The New Yorker is an unfair bar, though. Most founders stand to gain a lot from just writing, and many of them don't because they're (often) engineers, not writers.
Edit: The parent comment originally said something along the lines of "...there's a reason you don't see anyone from Baremetrics in The New Yorker."
Even if you're a New Yorker-calibre writer, you won't be able to write anything of "quality" in less than an hour.
Now imagine if you're not a New Yorker-calibre writer!
(I'm a pretty snobby reader and still like the occasional techie-founder post. You don't have to be a copywriting wizard to write something substantive, but it isn't enough to just commit text to the page. You can tell when someone has thought deeply and laboured over a piece of writing. The idea that you can write something worthy of other people's time in one hour is cut-and-dry clickbait.)
If someone has some insight and just writes about it and I get some value from it, like it is neat idea that is quality for me. Long post with a lot of research in area that turns out is not interesting for me does not have quality for me. Maybe quality would be that person writes first paragraph in a way that makes it clear it is not interesting for me.
Oh man. My two cents (many, many years of content writing). It's very difficult to write a high quality post in under an hour. In my mind, high quality = somewhat original, well thought out, required some level of research/citations, includes actionable advice, formatted properly, SEO-juiced appropriately, and proofread effectively. Not all blog posts need to be that in depth, however. I've produced a ton of medium quality posts and those can be done in under an hour, sometimes. And they have value.
Side note - getting on HN and "you read the thing" aren't markers of high quality.
Unless you're in the business of generating blog post views or HN comments the fact that people are discussing it here is irrelevant. Those things are vanity metrics. They don't matter to your business. Your post could get 10,000 upvotes and a million comments, but if you don't get a sale from all that extra "brand awareness" you've still wasted an hour of your time.
The person who wrote the article though has an ego and people reading, reacting, responding to the article all feed the ego. Vanity metrics are the only reason we do things after the base instincts
I think the thing for founders is they don't have time to spend more than an hour, but they have experience and viewpoints that are interesting to most people if they just put pen to paper (so to speak).
I know there are efficiency tips here, but the "one hour" thing seems like click bate. For example, it says writing topics should be limited to topics you already know or have been studying recently to limit research time. Well, that seems like something that requires prerequisite expertise. So it's not really so much you're limiting your research time, as you're overlapping blog writing with your regular work.
Again, the article has generally good advice, but there's no secrets here to make someone a master blogger. It's going to require the same thought, hustle, and persistence as anything else.
If you're trying to build an audience based on pithy advice in a well-known space, there are a lot of posts like this that apply. Focus your ideas, write about one thing, make it relatable, bold a couple random words, and Bam! Traffic!
If you're writing about something technical, complex, or sophisticated, it's worth spending more time to get it write. If you're writing for developers, include code and make sure it runs. If you're writing about hard topics, find research to back up your conclusions and build a real narrative (Priceonomics does this well).
Especially as a founder, your goal should be to write the definitive piece on whatever your topic is. As somebody starting a company on that topic, you are legitimately one of the foremost experts on this topic, so people want to hear your thoughts! Keep all those other rules in mind, buy don't sell yourself short by writing half-hearted pieces that sort of rehash the same topics.
For example, where I work, we think that traffic management (routing, proxies, service mesh, all that rot) is a better way to do things if you've gone to microservices. One example is releasing software. So we wrote one article on it (in two parts). It's long, it's technical, and it has been so, so successful. We don't try to reinvent the wheel on this topic. We just point people to this post.
Haha not to bash on the article at all, but I laughed at the title. Here's my take on how founders write a quality blog post in 1 hour:
1) Founder opens iA Writer and types for an hour
2) Founder thinks post is great and publishes immediately!
Maybe you can write something quickly in one hour but then continuously improve as you go along. That way you can come up with some semi-original content to begin with but over time, if properly maintained, it will flourish into something even better.
I think it's interesting that the consensus here is that you can't do quality in an hour.
It's been forever since I blogged, but when I did I always had that block in the back of my mind that I shouldn't publish unless it was well thought out/well written/reviewed into the ground.
