Taste Is Not Talent
Why writing well is now a matter of rewriting and appraising, not fluency.
Part 3 of 3. Part 1 found the snap, the bodily signal that tells a writer a piece works. Part 2 found that voice survives translation. This post is about what those two facts mean to educators.
Do you remember when onions tasted harsh, or when all red wine tasted the same? Taste develops through exposure, attention, and experience, and it can also be dulled by a diet saturated with easy sweetness. Writing works the same way. When a machine can draft the essay, the distinctly human skill is not writing the first draft but appraising what the draft is worth. This means sensing what is vivid instead of generic, insightful instead of secondhand, narratively alive instead of mechanically arranged, and evident rather than merely plausible. It is paying critical attention.
Henrik Karlsson’s most beloved essay is called Looking for Alice. It is about how he found his wife. He wrote it as private advice to a friend, it leaked, and it traveled around the world. Two and a half years later, Karlsson reread it and delivered a verdict few writers would survive saying out loud: “at least half of this advice is kind of shady.”
And yet the essay still works. He now understands why, and it isn’t the advice. It works because “you can feel how much I love my wife.”
Consider what that admission means. The energy I wrote about in Part 1 (the snap, the bodily yes, the release Karlsson trusts to tell him a piece is done) was fully present in “Looking for Alice.” The feeling was accurate about the love and wrong about the theory. The body’s signal verified emotional truth. It did not verify factual truth.
So taste, real taste, needs two loops. The somatic loop: a trained body that registers when structure, stakes, and honesty align. And the verification loop: the painter’s discipline, shared in Part 2, claims tested against real cases, against counterexamples, an adversarial reader invited to provide feedback. Karlsson runs both, and runs them separately. The sofa for the first, his wife as adversarial reader and his case files for the second loop. A writer with only the first process becomes eloquently wrong. A writer with only the second becomes correct and dead on the page.
Here is what strikes the educator in me. Part 2 sorted what a writer must never outsource, the posture. Look at everything Karlsson describes across the whole interview, and a second set of four principles becomes clear.
He insists on the vivid. Wittgenstein’s “don’t think, look.” The still-life exercises. Delacroix noticing that a shadow is yellow. Concrete reality, pulled into the prose until the prose stops being about ideas and starts being about the world.
He hunts the insightful. The obvious truths nobody can hear anymore (be kind, honor your commitments) sequenced so they deliver. “I want the piece to end up smarter than I am.”
He engineers the narrative. An animating question with stakes. Open loops the reader needs closed. Images placed to prepare an emotional state before the argument arrives.
He demands the evident. Three or four real cases per essay. Biographies as data. The standing question scribbled in his own margins: is that really true?
Vivid. Insightful. Narrative. Evident. Readers of my book will recognize VINE, the framework I built in The Learn-It-All Educator for training exactly the phenomenon Part 1 named: taste, the judgment that separates average work from excellent work. I did not derive it from Karlsson, which is why watching a master essayist’s native practice decompose into the same four qualities is the most encouraging kind of evidence. Good frameworks are not inventions. They are descriptions of what excellent practitioners already do, packaged so the rest of us can practice deliberately.
Why does this matter now, and why for educators in particular? Three reasons, in ascending order of stakes.
First, the standardization pressure is real. Perell names it in the interview: LLMs are just another force for standardization. Karlsson, a power user of GenAI, agrees without hedging and wants English pushed the other way, wilder. A model’s default prose is, almost by definition, the weighted average of everything. Fluent, useful, centered. Taste is the capacity to feel the difference between that center and the live thing, and like any perceptual capacity it sharpens with contrast and atrophies without it. Students who marinate exclusively in average prose lose the contrast.
Second: thinking grows under load, the argument of the Cognitive Gym chapter in my book. Karlsson’s method runs on deliberately engineered confusion. He writes a claim down so that he “can’t fool myself,” watches it break under his own questioning, and rides the confusion until it collapses into a simpler, truer formulation. He even cites the research tradition behind accelerated expertise: beware the comfortable, half-right mental model, the “knowledge shield,” because it ends learning early. Now watch what happens when a student lets a model draft the essay. The confusion stage is precisely what gets skipped. The load disappears, and the growth disappears with it. The essay was only ever the receipt for the thinking.
This is why the assessment shift I argue for moves from generation to verification. If the machine can produce a draft, the gradable human act becomes the audit. Is this vivid, or generic? Is the insight real, or a rearranged cliché? Does the narrative earn its turn? Is it evident? Show me the case that survives a counterexample. Karlsson grades his own drafts this way every working day. We can teach students to do the same, including to AI output. Especially to AI output.
Third, the reason that moves me most. One of Karlsson’s best-known essays has a title two dozen words long, and its thesis is that a blog post is “a very long and complex search query” for finding your people. Two years before that essay, in December 2021, he had about fifty readers. He kept publishing honest, strange essays anyway, and they went out across the network and came back with collaborators, mentors, friends: a summoned culture that then changed him in return. That flywheel spins on signal. In an ocean of competent average prose, the writing that can still summon anyone is the writing with a detectable human inside it, and the readers who can still be summoned are the ones who can detect one. Taste on both ends. Voice and taste are the network protocol of intellectual life, and educators are now responsible for keeping that protocol alive in the next generation.
Karlsson, asked how he would teach writing, refused the premise of a skills course. Writing well, he said, “is not a skill set”; it is “becoming a certain type of person.” Many educators know that sentence in their bones, because it has always been the actual job description. The syllabus says rhetoric. The work is formation.
The machines will keep getting better at the average. Our students will swim in fluent, frictionless, centered prose for the rest of their lives. The educators who matter in that world are the ones who train both loops: a body that can feel the live thing and a mind that checks it against reality.
The energy in the page was never magic. It is a trained body and a tested truth arriving together, past the reader’s defenses.
Teach them to taste.
The frameworks in this series (VINE, the Cognitive Gym, the shift from generation to verification) are developed fully in The Learn-It-All Educator: A Guidebook for Training Brains, Not Replacing Them, also available through the Open Textbook Library. If this series found you, the search query worked. You are probably my people. Subscribe and say hello.
“The essay was only ever the receipt for the thinking”
“Voice and taste are the network protocol of intellectual life”
“the distinctly human skill is not writing the first draft but appraising what the draft is worth”