TB: Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice (Alexander)
Core Thesis
Scott Alexander offers fifteen pieces of writing advice for aspiring bloggers built around one premise: small dishonesties — unnoticed at the level of the individual word — corrupt prose at the level of the paragraph. Good writing comes from genuine effort applied to overlooked angles, with the constraints of the form policing originality.
Key Takeaways
Microdishonesty is the first enemy of prose
- The English language punishes even unintentional dishonesty by making the writing worse. Hedging, overclaiming, or feigning interest in something you do not actually care about leaves a residue the reader can feel.
- The corollary: clear writing is closely correlated with honest thinking, because the prose breaks down at exactly the points where the thought is bent.
Cliches are not just lazy — they are concession
- "Cliches are semantic building blocks, bigger than words but smaller than entire concepts."
- Refusing inherited cliches forces you to build the bricks yourself. This is exhausting but is precisely where the originality lives.
Effort beats brilliance for most blog topics
- "If you put in a modicum of effort, the fruit is so low-hanging that it's burrowing tiny fruit boreholes until it dissolves." Most popular topics have not been thoroughly investigated by anyone — there is room for original work simply by going deeper than the field has bothered to.
- Either write competently about topics readers care about, or write brilliantly about anything. The middle ground is where blog posts go to die.
Constraints generate originality
- Poetry, fixed forms, and other formal requirements force the writer past the first available phrasing into one they would not have chosen freely. The constraint is the engine.
The voice has to be yours
- "Your writing is the coherent extrapolated volition of your thoughts … they should still be, in the end, your thoughts." Polish and craft are not in tension with authorship; they are how authorship survives editing.
John's notes
- "Great practical advice for writing and life."
Mental Models
- Occam's Razor — microdishonesty is excess machinery the prose has to drag along
- It Pays to Get the Design Right — formal constraints (poetry, structure) tune the writing surface to the problem
- Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast — go slow on the unforced cliche; rushing past it is what produces flat prose
See also
- Paul Graham on Writing (Two Essays) — Graham's "writing is thinking when developing your own ideas" thesis dovetails with Alexander's microdishonesty argument: thought goes wrong at exactly the place the prose goes wrong
- Good Writing (Paul Graham) — same diagnosis, different surface
- How to Write an Essay (Paul Graham) — breadth × depth as the engine of original blog content
- Attention and Deep Work — "modicum of effort" only buys low-hanging fruit because almost no one is actually paying attention to most topics
Source
Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten, 2026 Original article