Write Like Someone’s Going to Read It (Because They Might)

People tell me I’m a good writer and I never know what to do with that. Thank you? I guess? I don’t really think of myself as a good writer. I think of myself as someone who decided at a very young age that everything I put into the world, every text, every tweet, every email, every museum label, every unhinged Substack post, should be worth reading. Not worth tolerating. Not worth skimming while you wait for your coffee. Actually worth reading.

That’s it. That’s the whole secret. I’m going to keep going but I could honestly stop right here.

The rule is stupid simple: treat every single thing you write like it’s going to be read by someone who has absolutely no obligation to finish it. Because they don’t. Nobody owes you their attention. Not on a wall label, not on a tweet, not on a newsletter, not ever. They will scroll past you. They will walk to the next painting. They will close the tab. Unless you make them want to stay.

The Yelp Thing

Okay so when I was in middle school I used to write Yelp reviews. For fun. For local businesses I liked. Nobody asked me to do this. There was no assignment. I was just a twelve year old on the internet writing enthusiastically about sandwich shops and nail salons and the dry cleaner that always had candy at the counter because I wanted strangers on the internet to go to these places and experience what I experienced.

Unhinged behavior for a child? Maybe. But here’s what I didn’t realize I was learning: how to write for people who don’t know you and don’t care about you and are going to bounce in three seconds unless you say something that hooks them. A Yelp review is a masterclass in that. You can’t ramble. You can’t be vague. “The food was great” is nothing. Nobody has ever read “the food was great” and driven across town. You have to give them the *detail*. The specific thing. The reason.

I was twelve years old learning economy, tone, rhythm, and audience awareness. I was learning that funny and credible are not opposites. I was learning that warmth makes people trust you. I didn’t know I was training for anything. I thought I was just being a weird kid who liked writing about local businesses. Turns out that weird kid was doing more useful writing practice than most of what I’d later do in school.

The Labels

The other thing I used to do, and this is the one that makes me sound truly feral, is go to museums, read the wall labels, go home, and rewrite them in a notebook.

For no one. For absolutely no audience. Just me, sitting on my bed, trying to make a label better.

I’d stand in front of a painting and read something like “this work exemplifies the artist’s transition toward a more restrained palette during the later period” and I’d think okay cool but the painting is SAD. It’s so clearly sad. Why doesn’t the label say it’s sad? Why is this written like a textbook when there’s a person standing here having an actual emotional response and the words on the wall are doing nothing to meet them there?

So I’d go home and try. I’d try to write the version that had the dates and the context and the art history but also had blood in it. A version that acknowledged that someone was going to stand in front of this thing and feel something.

Nobody ever saw these. They were terrible, especially early on. But here’s what practicing in private does for you: it lets you be bad without consequences. You can try things. You can overwrite and underwrite and be too clever and not clever enough and slowly, without anyone watching, figure out what works. I filled notebooks with these rewrites and none of them were good but every single one of them made the next one slightly less bad.

And the thing those notebooks taught me, the thing I still carry, is that writing isn’t about the subject. It’s about the gap between the subject and the person encountering it. Your entire job, in any form of writing, is to close that gap. Not with jargon. Not with everything you know. With the right thing, said the right way, at the right length.

That’s true whether it’s a museum label or a tweet or a pitch email or a birthday card. The gap is always there. Close it.

There Is No Such Thing as Different Kinds of Writing

I need you to hear me on this because I think it’s the most important thing I believe about writing: there are no categories. There’s no “professional writing” and “casual writing” and “academic writing” and “social media writing.” There is writing that works and writing that doesn’t. That’s the whole taxonomy.

A tweet, a museum label, a Substack essay, a thread, an email to your boss, a DM to your friend, a caption on a photo you love. Different formats. Different word counts. Different constraints. Same skill. Same question: did you say something worth reading in a way that respects the person on the other end?

The moment you start thinking “well this is just a tweet so it doesn’t matter” or “this is just an email so I don’t need to try,” you’re training yourself to not care about your own words. And that training carries over. It always carries over. The person who’s sloppy in emails is sloppy everywhere, they just don’t know it yet.

I treat everything like it’s for public consumption. Every tweet. Every DM. Every Slack message. Not because I’m performing. Because the habit of giving a damn about how your words land is the habit that makes you a good writer, and you either have that habit or you don’t, and you build it by never turning it off.

Tweets Are Writing and I Will Die on This

A tweet is writing. A thread is writing. A caption is writing. I need this to be clear because the number of people who will spend two hours agonizing over an essay and then tweet something that reads like they fell asleep on their keyboard is genuinely staggering to me.

The discipline of making a point in 280 characters? That’s not a lesser skill. That’s one of the hardest things you can do with language. You have to find the single sharpest way to say the thing. No runway. No preamble. No “in this essay I will.” Just the thing, clean and fast, and it either lands or it doesn’t and there is nowhere to hide.

Those are the exact same muscles you use to write a wall label. Or a headline. Or the first line of anything that determines whether a person keeps reading.

