The Cultural Tutor's Advice on Writing: Two Kinds of Writing and Building an Audience Through Beauty
Sheehan Quirke was working at McDonald's when he started posting threads about architecture, art, and history on Twitter under the name The Cultural Tutor. Eighteen months later he had 1.5 million followers. He has since published The Cultural Tutor: Forty-Nine Lessons You Wish You'd Learned at School with Penguin and writes one of the most widely read Substacks on culture and aesthetics.
His writing advice comes from David Perell's How I Write podcast, a Growth in Reverse breakdown of his strategy, and his own essays on craft.
Two Kinds of Writing
Quirke and Perell frame every piece of writing as a negotiation between two poles: maximalist and minimalist. Ornate and stripped. Layered and direct.
The insight is not that one is better. The insight is that contrast between them creates emphasis.
"You can have an essay that is 95% maximalism, but when you have a short paragraph, a bunch of short sentences, you get right to the point, the reader is going to see that as a sign to say, 'Focus on this.'" The reverse works identically. Write in short, clean sentences for three pages, and the moment you let one paragraph bloom into something lush and vibrant, the reader knows it matters.
When he pasted Shakespeare into Microsoft Word, the program flagged the text with grammar and syntax errors. Spell-checkers enforce standardized rules that flatten distinctive voice. AI writing tools do the same thing at scale. The homogenization of prose is not a metaphor. It is a software feature.
The antidote: know both registers. Write in both. Deploy them deliberately.
Don't Read Anything Written in the Last Fifty Years
Quirke's most provocative advice: avoid recent reading when developing your voice. If you only read what everyone else is reading, you will echo what everyone else is thinking. Your references will be their references. Your cadence will be their cadence.
He reads old books. He studies architecture from centuries ago. He writes about the Pantheon and Baroque churches and the history of the colour blue. But his argument is not that the past was uniformly maximalist. The pendulum has swung back and forth for centuries. The King James Bible, written in 1611 by forty-nine translators, is beautifully simple - arguably minimalist. Chaucer in the fourteenth century, if you modernize the spelling, is clear as daylight. Sixteenth-century Elizabethan prose is easier to understand than eighteenth- or nineteenth-century prose. The current minimalist era is not the natural state of language. It is one position on a very old pendulum.
Quirke's reading strategy works because it reveals what is possible. When he first read John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice - a technical treatise on architecture - he got emotional reading a description of how to build a wall. Ruskin was using precise, beautiful, long sentences to describe masonry, and the writing made him feel something a modern architecture textbook never could. "When I read William Morris on interior design, I didn't know you were allowed to write in that way about that subject." You cannot reach what you have never seen.
Write the Opening Line for Scrollers
His content competes against memes, viral clips, and infinite feeds. The opening line must stop someone mid-scroll. Not through clickbait. Through genuine curiosity.
Quirke amplifies written hooks with compelling imagery - arrows pointing at architectural details, side-by-side comparisons, visuals that create immediate curiosity before readers scroll past. The image is the hook. The thread is the reward.
He developed six template types that consistently worked: cultural connections linking modern trends to historical events, everyday objects with surprising origins, historical anniversaries, superlative examples, present-versus-past comparisons, and famous figure backstories. These are not formulas. They are containers for genuine knowledge.
Your Judgment Must Always Exceed the Work
Quirke interprets this as a directive for permanent dissatisfaction. Not paralysis - production. He maintained a one-thread-daily deadline on Twitter. But he never stopped believing the next one should be better.
"Ideas are cheap. The difficulty is in picking one and executing it." He writes when inspiration strikes, sometimes running home mid-walk to capture an idea. But the editing is rational, deliberate. "The best work comes when you have passion and can see it clearly but also step back and think very rationally."
Three filters for completed work: Is it useful? Is it interesting? Is it beautiful? If it fails any of these, it does not ship.
Build on One Platform
His early phase was intense: two to six posts daily, testing formats, direct-messaging followers about new threads, seeking advice from more-established creators. He iterated based on engagement signals, but he did all of this on one platform.
David Perell offered him a Writer in Residence salary specifically to prevent him from launching a paid newsletter too early. The reasoning: a paywall stunts growth when you are still building reach. Quirke accepted. He stayed free. He grew.
The counterintuitive result: organic search traffic eventually exceeded social referrals. People heard his name on podcasts, searched "The Cultural Tutor" on Google, and landed on his site. Brand building, not platform hacking, drove the compounding.
The Word Processor Killed Your Style
Quirke had a moment six months before the interview that genuinely frightened him. He copy-pasted a bit of Shakespeare into Microsoft Word. Red squiggly lines appeared everywhere. Spelling errors. Grammar errors. Suggested improvements. Shakespeare - arguably the greatest English dramatist - being corrected by software used by over a billion people.
The implications go deeper than spell-check. Word processors enforce standardized rules that flatten distinctive voice. Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian historian, deliberately capitalized random words for emphasis. He spent years developing a unique prose style because he felt existing English was not powerful enough for the history he wanted to write. If Carlyle were writing today, Word would tell him he was wrong. Grammarly would tell him he was wrong. Everyone would point to the machine. The invisible hand of the word processor has been shaping how we all write since childhood - and we never noticed.
Quirke's practical advice: turn off the spell-checker. Learn more words - not from a thesaurus, but by understanding what they actually mean. The word "palimpsest" (a manuscript that has been written on, scraped off, and written over) lets you describe buildings, people, and cities in a single word that would otherwise require a clumsy sentence. Maximalism can be more precise than minimalism. "Language is like clay," he says. "We've been given a Lego box. The pieces come in set sizes. But language is clay - you can mold it however you want."
Write From Genuine Interest
"It's worth paying the price of less engagement creating something you're proud of." Quirke never chased trends. He never wrote about whatever topic was dominating the timeline that week. He wrote about Romanesque arches and the history of stained glass and why certain cities feel alive while others feel dead.
He is not an expert. He says so openly. "I'm not an expert, but I've got a passion for them." The passion is the expertise. When someone writes from genuine fascination, readers sense it immediately. When someone writes to perform knowledge, readers sense that too.
Key Takeaways
- Use contrast between maximalist and minimalist writing to guide the reader's attention.
- Read old books. Your inputs determine your outputs. Different inputs produce a different voice.
- Write opening lines that stop scrollers. Pair them with images that create immediate curiosity.
- Keep your judgment ahead of your work. Ship daily. Edit rationally. Never settle.
- Build on one platform before expanding. Brand compounds faster than distribution tricks.
- Apply the beauty test to your prose. If it does not look inviting on screen, it will not get read.
- Write from genuine interest. Audiences can tell the difference between passion and performance.
Quirke proved that you do not need credentials, a publishing deal, or an algorithm hack to build a massive audience. You need knowledge worth sharing, a voice worth hearing, and the discipline to show up daily. Athens can help you tighten the prose, but only genuine curiosity can supply the substance.
This post draws from Quirke's appearance on How I Write, the Growth in Reverse analysis, and the No Film School breakdown of his writing philosophy.