Michael Dean
Architect turned writing teacher and creator of Essay Architecture
Where to hear and read about Michael Dean1 episode or test
Michael Dean is a former architect who built Essay Architecture, a framework that scores essays on 27 patterns across idea, form and voice. The most useful thing to learn from him is to draft intuitively for yourself, then edit for readers through one pattern at a time.
you need to write your first draft for yourself and your second draft for your reader
A New Way to Teach Writing — Meet Michael Dean
Michael Dean: the story and the lessons
1How Michael Dean turned architecture into a theory of essays
Dean left architecture to study the structure of great writing. He is a former architect and VR specialist. His way of visualizing the writing process shows an editor where a draft is weak, which he calls X-ray vision for a draft that feels off.
David Perell worked with him for years.
He claims every essay faces the same 27 design questions. The framework has three dimensions (idea, form, voice), nine elements and 27 patterns, each scored from one to five. Sometimes he scores 81 criteria, since each pattern has three more.
His view rests on thousands of new writers' drafts, a hundred classic essays and almost a million of his own words.
Dean borrowed the model from Christopher Alexander's pattern language. Alexander mapped 253 recurring design problems in architecture. Dean treats each writing pattern as a question with a whole dictionary of valid answers, so the hero's journey is one of hundreds of possible sequences.
He says a pattern is not a solution. It is a question.
He compared the Guggenheim and the Apple Store to find shared structure. Architects flatten opposite buildings into section drawings, and both turn out to be built around a central atrium with light entering from above. He applies the same move to essays.
Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" and Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" differ in subject, route and density, yet both score about nine out of ten.
Dean is exact about the patterns and anti-template about process. He follows Frank Lloyd Wright's emergent architecture, where each site and client reveals its own design instead of a stamped floor plan. He calls Essay Architecture an editing philosophy, not a drafting one.
2Dean's method for drafting and editing
Dean writes the first draft for himself and the second for readers. In the first draft he thinks about no patterns or structure and chases the material to find what it is. Once he knows the specific question, he uses craft to make the idea legible.
The start of a draft is a mystical process, and he finds it better not to know where it leads.
He edits through one pattern per pass, with a single color. Instead of reading top to bottom hoping to spot problems, he picks one pattern such as voice and highlights every place it shows up in orange. Stretches with no highlight show where voice vanished, so he rewrites them.
He calls this "a razor lens just on one pattern at a time".
Dean rewrites a weak paragraph from scratch instead of patching it. A three out of ten paragraph cannot be fixed by adding voice mechanically. He tries it again with a few patterns in mind, such as more sound or imagery, and loops until one version works.
A paragraph may fail for a clear reason, such as too phonetic and no imagery, so he cuts it and tries again.
He gathers feedback like a comedian, from isolated readers. Each reader gets a private copy and marks gut reactions only: green for likes, red for dislikes. A master document merges them, so a sentence three people love turns dark green, and five readers silent on five paragraphs signals a cut.
Comedians test one joke on separate audiences, so after 50 rooms they know it works.
Dean says to study basics analytically so you can perform intuitively. Jerry Garcia practiced scales ten hours a day, and Kerouac wrote a million words of plain novels before his scroll. Dean uses his 27 patterns to find which basics to shore up, with the aim of eventually forgetting the system.
Hunter S. Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby, and Picasso's early work was formal and classical.
He puts fundamentals before taste. Taste blindness means clinging to one solution, such as the hero's journey, confessions or short blocky paragraphs, while losing the basics. Dean compares it to curvy software-designed buildings with no visible front door.
His advice is to start with the basics and let taste arise from them.
3How Dean builds ideas, hooks and tension
Dean tells writers to pick one volcano. Scope balloons as you write, so zoom in on one example that stands for a bigger idea and let readers reach the conclusion themselves. Wallace narrowed animal ethics to lobsters, to Maine, to the 2002 Maine Lobster Festival.
The advice comes from Umberto Eco, who stopped a student at "volcanoes in Mexico" and said to pick Popocatepetl. Perell's top lesson for students was also to write about fewer things.
He puts the core question at the top of the draft. After drafting, he reverse-outlines to see which sub-question each paragraph answers, then cuts the ones he does not want to discuss. A fuzzy first draft means a fuzzy question, and redrafting sharpens it.
