Reflecting on my writing journey (as of 2025)
Date published: Sep 14, 2025
I recently reviewed an essay for someone's medical residency application. Coincidentally, I was also recently reviewing old high school English essays; before submitting for a grade, friends used to send me their writing and ask for feedback.
Feedback on a "To Kill a Mockingbird" essay (from 10th grade in 2016)
If I recall, I only occasionally wrote Google Docs comments because they felt tedious (especially when I had a lot of feedback). Eventually, I started directly modifying the writing myself; they could discard changes they disliked using the Google Docs revision history viewer (and sometimes they'd watch the realtime changes on the document and discuss with me through the Google Docs chat feature). I'd mainly leave comments for "broader" things, where it was their job to actually do the work (since it's their essay).
I think I'm good at writing and giving feedback on writing (based on the positive feedback I've gotten at least). The main reason why is probably because I felt forced to get good at it in high school. I got my first and only B+ in my first semester of 9th grade in Honors English 9; I was sad about this since I was aiming for straight A's in high school and felt like anything less would significantly hurt my college admission prospects. Since I felt like I couldn't afford another B, I started focusing more on improving my writing skills.
Over time, I've internalized good "prompts" for producing good writing. For example, at a high level: What is the prompt for this essay? What is my answer/thesis for that prompt? How does every sentence in this essay contribute to supporting that answer/thesis? For some reason, it's easy to lose sight of these fundamental questions. Another example of this is how when people give a long-winded explanation, you can often ask "What are you trying to say here?", and they concisely explain "I'm just trying to say that X...", and then you say "Makes sense!... So say that instead :)". This idea of recognizing and using the best prompts is similar to how people think about prompting LLMs. It's also similar to "algorithms of thought", which people discuss in the "tools for thought" (TFT) scene.
Speaking of school, English teachers in middle school and high school frequently talked about this idea of "summary vs analysis", which confused almost everyone. Even students getting A's on their essays didn't fully understand the distinction or why their essays were better. This frustrated me at the time; so many students being confused felt like a major issue, and yet it felt like teachers blamed the students and continued repeating "this is summary, not analysis" in essay feedback... My memory is hazy, but I think the key insight I eventually had was to avoid thinking about "summary vs analysis" and instead ask "What is my thesis/answer to the essay prompt, and how is every sentence in my essay contributing to that thesis?" If you're summarizing events for a novel that you're writing an essay on, this is generally fine as long as you clearly explain how those summarized events support your thesis. That explanation of how events in the novel support your thesis is called "analysis". If you skip that connection step, then it's called summary; otherwise, "analysis" often includes summary... I was sad about this at the time as I got better, thinking "Why couldn't someone spell this simple thing out for me? I wouldn't have had to be 0.6% away from an A-...".
Since 9th grade (10+ years since my 2015-2016 9th grade school year), I've gotten good practice writing and editting essays. The main sources of practice were:
- School essays (in high school, and in college from a few humanities courses)
- College admissions applications (my own application, and reviewing others' applications)
- Cold DMs/emails (which have gotten me most of my work experience thus far)
- Technical writing at work (e.g. for individual product features or architectural changes)
- Personal writing (I've produced 5+ million words of writing in my personal notes)
- Posts for this website
After publishing more posts, I want to spend time focusing on my writing process itself and improving it. Until then, I'll keep publishing and getting more practice!