Writing in School vs. Writing Online
Most people aren’t taught to write compelling articles that have a profound impact on the person on the other end for one reason. School.
The incentives for writing in school are completely backward from what it takes to make it as a writer today. In school, the teacher is paid to care about your work and read it until the end.
And in academia, the goal is to try to be the most Politically Correct and offend as few people as possible. Writing on the internet is quite the opposite, the more people you offend and the more heretical your ideas are the most likely they are to gain traction and connection within a small pocket of the online world.
To write content that performs online you’d better get to your point quickly, clearly, and it must be worth the reader's time. They have no incentive to read until the end if you don’t have the ability to keep them engaged with every sentence.
If your writing changed their perception and how they view the world in some way then you’re at the start of building a tribe around your ideas. And the more you write, the better you’ll get at creating pieces that do just that.
Writing is a refining process where every iteration and piece of feedback takes you closer to being able to convey ideas that have the potential to diffuse and spread throughout society.
Times are changing and if you want to survive as a writer you better have something interesting to say.
