William Fitzpatrick

Day job: English professor, Nonfiction writing coach;
Building: Writer Science—Studying the art and science of expert writing, sharing what I learn

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

A good essay is like a set of instructions: it gives readers the info they need in the places and order they expect to find it.

Here are the five structural locations that readers use to interpret your essay—the places where they expect to find the answers to certain questions.

These reader expectations are unconscious.

But if you anticipate consciously what your readers expect intuitively, then you make your essay much more readable and valuable.

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

Very intrigued, but I find Gemini's lack of functionality mindbending. I just logged in to Gemini and ask if I have access to Argon; it says it doesn't know, gives me instructions to click through workplace admin myself. Alrighty. I do as I'm told, discover I'm on the wrong tier, and ask Gemini how much the AI upgrade would cost; says it doesn't know! The other day I wanted to clean up the file structure on my Drive, archive old projects, delete fragments, etc.; Gemini couldn't do it, so I had to send in Claude to handle it. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Everything I do is in google so I'd love for this to work, but so far gemini just feels like a chatbot add on rather than leverage

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@talon_layman I've found this modification to that writing exercise to be quite effective, try it out on day 45 https://t.co/iteTgUZ8JC

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

https://t.co/TAKsIum7rA

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@kepano Is it possible for these to autopopulate as unique notes, to be saved in a designated folder?

I still use your unique note method, like to just write a note and chuck it in a folder, would be incredible if that workflow could be executed from the homescreen

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@p_millerd Also the way 'add a slide' has a 'help me choose' section, that would be useful in the checks section too

And for the vertical flow check, I think there's something in the way I've been formatting my slides that isn't getting picked up.

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@p_millerd feedback on academic writing is my bread and butter, happy to help

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

The reader isn’t an output of your writing; they’re an input.

You don’t find your readers. You produce them in the text.

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@p_millerd What's great is not just that you pulled it off, but how well it works. I always read that digest email because there's always something happening in the community that's new and weird in the best way possible

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@p_millerd No, it's a psyop from creative writing departments to convince students that it's still worthwhile to pursue an MFA

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@MattStrangelove If you want to drive them mad, point out that Québécois is closer to true French (thanks to centuries of isolation that locked in Ancien Régime features) than the metrapolitan dialect spoken in France (which innovated post-Revolution)

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@richiemcilroy Don’t sleep on Busan!

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

Full conversation and transcript available on Writer Science, the free newsletter for writers who care about readers
https://t.co/tjZp0doZsx

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

Writing advice almost always comes as a list of rules.

But Paul Millerd would never presume to tell you how to write. Instead, he'll tell you not to copy him, to do it your own way.

So we flipped the genre on its head.

Here are the 6 rules of writing that @p_millerd broke in order to keep his writing free.

[Paul Millerd @p_millerd]

did this cut with claude code

new convo with @WriterScience to youtube asap

[Paul Millerd @p_millerd]

did this cut with claude code

new convo with @WriterScience to youtube asap

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

Been editing this video all day and just realized I’ve got a booger hanging out.

Can Claude fix this? 😅

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

A good point, but to say that writing makes thinking possible is strident. It’s not as though we were unable to think before the advent of writing. You can absolutely think on your own without writing.

Probably the strongest argument for the necessary relationship between writing and thinking is that it allows our ideas to be analyzed and refuted—and thus strengthened—by others separated from us by space and time.

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

@MereSophistry Retrieval isnt thinking; it’s remembering ideas that have already been thought.

Thinking is problem solving, a subconscious process that precedes its expression in language.

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

https://t.co/YLVjVSy6jc

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

Had a lot of fun making this video, in which I introduce psycholinguistics as a method for making writing decisions.

Prescriptivists are grammar nazis, enforcing arbitrary rules. Descriptivists are pollsters who refuse to weigh in. Both miss the point.

Instead I use psycholinguistics, basing writing choices on how readers' brains actually process language.

Not what's proper or popular, but what works.

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

Descriptivists like Kamm are just pollsters: they think the only measure of a language choice is whether it’s made by native speakers.

But the relevant question for writers is neither the descriptivist one (is it popular?) nor the prescriptivist one (is it correct?), but the functional one: does it work?

An objective basis for answering that third question is found in psycholinguistics.

If we understand the reader’s experience—the ways in which certain language choices tax or exploit cognitive faculties—e.g.: working memory (how many details a sentence forces you to hold); mental imagery (how readily a phrase can be pictured, versus abstractions in nominalizations); and negation (the extra work required of flipping a negative statement to its positive form)—then we can make the case that certain constructions are not right or wrong but better or worse, regardless of who wrote it.

[Oliver Kamm @OliverKamm]

@ClaudeLorraine6 No construction that’s in general use among native speakers of a language variety (e.g. Standard English) can be ‘grammatically incorrect’. This is a mere truism, accepted by literally all scholarly linguists. There’s no other evidence for the grammar (or lexis) of a language.

[William Fitzpatrick @WriterScience]

It’s been 25 years and I still know all the words 😂

[Tupac Chopra @N_Kognito]

I really can’t ever explain to a younger person how beautiful life was when this song came out