Writing on emsenn.net

text

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A text is a composed document: an essay, paper, survey, or other sustained piece of writing. Where terms define and concepts expose, texts compose — they bring together multiple terms and concepts into a sustained argument, narrative, or analysis.

Texts are the composition layer of a knowledge system. A text about digital notetaking composes terms like “Zettelkasten,” “evergreen note,” and “atomicity” into an argument about how concept chunking works. The text is not a container for new definitions (those belong in term files per the one-concept-per-file principle) but a structure that relates existing definitions to each other and to something new.

Audience and Task Analysis

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable writing prose; new to writing documentation for others.
Background: has written essays or reports but not procedural documentation or reference material for unfamiliar readers.
Goal: learn to analyze an audience and organize documentation around the reader’s tasks.

The fundamental problem

Technical writing exists because someone knows something another person needs. The writer’s job is to close that gap. The difficulty is that the writer, by definition, stands on the far side of the gap — they already understand the material, and this understanding makes it hard to see what a reader who doesn’t understand it actually needs.

Character and Conflict

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable reading fiction; has completed “Scene Construction” and “Point of View.”
Background: understands scene structure and POV choices.
Goal: learn to create characters who feel real and to generate conflict from character rather than from external imposition.

Character is what character does

Consider two introductions of the same character:

Description: “Maria was a generous person who cared deeply about her community.”

Action: “Maria left the meeting twenty minutes early, drove to the hardware store, and bought six bags of salt for the elderly couple’s walkway. She didn’t mention it when she came back.”

Clear Prose and the Paramedic Method

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable writing documentation; has completed “Audience and Task Analysis” and “Information Architecture for Documents.”
Background: understands audience analysis and document structure.
Goal: learn to revise prose at the sentence level so that documentation is not just well-organized but well-written.

The Official Style

Richard Lanham named the Official Style: the bloated, nominalized prose characteristic of bureaucracies, institutions, and academia [@lanham2006]. Its hallmarks are:

Nominalizations: turning verbs into nouns. Implement becomes the implementation of. Decide becomes the decision was made to. The action disappears into an abstraction.
Prepositional pile-up: chains of of, in, for, by, with phrases. “The implementation of the configuration of the settings for the management of user access” — five prepositions, zero clarity.
Passive voice without purpose: “The system was configured” rather than “We configured the system.” Passive voice has legitimate uses (when the agent is unknown or irrelevant), but in the Official Style it serves to hide who did what.
Throat-clearing: “It is important to note that,” “There are several factors that should be taken into consideration,” “It should be pointed out that.” These delay the sentence’s content without adding meaning.

The Official Style is not a deliberate choice. It is the default register of institutional writing — the way people write when they’re writing as a role (engineer, manager, academic) rather than as a person communicating with another person.

Essay Revision

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: has written multiple essay drafts.
Background: understands thesis, evidence, and analysis (has completed the prior lessons).
Goal: learn to transform a rough draft into a finished essay through systematic revision.

Revision is not editing

Editing fixes sentences: grammar, spelling, word choice, punctuation. Revision fixes the essay: structure, argument, evidence, focus. Editing polishes the surface; revision changes the substance.

The most common mistake is editing too early. A writer who spends an hour perfecting the opening paragraph of a first draft may discover, three paragraphs later, that the opening needs to be cut entirely. Edit after the structure is right, not before.

Evidence and Analysis

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: has written essays with evidence before.
Background: understands what a thesis is (has completed “Thesis Development”).
Goal: learn to use evidence as the engine of an argument rather than its decoration.

Evidence without analysis is a list

The most common evidence failure isn’t missing evidence — it’s evidence that sits on the page without doing anything. The writer presents a quotation, a statistic, or an example, and then moves on to the next one. The reader gets a list of sources but no argument.

Headlines and Value Propositions

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable writing prose; new to writing copy that sells.
Background: understands audience, tone, and voice as general writing concepts.
Goal: learn to write headlines and value propositions that earn readers’ attention and give them a reason to act.

The headline’s job

A headline has one job: earn the reader’s next second of attention. Not their commitment, not their money, not their email address — just one more second. Everything else in the copy depends on that second.

Information Architecture for Documents

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable writing documentation; has completed “Audience and Task Analysis.”
Background: understands audience analysis and task analysis.
Goal: learn to organize documents so readers can find and use the information they need.

