A review of the writing course that started this - Holidays Special

Or why i’m not upset Write of Passage has closed down.

Buckle up, it’s time to bitch! If you’re read me before, you know i do fill the mean-hypercritical-French-woman-with-opinions quite well, and today i’m here to put those skills to use. This is my review of Write Of Passage, a writing course led by David Perell, which i took in its last cohort. As this lead-up may tell you, i have more than good things to say about it (but i’ll also tell you the nice parts, France is home to critical thinking after all!).

Disclaimer: this had been only very lightly edited because i can’t be bothered during the holidays. Then why write it at all?

CansaFis Foote

,

Lily | 5459.eth

,

Justin

, and

Sandhya Domah

all told me it was a good idea in my 2024 reading and writing wrap-up so i opened a word doc and 3 hours later tadam… 4,000 words for your pleasure! Felt like a waste not to share <3

Some Context Before the Complaints Begin

(Don’t worry, it’ll be quick!)

Write of Passage (WoP for friends and family) is (was, now defunct) a writing course that promises to teach you how to write online. It ran for five weeks and followed a cohort-based model, meaning you take the course live alongside other students. My cohort, which had several hundred participants, ran from October 7th to November 11th.

Some details on the structure:

• Weekly Live Sessions: there was one live session every week over Zoom, though i couldn’t attend them because they were held in the middle of the night in Paris. Instead, i joined the “watch parties”, which were impressively well-run. A team member played the recording from the previous night and paused at key moments to send us into breakout rooms for exercises. Very smooth; no comments. Well, one comment: Matt ran one such party in the middle of hurricane Milton and it barely stuttered once… i was (and still am) impressed! (and afraid at the things Americans do for work, but that’s not the point)

• Breakout Rooms: during live sessions (or watch parties), we were split into small groups of 3–4 for quick exercises. I’ll dive into what those exercises were like later, but for now, let’s say they were… fine.

• Writing Gyms: these were offered three times a day, every day of the week, and it was easy enough to find time to attend, even with my 9-to-5 job. Kudos to the team for scheduling sessions that worked for Europeans too! That said, for the price of admission, weekend options would’ve been nice. There was high attendance from entrepreneurs and self-employed consultants so i see why not, but i would have appreciated it. Still, I managed.

• Assignments: there were three total assignments (other reviews will say five, the course used to include one assignment per week, but my cohort got a trimmed-down version). Each assignment came with a prompt, some guidance tied loosely to the week’s topic, and feedback from a trained editor. I’ll talk more about these later.

And, of course, the price. The full price for one cohort was $4,000. If you wanted unlimited access to all cohorts, it was $8,000. Yes, that’s a lot of money. Luckily, i applied for a scholarship and ended up paying “just” $1,000 (€900). Stay ‘til the end to know if it was worth it ;) (call this my attempt at clickbait).

Now, we’re ready to dive into the course’s promises and why i think it fell short on so many of them.

from the Write of Passage homepage

Promise 1: We’ll teach you how to write

I was very excited for this promise! I was never really taught how to write essays in French school. We focused on the dissertation, which is very formal and looks a lot more like academic writing. English is my second language, so i was enthusiastic at the idea of polishing my quirks and learning all kinds of professional techniques.

One of my biggest hurdles with writing – that follows me even after the course — is my lack of confidence. I feel extremely self-conscious about my writing (especially any time i use forbidden words like very or extremely) and i know it needs a lot of work.!

That’s the plight of the critical reader you see, and why i will never publish a novel: i have read all the shitty fantasy there is, and all the bad medium essays. My biggest fear is to join the ranks of the disastrous writer, the one who bores and annoys and destroys the tongue they write in.

So here goes the criticism: David’s course had a middle-school level of advice. Each live session was 1h30 long, but it was all extremely superficial. We were told to make sure our ideas flow well into each other – in France it’s called using “logical connectors” (words like and, but, then, otherwise, meanwhile, in conclusion,...) and logic was a prerequisite to anything.

Another session told you to write with life (ie interesting, captivating, engaging prose) but left it at one example we read silently. I wanted them to show me several examples, contrast and compare, share guidelines for writing descriptions, or how to edit them. I wanted to know what practical steps i could take to add rhythm to my piece, how to know if it’s too much or too little,... anything really!

