Many pieces of good advice here, worth reading again.
The part about being concise and clear should be taught in universities. Some academic writing seems to want to be verbose and unclear.
For myself, I create a table in Word, then write in it whatever ideas are relevant to the essay topic. One idea on each row. This table may end up several pages long. I then seek a logical structure within those ideas, group by association, and sort all the points. Then print it up and write the actual essay (or chapter).
As MW also said, it's important to start and end well.
I greatly appreciate your blogging work and do try to take the time to read your essays when I get a chance. I also think that one essay a week is reasonable because it's not an overwhelming amount of information to have to take in. Some creators are extremely overproductive by their very nature and create several hours' worth of content every single week (AA is a textbook example, but I believe he was a university lecturer after all, so probably misses the experience of "talking to an audience"). Quality over quantity should be the general rule.
It barely needs to be said that we are absolutely saturated in content in 2026. Every week on the Internet there are thousands of hours' worth of blogs, podcasts, videos and more created. No one, even if they devoted all of their time to watching all of it (which would be a pretty sad existence), could possibly take in even a fraction of what is being said. Online writers, bloggers, vloggers, podcasters and so on must compete for the limited attention of their audience.
There is also the newer factor of AI to take into account: AI can produce in a matter of seconds what could take hours or days for a human to write, with significant mental effort required in the process. Of course, not everything created by AI is of good quality, but we're still in the very early days of AI and the more time that passes, the harder it will become to distinguish between an essay painstakingly written by a human and one written by an AI in under a minute.
All of this should act as an impediment to any aspiring online writer or blogger, but I can think of at least two other factors that can serve to discourage potential bloggers such as yourself:
As you will of course be aware, political speech comes with consequences, especially in this country. It can fall foul of the law in some circumstances, but even if it doesn't do that, there can still be social and economic consequences of political speech. Some employers would happily let go of someone who expresses the "wrong" political opinions online. There are also groups that go around doxxing and spreading personal information about people, sometimes with spurious allegations attached. All of this serves to help "shut people up" and has the effect of helping to perpetuate the injustices that continue to prevail in our societies, because it makes it harder to speak the truth plainly, openly and without the kind of self-censorship that so many people engage in.
Finally, there's also the simple reality of people not having enough free time to write, especially for those who work full-time. If I did not have to work, I'd probably be capable of writing similar weekly blog posts to those you're publishing at the moment, as I'm certainly not short of ideas or things to say. When your free time is limited, though, all of that goes out the window.
The biggest problem with writing is that the effort-reward ratio isn't balanced for most people: if blogging were a highly lucrative industry, I'd be right in there and would happily quit my current job to do something similar to what you're doing, but the reality for most is that it's a struggle, and extremely competitive due to the aforementioned over-saturation of content and the "attention economy" we have in the social media age.
Unfortunately, this means that genuinely great and intellectually nuanced ideas are sometimes lost simply because there isn't a market for them, and many people have their attention captured by the most simplistic of things. One of the biggest problems with the free market is that it doesn't genuinely reward true greatness; instead true greatness sometimes languishes in obscurity while that which appeals to the lowest common denominator is the most commercially successful. There are countless examples within music, food, TV, entertainment, and elsewhere: slop for the masses makes a profit while those occupying a creative niche struggle financially.
A society like ours that doesn't seem to value the truth, beauty, greatness or intellectual nuance, and above all, just wants you to shut up, pay taxes and die, is a psychologically demoralising environment. That is why it is so important that people like you are doing the work you do: you speak for thousands of others who have a very similar perspective on many issues. Keep up the great work.
So, there's a madness to your method, that explains a lot. You forgot to advise that we eschew obfuscation. But seriously, I feel like writing something now. Thanks for the inspiration.
My whole career was writing technical essays or reports and they have to have certain formats so managers can read the summary and then pretend they know the details within that they never bothered to read.
