A Reflection on UChicago's "Craft of Writing Effectively"

Introduction

Most of you went to school, took writing classes, and wrote a lot of essays. So, chances are you were taught rules for writing: be clear, be concise, be correct. You wrote essays with a thesis, followed the five-paragraph formula, and handed it to your teacher for a grade.

That's how I learned to write. For a long time, I thought I was doing it correctly.

But then I watched a lecture from the University of Chicago titled The Craft of Writing Effectively by Professor Larry McEnerney, and it changed how I think about writing.

This post is a reflection on that lecture, and on one lesson in particular: writing isn't about rules. It's about value.

Why We Write

McEnerney starts with a simple but powerful idea:
We are not writing to convey our ideas. We write to change the way other people think.

That might seem obvious, but it made me realize something profound. Until that moment, I hadn't really thought about writing as something with a purpose. I had always seen it as a tool for organizing my ideas, proving I understood something, or sharing my thoughts on a particular topic.

But here's the challenge McEnerney pointed out: the way we write to help ourselves think often conflicts with the way readers understand. Readers don't want to go through your stream of thoughts or decode your vague ideas. If they have to stop, re-read, or wonder "what's the point?", most of them will get annoyed and give up.

And that's when it dawned on me: good writing isn't about putting your thoughts on the page; it's about shaping them so someone else can actually use them.
It's not about you. It's about your readers.

The Flaw in How We Were Taught to Write

One of McEnerney's biggest criticisms of our education system is that most of us learned to write in a system that does not resemble the real world at all. Why is that? Because we were writing for an audience that is forced to care about our writing.

Think about it:
in school, you were writing to submit an essay to a teacher.
You weren't writing to persuade, to inform, or to offer insight. No, you were writing so that your teacher could give you a grade and some feedback.
Teachers weren't reading your essay (plus 30 others) because they cared about your ideas. They weren't reading your essay because they think it will offer them new perspectives about the world.
No, they were reading it because they were PAID to care.
That's the trut
And McEnerney was very blunt: "if any of your teachers says your essay is valuable, they are lying."

That sounds harsh, but it's true. It made me realize something: I never truly learned how to write for an audience that wasn't forced to care about my work. I was writing for an audience that was forced to care about what I had to say. My teachers could be doing so many other things than going through hundreds of high-school quality essays.

This fundamental flaw might explain why so many students of all levels struggle to write effectively outside of school. We learned in a system that made us write for an audience that was paid to care.

But once you're out in the real world, no one's paid to read your blog post. No one's paid to care about your proposal, research paper, pitch, or article. Once you're out there in the real world, you're not writing for people who are paid to care. You are writing for an audience who can stop reading at any moment.

And that's why writing is so hard.
It doesn't matter how hard you worked on it, because at the end of the day, no one has to care about your work.

The Most Important Quality in Any Writing

So if no one is paid to read your work, why would they?

McEnerney's answer is simple:

And that to me, is the most important lesson in the entire lecture.
Writing isn't about rules. It's about value.

Don't get me wrong, the rules you learned in your writing classes are still important. Yes, your writing needs to be clear, concise, organized, and persuasive. But above all else, your writing needs to be valuable.

The harsh truth is: If your writing is not valuable, then it doesn't matter how well-written it is. It can be clear, concise, correct, courteous, all of these things. But if it's not valuable, then it's useless. End of story.

If it's clear but useless, it's useless.

If it's organized but useless, it's useless.

If it's persuasive but useless, it's useless.

That idea hit me hard.
I'd spent years obsessing over whether my writing followed a set of rules or guidelines. I'd spent years learning to write in a system that taught it as if it was a rule-governed process. I never stopped to ask the one question that actually matters:
Why would anyone care about this?

And that's when I realized:
to be a better writer, I need to stop thinking about writing as a set of rules. I need to start thinking about writing as a way to offer value to my readers.

Originality is not the ultimate goal

Here's another thing McEnerney says that surprised me: you are not writing to do original work.

That sounds counterintuitive, especially in school, where we're taught to come up with unique and original ideas. But remember what McEnerney said: your writing needs to be valuable. Don't get me wrong: novelty is not a bad thing. But according to McEnerney, it's not the most important thing.

To illustrate his point:
If you want to create new knowledge, then we can create new knowledge within the next few seconds. How many vowels are in this blog post?
Nobody in the world knows that. I don't even know the answer. That's new and original knowledge! But if we published a paper about it, is anyone going to read it? No, of course not!

So, originality is not the ultimate goal. Value is the ultimate goal. This could mean building on existing ideas, synthesizing information, or presenting known concepts in a new light.

You Need to Know Your Community

In the lecture, McEnerney highlighted that every community has its own code, a set of words that indicates value. You MUST know the code of the community you are writing for. You need to know your readers.

For example, in the lecture, McEnerney used an example of a biology text, and he highlighted words like "nonetheless", "accepted", "however", "although", "inconsistent", "anomaly". These words were highlighted as code words because they signal to the readers within the community the significance and value of the text.

Use transition languages to create tension.

Bad example:
"Hey readers, I've read your stuff, and wow... I know what you think, AND here's what I think..."

Better example:
"Hey readers, I've read your stuff, and wow... I know what you think, BUT here's what I think..."

See the difference? The first example is just stating your opinion. The second example is creating tension between your opinion and the reader's opinion. And that tension is what creates value.

It's not about the general rules of writing, it's about how your community communicates what is valuable. You have to know how your readers communicate value. You have to know what your readers doubt, where they are skeptical about. If you do not know your readers, if you do not understand where they are skeptical or uncertain, then you are less likely to create valuable work. How are you going to change their world view?

So, you need to know your community and your readers. You need to know what they care about, what they doubt, and what they think is valuable.

Another thing McEnerney pointed out: the harsh reality is that there are people in power in every community who determine what knowledge looks like in their field. You may not like the system, but you must know them, and you have to give them what they want, while challenging them using their code. It's not enough to know the subject matter.

The harsh truth is: Nobody cares about the thoughts in your head.

Instead, your goal as a writer is to challenge the ideas in your community, move the conversation forward, and, most of all, to create something valuable.

And to do that, you need to know your community.

Conclusion

Watching McEnerney's lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively changed how I think about writing altogether.

For most of my life, I saw writing as a rule-governed task: follow the rules, hit the word count, impress the grader. But McEnerney exposed a fundamental flaw in the way I've been taught about writing. It doesn't matter if my writing follows all these rules and is well-written. At the end of the day, it needs to be valuable.

That doesn't mean rules are useless. They still matter: clarity, structure, persuasion, organization. But they should not be the ultimate goal. They are tools for writing. And they only matter if what you're saying has value to the reader.

So the craft of writing effectively comes down to this:
stop thinking about writing as a rule-governed task. Start thinking about writing as a way to create valuable work.
Know your community, know your readers, and know what they care about.

McEnerney's ideas apply not only to academic writing but also to any form of writing: blog posts, books, emails, articles, proposals, even social media captions.

At the end of the day, the value lies not within the work. It lies within your readers.