I had hoped we’d get some personal help during the sessions – if you’re handing out exercises, you’ll make sure to give everyone corrections, right? Well, not really. There isn’t enough teachers to make the rounds, so all the advice you’ll get in the breakout rooms is from other students. Some of them are great: they’ve been writing for a while, are native English speakers, have some decent notions of grammar. But others, like me, are severely lacking (thank you Google Docs autocorrect!) and can’t really help each other.

So sadly, the course never delivered on that aspect, and didn’t even share resources we could learn from (i’m hearing something about a Chicago Manual of Style that could help? Please comment or reply if you know/like it or any other!).

Promise 2: We’ll help you find ideas

from the Write of Passage homepage

I was the prime target for this course: insecure in my writing style and absolutely convinced i didn’t have good ideas. Not to worry, the FAQ section promised me they would help me find some, and uncover my personal niche, one i could follow blindly and tap into for the rest of my life.

Well, once again, none of that happened. I’m lucky that i didn’t entirely believe it, and worked hard in September to prepare some decent stuff because otherwise i would have died in the draft phase.

Sure, the first assignment (well, number 0, it didn’t count in the total three) was to write 5 “sketches”, ie 5 paragraphs that each showed one idea you could write about. This doc was then to be posted for other students to comment on, such that you would get early feedback on your stuff and would then easily write something that had an audience built-in.

Being a dutiful straight A student, i posted my 5 sketches the day the forum opened. And i got a total of 2 comments, one who hadn’t read the post, and another who asked me whether Goodreads was like a Kindle or more like Readwise (the answer is neither, but also you could have googled it – oh wait no, you can’t call yourself a community leader if you don’t post shitty comments everywhere under the guise of “participating”).

The other way to get comments on your ideas was in the “Idea gyms”. You get paired up with another person, and then take turn for 20 minutes each to discuss an idea. The rules are as follows:

• Listen actively

• Ask follow-up questions to probe for more detail

• Say which parts of the idea resonate with you

• Don’t criticize your partner’s ideas

The first 3 are good general advice, but the fourth one? Of course i want you to criticize my shit! That’s the whole point of this! Tell me if it’s boring or cliché or plain up dumb. How else would i know?

The demographics of the student body (more on that later) didn’t help either: i often got paired with middle-aged men and no offense to you but none of you gave a shit about the description of aliens in scifi books, the compared morals or harry potter and percy jackson or endometriosis. And yet each of those essays got at least 100 reads and a few comments that enjoyed them. In return, i listened actively to ideas like “how crypto is a gift from god” or “that one simple trick to make sure angel investors want to fund your startup” and was bored af. To be clear, i don’t blame those students at all, we were just very incompatible for this kind of exercises.

I think my upset comes from the few reviews i read that mentioned “writing groups” or “pods” in which people were placed based on their topic, ideas and audience. It seemed to help a lot to make sure everyone got appropriate feedback on their work. But this idea was scrapped for my cohort. I’d have appreciated a “what changed from the last time we ran this” bit on the homepage, because a lot of things mentioned in the reviews online didn’t happen at all. I get it was a living, evolving course, but still, i feel chaffed.

from the Write of Passage homepage

Finally, i fully expected, without any reservation, that the assignment prompts would provide some guidance and some constraint or inspiration for ideas. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Assignment one was “Through your lense” ie take one of your sketches and expand on it – gee thanks, and what if your ideas were shit (you wouldn’t know anyways because no-one told you). Number 2 was “What’s missing?” as in what do you think is missing from the world. And number 3 was “Your rite of passage: write an essay you would have wanted to read 2 years ago”.

Generic, bland, uninspiring prompts that couldn’t move a fly if they wanted to. Thanks for the ideas!

Promise 3: We’ll teach you how to write online

I haven’t completely cracked the code on that one personally, so i’m going to struggle with you here for a moment to explain what i feel was missing. This isn’t a writing course for a book, for journalism, for an essay in print magazine. This is an online course for blogs or newsletters. The medium they recommend is substack. I expected at least one session explaining how and why writing for the internet is different, and strategies on how to adapt.

For example, i would have like a discussion on links. Hyperlinks are the bread and butter of the internet, and they are slowly disappearing, sure, but they remain an important part of blog writing.

Or something about writing for different screen formats and ratios! Something i write a wonderful paragraph, but when i render it on a phone screen it’s 300000 lines long and i know no-one will read that.

