Welcome to Essay Architecture!
Despite how you may have been traumatized by high school English class, essays are the cultural currency of the Internet; knowing how to write good ones can change your life. My goal is to help you write better essays by showing you the invisible patterns that shape them.
Our canon of writing advice—as rich as it is—is disorganized. Unlike the field of architecture, which has works like Form, Space, and Order, (Ching) and A Pattern Language (Alexander), there is no map to help writers find their blindspots.
Essay quality is not subjective, it’s statistical. Of course, each reader brings their own personal, historical, and moral lens to the page, but when it comes to form, we all have a shared psychology in how we process text. These constraints—once we learn, master, and then forget them—are liberating. They let us experiment into new grounds while still being understood.
The purpose of Essay Architecture—the textbook I’m writing—is to bring clarity to craft so you can master it. I’ll be releasing chapters and essay reviews here on Substack, and I’m also developing a tool that will analyze your writing and ask you great questions to improve you draft. While most AI tools seek to automate the prose of people who hate writing, I think we can build better tools; a great AI-editor can unlock a generation of brilliant, human-created writing.
Why subscribe?
All subscribers get:
A monthly essay, covering an eclectic range of topics, like: the influence of American Idol on social media architecture, the role of psychedelics in ancient Greek religions, the nature of Beatles fan-fiction post-singularity, a biography of an online writer from 1994, and thoughts on Leap Year.
2 essay reviews per month, curated from Dean’s List, where I score and breakdown classic essays across history.
Previews of my textbook Essay Architecture. Once a month you get a full chapter that overviews 3 patterns (like this). While pattern posts are for paid subscribers, you’ll still get a preview with value.
A monthly update.
Paid subscribers will get:
All chapters of Essay Architecture—sent weekly—including visuals, examples, and prompts. Check out the 3 chapters within Thesis: Microcosm, Response, Catalyst.
A look behind the scenes of a working writer, including typewriter drafts and the full archive of daily logs.
As I develop my AI-editor, I’ll share beta releases with paid subscribers.
Founding members get access to The Writing Studio, a community of writers that meet twice a week to exchange drafts for feedback.
About me
Over the last 4 years, I’ve been obsessed with reading, writing, and editing essays. Before that I was an architect and a virtual reality specialist. Now I’m developing Essay Architecture through an O’Shaughnessy Fellowship grant, and leading the Editor program at Write of Passage.
Tags: FEATURED : #2024, #alchemy, #altered states, #analog, #antiquity, #architecture, #artificial intelligence, #artist in the machine, #auto-bio, #auto-fiction, #cartography, #community, #consciousness, #covers, #culture, #decentralization, #deconstructed, #delirious, #editing, #essay architecture, #futurism, #internet history, #language, #lessons from artists, #logging, #logloglog, #mastery, # music, #nature, #new york, #religion, #social media reform, #synthesis, #techno-selectivism, #time, #transitions, #virtual reality, #warped incentives, #writing online.
From Jim O’Shaughnessy on the OSV Fellowship Press Release:
“Despite the influx of new and exciting technologies, writing—one of our oldest technologies—has remained as central to our civilization as ever, and while AI alone will never fulfill our need for great writing, it has the potential to be an incredibly valuable tool for the writers of the future. We were immensely impressed with Michael’s interdisciplinary expertise, and look forward to supporting him usher in a new era of essay writing.”
From Garrett Kincaid’s Get Schooled: The Ultimate Guide to Michael Dean
“He’s a semantic savant, a lexical technophile, a feedback fanatic, The Clarity King. He’s a sage of the craft … He was clearly curious, a proud polymath, and a self-proclaimed “niche-hobbyist.” And, like me, he was an editor and a language-lover, despite not studying English … I felt an intense familiarity, but it wasn’t because of what he wrote. It was because of how he wrote.”
From Charlie Becker’s Castles in the Sky
“Encountering Michael Dean’s writing is a mashup of experiences: it’s like reading Hunter S. Thompson the gonzo journalist, and Neal Stephenson the cyberpunk novelist (circa Snow Crash), combined with stumbling upon one of those long forum posts you encounter deep on the internet that almost seems like an alien intelligence because it is able to thread so many needles at once.”
Some of my favorite comments about my writing:
“Your newsletter is probably the most value adding thing in my inbox now! Love these pieces focused on deconstruction.” — Atom Go Tian
“This had me think and laugh so hard my head’s in pain.” — Silvio Castelletti
“World-class, cutting-edge thinking, Michael, matched by your pitch-perfect writing style. Thank you.” — Mike Goodenow Weber
michael@michaeldean.site
