💥 The Craft of Writing Effectively — Larry McEnerney (UChicago)

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1. 🧨 “This is not a remedial class.”

Forget grammar. Forget “clarity, concision, structure.” You’re not here because you can’t write; you’re here because you don’t know how writing actually works.

You’ve been trained in rule-based writing — bottom-up, formulaic, graded writing — “good” for high-school essays and memos. That’s garbage at your level. You’re an expert, writing about something so complex that even you can’t think it through without writing. But here’s the problem:

The way you write to think interferes with how your readers read.

That’s why they slow down, get confused, get annoyed, and finally — stop reading.

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2. 🎯 Writing’s not about you.

Let’s kill the biggest lie first:

“Writing is how I express my ideas.” Wrong. Professional writing is how you change other people’s ideas.

Nobody — nobody — cares what’s in your head. Your teachers used to. They were paid to. That’s over. Now your readers — editors, reviewers, committees — are not paid to care about you. They read because they believe what you write might be valuable to them. If it’s not valuable, it dies unread, no matter how “clear” or “organized” it is.

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3. 💰 Value is everything.

You’ve been trained to chase clarity, organization, and persuasiveness. He says: throw that away.

Clear and useless? Useless. Organized and useless? Useless. Persuasive and useless? Still useless.

Writing only matters if it’s valuable — and value doesn’t live in your text. It lives in your readers.

Value isn’t “new.” It isn’t “original.” You can create “new knowledge” by counting how many people are in the room — nobody will read that paper.

“It’s new,” he says. “Yes,” the committee replies, “and we wish we still didn’t know it.”

Value is what your community cares about. Your job is to change their thinking, not parade your brilliance.

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4. 📢 “Stop explaining.”

You’ve been trained to explain — to show teachers you understood something. That habit kills real writing. Explaining means you’re trying to show the world what’s inside your head.

No one cares about the inside of your head — unless they’re paid to.

In the real world, you’re not explaining; you’re arguing. You’re saying:

“You — smart, respected, powerful people — are wrong, and here’s why.” And you’d better say it politely, in code.

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5. 🧬 Learn the code.

Every field has its code — a hidden language that signals value. Words like:

nonetheless, however, although, inconsistent, anomaly, widely accepted.

They tell the reader: “There’s tension here — something unstable, something that matters.” That’s what your readers crave: instability.

They don’t want smooth continuity (“As everyone agrees…”). They want friction (“Although everyone believes X, Y suggests otherwise”). That’s where value lives.

Spend 15 minutes a week circling those words in articles you admire. Build a “value word list.” When you revise, check your own text: if you can’t underline 10 such words in the first two paragraphs, your writing has no pulse.

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6. ⚡ The function of writing

Writing doesn’t preserve your ideas forever. It moves a conversation forward — and then gets left behind. That’s the game. You’re not Aristotle. You’re part of a living, decaying ecosystem of thought. Your work is fertilizer. Accept it.

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7. 🧱 “Gap” vs “Error”

Grad students love to say:

“There’s a gap in the literature.” Larry: “That’s death.”

Knowledge isn’t a crossword puzzle where you fill missing squares. It’s infinite. Your ‘gap’ fills nothing.

Instead, show error — instability, contradiction, cost. Show that something the community believes is wrong or dangerous. Then they’ll care.

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8. 🧩 Construct the problem, not background

Stop opening papers with background, definitions, or history. Your first job is to make your readers feel a problem. And not your problem (“Ever since I was a child, I’ve wondered…”). Their problem — something that costs them understanding, reputation, or truth.

Once they see the problem, your solution has meaning. No problem → no value → no reader.

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9. 🧭 The community decides what counts as knowledge

You may hate it, but it’s true:

Knowledge isn’t eternal. It’s what a community of people currently believes. They get to decide what matters, what’s true, what gets published.

You can challenge them — but you must do it inside their code. Tell them they’re wrong, but say it like this:

“Your work has been deeply influential… however…”

That’s power. That’s survival.

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10. 🩸 The Final Lesson

Writing is hard — brutally hard. People cry in his office. There’s a box of Kleenex next to the writer’s chair. Why? Because careers depend on this. Because clarity won’t save you. Because the world does not care about what’s in your head.

Your writing’s job is not to display your mind. Your writing’s job is to change what happens between minds.

When you understand that, you stop writing to be liked, or correct, or “clear.” You start writing to matter. And that’s the craft.