
The Guide to Writing Online - davidperell
https://www.perell.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-writing-online
======
camillomiller
Quick guide to Americans writing for a European public (or who want to make
business with Europe, especially Germany).

Writing something like this:

>“I’ve interviewed more than 70 of the world’s most interesting people on my
North Star Podcast, built a weekly email newsletter with almost 10,000
subscribers, and my most popular articles, such as What the Hell is Going On?,
have been read more than 100,000 times. I’ve done all this in just a couple of
years.“

will attract contempt and make you look like a moron. Boasting your
achievements in such a straightforward way might be ok for a US public, but in
Europe everyone just thinks “so what” and then “what the hell is this person
trying to sell me”?

~~~
Toine
European here, you nailed it. I stopped reading because of this,
unfortunately. Americans, why does everything have to sound like a cheap TV
commercial from the 90s ?

~~~
sridca
Neither an European nor an American here (born in India actually), and I too
stopped reading for the same reason.

~~~
Noumenon72
I hadn't even started reading at that point. By the third sentence I was
skimming. I slowed down at the heading "Age of Leverage" but didn't start
actually reading till the bullet points

1\. A Start Here page

2\. A curated list of your favorite articles

At that point I thought the advice on bootstrapping a blog was quite
worthwhile. I think the reading strategy of rejecting articles that start slow
is not as good as skimming over what isn't interesting to get to what is.

------
mikro2nd
I confess to having my confidence in the writer shaken when I read, "That’s
when they’ll pour through the archives".

No, they won't. They might _pore_ through your archives, though.

Offering a course in "Online Writing" and then making such a basic usage error
did not inspire much confidence. Perhaps another pair of editorial eyes might
help? For _any_ writer (myself especially included!) editors and proofreaders
are your friends. I've also misused words and had someone else point out my
error, and I'm grateful to them for having taught me something.

Lesson: If you aspire to "being a writer" \- online or anywhere - get
editorial help where polish matters.

~~~
cutler
No, they won't. They might pore over your archives, though.

~~~
codetrotter
Seems that both “pore through” and “pore over” are correct but the latter is
much more common.

[https://www.thefreedictionary.com/pore+over+or+through](https://www.thefreedictionary.com/pore+over+or+through)

[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46624/do-you-
use...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46624/do-you-use-pore-
over)

------
friggeri
One of the things I've been struggling with is that once I've mastered a topic
enough to feel comfortable writing about it, everything I write sounds obvious
to me, and from there there is an easy leap to "it's probably obvious to
everyone", and I start questioning whether I should write at all. Anyone has
dealt with this? Tips would be appreciated.

~~~
bachmeier
What's the problem with writing something obvious? Honest question. I don't
see why that should matter. (I mean, sure, you don't want to write 1000 words
about how you should blink your eyes so they don't dry out.) Try to think of
one person you know that wouldn't already know what you're writing. Even if
it's obvious, it's not literally something everyone in the world already knows
or shares your perspective on.

~~~
luckylion
> What's the problem with writing something obvious?

You're not contributing something useful if you're just pointing out the
obvious. Yeah, you can write the ten millionth article on how to change the
default slogan in WordPress, but unless that's the maximum extent of your
knowledge, you're wasting your potential and everybody else's time. That's how
I feel about it at least, and why I don't write stuff that's too obvious or
has already been widely covered. In that case, I might give a small overview
and some tips to newcomers and link to others that I think did a good job.

~~~
bachmeier
"ten millionth" is a duplication problem, not an obvious problem.

~~~
luckylion
There isn't a lot of a difference to me: the obvious has been stated by nearly
everyone. You're right that there will always be some that can benefit from
what one might consider obvious, but the amount of people depends on the level
of what you're writing about. There are people that don't know how to change
the default slogan on a WP site after all.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that nobody should write about
that, I'm offering my perspective on why I probably wouldn't.

------
codingdave
From the headline, I thought it was going to talk about the well-hashed-over
advice of keeping online content short, concise, and skimmable. But when he
spent 4 paragraphs just leading up to a statement of, "In this essay, I'll
show you...", and then a table of contents. I pretty much gave up, as even if
the rest of the article does have something to say about writing, it clearly
isn't going to be accurate to the 'Online' part of the headline.

------
tenkabuto
> "As Devon Zuegel said in my interview with her, writing falls into three
> buckets: (1) trivial things that everybody knows, (2) things that everybody
> knows, [but nobody around you knows], and you have a unique perspective on,
> and (3) stuff that nobody knows so you have to do tons of research. Direct
> your energy towards the second bucket.”

Amusingly, this leaves out things that nobody knows but desperately wants to
know, among other potential things.

------
enygmata
Just write, dammit.

