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You should strive for your writing to be four things:

• Clear
• Organized
• Persuasive
• Valuable

And it is valuable that is the most important

Anytime you want to apply any sort of rule to your writing, you should be asking, "for which readers, and what purpose?"

• "Don't use jargon" ... maybe (probably not), but if so, be able to answer, "for which readers and what purpose?"
• "Use short sentences." ... well, for who and why?

No advice about writing makes any sense unless you've clarified who is reading and for what function.

Claim: the function of the text is change the way the readers think about the _world. You are a person with expertise, who spends time thinking and writing nuanced, complex, interesting, deep things in your area and how it relates to the world. What your write, the text, is the readers experience of that. Whether it is valuable to them depends on whether what you have written valuably changes what they think about the world (or what they do out in the world/in their job/in their life, or how they make decisions out in the ..., etc.).

Or to change the perspective on that: good writing is something that people will seek out (pay for even) because they want to read something that will change the way they think about the world.

Readers need you to make your text valuable to them. Instead of "does your writing check these boxes and follow these rules?" it is "does your writing provide value that readers are seeking?".

Larry strongly emphasizes the point that teachers throughout all of your years of education read what you had to write not because the writing was valuable to them, but because it was valuable to them that they were paid to read what you wrote and evaluate you for it. He goes on to say, this will never happen again after school, no one will be paid to read what you write. This isn't quite right though. There are a lot of jobs where a person doesn't have to be good at writing because everyone on their team (or on the project or whatever) is expected (and paid) to read it -- a report, documentation, a plan for a project, an email, etc. These things can be as well-written or poorly-written as you can imagine and we have to read them. Well-run and poorly-run meetings function the same way.

"the language game"

Why do people read something like the NYT? To be informed...maybe. But also, perhaps primarily, it is to be entertained. The editors at the NYT understand that.

You have to think about this holistically, which means you have to think about the reader, how they are encountering the text, and what their experience of it is. Once you are looking at it through that lens, you can notice the ways in which the medium gets in the way of the reader or enables the reader... to get the value they are seeking.

In what ways can the medium (text, content, whatever) interfere with the process of consumption (reading, viewing, whatever)?

Your job, as a writer, is to make sure the process of reading is valuable for the reader... all the time.

The importance of knowing your audience is knowing what they'll endure to get to the valuable part. If, in the case of the average NYT, it is "not much" that they will endure, then you need to provide constant value (whether that is quick-hitting sentences OR long sentences with value laced within). What you cannot do in that case is make them wait until the end to get the value, because they won't get there. You'll lose them before that. They quit, they read something else. That might work in an academic paper where the reader is willing to wait until the end of a dense paragraph, but that is a different language game.

Via Geoffrey Litt on bluesky