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DinoNerd's avatar

The kind of writing you want to do seems to me to be affected by the star system. There are lots of aspirants, and very few that do well at it. Those would be your tier 5s.

Consider the difference between a teacher, and a writer of textbooks. If you are teaching 5 kids algebra, you need one teacher, and 5+1 copies of one text book. If you are teaching 10 kids algebra, still one teacher, and still one text book, with 10+1 copies. But when you need to teach 50,000 kids algebra, you need several thousand teachers - and still only need one textbook author.

So teaching doesn't pay very well - but lots of people can find a steady job as teachers. Whereas writing the textbook potentially pays more - but only for one person, and it's not a steady job.

Whatever you write can be read by 10 people - or 10 million people. It costs you the same to produce, either way -- except to the extent that you respond to comments. This makes you more like the textbook writer, and less like the school teacher.

OTOH, if I need something specific written - let's say a manual for the product I want to sell - you are a bit more like a teacher. I can't use any old product manual - it has to be specific to my product. But then you have to make writing products to order. Which may not satisfy the desire to write something you *want* to write.

My suspicion is that this is the key difference. It's not pure writing vs writing mixed with other skills; it's more like the difference between creating fine arts and creating advertising images - the same technical skills may be used for both.

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pythagoras's avatar

(1) I think you overestimate the technical skills of technical writers. I've worked with full-time technical writers at a Fortune 500 tech company. They don't grok the thing they're writing about. Essentially they rely on software engineers to write documentation which they format. They attempt to make it pretty and clean up grammar and language. Sometimes they inadvertently change the meaning, so I have to review their work pretty carefully.

(2) Often I find that I'm correcting the output of technical writers for things that they should excel in: gramar, formatting and clarity.

I think that a highly skilled technical writer from both the technical and the writing side is probably quite rare. I also think that they are also undervalued, so as a result, we mostly skate along with bad technical writers.

I agree with you that there aren't many jobs for writers where writing is the job in itself. I also think that whatever pure "writing" jobs exist now are likely be replaced by AI pretty quickly.

That's not to say that writing isn't going to remain a valuable skill, but it's going to mean that, even more than today, writing is going to be a skill that's only really in demand in conjunction with some other skills.

One of the best writers I know is a lawyer. I suspect that being able to express complicated concepts in concise, easy-to-understand prose is a significant factor in making him a great lawyer. But he's a lawyer, not a writer.

Most of the best writing I encounter is in the context of fiction. It takes more than some well-written prose to make good fiction, and so I think writing is simply the technical aspect of the creative writer. I suspect that while one can exercise the creative muscle to get better at it, you need a create spark that's pretty rare.

The internet writers you list are all are using writing as a tool to express novel ideas. They are not being compensated for their writing, they're being compensated for their ideas. Some of them are really good at writing (Scott Alexander, Andrew Sullivan), but we read them for their novel ideas or perspectives. Not their ability to synthesize prose. I also read writers that are frankly terrible at writing (Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson). They're just good enough writers to get their novel ideas on to the page.

For the most part, I don't think you've shared much in the way of novel ideas on this blog, but the best pieces you've written offer a novel perspective. Novel perspective can only get you so far, but it's a good start on the road to novel ideas. Novel ideas gets you to the next tier--not better argumentation, relatability, readability or likeability.

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