But this is a twitter world. People don't spend any time reading and they don't care to retain most material. If you blog, the most important thing is having a regular schedule. People won't come back for one well written article a month. But they'll read regularly if you produce content twice a day even if they aren't particularly interested in half of what you write.
I don't think the ROI value really exists for blogging unless it's an investment in name recognition for an individual in a niche market. It's too much effort for too little reward.
Honestly, the sad truth about the world post social media is that most people don't read past the title/thumbnail image. In a lot of cases, you could probably just write a title and neat meta description then stick a thumbnail on it, and if it was 'interesting' enough watch it get a few hundred/thousand shares.
If they do get past the title, then in about 99.999% of cases, they sure as hell won't care how well written the actual content is so long as they find the subject interesting and they agree with the conclusions.
It's especially true of the news world, where 'get anything out the door as long as its trending' seems to be the only way to get popularity.
Whew. There's so much I disagree with here. Where to start?
All of these "Lessons from the Greats" have been floating around for a few generations at this point, and they are utter garbage as general writing advice. Twain, Hemingway, Strunk & White all ignore this advice in their own writing. And they do it for very good reasons: it makes for shitty, boring writing with zero personality.
Some domains of writing require this, of course. It's not bad advice for Garner to preach these things in his Legal Writing and Editing books and courses because in legal contexts (briefs, contracts, laws) you don't want interesting writing. You want the clearest, most unambiguous writing possible. Same goes for pure journalism. The writer's voice should be absent and the facts put on display as simply as possible. Academic papers and textbooks should also follow this advice.
But writing a blog post you want other people to read is exactly the place where all of that goes out the window. If the author of this post had spend more than 12 minutes researching good writing advice, he might have noticed the hundreds of writing experts who rail against this kind of guidance all the time. He might also have noticed that every single one of these things like active voice, avoiding adverbs, etc. goes against the only two pieces of good advice he wrote: write what you want to read and write in your own voice.
These specific prohibitions are in the same class of shit advice that shit writing teachers give to shit writing students to get a not-shit grade in a shit writing class. Don't begin a sentence with a conjunction. And don't end a sentence with a preposition. And don't use passive voice. (Most of the people who still troll with this kind critique can't even identify passive voice in non-trivial constructions.) Don't split infinitives. And don't use big words. And on. And on. And on.
Of course people can overuse these patterns. Many people do. Maybe I just did. But telling people to avoid them in general because they can be overused is absurd. It's also lazy. It's a lot easier to tell someone to write according to a safe formula than it is to sit down and analyze why something feels overused and help the writer understand what can be better about it.
Quality writing for a blog post needs personality. Minding these "Lessons" removes that.
Here's my advice for writing a quality blog post in 1 hour:
1. Don't. It doesn't work.
2. Don't assume you're an expert on a topic simply because you started a business related to it. You probably aren't.
3. Don't assume that 12 minutes of research makes you an expert on anything.
4. Don't refer to yourself as a founder or talk about how founders do things differently than other people do. Founders aren't special.
5. Don't be afraid to write above 8th grade reading comprehension.
6. Do write things you want to read.
7. Do write in your own voice.
8. Do use adverbs, colorful phrases, made up words, and flavoring elements that put your unique voice and personality into your written text.
9. Do give me a reason to read your blog post on a topic (Trust me, there are thousands of others. You're not the first.) instead of some other blog, a Wikipedia article, an academic journal article, or some other source of information.
10. Do be kind to yourself when you're writing; be an asshole when editing.
I'm no founder, I never found anything. I do have a lot of hats. Safe to say, non of them are very fancy. The article writing hat is, you guessed it, made of paper. I've reduced the rules to a single one (where reduced is a lie that means I don't know any better) Whatever you do, its probably crap enough to alienate some of the audience. Stick with however you did this. Consistency is everything.