Maybe another talk voice and modalities of text. Very unsure of what i’m saying here, but it sounds to me you don’t write the same online than in a newspaper, no matter how casual its editors. There are many more ways to express yourself on here, you can break grammar rules, or swear, or invent words, or use memes, reference stuff, … It all depends on your audience of course, but it’s a fundamental thing!

There was also no mention made of illustrations, but featured images are paramount to a post finding its intended audience. Which leads me to the next promise:

Promise 4: We’ll teach you how to write online and get people to read you

from the Write of Passage homepage

We got some very reassuring words in the FAQ, telling us they would hold our hands and help us gain an audience. I was naive coming in, but not this naive: there is no way a course can help you gain subscribers – apart from the fact that we all would gather round and follow each other.

My results were on par with my expectations (and not at all on par with the promise): i currently have a tiny bit over 50 subscribers, some of which are peers from the course, some are strangers i met over on Notes.

The general teachings from the Live Sessions ran by David was as follows: publish you shit and tell social media about it, otherwise no one will see it. No shit Sherlock. But that was all – and it’s normal: there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to this kind of thing.

They organized a “Distribution-Palooza” session, where 4 speakers came to deliver a guest lecture. There was one called “unbundling”, which was about how to take the piece you’ve written and re-write it into tweets – the idea isn’t dumb in itself, but the execution was superficial and didn’t teach me shit. The one about titles was all about clickbaity techniques which i don’t want to follow and i think it’s a) unhealthy and b) inappropriate for the wholesome brand David curated. Same (but even worse) for the one about cold outreach.

The only lecture that i found somewhat useful was the one about “substack growth” were my editor told us all about how she grew her 20k publication, and now makes a living from it. Sadly, half the answer laid into the fact that she’d had a mailing list in the past with 1K active contacts which gave her a boost when she started + her background as a journalist which got her featured by Substack and given a place in their accelerator program.

There was one takeaway from it, which you can see repeated as-nauseam on Notes: use Notes. People will find your profile, follow and maybe subscribe. So yeah, if you see me spit some weird takes or museum photos over there, that’s what i’m trying to do (and it’s not working too bad – 50 subs in 60 days is pretty cool!).

But once more, the content of the course was superficial, and didn’t give me anything new. Sure, the website copy does tell you it’s possible to find everything online, but they follow up by saying their concentrated it all in one place (wrong) and that it would take decades to dig it up yourself (wrong, took 5 minutes).

Promise 4: You’ll meet amazing people

from the Write of Passage homepage

The message that i fell for the most: people who pay 4 fucking Ks to get into a writing course will be educated, serious, engaged and smart so you’ll have a good time and meet people who can become your peers.

The reality: it’s full of tech people with disposable income, “entrepreneurs” who want to write dry business shit and “creators” who want to produce LinkedIn AI slop. Don’t forget that David Perell is a Christian and talks about it quite a bit so you also end up with nauseating gender-roles affirming dudes who think marriage is the best thing ever and you should become a housewife. Oh, and they’re all men, of course – which means it was surprisingly hard to find female-centric advice: when your topic is endometriosis it becomes difficult to get useful feedback (no, “what is it?” doesn’t count, the audience already knows, also i explained it 2 paragraphs ago).

I was surprised to see a significant amount of messages on the forums of people who can’t read the tutorials, post things in the wrong section, can’t accept a calendar invite or are just so fucking oblivious they didn’t listen when David gave the deadlines for the assignments. Not the behavior i expected from adults who elected to join and paid their own money for it!

Part of the assignment was to read other people’s drafts and provide feedback on them (which i agree is a very valuable practice). So i dutifully did it and realized that even the people with a good enough topic (ie not “AI is 100% great no problem ever” or “How i built my business”) didn’t know how to write. The sessions i told you were middle school level? Well, they are absolutely needed there! Really bad grammar, people using ChatGPT without removing the extra part, sentences that made no sense, or were dry and uninteresting… Once again, i was disappointed. I expected peer emulation, light competitive spirit or something to build momentum (and i did find friends for that, but this is the complaining section so wait a minute).

All in all, this wasn’t the college nirvana i aspired to (my college experience was in compsci, so it was also full of dudes, except they were 20yo and therefore a lot dumber). At least i didn’t get hit on or harassed – but i read a few essays that told me their authors wouldn’t consider me very highly because of my gender.

