All right, Jesse, I think we have time for a couple more quick calls. Who do we have next? All right, next question. We have a question about writing non-technical stuff. Hey, Cal, my name is Abhishek. I've been following your writing since the Google Reader days. Thanks for all the advice over the years.

My question is about getting better at writing. I've read William Zinser's On Writing Well, and I've read the Elements of Style by Ed Strunk and White. This has really helped me write better technical documents in my work. I also read widely. However, I want to write better blog posts and articles that are not as technical.

I want to emulate the writing styles of some of my favorite authors. What is the process I should follow in learning the way other authors write? How do I learn to reproduce the feeling I get from reading their work? Do I dissect grammar and composition? Can you recommend a book or training that goes into this?

The author I want to emulate in this case is Bill Bellevue. He primarily writes about nature, and his writing makes me feel very peaceful and relaxed. I'd love to be able to write like him. I remember you talking about doing this with your own writing career. How did you go about it?

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks. Well, Abhishek, there's two things I'd recommend when it comes to improving nonfiction writing. One, yes, dissect. Dissect the authors that you want to emulate and try to replicate their formula in your own writing. Now down the line, this will evolve into your own style, but that is deliberate practice for style development.

As you referenced, I did this back when I was first emerging as a nonfiction writer. I was trying to understand the then kind of new but quite popular nonfiction pop science style of idea writing. So I would dissect Malcolm Gladwell. I remember dissecting Clive Thompson, maybe some Stephen Johnson.

But I would take articles, and I would break it down. And I would figure out like, OK, here are the sections, and then what happens in each section? You know, opening story with a cliffhanger transition, idea introduction back to opening story. Like I'd really break these things down. And then I would try to emulate that in articles I was writing.

So great. I am now going to take this style of this article. I broke down the formula. I'm going to now try to write my own article that follows that formula. That's how you actually begin to grow those muscles, see what works, see what doesn't work. It's practice with direction.

It's what makes practice deliberate and not just repetitious. You know, who used to do this famously was Ben Franklin. So when Ben Franklin was learning how to write, he would take essays or poetry and would break them down to their component parts and then try to replicate it from scratch.

So he really had a mimic style way of learning because he had no other way of learning how to write. He was apprenticed to his brother's printing shop in Boston and wanted to become a writer. So he would just literally break down and reconstruct other people's writing. And then he started writing anonymous letters for his brother's newspaper in the name of characters.

His brother didn't know it was him, but he was at that point able to apply what he learned. And he was a pretty good mimic. And that's where he really developed his style. So I think it's a really effective tactic. So I would definitely recommend you do that. The second thing is, if at all possible, you want to write for editing.

There is a difference in the deliberate practice effect between writing something that someone's going to look at and potentially say, "Nope, that's not good. We're going to reject it or edit it heavily," versus writing for your own blog or writing your own journal. And this is what I did.

So when I was deconstructing Gladwell, when I was deconstructing Thompson or Johnson, it wasn't for blog posts. I actually went out and found an online magazine that had editing, but they needed content. So I was like, "I'm just good enough to get pieces in here." But they'll reject them if they're not good.

And it was like a serious writers, but the magazine never really took off. It was called Flack Magazine. I think it eventually closed down. But it had real editors and they were open to submissions. And there was a period of two years where that was where my writing energy was going.

I believe this was primarily between my second book, How to Become a Straight-A Student, and my third book, How to Become a High School Superstar. It was between those two periods, which is why superstar actually reads like, what if Malcolm Gladwell wrote a college admissions book? Because I was doing this training and I was focused on this magazine, not because they had a big audience, not because anyone ever saw those articles, but because I was deconstructing writers I admired, then pitching an article to Flack.

And then when they'd accept that pitch, I would write that article in a direct emulation of a style and article as deconstructing. Because I was writing for editing, it pushed me harder to make that better. The stakes were higher. And then I'd take another article and I was like, "Let me try this format." So I pitched an article that allowed me to practice that format.

And then I would practice that format. And that's how I built up my initial nonfiction idea writing chops. It was through exactly that practice. So that's my two piece of recommendation. Dissect writers, emulate their style, if possible, do that emulation for editing so that you have that pressure and feedback to try to stretch yourself and make that writing as good as possible.

And thank you, by the way, for being such a longtime reader. The Google Reader Days, those are some of my favorite days, 2007, 2008. It was like the Study Hacks blog and you had your RSS reader. And I liked that day. This was before social media had taken over the internet.

And it was like interesting people with interesting blogs. And you would curate them in your RSS feed and see their articles that came in. And I remember back then being big on the minimalist bloggers. This is when Leo Babuda and Zen Habits. This was before the FIRE movement. But I'm trying to think.

There's some other bloggers like that, people who were doing interesting radical experiments in their life. And they'd write these essays about it. And it was also personal and interesting and creative. And I just think there was like a high point, early Web 2.0 was this great high point of web production.

And then five years later, all that got reduced to Facebook posts and Instagram things. And we kind of lost that moment. So thanks for the memory, Abhishek. I miss and remember that time fondly.