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> And presumably would go on to add systems to allow them to persecute others they deem to be slackers.

According to the story (which seemed to lack a "trunk"), the proposed system was individual essays.

> The structure of this post is a bit of a miss for me. Sorry about that. I wanted to write a short post about writing non-fiction but it turned out to be a bit longer than expected and I need to get to work now. I hope you enjoyed it.

It almost reads like the author climbed the tree to shake its branches and content himself with whatever dropped. Which in this case is fine by me.

To be honest what happened was that I tried to write a short introduction with both stories from university, they got way too long, then wrote the writing advice, and then tried to mix them both into a coherent post, then noticed the analogy of the trunk was a good anchor and remixed the article even more around that, and this is what we got. Still I enjoyed writing it.

There's always hope for a Part II. Maybe on rhetoric; which is what I interpreted "The second most important thing" to be about. But the concepts introduced there are entirely new to me so I may be off.

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