And it works the other direction too. Writing longer pieces, building arguments, earning a reader’s trust over paragraphs, setting up a payoff, that practice makes your short form better. It makes your one line tweet hit harder because you understand the structure underneath it even when the structure isn’t visible.

People who dismiss social media writing as not real writing are telling on themselves. If you can make a distracted stranger stop scrolling and actually *feel* something in the space of a single tweet, you can write anything. That’s the hardest room to play. Everything else is easier after that.

The History Rant

Okay. This is where I get loud.

History is not boring. History has never been boring. History is the wildest, most unhinged, most entertaining collection of stories that has ever existed and I will not rest until people stop acting like it’s medicine you have to choke down.

You know what history is? History is John Quincy Adams swimming naked in the Potomac River at 5am every morning like an absolute maniac while also being president. History is medieval peasants filing lawsuits against insects. History is Cleopatra, who spoke nine languages and was running geopolitical strategy that would make most modern politicians look like interns, getting reduced to “she was pretty” for two thousand years. History is a series of deeply unwell people making insane decisions and then writing letters to each other about it, and we can still read the letters, and the letters are WILD.

History is boring when boring people write about it. Period. End of sentence.

The material was never the problem. The delivery was always the problem. Somewhere along the way the discipline decided that being engaging was undignified. That if people were enjoying themselves while learning something, the learning didn’t count. That there was something noble about being difficult to read.

There is nothing noble about writing a sentence so dry that a reader’s eyes slide off the page before they reach the period. You didn’t protect the scholarship. You killed the reader’s interest, and now your incredibly accurate, heavily footnoted, peer reviewed work sits there being read by eleven people, seven of whom are your colleagues and two of whom are your graduate students who had no choice.

The people in history were PEOPLE. They were petty and horny and ambitious and scared and weird and funny and contradictory and recognizable. They had terrible days. They made catastrophically bad decisions for reasons that you, sitting in your apartment in 2026, can completely relate to. They gossiped about each other. They wrote passive aggressive letters. They had beef that lasted decades. They ate something strange and told someone about it.

When I write about history I write about the people. Not the “socioeconomic shifts in agrarian labor practices.” The people who lived through the socioeconomic shifts in agrarian labor practices and had opinions about it and wrote those opinions down in letters we can still read. Those are the same story. One of them people will read. One of them they won’t.

Making history entertaining isn’t dumbing it down. It’s waking it up. It’s putting the humanity back into stories that bad writing sucked the humanity out of. The facts don’t change when you write them well. They just finally reach the people who deserve to know them.

Most Writing Is Bad and Here’s Why

I’m going to be blunt. Most writing is bad because most people are writing for themselves and not for the reader.

They’re writing to sound smart. They’re writing to demonstrate that they did the research. They’re writing to cover themselves, to hedge, to qualify, to show that they considered every possible angle and therefore cannot be criticized. They’re writing to perform expertise rather than transfer it. And you can feel it on the page. You can always feel when someone is showing off versus when someone is trying to reach you.

I see it everywhere. Museum labels that sound like they were written by a committee that was afraid of being wrong. Tweets that try so hard to be clever that they circle right back around to saying nothing. Emails that are three paragraphs when three sentences would have been twice as clear. Essays that orbit a point for a thousand words without ever landing on it.

The fix is so simple it’s almost embarrassing: care more about being understood than being impressive.

That’s it. Every time you write anything, ask yourself, am I writing this to communicate or am I writing this to show that I know things? If it’s the second one, start over. You can always tell. Be honest with yourself. Start over.

The Practical Stuff, Fast

Read your writing out loud. Every single time. If you trip over a sentence, your reader will too. If it sounds like something no human being would ever actually say, rewrite it.

Read everything. Not just people in your field. Journalists, food writers, novelists, essayists, people whose tweets you screenshot, people whose newsletters you actually open. Pay attention to what they do and why it works. Steal the structure. Steal the rhythm. Your influences should come from everywhere.

Write all the time about everything. Captions. Reviews. Emails. Texts. Recommendations. Every piece of writing is reps. The muscle is the muscle. It doesn’t care what format it’s working in.

Edit like you’re being charged by the word. Fall in love with your sentences and then cut the ones that are there for you and not for the reader. Your cleverest sentence is almost always the one that needs to go. You know which one it is. Kill it.

And if you want to write about anything, whether it’s art or history or food or sports or whatever you care about, go experience it. Go stand in front of the thing. Go to the weird little museum with one room and a volunteer docent who’s been there forty years. Go read the labels. Go home and think about what you’d do differently. Fill a notebook with attempts that nobody will ever see.

That’s the real training. Not a workshop. Not a degree. A notebook full of bad drafts and the willingness to keep going until they’re less bad.

The reason I write the way I write isn’t talent. It’s that I was a twelve year old writing Yelp reviews for strangers and rewriting museum labels for nobody and somewhere in there I decided that every word I write matters, every context counts, and the only unforgivable sin is being boring.

That’s the whole secret. There really isn’t a different one.