a shortcut which take longer to figure out than the time the shortcut would save.
• Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next.
• It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence(general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.
• It's not that authors should avoid signposting altogether.
• Like all writing decisions, the amount of signposting requires judgement and compromise.
• The art of classic prose is to signpost sparingly.

• As for the advice to say what you said, the key is the expression "in other words".
• A summary should repeat enough of the key words to allow the reader to connect it back to the earlier passages that spelled out the points in detail.
• Those words should be fitted into new sentences that work together as a coherent passage of prose in its own right.
• The summary should be self-contained, almost as if the material being summarized had never existed.

• Researchers are apt to lose sight of whom they are writing for, and describe the obsessions of their guild rather than what the audience really wants to know.
• The kinds of information a user seeks.
• The inward-looking style that makes academic writing so tedious.
• In classic style, the writer credits the reader with enough intelligence to realize that many concepts aren't easy to define and that many controversies aren't easy to resolve. She is there to see what the writer will do about it.

• Quotation marks can be used to reproduce someone else's words.
• Classic style is confident about its own voice.
• There is also compulsive hedging.
• Many writers cushion their prose with wads of fluff that imply that they are not willing to stand behind what they are saying.
• Cover Your Anatomy.
• A classic writer counts on the common sense and ordinary charity of his readers.
• Accuracy becomes pedantry if it is indulged for its own sake.
• A classic writer will phrase a subordinate point precisely but without the promise that it is technically accurate.
• The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged on these points because they are mere scaffolding.

• Sometimes a writer has no choice but to hedge a statement.
• A scholar who is proposing a pypothesis must go on the record with it in as precise a form as possible at least once so that critics can see exactly what he is claiming and give it their best shot.
• Best of all is to convey the magnitude of the effect and the degree of certainty explicitly.

• Classic prose is a pleasant illusion, like losing yourself in a play.
• The writer must work to keep up the impression thathis prose is a window onto the scenerather than just a mess of words.
• Even when a shopworn image is the best way to convey an idea, a classic writer can keep his reader engaged by remembering what the idiom literally refers to and playing with the image to keep it in her mind's eye.
• Though no writer can avoid idioms altogether,
• they are part of the English lexicon,
• just like individual words,
• good writers reach for fresh similes and metaphors that keep the reader's sensory cortexes lit up.
• But you don't have to be a great fiction writer to engage a reader's mental imagery.
• Attention to imagery.

• In classic prose, the writer is directing the gaze of the reader to something in the world she can see for herself.
• Classic style minimizes abstractions, which cannot be seen with the naked eye.
• By narrating an unfolding plot with real characters doing things, rather than by naming an abstract concept that encapsulates those events in a single word.

• Metaconcepts:
• concepts about concepts.
• Verbs can be drained of life when they are turned into adjectives,
• as whencontributebecomescontributiveoraspirebecomes on theaspirationallevel.
• Often the pronounsI, me,andyouare not just harmless but downright helpful.
• Often a writer needs to steer the reader's attention away from the agent of an action.
• The passive allows him to do so because the agent can be left unmentioned, which is impossible in the active voice.

• Summary from w.l.y:
• soggy prose:
• metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives.
• W.l.y's favorite statement:
• A writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader's gaze to something in the world.
• Classic style is not the only way to write.
• It works particularly well because it makes the unnatural art of writing seem like two of our most natural acts:
• talking and seeing~

The Curse of Knowledge

• for someone else not to know something that you know.
• Opaque prose is a deliberate choice.
• A healthy minority in every field were written with grace and verve.
• Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
• The Curse of Knowledge:
• a difficulty in imagining what it's like for someone else not to know something that you know.
• egocentrism~
• hindsight bias and illusory transparency.
• The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.
• doesn't bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

• The traditional advice——
• always remember the reader over your shoulder
• which is not as effective as you might think.
• Just trying harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't make you a whole lot more accurate in figuring out what that person knows.

• Pleasecheckwhether they know it.
• Imagine the reader over your shoulder.
• Hey, I'm talking toyou.
• Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think they do.
• The use of jargon, abbreviations, and technical vocabulary is important.
• The curse of knowledge ensures that most writers will overestimate how standard a term has become and how wide the community is that has learned it.

• Abbreviations:
• The writers forget that the few seconds they add to their own lives come at the cost of many minutes stolen from the lives of the readers.
• paired-associate learning/
• Summary from w.l.y~
• A considerate writer will also cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms.
• for example,as in, andsuch as.
• When technical terms are unavoidable, we could choose ones that are easy for readers to understand and remember.

• The curse of knowledge is insidious
• It conceals the contents of our thoughts and their very form.
• When we know something well, we don't realize how abstractly we think about it.
• The amount of abstraction that a writer can get away with
• depends on the expertise of her readership.
• w.l.y's favourite sentence~
• When we make first contact with the aliens in other universes and jabber at them in our local code, they cannot understand us without a sci-fi Universal Translator.
• We're more likely to overestimate the average reader's familiarity with our little world than to underestimate it.
• The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are,
• but that they happen not to know something you know.

• Why do writers invent such confusing terminology?
• The answer lies in another way in which expertise can make our thoughts more idiosyncratic and thus harder to share.
• functional fixity:
• People get fixated on an object's function and forget its physical makeup.
• We lose our appreciation of objects as objects.
• We think of them as means to an end.
• Summary from w.l.y~
• Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better
• when it's expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images.
• A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication;
• It can lead to better reasoning.

• As writers,
• we should try to get into our readers' heads and be mindful of how easy it is to fall back on parochial jargon and private abstractions.
• The reviewers needn't even be a representative sample of your intended audience.
• Often it's enough that they are not you.
• For most mortals,
• too many things have to go right in a passage of writing to get them all the first time.
• It's hard enough to formulate a thought that is both interesting and true.
• The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader.
• Summary from w.l.y~
• always try to lift yourself out of your parochial mindset;
• find out how other people think and feel.
• It will be a source of continuing kindness to readers.

The Web, the Tree, and the String