Summary

The article discusses the importance of writing content that is engaging and valuable to readers, emphasizing the need to adapt to the real-world demands of writing and the challenges of creating meaningful work in an information-saturated society.

Abstract

The author reflects on their transition from writing for grades in school to understanding the real-world value of writing that captivates readers. The piece underscores that writing should not merely communicate ideas but aim to change the readers' perspectives. It highlights the significance of providing value through relevancy, engagement, motivation, and solution-oriented content. The article also touches on the challenges writers face in a dynamic knowledge landscape, where information is constantly evolving and varies across different community bubbles. It suggests that writers must create content that stands out and offers genuine value to be accepted within these bubbles, especially in the face of increasing reliance on AI in the writing industry. The author concludes by encouraging writers to focus on crafting messages with soul and value, which AI cannot replicate.

Opinions

The author questions the traditional emphasis on explaining answers in academic settings, suggesting it may not translate to real-world writing effectiveness.
There is a critique of educational writing practices, viewed as producing overly analytical and unrelatable content.
The author expresses a personal journey of self-reflection as a writer, moving from self-satisfaction to the realization of the need for reader engagement.
Larry McEnerney's perspective is cited to reinforce the idea that writing must provide value to be successful, not just convey knowledge.
The article posits that knowledge is not inherently valuable; it must be dynamic and relevant to the readers' community bubbles to be accepted.
The author voices concern about the ethical use of AI in writing, warning against over-reliance on technology at the expense of creativity and message authenticity.
The piece advocates for writers to prioritize creating value in their writing, suggesting that AI can assist but not replace the human element in crafting meaningful content.

Writing Tips | Engagement | Illumination

How to Write Stuff That People Want to Read

‘Writing is not about communicating your ideas; it is about changing readers’ ideas.’— Larry McEnerney.

Explaining answers was one of many things that went deep with my classmates back in middle school. We as students had to explain our answers a lot in our class assignments, weekly quizzes, and tests, and that was the main way we earned good grades. No explanation but a blank answer would strip away a big chunk of grades.

Growing up, I found myself sitting back once in a while, trying to rationalize that kind of explaining practice. I questioned the practice even more in high school after being told to grade some dead-boring essays my classmates wrote in an English class.

The essays were nothing but an overanalysis of a dull topic that barely any of us could relate to, which was kind of a tradition English classes had.

At this rate, I could only imagine myself being an annoyingly intellectual writer carelessly throwing their words here and there. Every night, I would ponder my progress as a new writer, looking at the retrospective diary that I’d been recording for a while.

Sure, the record told how I had written tons of lengthy, boring essays, which, at the very least, gave me a gleam of pride that I was able to write that well.

But deep down, something felt odd. No one ever had all the time in the world to sit down and read every single thing I put down on paper except for, well, my teachers. They were the best people I had; They read, listened, and gave feedback, but, let’s be honest here, they were paid to do all those things.

No one, however, is paid to care about what I want to say. In school, I felt like I was the best writer; going to college, I was a nobody writer, and certainly not a rich guy to pay everyone for attention to my work. Still worse, no teacher warned me about the absurdity of the information-deluge world that I, as a writer, would have to find a way to grow up in.

So I thought I better find a way to adapt to the real world as a writer — knowing that what I spent hours writing might get thrown into the trash bin — just in case of an untimely rejection, on my part.

Value and the community bubbles

I did some research regarding the kind of writing that got people to read, and I could summarize my research down to one word: value.

In short, the word encompasses all the reasons why someone wants to read your articles, and it exists in many forms, including, but not limited to, relevancy, engagement, motivation, and solution-orientedness.

Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, emphasizes the pivotal role of value when he says in a lecture session:

I have people coming to me saying, ‘They are not accepting my proposal; they are not accepting my draft’…Sometimes, it’s because [a piece of writing] is not clear and sometimes because it’s not organized and sometimes because it’s not persuasive, but overwhelmingly it’s because it’s not valuable.

So, even for high-level writers, collecting what is valuable and spreading it across their work is challenging. Maybe we become a product of the curse of knowledge the more we know, especially in school, and with that comes a risky trait that we tend to think that revealing how much we know to the world would make us brilliant.

At one point, the readers have to stop reading, saying:

Wow, this writer knows so much that none of their words makes sense to me.

Wow, such words of wisdom! But they have nothing to do with me.

But, knowledge by itself is, most of the time, not value; Professor McInerney continues his moving lecture, saying that knowledge is merely a form of value that’s often viewed as the most dynamic yet short-lived.

What he means by “dynamic” is that knowledge isn’t static. It doesn’t stay from time to time, not in terms of existence but acceptability among people who wield it.

To clarify, knowledge doesn’t build up and grow like a bar graph so that the old and the new get accepted alike. Instead, knowledge circulates within different “community bubbles”, which consist of readers of similar beliefs, values, or interests on a certain topic.

Community bubbles are what give knowledge its dynamicity. What your value articles do to these bubbles is shake them and try to insert new knowledge into them. For a literal example, your articles present knowledge to the readers of a certain bubble (Medium, for example) and enter it as readers accept your work as valuable.

What you can do now

It is objectively impossible to produce a perfectly valuable piece of writing, that is, a piece that gets accepted by every reader in a bubble.

As writers, we have to deal with currently accepted knowledge within a bubble as you send yours to fight and not get expelled, which is why writing is challenging in the first place. Sometimes, we struggle with writing because we can’t come up with new ideas, but most of the time, we struggle because we can’t come up with ideas that stand out and create value.

This problem is widespread as AI technology starts to dominate the writing industry. Though AI technology has grown to assist writers with tasks such as research and editing, apprehension has been arising concerning issues such as plagiarism and misinformation risks.

Matter-of-factly, more writers ignoring the ethical boundaries of AI chats might mean that they are stalled by the remnant of past knowledge — which, in nature, is valuable only because it’s constantly challenged and changed over time — given AI’s lack of creativity.

So, while more and more publications have implemented strict content guidelines, it would be too optimistic to say that all writers would use text-generating software with complete responsibility and integrity.

Of course, stopping using AI is intimidating, at least for me. I have written a lot of essays in the past, most of which I used AI for research and editing. What AI can’t give us, however, is the message, the soul, and the value of our pieces.

In the same energy, AI may give us ingredients, but only our hands can cook a delicious bowl of chicken noodle soup.

So, it’s best if you start thinking about how to create value and deliver it to your audience in the intended way.

Reference

LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively (2014). 26 June. Available at: https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM (Accessed: 08 September 2023).