An example would be the frequency of posting. If you went with daily posts you have to stick with it. People who don't like daily posts certainly wont start reading you just because you've dropped to 1 post every 2 months. Try stay a few drafts ahead of reality if something new has to happen every day.
A different example would be making dumb jokes or the choice of uhmmm voice? Be humble and polite, be condescending and authoritative - don't mix the 2. If you chose to make some kind of jokes try stick with the theme.
Back in the days when I was half serious about anything one of the things was writing. To avoid the paper hat from self-combusting or blowing away in the wind I made sure I had one person with relevant skills read it to fire proof it and one grammar nazi to huff and puff at it. There is room for unreasonably people in your life here and in our world.
36 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 43.3 ms ] threadConsider the content of this post:
1. research
2. draft
3. edit
...revolutionary. Maybe there's a reason why Baremetrics writers aren't in the New Yorker ;)
Edit: The parent comment originally said something along the lines of "...there's a reason you don't see anyone from Baremetrics in The New Yorker."
Edit: Now the New Yorker comment is back.
Now imagine if you're not a New Yorker-calibre writer!
(I'm a pretty snobby reader and still like the occasional techie-founder post. You don't have to be a copywriting wizard to write something substantive, but it isn't enough to just commit text to the page. You can tell when someone has thought deeply and laboured over a piece of writing. The idea that you can write something worthy of other people's time in one hour is cut-and-dry clickbait.)
I write most of our posts in ~1 hour and hot dog, here we are on HN and you're reading it. :)
Side note - getting on HN and "you read the thing" aren't markers of high quality.
Unless you're in the business of generating blog post views or HN comments the fact that people are discussing it here is irrelevant. Those things are vanity metrics. They don't matter to your business. Your post could get 10,000 upvotes and a million comments, but if you don't get a sale from all that extra "brand awareness" you've still wasted an hour of your time.
The person who wrote the article though has an ego and people reading, reacting, responding to the article all feed the ego. Vanity metrics are the only reason we do things after the base instincts
I'm assuming these 1-hour blog posts do move their metrics in a meaningful way and the HN thing was just banter.
Also, the term "quality" is highly dependant on context. I wouldn't compare it to "The New Yorker," but rather other similar companies' blog posts.
That's a good thing. They want as many people to read as possible, and most of their audience will not have the patience to read a New Yorker piece.
But a blog post you'd hire a very expensive copywriter for and a blog post like the ones discussed in the article are quite different.
That doesn't mean the latter aren't quality blog posts.
Like another comment said, it depends on your audience (and, I'd add, more importantly, the purpose of the post).
>>> Can tell you the reading level of your content (aim for 8th grade or lower)
Fun fact: This blog entry has grade 4 (Good)
Again, the article has generally good advice, but there's no secrets here to make someone a master blogger. It's going to require the same thought, hustle, and persistence as anything else.
If you're trying to build an audience based on pithy advice in a well-known space, there are a lot of posts like this that apply. Focus your ideas, write about one thing, make it relatable, bold a couple random words, and Bam! Traffic!
If you're writing about something technical, complex, or sophisticated, it's worth spending more time to get it write. If you're writing for developers, include code and make sure it runs. If you're writing about hard topics, find research to back up your conclusions and build a real narrative (Priceonomics does this well).
Especially as a founder, your goal should be to write the definitive piece on whatever your topic is. As somebody starting a company on that topic, you are legitimately one of the foremost experts on this topic, so people want to hear your thoughts! Keep all those other rules in mind, buy don't sell yourself short by writing half-hearted pieces that sort of rehash the same topics.
For example, where I work, we think that traffic management (routing, proxies, service mesh, all that rot) is a better way to do things if you've gone to microservices. One example is releasing software. So we wrote one article on it (in two parts). It's long, it's technical, and it has been so, so successful. We don't try to reinvent the wheel on this topic. We just point people to this post.
https://blog.turbinelabs.io/deploy-not-equal-release-part-on...
Was this an intentional pun? :)
This should read "It _varies_ industry to industry"
The whole point of the article is kinda moot if the reader finds these small errors like these
It's been forever since I blogged, but when I did I always had that block in the back of my mind that I shouldn't publish unless it was well thought out/well written/reviewed into the ground.
