These Substack Kids Wouldn't Last One Shift in the Blog Mines

An unintended side effect of digital media's demise is that no one knows how to write anymore.

Federico Gambarini/picture alliance via Getty Images

How do you learn to write? The simplest answer is that you learn to write by writing, but that veers into a kind of tautology that I find mildly annoying—mostly because it gives writers the excuse to work the word “tautology” into a sentence, but also because it’s not particularly helpful.

The truth, I think, is that like most forms of communication, you cannot learn to write on your own. It is not a skill that can be self-taught. There are many things in this world that you can teach yourself, in a vacuum, at least to some degree of proficiency. Most of those things are easier to learn with a teacher, but there’s plenty of stuff out there you can kind of muddle through with trial and error. Not everything, though. Many of the good, interesting, vital skills that human beings can learn — writing, speaking, fighting, sex — are not things you can do alone. You need help.

I have had a lot of writing teachers. Mrs. Rose in sophomore year honors English, who praised my bullshit about The Grapes of Wrath and convinced a psychotically arrogant 16-year-old that he had a God-given talent for words. The history T.A. in my freshman year of college, who very quickly disabused me of that notion by seeing directly through my bullshit about the Reconstruction era. Mashey Bernstein, a wonderfully flamboyant bear of an Irishman who talked constantly about his glory days writing for Muscle and Fitness, and taught me how to shape a profile of a subject and think about magazine work for the first time. Paula Span, my reporting instructor in graduate school, who ruthlessly persecuted “sludge,” or extraneous words, wherever they cropped up in a piece.

So by the time I entered the world of digital media in 2015, I thought I knew how to write. I was wrong.