How I Write: Rise Above the Noise (Premium)

There's a lot of noise out there. But I have one central rule when it comes to my own writing. And it's a simple one.

Tell me something I don't already know.

I printed out this sentence and taped it to the top of my monitor, where it sat for many years. Actually, it's still there. I just use a different display now. But that's OK: I don't need to see it anymore. This rule, this mantra, is burned into my consciousness.

(As a random aside, I also had a grammar-related reminder taped to the same monitor: "It is can be it's. Possessive cannot.")

Tell me something I don't already know.

In other words, any blogger, even a bad one, can regurgitate a Microsoft blog post, or whatever. Can copy and paste. Can even summarize, at least some of them.

But my goal is broader than that. My goal is to educate. To provide context or perspective. To help people view a problem, or a situation, differently. To do more than burp up some information that you can find anywhere else.

How this manifests itself varies.

And to be clear, I'm referring to what I think of as my formal writing, which today consists of the posts here at Thurrott.com and my book, the Windows 10 Field Guide. Twitter is informal, and my goal there is usually more closely aligned with comedy than education. There is, of course, some cross-over.

On the site, it can be subtle. In the most basic cases, just a link or some set of links back to previous, related articles that provide context. For most premium articles, I try to go deeper, generally via analysis or opinion. To provide a perspective that the reader may have never otherwise been exposed to. (And, yes, I'm sure you can find examples of posts here that don't rise to this standard. I'm human.)

The book is deeper still. I think of that as my most recent example of "documenting the undocumentable," and this past week's struggles with documenting Microsoft's ever-evolving system recovery tools is a hint at why the kind of work I do can often be frustrating and thankless. But I'm stuck. I'm now wired this way.

Tell me something I don't already know.

This mentality dates back to the mid-1990's. I had just started a job at a Bay Area publishing start-up called Big Tent and my boss, Adam, had brought my work---the WinInfo news and information newsletter and a predecessor to the SuperSite for Windows called the Internet Nexus---in-house. The issue was that WinInfo, at that time, was like many blogs are today (and like Thurrott Now, actually): I would quote liberally from some presumably authoritative source (Infoworld, perhaps, or PC Week) and then explain why this information was relevant.

But Adam told me that we couldn't keep doing that, that we were essentially just copying material from other publishers. That they might sue us, or at least threaten to do so. (We were so innocent then.) What was important, he told me, was what I thought about this information. I needed to write the articles myself, he ...