But this is a twitter world. People don't spend any time reading and they don't care to retain most material. If you blog, the most important thing is having a regular schedule. People won't come back for one well written article a month. But they'll read regularly if you produce content twice a day even if they aren't particularly interested in half of what you write.
I don't think the ROI value really exists for blogging unless it's an investment in name recognition for an individual in a niche market. It's too much effort for too little reward.
If they do get past the title, then in about 99.999% of cases, they sure as hell won't care how well written the actual content is so long as they find the subject interesting and they agree with the conclusions.
It's especially true of the news world, where 'get anything out the door as long as its trending' seems to be the only way to get popularity.
All of these "Lessons from the Greats" have been floating around for a few generations at this point, and they are utter garbage as general writing advice. Twain, Hemingway, Strunk & White all ignore this advice in their own writing. And they do it for very good reasons: it makes for shitty, boring writing with zero personality.
Some domains of writing require this, of course. It's not bad advice for Garner to preach these things in his Legal Writing and Editing books and courses because in legal contexts (briefs, contracts, laws) you don't want interesting writing. You want the clearest, most unambiguous writing possible. Same goes for pure journalism. The writer's voice should be absent and the facts put on display as simply as possible. Academic papers and textbooks should also follow this advice.
But writing a blog post you want other people to read is exactly the place where all of that goes out the window. If the author of this post had spend more than 12 minutes researching good writing advice, he might have noticed the hundreds of writing experts who rail against this kind of guidance all the time. He might also have noticed that every single one of these things like active voice, avoiding adverbs, etc. goes against the only two pieces of good advice he wrote: write what you want to read and write in your own voice.
These specific prohibitions are in the same class of shit advice that shit writing teachers give to shit writing students to get a not-shit grade in a shit writing class. Don't begin a sentence with a conjunction. And don't end a sentence with a preposition. And don't use passive voice. (Most of the people who still troll with this kind critique can't even identify passive voice in non-trivial constructions.) Don't split infinitives. And don't use big words. And on. And on. And on.
Of course people can overuse these patterns. Many people do. Maybe I just did. But telling people to avoid them in general because they can be overused is absurd. It's also lazy. It's a lot easier to tell someone to write according to a safe formula than it is to sit down and analyze why something feels overused and help the writer understand what can be better about it.
Quality writing for a blog post needs personality. Minding these "Lessons" removes that.
Here's my advice for writing a quality blog post in 1 hour:
1. Don't. It doesn't work. 2. Don't assume you're an expert on a topic simply because you started a business related to it. You probably aren't. 3. Don't assume that 12 minutes of research makes you an expert on anything. 4. Don't refer to yourself as a founder or talk about how founders do things differently than other people do. Founders aren't special. 5. Don't be afraid to write above 8th grade reading comprehension.
6. Do write things you want to read. 7. Do write in your own voice. 8. Do use adverbs, colorful phrases, made up words, and flavoring elements that put your unique voice and personality into your written text. 9. Do give me a reason to read your blog post on a topic (Trust me, there are thousands of others. You're not the first.) instead of some other blog, a Wikipedia article, an academic journal article, or some other source of information. 10. Do be kind to yourself when you're writing; be an asshole when editing.
An example would be the frequency of posting. If you went with daily posts you have to stick with it. People who don't like daily posts certainly wont start reading you just because you've dropped to 1 post every 2 months. Try stay a few drafts ahead of reality if something new has to happen every day.
A different example would be making dumb jokes or the choice of uhmmm voice? Be humble and polite, be condescending and authoritative - don't mix the 2. If you chose to make some kind of jokes try stick with the theme.
Back in the days when I was half serious about anything one of the things was writing. To avoid the paper hat from self-combusting or blowing away in the wind I made sure I had one person with relevant skills read it to fire proof it and one grammar nazi to huff and puff at it. There is room for unreasonably people in your life here and in our world.