🌱 Atomic essays

Have you heard of the term "atomic essay" coined by the Ship-30-by-30 creators? It's a fascinating concept that I absolutely adore.

An essay is a long, serious document and must be written professionally and in a structured way. We need to dedicate lots of time to writing it, which is very hard for beginners.

But the word "atomic" eases that anxiety. It makes the essay more approachable: a short essay written around one single idea.

So each atomic essay should be:

• A single idea
• A ~250-word writing, which equals one page on paper.
• It’s more than a thread but less than a blog.

The concept is somehow similar to 🌱 Evergreen notes, but there are some differences:

Atomic essays are more structured than evergreen notes. Every atomic essay has its key points and a message to expand on these main points.

They are written with a specific audience in mind. When writing atomic essays, we have to think a lot about the audience: identify what they need, write a catchy title,... Evergreen notes are more for personal learning, so the content is more explanatory, and the title is declarative to describe the concept of the note.

The main goal of atomic essays is to test your audience to see if they are interested before spending longer time writing longer forms like blog posts, articles, or essays. For evergreen notes, they are for learning and expressing personal opinions.

But there are two things I love about this idea:

1. Writing 30 atomic essays for 30 days is a good challenge to improve your writing skills. Similar challenges like the 30 for 30 challenge started by Sahil Bloom and Austin Kleon have inspired these challenges, inspired by 🌱 The Seinfeld strategy — Don’t break the chain.
2. It teaches me the structure of good writing. That's what I'm looking for when practicing writing.

I believe you can improve anything in the world if you spend 30 minutes a day for 30 continuous days of focus.

I'm looking forward to writing better with the idea of Atomic Essay.