When I am writing to get across my ideas I usually start with the main point, wander off into seeming unrelated things and then come back to the main starting point and the reader can then see there was a bigger picture there that they had never considered.
Sadly all mainstream media are interested in is soundbites that don't convey anything of the complexity hence the idiocy of this country spending over £1 trillion on wind turbines etc that have to be switched off, but still paid for, when it gets too windy as the interconnectors from where it is windy (Scotland) to where the load is (Central and Southern England) are not capable of carrying the installed Scottish capacity and yet they are building more Scottish capacity which simply makes Milliband and his tribe richer at our expense. All this based on completely erroneous "climate models" that all mysteriously year on year always predict higher temperatures, higher winds speeds and higher sea levels than are measured in reality. If the modelling wasn't biased one would expect that half the models would be low and half would be high but no they are all high and most by huge margins. Milliband's tribe also controls all of the main "science" journals so creating a circle jerk of fraud against the people of the Western world who are being preyed upon.
Sometimes as I am writing I feel this is getting too involved or unwieldy and then poof the text disappears by accident or by a computer glitch and I start again with the same basic points but a shorter version that is always better. If it goes poof three times I stop writing that idea down as it wasn't meant to be. Physics is at last coming round to the old idea that our subconscious mind, the father we could say, creates the world the conscious mind, the son we could say, inhabits and so it is as well to be mindful of what the subconscious mind is trying to tell us at such times.
But which is really the father and which is really the son? It is one thing to live in a reality created by the subconscious mind but it is quite another and far scarier if in fact that world is actually created by the conscious mind. As AI doesn't have a mind as such he, she or it isn't capable of wiping out a race of beings that use their God given gift to create their own reality with words, a reality which, for the moment at least, includes that AI. All that race of beings has to do is collectively decide it shall not be dominated by an evil minority or an evil AI ...... and so it shall be.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God ..... and the Word was God. And the Word is mightier than the sword.
Good advice thanks
It's amazing how many articles in reputable outlets contain overly convoluted sentences and generally ask too much of the reader.
Very good stuff.
Many pieces of good advice here, worth reading again.
The part about being concise and clear should be taught in universities. Some academic writing seems to want to be verbose and unclear.
For myself, I create a table in Word, then write in it whatever ideas are relevant to the essay topic. One idea on each row. This table may end up several pages long. I then seek a logical structure within those ideas, group by association, and sort all the points. Then print it up and write the actual essay (or chapter).
As MW also said, it's important to start and end well.
I greatly appreciate your blogging work and do try to take the time to read your essays when I get a chance. I also think that one essay a week is reasonable because it's not an overwhelming amount of information to have to take in. Some creators are extremely overproductive by their very nature and create several hours' worth of content every single week (AA is a textbook example, but I believe he was a university lecturer after all, so probably misses the experience of "talking to an audience"). Quality over quantity should be the general rule.
It barely needs to be said that we are absolutely saturated in content in 2026. Every week on the Internet there are thousands of hours' worth of blogs, podcasts, videos and more created. No one, even if they devoted all of their time to watching all of it (which would be a pretty sad existence), could possibly take in even a fraction of what is being said. Online writers, bloggers, vloggers, podcasters and so on must compete for the limited attention of their audience.
There is also the newer factor of AI to take into account: AI can produce in a matter of seconds what could take hours or days for a human to write, with significant mental effort required in the process. Of course, not everything created by AI is of good quality, but we're still in the very early days of AI and the more time that passes, the harder it will become to distinguish between an essay painstakingly written by a human and one written by an AI in under a minute.
All of this should act as an impediment to any aspiring online writer or blogger, but I can think of at least two other factors that can serve to discourage potential bloggers such as yourself:
As you will of course be aware, political speech comes with consequences, especially in this country. It can fall foul of the law in some circumstances, but even if it doesn't do that, there can still be social and economic consequences of political speech. Some employers would happily let go of someone who expresses the "wrong" political opinions online. There are also groups that go around doxxing and spreading personal information about people, sometimes with spurious allegations attached. All of this serves to help "shut people up" and has the effect of helping to perpetuate the injustices that continue to prevail in our societies, because it makes it harder to speak the truth plainly, openly and without the kind of self-censorship that so many people engage in.
