Subordinate clauses in writing are one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s grammatical repertoire, and one of the least discussed in practical terms. Most writing advice that touches on grammar does so in the negative — avoid passive voice, vary sentence length, don’t use too many subordinate clauses. The positive account — what subordinate clauses in writing actually do when used deliberately — is less often given. This is a gap worth filling, because the decision of when to subordinate a clause and when to let it stand alone is one of the decisions that most directly shapes how an argument moves and how a reader experiences it.
Continue reading “What Subordinate Clauses Do”Tag: writing
Writing and Doubt
Writing and doubt are constant companions, and the relationship between them is more complicated than the standard account suggests. The standard account treats doubt as an obstacle — something to be overcome, managed, or pushed through in order to produce work. The writer who waits for doubt to pass is a writer who does not write. This is true as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough, because doubt is not only an obstacle. It is also, in the right conditions, a signal.
The question is not how to eliminate doubt from the writing process — it cannot be eliminated — but how to distinguish the doubt that is telling you something useful from the doubt that is simply the discomfort of doing difficult work.
Continue reading “Writing and Doubt”Writing the Middle
The middle of a piece is where most writing fails. Not the opening, which receives the most deliberate attention, and not the ending, which is brief enough to be controlled. The middle — everything between the opening that earns attention and the ending that releases the reader — is where the piece either delivers what it promised or quietly stops doing so.
Writing the middle is the hardest part to write well, and the hardest to diagnose when it goes wrong. A weak opening is usually visible. A weak ending announces itself. A weak middle tends to be felt rather than identified — the reader’s attention drifts, the piece loses its forward momentum, and neither the reader nor sometimes the writer can say exactly where it happened.
Continue reading “Writing the Middle”The Difference Between a Subject and an Argument
Subject and argument in writing are often treated as the same thing — but the difference between them is one of the most important distinctions a writer can make, and one of the least discussed. A subject is what a piece is about. An argument is what a piece says about what it is about. The two are not the same, and a piece that has a subject but no argument is not yet a piece of writing — it is a topic waiting to become one.
This matters practically because many writers treat the identification of a subject as the identification of a piece. They have something they want to write about — revision, memory, the internet, solitude — and they begin writing towards it, assuming that the piece will find its argument in the process. Sometimes it does. More often, the piece that begins without an argument produces a draft that covers the subject without saying anything about it — competent, sometimes interesting, but ultimately without the point that would make it worth reading.
Continue reading “The Difference Between a Subject and an Argument”How I Know When a Piece Is Ready to Publish
Knowing when a piece is ready to publish is harder than knowing how to write one. Writing has a recognisable sequence — notes, draft, revision, editing — and at each stage there is a reasonably clear sense of what comes next. Readiness has no equivalent sequence. It is a judgment, made at a specific moment, that the piece has reached a state where further work would not improve it enough to justify withholding it.
This judgment is difficult because it has no objective test. A piece can always be revised further. The question is not whether more revision is possible — it always is — but whether more revision is necessary. Distinguishing between these two is the actual skill, and it is one that develops slowly, through publishing pieces and seeing, after the fact, whether the readiness judgment was right.
Continue reading “How I Know When a Piece Is Ready to Publish”The Language of Care Online
Language of care online has developed a vocabulary — self-care, holding space, doing the work, showing up for yourself, protecting your peace — that has become so widespread it now functions as a default register for discussing wellbeing. This vocabulary emerged from genuine therapeutic and wellness traditions, where the terms had specific, considered meanings. In its online circulation, much of that specificity has been worn away, and what remains is a set of phrases that signal care without always practising it.
This warrants examining for the same reason the language of vulnerability and the language of expertise warrant examining: a vocabulary that becomes sufficiently widespread tends to be adopted independently of the substance it was built to describe. The language of care online can be used by someone genuinely practising care, and it can be used by someone performing the appearance of care, and the two uses are often indistinguishable from the outside.
Continue reading “The Language of Care Online”Writing and Solitude
Writing and solitude are connected in ways that are easy to state and harder to live with. The connection is not simply practical — that writing requires uninterrupted time, which is more available alone than in company. It is something closer to structural: writing requires a particular relationship with one’s own thinking that company, however welcome, tends to interrupt.
This is worth examining because the relationship between writing and solitude is often discussed only at the level of logistics — finding time, finding a quiet room, protecting a writing schedule from interruption. These are real concerns, but they are not the whole of what solitude does for writing. The deeper connection is about what solitude makes possible in the mind, not just in the schedule.
Continue reading “Writing and Solitude”Writing Across Different Formats
Writing across different formats — the essay, the social media post, the newsletter, the long-form article, the marketing copy — is often treated as a single skill that simply needs to be resized for each context. Write the idea, then adjust the length and tone for the platform. This understanding is incomplete. Different formats are not the same writing at different lengths. They are different kinds of writing, with different relationships to argument, structure, and reader attention, and treating them as interchangeable produces work that is competent in none of them.
Understanding what changes across formats — and, just as importantly, what does not — is a practical skill for any writer who works across more than one context, which today is most writers.
Continue reading “Writing Across Different Formats”How Titles Work
How titles work is rarely examined, though a title is the first sentence a reader encounters, and it is doing more work than it appears to do. It is not simply a label — a name attached to a piece for the purposes of identification. It is a contract, a signal, and in many cases the first element of the argument. The reader who encounters a title has already received information about what kind of piece they are about to read, what register it will use, and what it is likely to claim. All of this before the first word of the piece itself.
This makes the title one of the most consequential elements of a piece of writing and one of the least examined. Writers tend to treat titles as finishing work — something to settle once the piece is done — rather than as an integral part of the piece that deserves the same care as its argument and structure.
Continue reading “How Titles Work”What Makes a Piece of Writing Stay With You
What makes writing memorable is not always what makes it good. A piece can be well-constructed, accurately argued, and carefully written without leaving any trace in the reader’s mind after the reading is done. And a piece can be flawed in identifiable ways — overlong, imperfectly structured, occasionally overwritten — and still stay with the reader for years. The qualities that produce staying power are not identical to the qualities that produce quality, though they often overlap.
This is worth examining because writers tend to optimise for quality — for accuracy, clarity, and craft — without thinking explicitly about what makes a piece linger. And the piece that lingers is, in a practical sense, the piece that has done the most work. It has changed something in the reader’s thinking that persists beyond the reading.
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