how to become a good writer

i don't think i'm the best writer there is, but i do think that, to a certain extent, i find writing easier than most people. a couple of people have asked me how to write, so in a few words, i want to share my answer.

i strongly believe that you can't know what good or bad is until you've experienced a variety of options. when you experience enough of them, your brain subconsciously begins to recognize what you like and what you don't. it does a form of classification. "this is good", "this style sucks" typa classification.

for tech nerds, this is somewhat similar to unsupervised learning in machine learning: it's learning by being exposed to a broad range of unlabeled data. a good number of ai models are trained like this.

to become a good writer, you can replicate this by reading a lot.

when you read widely, you're exposed to different styles, voices, structures, and ways of expressing ideas. without even realizing it or making an effort to, you start to develop an intuition for what feels good and what doesn't. so as you read more books, essays or articles, you add a little more to that intuition.

and you don't have to limit yourself to any particular type of book. i strongly advise people to read as much as possible. read as widely as possible. classic literature, poems, fictional stories. cast your reading net as wide as possible.

ai models use enormous amounts of data to learn how to perform tasks well. so in the same way, you need a lot of exposure to good writing to train yourself to become a good writer.

it would be dumb to say "as long as you read a lot, you automatically become a good writer."

once an ai model has gone through its initial training, it goes through post-training, where its capabilities are tested and improved using feedback and additional data. then, they add reinforcement learning to take this further: the model learns by attempting a task, seeing where it fails, and adjusting.

you have to do the same thing.

so write. write more. get feedback. figure out where you're weak. write again. over time, you get better and better.

no one starts off as a great writer. after months and years of reading, writing, receiving feedback, and improving, you eventually become one. i mean the grading for writing is subjective but you get what i mean…

so yeah, the best way to become a good writer is to read more…

who would have thought?

unconventional thinker