WRITING
How To Write With Power
We write because we love it. And it makes us better. Here is a short guide to what I’ve learned about writing with power.
When you write, you want to communicate something to your reader. Feel free to tell them a story, if you want to, or maybe persuade them of something. Be polite, and remain aware that whatever you’re arguing has a counterpoint somewhere in the world. You’re going to be wrong. But that’s how communication works — it’s very difficult to do well.
An old teacher of mine used to quote someone I can’t remember as having said that good writers had to be willing to “call a fool a fool.” I stumbled over that, the first few times I read it. But as I’ve moved through life, the clumsy little phrase has stayed implanted in my mind, like a thorn that simply won’t go away. It comes out sometimes, when I write polemic, like this piece, which has outperformed almost everything else I’ve written on Medium.
I take the axiom a bit further than polemic, however. Calling a fool a fool is not simply about identifying fools — it can be about identifying anything. You want to use the right word to refer to the thing you have in mind, and you need to be willing to have something at stake as if you’d just told someone they were an idiot to…
