On reading slower than you write
A note on the gap between drafting speed and reading speed, and why margin notes are the honest unit of a newsletter, not the paragraph.
A newsletter written in the margins.
Read the latest issueA note on the gap between drafting speed and reading speed, and why margin notes are the honest unit of a newsletter, not the paragraph.
Most ideas worth keeping arrive as an aside. This issue is entirely asides, arranged to read in order anyway.
Not correction. Not summary. The margin is where the reader talks back, and where this newsletter starts each week.
A friend once asked why I still buy books when I could read the same words for free, slightly worse formatted, on a screen. The honest answer is that I like the ones I've marked up more than the ones I haven't. A pencil line under a sentence is a small, permanent vote: I was here, and this mattered enough to stop for.
That's the whole premise of this newsletter. Not the essay, the margin. The essay is what I drafted at a reasonable pace and then revised until it stopped embarrassing me. The margin is what I actually thought while reading it back, unrevised, a little defensive, occasionally right.
This is the part I'd cut if an editor were watching.
Most of what I've kept from other people's writing isn't the argument. It's the aside they didn't quite mean to publish.
So each issue ships as three short pieces and the notes I made in the margin of each one, left in, typos and all. If a note contradicts the essay above it, that's not an error to fix. That's the process, working as intended.
Continue in your inbox →A few older issues, kept exactly as they were sent.
Some readers write back in the margins of their own copies. This issue is for them.
It's not indecisive. It's patient.
A running list of sentences I've read more than once on purpose.
One email, when I actually have something worth sending. Not a popup, not a countdown, just a field.