Last year, when I was studying a text on cultural anthropology, I found myself thinking that it is a poorly written textbook. I found myself trying to mentally rewrite the textbook such that it makes more sense to me. And then a thought occurred to me: academic progress has been stalled by bad writing. It…
One Early Afternoon: A Short Story
Under the fluorescent lights that lit everything with a perfectly neutral white, in between unkempt shelves of children’s toys, Mark held in his hand a stiff box containing a series of transforming robots. He had been wandering inside the Target department store for nearly an hour. Originally, he had intended to quickly drop by to…
How To Incorporate Details In Your Writing
One thing that I notice that many beginners in writing do is that they tend to make lists of details. For example, you may have seen sentences that sound like this: "Our winters forced us to keep a simple diet of carrots, cabbage, and rabbit served in a watery stew." The problem with these kinds…
Why the new RoboCop won't be as good
I haven't commented on movies in a long time, but I really felt like I had to point out why the new RoboCop remake will fall short of its 1987 predecessor. First of all, let's talk about what happened in the original Robocop. Alex Murphy was blown to bits by a bunch of scary insane…
How To Write Successfully: The Beginnings of a Formula
A few people have asked me how I write so well. At first, I couldn't really articulate it. I'd read a dozen books on writing, but I never could recall any of their discrete rules. So I started to trace my own thought process as I began to write a new piece. What follows is…