"Consider the Lobster" runs on one title question, three section questions and a question behind every two or three paragraphs, most never asked aloud.
Dean writes the hook last, by baking in questions. He drafts the piece, turns its main pieces into questions, then compresses them into the subtext of the opening sentence. Orwell's "I was hated by large numbers of people" raises three questions that organize the essay.
Charlie Bleecker's memoir hook about stealing a whole bottle of Adderall took about 17 rewrites.
He builds tension from intention and obstacle with an open outcome. Name who the character is, what they want and what blocks them. In Orwell's essay the narrator wants to avoid shooting the elephant, but 2,000 people behind him expect it.
A good obstacle has two roads, so the reader stays in suspense until the climax settles one. Dean's invented example: parents arrive in 24 hours and the couch smells of weed.
Dean gives every paragraph a hook and a punchline. The hook creates a small mystery and the last line rewards the reader, so they keep reading. The punchline can be sad or disgusting, as long as it is a subtext explosion.
Wallace's lobster paragraph opens with giant sea insects and ends on "sometimes each other", which implies cannibal without saying it.
4Dean on voice, sound and word choice
Dean varies the resolution of examples and saves dense ones. Wallace packs 37 details into one paragraph: 17 general, 16 absurdly specific, plus numbers, clustered by music, attractions and food. Only 3 of his 33 paragraphs are that dense.
In unedited essays the density becomes unstable.
He builds personal writing from biography, interiority and outlook. Biography is the camera in the room, interiority is what only you can see in your head, and outlook is the belief. Show the first two before stating the third.
Wallace states his view only at the very end, and Orwell shows his conflict in detail. Dean scored both five out of five on experience.
Dean rhymes at about three key moments in prose. Prose rhyme is interior echo, so when choosing words he picks synonyms for the sound that sets up a key phrase. Orwell's S sounds build toward "hideous" and his F sounds toward "laughter".
Hunter S. Thompson gave friends beer to read his work aloud, then rewrote it by ear.
He balances concision, precision and inventiveness instead of following one rule. Concision cuts clutter, precision picks the word with the best undertone, and inventiveness brings in rare words with context clues. Dean says any rule on its own is incorrect.
"Illumination" beats "light" when undertone matters, and "alpenglow" suits a piece about mountains.
Dean keeps a private, unliked log to hear his unguarded voice. He writes five or six full-sentence thoughts each morning to an unlisted page, stored in monthly text files with no likes or comments. He has three to four years of them.
Writing under his full legal name was not fun, and dropping his last name freed his voice. He also keeps secret corners of his site on death, religion and politics where edgy ideas ripen.
5Michael Dean on AI and why writing still matters
Dean does not trust AI to judge writing quality. In his prompt tests, AI scored writing quality about 50% accurately, close to a random guesser. It writes about 400 words a minute without revising and short-circuits when given 25 principles at once.
In one experiment, AI rewrote Paradise Lost and then judged the two versions. It preferred its own slop.
He uses AI to compress drafts and see what is possible. He gives ChatGPT a 3,000-word draft and asks for versions at 10,000 words, 100 words and one sentence. When the short version carries the idea, he sees he was rambling and rewrites it himself.
He still writes every sentence, working mostly in ChatGPT with custom GPTs and using Claude for small experiments.
Dean asks for ten versions of a paragraph and weaves his own. He never pastes any of them. He pulls ideas from, say, the second, seventh and eighth versions and rewrites in his own words.
"It doesn't necessarily make it faster, but it can make it better."
He stress-tested his motive by imagining AI that surpasses him. He pictured AI that is brilliant, popular and able to replicate him, and concluded he would still write, to make sense of his life. He expects extraterrestrially good AI writing, with volume as the real problem.
He trusts three respected readers over a million unknown ones, so he chases quality, not mass taste.
Slow, manual work taught Dean how things go together. His architecture school banned software for three years. He hand-drew a 4x5 ft map of Manhattan out of dots, which took over 100 hours, and later found that drawing every line made him better at software.
He quotes Harari: editing is not rewiring words, it's rewiring your synapses.
He is building an AI coach that scores drafts by pattern. He is tuning a mix of models: Claude 3.7 for experience, GPT-4.5 for arguments and o1 Pro for rhyme. Each pattern gets a confidence score, such as 95% or 72% accurate.
