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Browse the guides →A practical guide to building an essay with a spine — and writing prose that reads like a person wrote it.
Everything sounds the same now. The same opening, the same tidy three-part structure, the same closing line that gestures at profundity without committing to anything. Readers have learned to recognise the pattern, and the moment they recognise it, they stop reading.
This guide argues that the cause is not style. It is that nobody decided anything before they began — and it shows you, chapter by chapter, how to write from a decision instead.
Why so much writing now reads as though nobody wrote it — and why the cause is not style.
The difference between a topic and an argument, the “so what” ladder, and knowing what would prove you wrong.
Openings that delay versus openings that start, the concession that costs you something, and the turn.
Rhythm, concreteness, nominalisation, and why the verb carries the weight.
Reading the primary thing, the three legitimate uses of a source, and how to disagree well.
Twelve specific habits that mark writing as generic, each with a fix.
Reverse-outlining, reading aloud, cutting ten per cent, and a working order that saves time.
Register over grammar, the over-formality trap, and translating your voice rather than your sentences.
“Distinctive prose is not a style you apply to a finished thought. It is what happens when the thought is finished.”From Chapter One
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Yes, and deliberately so. There is no version of this subject that needs two hundred pages, and padding a guide about clear writing would be an odd way to make the case. Everything in it is something I use.
No. It is about writing that reads as though a person made decisions. One chapter identifies the specific patterns readers now recognise as generic — most of which predate the machines by decades.
It is one of two. The guide is written in UK English, and Chapter Eight deals directly with writing well in a language that is not your first.
UK English only. The first guides in this series are written in UK English; translations into Portuguese, Spanish and other languages are planned for later editions. Chapter Eight deals specifically with writing well in a language that is not your first.
If the guide is not useful to you, reply to the delivery email within fourteen days and you will be refunded. No explanation required.
The generic register exists because it is safe. Nobody has ever been criticised for writing that there are many perspectives on a complex issue. The price of never being wrong is never being read.
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