Finally, there's also the simple reality of people not having enough free time to write, especially for those who work full-time. If I did not have to work, I'd probably be capable of writing similar weekly blog posts to those you're publishing at the moment, as I'm certainly not short of ideas or things to say. When your free time is limited, though, all of that goes out the window.
The biggest problem with writing is that the effort-reward ratio isn't balanced for most people: if blogging were a highly lucrative industry, I'd be right in there and would happily quit my current job to do something similar to what you're doing, but the reality for most is that it's a struggle, and extremely competitive due to the aforementioned over-saturation of content and the "attention economy" we have in the social media age.
Unfortunately, this means that genuinely great and intellectually nuanced ideas are sometimes lost simply because there isn't a market for them, and many people have their attention captured by the most simplistic of things. One of the biggest problems with the free market is that it doesn't genuinely reward true greatness; instead true greatness sometimes languishes in obscurity while that which appeals to the lowest common denominator is the most commercially successful. There are countless examples within music, food, TV, entertainment, and elsewhere: slop for the masses makes a profit while those occupying a creative niche struggle financially.
A society like ours that doesn't seem to value the truth, beauty, greatness or intellectual nuance, and above all, just wants you to shut up, pay taxes and die, is a psychologically demoralising environment. That is why it is so important that people like you are doing the work you do: you speak for thousands of others who have a very similar perspective on many issues. Keep up the great work.
Thank you.
So, there's a madness to your method, that explains a lot. You forgot to advise that we eschew obfuscation. But seriously, I feel like writing something now. Thanks for the inspiration.
My whole career was writing technical essays or reports and they have to have certain formats so managers can read the summary and then pretend they know the details within that they never bothered to read.
When I am writing to get across my ideas I usually start with the main point, wander off into seeming unrelated things and then come back to the main starting point and the reader can then see there was a bigger picture there that they had never considered.
Sadly all mainstream media are interested in is soundbites that don't convey anything of the complexity hence the idiocy of this country spending over £1 trillion on wind turbines etc that have to be switched off, but still paid for, when it gets too windy as the interconnectors from where it is windy (Scotland) to where the load is (Central and Southern England) are not capable of carrying the installed Scottish capacity and yet they are building more Scottish capacity which simply makes Milliband and his tribe richer at our expense. All this based on completely erroneous "climate models" that all mysteriously year on year always predict higher temperatures, higher winds speeds and higher sea levels than are measured in reality. If the modelling wasn't biased one would expect that half the models would be low and half would be high but no they are all high and most by huge margins. Milliband's tribe also controls all of the main "science" journals so creating a circle jerk of fraud against the people of the Western world who are being preyed upon.
Sometimes as I am writing I feel this is getting too involved or unwieldy and then poof the text disappears by accident or by a computer glitch and I start again with the same basic points but a shorter version that is always better. If it goes poof three times I stop writing that idea down as it wasn't meant to be. Physics is at last coming round to the old idea that our subconscious mind, the father we could say, creates the world the conscious mind, the son we could say, inhabits and so it is as well to be mindful of what the subconscious mind is trying to tell us at such times.
But which is really the father and which is really the son? It is one thing to live in a reality created by the subconscious mind but it is quite another and far scarier if in fact that world is actually created by the conscious mind. As AI doesn't have a mind as such he, she or it isn't capable of wiping out a race of beings that use their God given gift to create their own reality with words, a reality which, for the moment at least, includes that AI. All that race of beings has to do is collectively decide it shall not be dominated by an evil minority or an evil AI ...... and so it shall be.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God ..... and the Word was God. And the Word is mightier than the sword.