He believes a coach could cut mastery from 10 to 20 years to months, as long as the writer still writes every sentence.
A New Way to Teach Writing — Meet Michael Dean
Michael Dean applies an architect's pattern thinking to essays, scoring them on 27 patterns across idea, form and voice so writers can see exactly where a draft is weak. The technique worth hearing is to write the first draft intuitively and then edit through one pattern at a time, with a single color highlight per pass.
Dean left architecture to study the structure of great writing. He is a former architect and VR specialist. His way of visualizing the writing process shows an editor where a draft is weak, which he calls X-ray vision for a draft that feels off.
David Perell worked with him for years.
He claims every essay faces the same 27 design questions. The framework has three dimensions (idea, form, voice), nine elements and 27 patterns, each scored from one to five. Sometimes he scores 81 criteria, since each pattern has three more.
His view rests on thousands of new writers' drafts, a hundred classic essays and almost a million of his own words.
Dean borrowed the model from Christopher Alexander's pattern language. Alexander mapped 253 recurring design problems in architecture. Dean treats each writing pattern as a question with a whole dictionary of valid answers, so the hero's journey is one of hundreds of possible sequences.
He says a pattern is not a solution. It is a question.
He compared the Guggenheim and the Apple Store to find shared structure. Architects flatten opposite buildings into section drawings, and both turn out to be built around a central atrium with light entering from above. He applies the same move to essays.
Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" and Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" differ in subject, route and density, yet both score about nine out of ten.
Dean is exact about the patterns and anti-template about process. He follows Frank Lloyd Wright's emergent architecture, where each site and client reveals its own design instead of a stamped floor plan. He calls Essay Architecture an editing philosophy, not a drafting one.
Dean writes the first draft for himself and the second for readers. In the first draft he thinks about no patterns or structure and chases the material to find what it is. Once he knows the specific question, he uses craft to make the idea legible.
The start of a draft is a mystical process, and he finds it better not to know where it leads.
He edits through one pattern per pass, with a single color. Instead of reading top to bottom hoping to spot problems, he picks one pattern such as voice and highlights every place it shows up in orange. Stretches with no highlight show where voice vanished, so he rewrites them.
He calls this "a razor lens just on one pattern at a time".
Dean rewrites a weak paragraph from scratch instead of patching it. A three out of ten paragraph cannot be fixed by adding voice mechanically. He tries it again with a few patterns in mind, such as more sound or imagery, and loops until one version works.
A paragraph may fail for a clear reason, such as too phonetic and no imagery, so he cuts it and tries again.
He gathers feedback like a comedian, from isolated readers. Each reader gets a private copy and marks gut reactions only: green for likes, red for dislikes. A master document merges them, so a sentence three people love turns dark green, and five readers silent on five paragraphs signals a cut.
Comedians test one joke on separate audiences, so after 50 rooms they know it works.
Dean says to study basics analytically so you can perform intuitively. Jerry Garcia practiced scales ten hours a day, and Kerouac wrote a million words of plain novels before his scroll. Dean uses his 27 patterns to find which basics to shore up, with the aim of eventually forgetting the system.
Hunter S. Thompson retyped The Great Gatsby, and Picasso's early work was formal and classical.
He puts fundamentals before taste. Taste blindness means clinging to one solution, such as the hero's journey, confessions or short blocky paragraphs, while losing the basics. Dean compares it to curvy software-designed buildings with no visible front door.
His advice is to start with the basics and let taste arise from them.
Dean tells writers to pick one volcano. Scope balloons as you write, so zoom in on one example that stands for a bigger idea and let readers reach the conclusion themselves. Wallace narrowed animal ethics to lobsters, to Maine, to the 2002 Maine Lobster Festival.
The advice comes from Umberto Eco, who stopped a student at "volcanoes in Mexico" and said to pick Popocatepetl. Perell's top lesson for students was also to write about fewer things.
He puts the core question at the top of the draft. After drafting, he reverse-outlines to see which sub-question each paragraph answers, then cuts the ones he does not want to discuss. A fuzzy first draft means a fuzzy question, and redrafting sharpens it.
"Consider the Lobster" runs on one title question, three section questions and a question behind every two or three paragraphs, most never asked aloud.
