Michael Dean's Advice on Writing: 27 Patterns to Fix Bad Writing
Michael Dean is David Perell's writing coach and editor. A former architect and VR specialist, he became obsessed with the structure and patterns of great writing. He developed Essay Architecture - a framework of 27 specific patterns that diagnose and fix common writing problems.
What makes writing good, great, or world-class? Dean argues there are objective patterns underneath. Not rigid templates. But fundamental design problems that every writer faces, regardless of topic or style.
The Architecture of Essays
Dean organizes writing into three dimensions, nine elements, and 27 patterns.
Three dimensions: Idea, Form, and Voice.
Nine elements (three per dimension):
- Idea: Material (your stories and references), Thesis (the central idea everything revolves around), Title (the thesis compressed into a single package)
- Form: Paragraphs (the atomic unit of composition), Structure (how you move between ideas), Tension (how you build suspense and keep readers invested)
- Voice: Spirit (the attitude and tone in your subtext), Sound (rhythm, repetition, rhyme when read aloud), Sight (imagery, concreteness, making things visible)
27 patterns (three per element): These are not solutions. They are questions. The pattern asks: how are you handling this? The answer is yours.
Dean scores every essay on each criterion, one through five. He has scored hundreds of classic essays this way. David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster and George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant score nearly identically - 1095 and 1091 out of a possible 1350. They just answer the same questions in different ways.
The Guggenheim and the Apple Store
The Guggenheim Museum and the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue look like opposites. One is circular and opaque. The other is glass and boxy. One sells art, the other sells iPad Pros.
When architects cut section drawings and strip away materials, both reveal the same spatial logic: a grand central atrium with a skylight, circulation running around the perimeter, controlled lighting in the core spaces.
Dean does the same with essays. Strip away the surface and look at the underlying structure.
The Pick One Volcano Principle
Umberto Eco's How to Write a Thesis: a student wants to write about volcanoes. All of them? Too broad. Active volcanoes in Mexico? Still 48. Pick one. The student chooses Popocatepetl - multiple eruption types, history with the conquistadors, an intricate notification system.
"By zooming in on the right volcano and looking at it in detail, you can actually understand many volcanoes. It's not just about zooming in. It's zooming in on the thing that is emblematic of more than it is."
Wallace did this with Consider the Lobster. Not animal ethics broadly. Lobsters. Lobsters in Maine. The Maine Lobster Festival. The Maine Lobster Festival in 2002. The more specific the lens, the more the universal reveals itself through the particular.
Every Paragraph Needs a Hook and a Punchline
Every paragraph needs a hook at the beginning and a punchline at the end.
The hook creates a micro-mystery. The punchline does not need to be funny. "It could be sad, or awe-inducing, or disgusting. What a punchline means to me is that there's something in the subtext that is like an explosion."
From Consider the Lobster: "The point is that lobsters are basically giant sea insects." Expensive seafood is actually a massive bug. You are going to read on.
The paragraph moves through three points: lobsters are ancient Jurassic creatures, they are ugly with thick antennae, and they eat dead stuff, injured fish, and "sometimes each other."
"Sometimes each other." On its own, innocent. In context, it says "cannibal" without saying it. Subtextual explosion.
"If you get that loop right, the reader is going to want to read another paragraph. If you break that loop, they're going to say, 'Why am I going to keep going?' Reading is friction."
Maximalism vs. Minimalism
Wallace packs 37 details into a single paragraph in Consider the Lobster. Seventeen are general (the big parade, carnival rides, lobster ravioli). Sixteen are absurdly specific (the William D. Atwood Memorial Crate Race, the Maine Sea Goddess Beauty Pageant). Some are numerical (25,000 pounds of fresh-caught lobster, attendance of 100,000).
"By mixing general, specific, and numerical - by going back and forth between resolutions - you're always shifting at the syntax level."
Wallace only has three paragraphs like this in a 33-paragraph essay. The effect works because it is rare.
Invisible Questions
Essays are secretly organized by questions. Consider the Lobster's driving question: is eating lobsters wrong? Mid-level questions organize sections: How have lobsters gone mainstream? Is it all right to boil sentient creatures alive? Beneath those, more granular: Can lobsters feel pain? Do they exhibit preference?
Wallace does not ask most of these questions out loud. He plants them in the subtext of one paragraph and answers them in the next.
"At the top of your document, ask yourself: what is the core question I'm answering? Then look at what you've written and figure out the sub-questions. Oh, these first three paragraphs are actually answering this question. These next three, that question. I don't even want to be discussing this question - I can remove it."
The opening of Shooting an Elephant - "In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people" - contains at least three invisible questions. Why is Orwell in Southeast Asia? Why is he hated? How will this hatred lead to the elephant? Those questions become the outline for the entire essay.
Rhyme in Prose
Orwell: "No one had the guts to raise a riot. But if a European woman went through the bazaars alone, somebody would probably spit betel juice all over her dress. As a police officer, I was an obvious target, and I was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field, and the referee looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter."
The S sounds build through the passage. The F sounds converge: football, field, referee, laughter (the GH makes an F sound). All point toward "hideous laughter" - the thematic engine of the essay. Fear of laughter is what drove Orwell to shoot the elephant.
Hunter S. Thompson used to pay friends to come over, hand them beer, and say: "Read my work out loud." He would listen to how it sounded coming from someone else's voice, then rewrite. There is an entire dimension of editing that happens with the ear.
Experience: Biography, Interiority, Outlook
Biography is what a camera in the room would see. Your body moving through space. Dialogue. Body language.
Interiority is what is happening inside your head that no one can see. This is what literature can do that cinema cannot.
Outlook is what you believe about the world as a result of your experiences and internal processing.
Bad personal writing defaults to outlook alone. "I believe this." You need to go upstream and show the experiences and the interior calculations that led to that belief. Otherwise you are preaching, not writing.
Experience leads to interiority, which leads to a new outlook, which leads to new experiences. That loop is the core of all personal writing.
First Draft for Yourself, Second Draft for the Reader
The first draft should ignore all 27 patterns.
"The first draft, you're just trying to discover what the thing could be. Once you tap into the essence, once you know the specific question you want to answer, that's when you start using essay architecture to make that idea more legible."
Essay Architecture is an editing philosophy. The 27 patterns give you a diagnostic vocabulary. The tension is missing. The paragraphs do not have punchlines. The voice disappears in section three. The thesis is fuzzy.
Jerry Garcia was a competition banjo player who practiced scales for 10 hours a day. Phil Lesh studied music theory with trumpet. The early Grateful Dead kicked out Bob Weir because he was not practicing hard enough.
"Practice analytically and then perform intuitively."
For more on systematic prose techniques, see Ward Farnsworth's advice on writing and Steven Pinker's advice on writing. And for the first-draft philosophy that pairs with Dean's editing method, read David Perell's best writing advice.
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