Readers don’t read — they scan

Technical documents are not read from beginning to end. Readers scan for the section relevant to their current task, read that section, and leave. Janice Redish argued that web content should be treated as a user interface — readers interact with it the way they interact with software, and the same usability principles apply [@redish2012].

Landing Page Copy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable with writing and web publishing; has completed “Headlines and Value Propositions.”
Background: understands features vs. benefits, headline writing, and value propositions.
Goal: learn to write the complete copy for a landing page that converts visitors to action.

The persuasive sequence

A landing page is a single-purpose persuasive document. Every element serves one goal: moving the visitor toward the call to action. The page’s structure follows the reader’s psychology — it answers their questions in the order they naturally ask them.

Point of View

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable reading fiction; has completed “Scene Construction.”
Background: understands scene structure, including how interiority functions within a scene.
Goal: learn to choose and control point of view as a craft decision.

What point of view decides

Here is the same moment rendered in three points of view:

First person: “I saw her reach for the envelope, and I knew — before she opened it, before she read a word — that everything was about to change.”

Scene Construction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable reading fiction; has some experience writing stories.
Background: understands basic narrative terms — character, plot, setting.
Goal: learn to construct scenes that carry narrative weight.

Scene versus summary

Consider two ways of delivering the same event:

Summary: “Over the next three weeks, she gradually realized he had been lying about the money.”

Scene: “She found the receipt on Tuesday, folded inside his copy of Scientific American. Eleven hundred dollars to a jeweler she’d never heard of. She held it under the desk lamp, reading it twice, then folded it back along its original creases and slid it into the magazine.”

Thesis Development

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable with academic or professional prose.
Background: has written essays before; wants to write stronger ones.
Goal: learn to develop a thesis that drives an essay rather than decorating it.

A topic is not a thesis

A topic is what the essay is about: “climate change,” “social media,” “Hamlet’s indecision.” A thesis is what the essay argues about that topic: a specific, debatable claim that the rest of the essay develops and defends.

Writing for the Web

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable writing for publication; has completed “Headlines and Value Propositions” and “Landing Page Copy.”
Background: understands headline writing, landing page structure, and value propositions.
Goal: learn to write effective copy across web formats — blogs, emails, social media, product interfaces, and search-optimized content.

How people read on the web

They don’t — not in the way they read a book or even a newspaper. Jakob Nielsen’s eye-tracking research found that web readers scan in an F-pattern: they read the first line or two, then scan down the left side, reading progressively less of each line. Most readers leave a page without reading a single paragraph in full.

Fixed Forms and the Sonnet

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable with metrical concepts from “Sound and Meter.”
Background: understands line breaks, meter, and rhyme.
Goal: understand how fixed forms work and why constraint can be generative.

What is a fixed form?

A fixed form is a poem whose structure — line count, meter, rhyme scheme, stanza pattern — is prescribed in advance. The poet works within the form rather than inventing structure from scratch. Examples include the sonnet, the villanelle, the ghazal, the pantoum, and the haiku.

Sound and Meter

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable reading poetry; has completed “The Line and the Break.”
Background: understands line breaks and enjambment.
Goal: hear and understand the sound structures in formal and free verse.

Meter as template

Meter is a recurring pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. It is not the rhythm of a poem — it is the template against which the rhythm plays. When a poet writes in iambic pentameter, the template is five iambs (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM), but almost no actual line conforms perfectly. The interest is in how the spoken rhythm departs from, returns to, and plays against the metrical template.

The Line and the Break

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Assumed audience

Reading level: comfortable with prose; no prior study of poetry required.
Background: interest in writing or reading poetry.
Goal: understand why the line — not the sentence — is the basic unit of poetry.

The line is the unit

In prose, the sentence is the primary unit of composition: grammar governs when a thought begins and ends, and the text wraps at the margin. In poetry, the line takes over. Where a line ends is a decision, not a typographical accident.

Hotel Description Writing

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

These training materials cover writing descriptions for high-end hotels — the kind of copy that appears on travel booking platforms. The material was originally developed by emsenn for a writing team and is preserved here as a reference for marketing writing technique.

Tone and style

The standard tone is sophisticated while remaining natural and authentic. The reader should be addressed in second-person plural (“you”), connecting them to the hotel and inviting them to “travel” through the article. Emphasize the luxury of a 5-star hotel, but don’t oversell a 3-star property.

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Write Git Commit Message

Use the commit message skill to choose structure and tone.
Include the main change in the subject line.
Add a short body when context or rationale matters.