Dean writes the hook last, by baking in questions. He drafts the piece, turns its main pieces into questions, then compresses them into the subtext of the opening sentence. Orwell's "I was hated by large numbers of people" raises three questions that organize the essay.
Charlie Bleecker's memoir hook about stealing a whole bottle of Adderall took about 17 rewrites.
He builds tension from intention and obstacle with an open outcome. Name who the character is, what they want and what blocks them. In Orwell's essay the narrator wants to avoid shooting the elephant, but 2,000 people behind him expect it.
A good obstacle has two roads, so the reader stays in suspense until the climax settles one. Dean's invented example: parents arrive in 24 hours and the couch smells of weed.
Dean gives every paragraph a hook and a punchline. The hook creates a small mystery and the last line rewards the reader, so they keep reading. The punchline can be sad or disgusting, as long as it is a subtext explosion.
Wallace's lobster paragraph opens with giant sea insects and ends on "sometimes each other", which implies cannibal without saying it.
Dean varies the resolution of examples and saves dense ones. Wallace packs 37 details into one paragraph: 17 general, 16 absurdly specific, plus numbers, clustered by music, attractions and food. Only 3 of his 33 paragraphs are that dense.
In unedited essays the density becomes unstable.
He builds personal writing from biography, interiority and outlook. Biography is the camera in the room, interiority is what only you can see in your head, and outlook is the belief. Show the first two before stating the third.
Wallace states his view only at the very end, and Orwell shows his conflict in detail. Dean scored both five out of five on experience.
Dean rhymes at about three key moments in prose. Prose rhyme is interior echo, so when choosing words he picks synonyms for the sound that sets up a key phrase. Orwell's S sounds build toward "hideous" and his F sounds toward "laughter".
Hunter S. Thompson gave friends beer to read his work aloud, then rewrote it by ear.
He balances concision, precision and inventiveness instead of following one rule. Concision cuts clutter, precision picks the word with the best undertone, and inventiveness brings in rare words with context clues. Dean says any rule on its own is incorrect.
"Illumination" beats "light" when undertone matters, and "alpenglow" suits a piece about mountains.
Dean keeps a private, unliked log to hear his unguarded voice. He writes five or six full-sentence thoughts each morning to an unlisted page, stored in monthly text files with no likes or comments. He has three to four years of them.
Writing under his full legal name was not fun, and dropping his last name freed his voice. He also keeps secret corners of his site on death, religion and politics where edgy ideas ripen.
Dean does not trust AI to judge writing quality. In his prompt tests, AI scored writing quality about 50% accurately, close to a random guesser. It writes about 400 words a minute without revising and short-circuits when given 25 principles at once.
In one experiment, AI rewrote Paradise Lost and then judged the two versions. It preferred its own slop.
He uses AI to compress drafts and see what is possible. He gives ChatGPT a 3,000-word draft and asks for versions at 10,000 words, 100 words and one sentence. When the short version carries the idea, he sees he was rambling and rewrites it himself.
He still writes every sentence, working mostly in ChatGPT with custom GPTs and using Claude for small experiments.
Dean asks for ten versions of a paragraph and weaves his own. He never pastes any of them. He pulls ideas from, say, the second, seventh and eighth versions and rewrites in his own words.
"It doesn't necessarily make it faster, but it can make it better."
He stress-tested his motive by imagining AI that surpasses him. He pictured AI that is brilliant, popular and able to replicate him, and concluded he would still write, to make sense of his life. He expects extraterrestrially good AI writing, with volume as the real problem.
He trusts three respected readers over a million unknown ones, so he chases quality, not mass taste.
Slow, manual work taught Dean how things go together. His architecture school banned software for three years. He hand-drew a 4x5 ft map of Manhattan out of dots, which took over 100 hours, and later found that drawing every line made him better at software.
He quotes Harari: editing is not rewiring words, it's rewiring your synapses.
He is building an AI coach that scores drafts by pattern. He is tuning a mix of models: Claude 3.7 for experience, GPT-4.5 for arguments and o1 Pro for rhyme. Each pattern gets a confidence score, such as 95% or 72% accurate.
He believes a coach could cut mastery from 10 to 20 years to months, as long as the writer still writes every sentence.