Behind the scenes at Essay - Write Better. Think Better.

[Music] Writing is a navigation tool in some sense. You think about where you're going so you can test out the route before you implement it. That's all associated with thought, and the deepest form of thought is writing. It's the deepest form of thought.

[Music] My students in my fourth year seminar were very good students. I asked them to write three essays, and the first essays were terrible. I started to think through when I was assessing an essay, well what was I assessing? Use the correct words, then put them in the proper phrases, and then the phrases should be organized into sentences that are grammatically coherent.

Then you have to organize the sentences within each paragraph, and then your paragraphs have to be sequenced so that the essay exists as a coherent and meaningful totality. And so then I wrote a guide to writing and just made that explicit. This is what you're doing when you're writing, and you have to edit at every single one of those levels.

When my students in my fourth year seminar went through this process, they inevitably produced the best essay they'd ever written. [Music] So I took this writing manual and I discussed it a lot with my son and his team. That'll give me one that's more conversationalist between you and me.

"Hi, I'm Julian Peterson."

"I wouldn't say founder of essay in that situation though."

"Hey, I'm Julian. I guess I might."

So we started working on this how long ago now on essay? Well, we really started working on it, I think, in 2019. You were very interested in the idea of creating educational tools online, and we noticed on your website that the document that you produced for your students had been downloaded 150,000 times.

So I was like, okay, that's an interesting piece of information. Whenever we had thought about building something based off of this document, it was always kind of like a course idea. But what would be really cool is to build something that incorporated all of the tools and philosophical elements of that process and just build it into the software.

I do think it's a revolutionary program in some sense because word processing technology really hasn't changed that much since about 1985. Essay's value compared to other word processors is that we offer a more structured writing environment. It's a tool that will allow you to get your thoughts down and then make sure that they're clear and well-structured.

We really want to focus on the writer improving their own ideas. [Music] Why didn't you decide that working on this with me was a good idea? Well, I mean part of it was that I know that writing is important. The impact of writing on oneself—it's the way you organize your own thinking.

You can lay out what you think. What do I think? You just watch and you think, okay I have a problem. What do I think about that? I think this, I think this, I think this, but I think this and I think this. I don't know much about that, but I'm interested, so I better read this.

Now I think this. You write all that down just so you know who you are, and then you think, okay let's sort this mess out. [Music] Create your character with your words. You mark your path forward with your thoughts. Every word matters; intonation matters; connotation matters; poetic beauty matters.

And if it doesn't matter, then you're not writing. And if you're not writing, you're not thinking. And if you're not thinking, then you're going to fall into a pit—that's how serious you are. If you think words matter—and they matter—they matter more than anything.

One of the reasons that we believe in this product, in Essay, is to help people learn to work through their ideas before communicating them. University students who are learning to write well-structured arguments, people trying to write compelling emails, people who struggle with communication generally in their careers.

If people got in the habit of editing their writing and their thinking, and thinking critically about their own ideas, then you know the world would be a much better place. "To essay" means to attempt, to try. It's a lovely word to use as the signifier for the program because we're trying to get people to try.

Aim up and put everything you have behind it. Foreign. [Music]