# notes --- - [[{5.6} good writing has the right answers, not the best argument]] - expanded [[writing is turning your networked thought into a cohesive narrative|writing is turning your networked thought into a linear narrative]] and moved it from `snoozed`. - [[{5.6a} essays start with a question]] - [[{1.2b1} history is the full context]] - if you’ve thought about something a lot and find something that surprises you, it will likely surprise readers too. # highlights --- >Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth… The real problem is that you can't change the question. >Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. ^0aad53 >An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. > >Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, bt with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside. > >If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. >Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I've written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea. >So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Interfaces, as Geoffrey James has said, should follow the principle of least astonishment. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise. >I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording. > >Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. >How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. (The other half is expressing yourself well.) The trick is to use yourself as a proxy for the reader. **You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.** >When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. **But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto-- which means you accumulate knowledge at an exponential rate… Etc, etc squared.** >The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. >I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be. >I write down things that surprise me in notebooks. I never actually get around to reading them and using what I've written, but I do tend to reproduce the same thoughts later. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head. >**History seems to me so important that it's misleading to treat it as a mere field of study. Another way to describe it is _all the data we have so far._** ^e5c447 >If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Follow the threads that attract your attention. >just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to _plan_ such a thing.