My Favorite Things: Larry McEnerney Lectures on Writing

I’ve been incorrectly taught how to write in my entire schooling. Larry McEnerney opened my eyes to the fallacies I was under.

Larry McEnerney was the director of the University of Chicago's writing program, often referred to as “the Little Red Schoolhouse” for thirty years until his retirement in 2020. The program started in 1978 when two faculty members, Joseph M. Williams and Gregory Colomb, started to offer seminars for academic and professional writing. Back then McEnerney was a graduate student. He became one of the 12 initial graduate students involved in teaching the seminars and stayed to become the director.

I came across McEnerney lecture on “The Craft of Writing Effectively” by chance. It’s one of those lectures I wished I had heard when I was in school. I thought that Jordan Peterson’s “Essay Writing Guide” is the summit of essay writing instruction. This lecture by McEnerney is even better.

Peterson, in his essay writing guide, says that the purpose of writing an essay is to help the writer think. (You can also see also this clip.) McEnerney goes one step further: the purpose of your writing is to change your readers’ ideas. It is not even about communicating your ideas, it’s about changing another’s mind. 

McEnerney crucially observed that writers often use the text to think about the world. When you do this the flow of the text goes in a horizontal direction. When a reader reads your text, however, their thinking goes in a vertical direction. His advice: write for your readers.

In writing for your readers, you need to identify the things your readers value. Above persuasiveness, how organized it is, and its clarity, a text needs to be valuable. Your text doesn’t necessarily contain a value in and of itself; rather, your readers define the value of your text.

McEnerney gives a concrete example. Whether the sentence “The dog chased the cat” or “The cat was chased by the dog,” is more valuable depends entirely on whether your reader cares more about the dog or the cat.

Throughout our schooling, the value of our essays comes from us attaching a certain amount of money for our professors and teachers to read our essays. Basically, we are saying, “Here is 20 dollars. Read my essay and give me some feedback on my writing. Let me know whether you think I know the things you want me to know and whether I’m thinking properly.” 

Worse still–when I was in school–my purpose to write an essay was always to get a good grade. So I would write an essay that would give me a good grade, instead of actually using it as a way of thinking carefully about a subject. According to McEnerney, I needed to go one step further: to write to change the mind of my reader, once I’m done with my thinking.

Outside of school, however, I no longer attach $20 to my essay so that somebody would read it. It’s the opposite: I write so that people are willing to spend some money to read my essay. So it’s on me to know what my readers value and work in a way to fulfill that value. I also need to work so that my writing is entertaining enough for somebody to read this far.

There are plenty of wisdom–practical wisdom and principles alike–hidden in this lecture.  I’ll end with one that touches on humility.

At one point, McEnerney shared an anecdote about a former student who was having trouble finishing his first book. He wanted it to be perfect so that people will read it in 500 years. The advice McEnerney gave was, “You’re done.” It’s no use to try to make your writings relevant for the next 500 years.

It’s good to be reminded that there are only a handful of immortals: Jesus, Socrates, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Euler, Newton, Gauss, Einstein, Turing, Shannon, and von Neumann. They are the exceptions. We are the mortals and the common statistics. Our job with our writing is only to move the conversation forward.