Writing feedback: I overall enjoyed the post, but by far the biggest obstacle to me were the extremely long paragraphs, with relatively little to break them up (the images did help, but probably not enough). Scott has a bunch of good advice on this, in his writing advice post:
Nobody likes walls of text. By this point most people know that you should have short, sweet paragraphs with line breaks between them. The shorter, the better. If you’re ever debating whether or not to end the paragraph and add a line break, err on the side of “yes”.
Once you understand this principle, you can generalize it to other aspects of your writing. For example, I stole the Last Psychiatrist’s style of section breaks – bold headers saying I., II., III., etc. Now instead of just paragraph breaks, you have two forms of break – paragraph break and section break. On some of my longest posts, including the Anti-Reactionary FAQ and Meditations on Moloch, I add a third level of break – in the first case, a supersection level in large fonts, in the latter, a subsection level with an underlined First, Second, etc. Again, if you’re ever debating more versus fewer breaks, err on the side of “more”.
Finishing a paragraph or section gives people a micro-burst of accomplishment and reward. It helps them chunk the basic insight together and remember it for later. You want people to be going – “okay, insight, good, another insight, good, another insight, good” and then eventually you can tie all of the insights together into a high-level insight. Then you can start over, until eventually at the end you tie all of the high-level insights together. It’s nice and structured and easy to work with. If they’re just following a winding stream of thought wherever it’s going, it’ll take a lot more mental work and they’ll get bored and wander off.
Remember that clickbait comes from big media corporations optimizing for easy readability, and that the epitome of clickbait is the listicle. But the insight of the listicle applies even to much more sophisticated intellectual pieces – people are much happier to read a long thing if they can be tricked into thinking it’s a series of small things.
Thanks, that’s very useful advice. I’ve usually done the stream-of-conciousness approach because my blogwriting began as a recreational thing, but I’ll be sure to try and work harder on brevity and structure as I keep writing.
Writing feedback: I overall enjoyed the post, but by far the biggest obstacle to me were the extremely long paragraphs, with relatively little to break them up (the images did help, but probably not enough). Scott has a bunch of good advice on this, in his writing advice post:
Thanks, that’s very useful advice. I’ve usually done the stream-of-conciousness approach because my blogwriting began as a recreational thing, but I’ll be sure to try and work harder on brevity and structure as I keep writing.