How I Write

The other day I was reading an essay from my good friend Logan Graves, when I chanced upon the following quote:

“It does not matter if you are remembered. If humanity lives on, if humanity progresses, so do you; we are one. And when our children outgrow this small planet and colonize the stars, we may look upon them and smile.”

I like this quote. It’s a style I affectionately refer to as “Agniv-core” in honor of Agniv Sarkar. If you know him, you know what I mean (and if you don’t, maybe you should!). It’s a bit silly, yes, but it’s also fun to read. Reading this passage, it occurred to me that I almost never do this, so I wanted to create a brief reflection on why this is, and how I write.

In a sense, my writing is kind of bad. I make up words sometimes, I put commas in strange places, and I massively overuse the em-dash. When I read back my writing, I often find that certain sections feel awkward to read, or don’t get the point across as well as I had thought when writing them. But I usually don’t rewrite them — I much prefer to instead add addendums, or even just leave it as is.

The reason I do this is deeply related to the thesis of Linguistics, as well as that of Advice. I would highly recommend reading them, but I’ll summarize the ideas briefly here.

In Linguistics, I argue that the primary goal of language is not to be literal, but to convey experiences, and I suggest using it as such. In Advice, I argue that most experiences have to be experienced and not just theoretically understood. As such, the purpose of philosophical writings (which these vaguely count as) is to illuminate a path to coming to the realization yourself, not trivially providing truths (which is pointless anyway).

When I write essays, usually it’s because I have an idea I feel is important enough to my thinking that it deserves to be codified. And the process of writing it out does just that — it takes it from an experience to a much more rigorously thought out and argued point. The character of the pedant appears often in my writing. The pedant is me, pushing back against my ideas as issues appear during the codification process. At this point you may have figured out why I don’t edit my writing if I can help it: it misses the point of Linguistics and Advice. The words I choose are the ones that have the proper associations with experiences. The punctuation and sentence structure I choose is whatever best reflects the shape of the non-linguistic thought I’m trying to represent. In a somewhat definitional sense, my writing acts as art (if you haven’t read that essay, ignore this sentence). Writing in this way may not be the easiest to read, but that’s mainly because it reflects my thoughts. And that’s exactly what it needs to do — it’s very much in the spirit of “give the proof not the theorem” I put forward in Advice.

In fact, as indicated by the presence of the pedant, I often have internal discourse in the process of codifying and thus rigorizing my beliefs — issues arise, and I adjust my thesis accordingly. Writing in this way allows this progression of thought to be understood in a way editing it down afterwards would not. The pedant actually exemplifies this — I would much rather write the wrong thing and then correct it a few paragraphs later than just present the corrected idea. That’s precisely what it means to “show the proof.”

I’m not going to explain this in too much depth — if what I’ve said so far doesn’t make sense, it’s probably because you don’t understand Linguistics or Advice. In which case you should just go understand them — I’m not going to re-explain those ideas here.

To summarize, yes, my writing is, in a traditional sense, bad. But that allows it to reflect the intellectual journey that birthed it, which is crucial.

Editor's Note

While this essay serves as an excellent introduction to the ideas, it's (kind of) outdated. At the very least, I later caught some of the logical fallacies. I update it in my corrections essay.

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