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Promise 5: A trained editor will line-edit your pieces

from the Write of Passage homepage

Well, that didn’t happen, point-blank. I submitted all my drafts on time, in the right space, with the right formatting and the right access permissions on the google doc. I was even early, showing up on Friday evenings, just a day after the watch party where the prompt was given, and much earlier than the recommendation of “before Monday”.

I was assigned someone who has a successful substack (>20k subscribers, full-time writer – i won’t name her because i don’t want to make it a feud), and who also was a freelance writer for big publications before. What i mean by this is that she has experience with editors and should have known what to do.

Instead, i got some feel-good messages on my draft, and very little in way of a critic and ways to improve. It’s not that my drafts were ready to go – i re-worked them significantly, and there was A LOT to do each time!

As examples, i’ve added a collage of the comments i received from my piece about escaping Goodreads gravity well. This was done on an early draft that i edited a lot to make it to this final form. You can see that all i got were inspiring, supporting messages. I barely got a single improvement point.

On my Harry vs Percy morals comparison, i got some light typos editing + a message about how it could be confusing if someone hasn’t read both books. Passing on the fact that the audience is clearly meant to be someone who has read both as a kid, i think this is extremely light!

I was told i’d get “line-editing”, which to me means going over each sentence and helping me make it better: is the grammar right (probably not, i’m a non-native mess), is it phrased properly, is there a way to make it more impactful, should you maybe use this synonym instead of that, are your arguments clear and structured, is the flow good, does it sound nice, …

I yearned for this kind of correction, and the appointed editor didn’t deliver. Once i fixed the few things she highlighted in the comments, i asked her for a second pass, focusing on the details, and she didn’t reply back. So much for that promise!

I also took a look at the other editors profiles. Some of them did a good job (i could see their feedbacks on other people’s drafts), but it strikes me that very few of them had any actual education in English, or editor experience prior to working for WoP. I’m sure it’s a great opportunity for them to launch their editing careers, but as a student who paid 4K, i expect trained editors, not former students who have a good enough handle on English.

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Stuff i liked: new friends and feedback partners

With all the complaints i had earlier about people who are not my tribe, i did also meet some really nice people! I’ll tag a few people (but not being on the list doesn’t mean i didn’t like you, i just can’t find your name in the \@ dropdown):

Lily | 5459.eth

,

CansaFis Foote

,

Sandra Yvonne

,

Nat Lee

,

Leo Ariel

,

Luke Dougherty

,

Matthew Beebe

,

Kuriakin Zeng | WOP 13

<3

They showed me that good feedback is valuable, and that i enjoy exchanging it, when i get it back in the same quality. I now get people to read my draft, and go through several rounds of revisions before i publish and it’s helped me tremendously. On a normal day, i would never put out this kind of monstrosity; and my friends wouldn’t let me either (but it’s the holidays so i’m not bothering people, and instead here you go with all my ramblings).

First, i put out better stuff (no shit). Second, i’m much less anxious about press “publish” (i still die every time, but i’m a drama queen – i’m on substack after all) because someone has read it and deemed it not shit. I know i can trust their advice because they’ve told me when something wasn’t ready, and done so very clearly (but not mean). Anyways, i’ve found friends :))

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I spent so much money i had to follow up lol

The main thing i gained from WoP wasn’t in any of the teachings. It’s just that i paid so much money for it that i forced myself to show up. Didn’t learn much in the sessions, but it was a wonderful forcing function for me to write shit down and hit publish on time.

I went above and beyond, and published 5 essays during those 5 weeks, and had a few in progress to be published after that. You can see that i took a 3 weeks break after the course because i was a bit tired, and i wanted the next piece to be really good (and not die by AI bros).

So, do i regret it?

No. I do think i overpaid at 900 euros (and i can’t imagine what it feels for the people who paid full price!), but it was more worth it than not. It gave me the initial push to publish, the momentum to keep going, and a few friends to make a nice community.

I did learn a very valuable lesson: if the course seems too good to be true, it probably is! I won’t fall for the same trap again, and i’ll be more thoughtful in the future…

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What about you? Have you ever taken a course that didn’t fulfill its promises? Did you take Write Of Passage or considered doing so before it closed? Tell me all in the comments!

Other than that, Happy Holidays if you celebrate any of them, and i’ll see you in the new year with a very original and thought-provoking piece about my goals for 2025 ;)