Writing and reading are sneakily intertwined. In the past few months, I’ve realized writing is a true gem of a tool that can help you improve your thinking — questioning your assumptions, clarifying thoughts, and helping learn. Like many realizations of mine, they come from recent projects: a literature review of Open Information Extraction datasets, and a few thousand word paper/article on Levittown, New York, where I found historical research with 50-100 sources quite fun, and translating that into punchy, concise writing even more so. I’ve also been interested in tech related to writing. After writing a paper about my project Loqu¹, I built a proof of concept app Paperweight, and after some recent school research built another POC ScholarWrite.

What should you read?

Books and longform journalism are the most rewarding reads. Non-fiction books are highly informative, and the good ones tell a story. Longform articles are great stories and hopefully informative about useful subjects. I’ve made a list of my favorite books and Longform has great articles organized by topic, while Arts and Letters Daily is a comprehensive list of magazines and some curated top articles of the week.

Mortimer Adler makes a compelling case for reading the classics in How to Read a Book, and I heartily agree. They contain the most core knowledge on society—if only they weren’t so hard to read! I believe the 1940 edition is best because it contains his original commentary on the declining state of reading and education in the US, where classics were replaced by synopses and summaries.

Writing Tips

Be clear and concise. As someone steeped in technical skepticism, I used to love loading a sentence with as many qualifiers as possible. Then I wouldn’t be wrong because I’m acknowledging the uncertainty. But I could still be wrong. And people love a good story, even if it’s the less accurate view. So I’m writing like how I talk, a little punchier and more direct.

Good sources are an art. In law, you prepend a “table of points and authorities” to every motion — all the cases and statutes you cite/rely on. Much of your case relies on how well those sources support your claims. I feel that doing the extra research to provide the reader with the best possible resource you can find on a topic will leave them with a happy feeling and a desire to read more of your work.

Add humor. The best blog posts are funny.