How to Write Online

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I’ve devoted the last four years of my life to trying to make beautiful writing. In that time, I have published 423,513 words here on Every’s site. Between rejected drafts, personal essays I haven’t published, and other miscellaneous writing, I figure I’ve written at least 500,000 words—a little more than the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

When I started, I had never published anything before. Now, I am a professional writer, and Every has grown to over 100,000 subscribers. We made a media company that people love to read, where previously there was nothing. Creation ex nihilio.

That amount of suffering—*cough* sorry, writing—has taught me a number of unintuitive, uncomfortable truths about what makes an essay succeed.

Today, I would like to tell them all to you. I do so not because I want more competition, but because I want more beauty and truth in the world. I want the world to be overflowing with independent, smart writers. If you’ve ever thought about writing online or been tempted to publish an opinion, let me teach you all that I know. Here are the four principles I’d like to share:

1. Craft at every level matters.
2. Pursue your curiosity, but acknowledge the lizard brain.
3. People will misinterpret you.
4. AI is a terrible writer, and a wonderful thought companion.

What, exactly, are you crafting?

As a writer, you have limited hours to dedicate to your craft, and deciding where to focus can be overwhelming. You might spend your time finding the perfect word that conveys your feeling, rearranging paragraphs to improve flow, or even stepping back further to come up with a better idea for a piece. But you can’t do all of these at once. How are you supposed to choose?

When writing falls short, it's often because the writer concentrated on the wrong level of craft for their desired audience. For example, carefully editing at the individual word or sentence level can create a smooth, waterslide-like flow where readers glide effortlessly from sentence to sentence, unable to stop themselves. Many writers mistakenly think achieving this effect means using elaborate language, complicated grammar, or ornate sentences. In reality, especially in online publishing, it typically means simplifying—shorter sentences, direct language. People behave differently on the internet than when they sit down to read a book. You need to work harder to hold their attention.

The challenge with simple sentence structure is that you can attract an audience that is only casually engaged in what you’re writing about. The more broadly accessible your work, the more explanatory you’ll have to be, and the less subtlety you’ll be able to employ. This may work for you! But there are risks to the approach. 

If, on the other hand, your goal is to attract expert-level readers, you should write with extreme levels of idea clarity. If you make the writing deliberately boring, anyone who isn’t deeply invested in the topic itself is going to churn. Surprisingly, this is a net positive for some types of writing. When you are trying to cultivate a technical audience, using industry-specific language acts as a filtering mechanism so that only the truly invested in the idea space remain. The result is that those readers who do stick around have a deeper connection with your work.

In either case, it’s important to recognize what separates a good piece from a great one.  A merely good piece can get away with containing either a great idea or great sentences. But if you really want to be in the top one percent, you have to be excellent at both sentence-level craft and ideas. The world of attention is so competitive that you have no choice but to be incredible in both if you would like to succeed in the long run. That can mean the writing is “boring,” simple, or complex. What matters as the writer is being crystal clear who you are trying to attract and what they can expect from you. 

Perhaps the biggest wrinkle when it comes to writing online is that success is platform-dependent. The type of work that is successful on LinkedIn is different from what works for X. I’ll sometimes have a piece that goes nuts on LinkedIn fail to draw five likes on X (and vice versa). Your job as a writer is to understand the situations in which your readers will encounter your work and adjust accordingly.

We all have lizard brain

It makes me uncomfortable to say, but if you wanted to have a consistently performant publication, you should probably find a way to tie everything into sex, sports, gambling, or outrage. No matter the level of sophistication of the audience, if you can dress up one of the base instincts of humanity, your piece will draw more attention. 

I don't like this.

But this pattern has been so consistent across my audience that I’ve had to accept it. For example, I've written about chatbots numerous times over the years. Far and away the most performant piece I ever wrote on the topic was when I framed it as "The Horny Truth About AI Chatbots." It's the same arguments about how people relate to AI that I’ve been making for years, but the framing was “people are addicted to sexting their AI,” so far more people paid attention. As a writer that is deeply frustrating. However, I’m still part of that problem! I also have a lizard brain and can’t help but enjoy NBA drama. At some point you just have to acknowledge that everyone has lizard brains. Your task is to embrace it or write work that is so good people overcome their more primal interests. 

To publish is to be misunderstood

One of the strangest moments of my writing career happened a few years ago. I received a phone call from the chairman of a board of an enterprise software company with a market capitalization of over $15 billion. He told me, to my initial delight, that a piece I had recently written had shaped their company strategy around product led-growth. They had printed copies of it, read it during the board meeting, discussed it for 30 minutes, and made key decisions around how they would do their sales motions. I couldn't have been more thrilled. This was exactly what I had envisioned when I started writing online: From my little desk, I could shape the world.

I asked, “What part of the piece stuck out to you the most?”

To my horror, as he described what insights he gained from my piece, I realized that he had somehow come away with the opposite conclusion as what I’d argued. (In the piece, I said software sales processes that didn’t have salespeople were vulnerable to startups with savvy marketing. He thought I argued the exact opposite.) Despite all the wealth, despite the intelligence and the focus, he had interpreted my piece totally incorrectly. This happens all the time. The hard truth is that your readers will misinterpret what you do. People are more interested in confirmation of their biases than nuanced argument.

You cannot take it personally.

When readers send me feedback, I will frequently get smart, intelligent comments that expand my argument and make me a better thinker. But I will also get ones that call me by the wrong name or are just plain stupid. The lesson isn't necessarily that you should view your audience with skepticism. I don't think any writer can publish for an audience that they don't respect. But you have to be comfortable with the fact that people will misinterpret what you say. When you are making an expansive, detailed argument, you need to repeat your central point over and over again throughout the piece. Every section has to clearly support your central thesis. If there is an iota of ambiguity, readers will insert their own bias and your writing will not be nearly as impactful.

AI is not a cure-all

Despite having taught more than 200 people how to write with AI, I don’t think that AI is currently capable of generating consistently meaningful prose. Sure, with careful prompting and pruning, an LLM can generate some great sentences. But beyond that, the writing grows stale.

The best way to use AI is as a mental lubricator. It can edit, advise, partner, and transcribe. It’s the world’s most flexible intellectual assistant. It should reduce the delta between the words you can type per minute and the publishable words you can type per minute.

You'll know that you're using AI well when your total publishable word count creeps up per day. In my own practice, I found that I was slowly but surely able to go from 1,500 to 1,600 to 2,000 to, these days, 2,500 words of publishable content in a day. The ultimate sign of success is that you are able to create great work faster that feels like it is yours, not the AI’s. Writing with AI means that you no longer worry about publishing enough content; you only worry about publishing the right content. 

The world deserves more beauty and truth

Writing online is fundamentally an act of generosity. Yes, the internet is crowded. But within it lies immense potential—the potential to remake your life and to change the lives of others.

Great online writing acknowledges the realities of human nature, accommodates the constraints of the platforms we use, and is intimately aware of its readers' biases and limitations. Nevertheless, it also pushes relentlessly towards something better.

My four years of effort have convinced me that writing online is less about capturing attention and more about deserving it. The insights I've shared here are tough, sometimes uncomfortable truths gleaned from hard-earned experience. Use them wisely. In the end, the world will always be hungry for more beauty and more truth—especially online. I hope you’ll publish more. 

Evan Armstrong is the lead writer for Every, where he writes the Napkin Math column. You can follow him on X at @itsurboyevan and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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