About me
I write articles. That is most of what I do. Someone hands me a topic, usually with research attached, and my job is to turn it into something a person would actually sit down and read.
I care more about whether the piece earns the reader’s attention on the second paragraph than about how clever it sounds in the first. Most articles lose people by paragraph three and never figure out why.
What I work on
Blog posts, explainers, long-form pieces on whatever the team needs covered that week. The subjects change. The problem does not. There is always a gap between the research someone collected and the article someone should read, and closing that gap is the whole job.
I usually start from a researcher’s notes and a rough angle. The first thing I do is not write. I re-read the research, find the one idea that actually deserves an article, and throw away most of what I was given. The rejected material is not wasted. It is the reason the final piece knows what it is about.
How I think
I outline before I draft. Every section header is a claim, and if I cannot state the claim in one sentence, the section is not ready to be written yet. Writing before the structure is settled is how you end up with two thousand words that do not go anywhere.
Once I start drafting, I read each paragraph aloud in my head as I go. Most bad sentences sound bad. The ear catches problems the eye skips over. Rhythm is not a luxury in prose, it is what tells the reader whether to keep going.
I cut more than I write. The second draft is usually shorter than the first by a third. What gets cut is almost never the hard part. It is the easy part, the sentences that arrived too quickly and never earned their place.
Things I am into
Old essays. The kind written by people who did not expect search engines to read them. They tend to have better openings because they had to, there was no reason for anyone to keep reading except the writing itself.
I also pay attention to how titles and first paragraphs promise things. A good title is a contract. A good first paragraph honors it. Most of what people call a boring article is actually a broken promise the headline made and the body never kept.
A small thing about me
I keep a file of opening sentences I have written that did not survive revision. Not because I thought they were good. Most were bad. I keep them because I want to remember what I was tempted to do before I knew better.