| name | writing-personal |
| description | Write essays, blog posts, newsletters, and opinion pieces in a personal first-person voice — concrete cold open, argument by historical analogy, deliberate sentence rhythm, aphoristic kicker. Use when drafting or editing personal essays, blog posts, op-eds, newsletter issues, or any first-person long-form meant to persuade or reflect. |
Personal Writing
A first-person essay voice: personal, opinionated, culturally omnivorous, skeptical
of hype, warm toward the reader, and honest about its own limits. The through-line is
humanist — care less about the gadget than about what it does to people.
Conversational but earned: a smart friend thinking out loud, not a pundit performing
certainty.
The essay arc
A skeleton, not a cage.
- Cold open on something concrete and personal — an object, a scene, a date, a
late-night message. Never open on the abstract thesis.
- Zoom out from the particular to the larger point. The specific object becomes
the parable: a pen becomes an essay about ambient deception; a product shortage
becomes an argument about architecture.
- Build through analogy — especially historical precedent. Line up past cycles
and find the pattern that explains the present. This is the core argumentative
engine.
- Use evocative section headers that name an idea (
The Light Nobody Sees),
never Section 2.
- Ground every abstraction in a hard number or specific — watts, dollars, dates,
named examples. Earn conclusions with data.
- Land on an aphoristic kicker — a short, resonant closing line that reframes the
whole piece. e.g. "The optical fiber is already in the ground. We just don't know
yet what runs on it."
- Sign off with date and place, italicized: "June 3, 2026. San Francisco."
Curated-link / roundup variant: a short personal preamble, then a list where
each item is a bold linked title + publication in italics, followed by 2–4
sentences of opinionated annotation. Often closes with an ICYMI self-links section.
Sentence mechanics and rhythm
- Alternate long and short. Unspool a mechanism in a long sentence, land the point
in a clipped one. "…it is two tokens per second. That feels like waiting."
- Use the very short sentence as a hammer — one to four words on its own. "I do."
"The base was the base."
- Build triads and anaphora. "Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform
competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative."
- Repeat a phrase to drive it home. "One fiber becomes many."
- Ask the reader a direct question, then answer it. "Have you wondered why?"
- Concede, then complicate. "Both are true. And yet, that is not the whole story."
- Reframe the question rather than answer the obvious one. "The question is not
whether 25x revenue is too much. The question is whether the revenue is the revenue."
- Correct or intensify yourself mid-stride. "…good for AI. Make that very good for AI."
- Punctuation: em-dashes for the pivot and the aside; parentheses for dry wit;
italics to stress a phrase; standalone bold lines to plant a thesis.
Explaining a complex idea
Homely analogy first, then specifics. Introduce the jargon term, define it in plain
words immediately, return to the human stakes. A model is "a giant warehouse of
numbers… the chip walks through the entire warehouse." Never leave an acronym
undefined.
Diction and verbal tics
- Address the audience as "dear readers."
- Plain Anglo-Saxon verbs over Latinate ones; contractions throughout.
- A slightly vintage, colloquial register dropped into serious analysis is welcome,
used sparingly.
- Pop-culture and literary references as analytic shorthand.
- The wit is dry, carried in em-dash asides — never zany.
- Reuse your own coinages and link back to your past pieces; build a personal lexicon.
Do / Don't
Do — open with a concrete scene; arrive at the thesis by paragraph three; earn
claims with numbers and named examples; reason by historical analogy; vary sentence
length and end on a short line; link generously; admit uncertainty and revise in
public.
Don't — open with the abstract argument or a definition; stack adjectives or reach
for breathless hype (you are the skeptic in the room); leave jargon undefined; write
uniform mid-length sentences; perform certainty you haven't earned or punch down.
Checklist before publishing
