// the find
mnielsen/notes-on-writing
Notes on writing
This is a single markdown file of Michael Nielsen's personal notes on the craft of writing, not a tool or library. It's for people who want unfiltered, aphoristic thinking from someone who's written some of the best technical essays and explainers around (Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Quantum Country).
The notes are dense and specific rather than generic advice-blog filler — things like how to handle reader attention or structure an explanation, drawn from someone who's actually done the work. It's short enough to read in one sitting but written so you can also dip into any section independently. Being in git, you can check the commit history to see which ideas got added, cut, or revised over time, which is itself a small lesson in editing.
It's a flat markdown file with no table of contents or headers to speak of, so finding a specific idea again later means ctrl-F or re-reading. Nothing has been pushed since 2022, so this is a frozen snapshot of Nielsen's thinking at that point, not a living document. There's no license file, so technically the reuse terms are undefined. And because it's raw notes rather than a worked essay, you're on your own to turn fragments into something you can apply — there's no narrative connecting the ideas.