Reread

You know you’ve found something good when it’s worth rereading.

It doesn’t matter what it is. Even a press release handled well has a moment that you can’t help but revisit. A police interview has that moment of catharsis that some of us love to watch over and over.

Hitchcock famously said that “suspense is when the spectator knows more than the characters.” And indeed, anything worth reading — or watching — must have that same feeling. Not necessarily of suspense, mind you, but just the feeling that it’s worth seeing the piece through even when you know its conclusion. After all, there are very few mystery novels that are stunning the first time around and absolutely boring the next.

That’s not to say that reading something for the first time has no value — obviously it does. So a good book, essay, movie, or game needs to be interesting enough to capture your interest the first time, even if you don’t know or understand everything that’s happened.

But there’s a separate sort of value you get from rereading something. I feel that this isn’t given as much attention as it really deserves. Even when it comes to documentation, how often something is reread tells you a lot. It tends to either be important or have some fundamental concept it’s easy to get confused on.

Consider the mount command: is it # mount /dev/sda2 /mnt or is it # mount /mnt /dev/sda2? Turns out it’s the former. And it has to be the former, because otherwise you can’t run mount with one argument. And this makes mounting USBs without user intervention so much easier to handle because now you don’t have to worry about where to mount it.

As a writer, I am good enough to make all my essays worth reading the first time around. But I don’t think that’s enough. In fact, I have several essays that I haven’t published — both on my old site and this one — that I think were worth reading once. But that’s the problem: it’s only worth reading once.

The day before publishing this essay I made a couple of user interface changes on this site. One of them was removing the boxes with the links in the writing subpages, but not the main one. Why? Because no one will ever reread the descriptions.¹ I might even remove it for the main writing page, because the sections are honestly pretty self-explanatory.

This is a new idea for me as well. Only for the last few weeks have I been writing with a focus on rereadability. The essays on my old site were littered with hyperlinks everywhere. I didn’t notice at the time, but that was a good sign — it meant that at least I was interested enough in my writing to reread it and reference it. And the reason to aggressively prune writing? To increase the proportion that’s worth rereading. I’ve even started trying to minimize the number of footnotes in my essays, because often people don’t find them worth reading even once, let alone rereading.²

Rereadability is the one word summary for what makes a good hook. I don’t know how rereadble the rest of this essay is, but I hope at least the hook is.³