Every essay begins with a suspicion. A feeling that somewhere inside an anecdote, an encounter or a memory there is a larger question waiting to reveal itself.

The Espadrilles began with a contradiction.

For fifty years I have been vegetarian. For almost as long, I have lived with the small observations and challenges that accompany that choice. Some are thoughtful. Some less so. One in particular returns with remarkable perseverance.

“But you wear leather shoes.”

The observation is fair. The contradiction is real.

Originally, I imagined I was writing an essay about that contradiction and about the larger difficulty of aligning conduct with conviction. The piece would be concerned with the distance between the people we imagine ourselves to be and the people revealed by our daily actions.

But somewhere in the hills east of Tardets, and where I sit at this moment, the essay began moving in a different direction.

What began as a reflection on personal inconsistency slowly became an exploration of recognition. Of those moments when we encounter another person and experience a sense of affinity. Not because we share the same opinions, but because we appear to value many of the same things.

The artisan at the centre of the essay is such a figure.

Through his treatment of materials, his respect for craft, his regard for tradition, place and workmanship, he appeared to embody many of the qualities I most admire. As the essay developed, I found myself less interested in the shoes than in the relationship emerging between two people who seemed to understand the world in broadly similar ways.

Then came the leather. Not as compromise, but as excellence.

Not as a failure of values, but as their fullest expression. The moment mattered because it revealed something more interesting than contradiction. It revealed the limits of consensus.

We often imagine that shared values naturally lead to shared conclusions. That if people are thoughtful enough, careful enough and sincere enough, they will eventually agree about what is good. Yet life repeatedly presents us with examples of decent people who share many fundamental values and nevertheless arrive at very different understandings of what those values demand.

The essay does not attempt to resolve that tension. Indeed, one of its ambitions is to resist resolution. Too often essays become vehicles for conclusions already reached. I am interested in essays as places of observation; places where a question can be examined without being immediately answered.

Increasingly, I find myself reserving the term essay for writing that remains genuinely exploratory. Not the presentation of a conclusion already reached, but an attempt to understand something not yet fully understood. A place of observation rather than advocacy. A place where writer and reader may linger with a question long enough for it to reveal more of itself.

It may also be that this is a heritage thing. Or perhaps a geographical one. Living among the hills and small communities of rural France, I find myself less interested than I once was in advancing conclusions and more interested in living with observation. Montaigne, not so very far from here, understood the essay as an attempt rather than a verdict. Increasingly, I find that the practice of essay writing is teaching me the same perspective. That understanding often follows observation, and that the most interesting questions have a habit of becoming larger.

In that sense, The Espadrilles is less an argument than a landscape. It begins with one contradiction and ends in the presence of another. The purpose is not to tell the reader what to think, but to lead them into the field and allow them to look around for themselves. To turn their head from side to side, accommodate themselves to the breeze, and observe what becomes visible when the need for immediate answers subsides.

Whether it succeeds is for others to decide.

For my part, I am simply grateful to the artisan, the workshop, the scent of magnolia, and a box containing some of Navarre's finest leather for revealing a question I had not known I was carrying.

David Marshall Montory

Notes towards an essay

All of my recently published essays have been identified by AI scanners as between 67% and 98% AI-generated.

I wrote my first published essay in 1965 and made my first documented contribution to public policy in 1969, in the United Kingdom, on the subject of arbitrary dismissal.

Since that time, my professional life has required that I write continually; essays, policy papers, reports, breifings, teaching materials & text books, letters, magazine features & jouralism, manuals and books

The suggestion that this work, or work emerging from the same habits and disciplines, is now classified as AI-generated is both curious and instructive. And even as I write this, I notice I can't help myself, but open this note with a tension. It's hard-wired. An immediate construction that emerges when my fingers connect with keys.

What's happening

I am told that as a practised writer, I may be triggering some of the same patterns that AI systems were trained to produce:

Clear, grammatical sentences with few mistakes. Consistent tone and structure throughout a piece. Balanced paragraph lengths. Predictable word choices rather than unusual or idiosyncratic phrasing. Explanatory writing that moves logically from point to point.

Apparently, and somewhat ironically, these are features that I strive for, I am after all addressing audiences that, for the most part, appreciate these things. These are features of good professional writing. And these are the very features that trigger the AI conclusion that I, or that my writing, is AI generated.

Thought: If I, and other writers, have been writing in roughly this manner for fifty, sixty years or more, and AI now writes in a similar manner, what is imitating whom?

Interim test.

So I took the seven paragraphs above, which I have written in the last five minutes or so, and ran them through the first free AI text detector that came up on bing; undetectable.ai . I did well and scored only 71% as AI drafted. Just Done gave me around 75% AI

The test assignment

Write an essay with three objectives:

1: Explain why my notebooks (like this one) are public. 2: Explain why I choose to use Write.as as my writing and publishing surface 3: Record the blogs and notebooks I maintain on Write.as and show how they link together, and how they link-in to my wider publication architecture.

Below I'm listing my structured notes that I will use to write the essay. Essentially I'll start with everything that occurs to me that I think is relevant. I will use the facility that Write.as affords me to edit and organize my notes as my thinking proceeds.

Structured Notes

I already have a notional structure in my head about the flow of the essay – the “publication architecture” as I call it.

I seem to be carrying an explanation of why the process of public thinking matters to me as an essayist. Write.as happens to be the tool.

I'm tempted to structure it around these questions: why I make my notes public / the open notebook concept why I want the foundations visible how my essays are the pursuit of understanding why write.as revision as navigation The notebooks/blogs as a defined appendix

Why I Write in Public

The discipline : People sometimes ask why so much of my writing appears in public notebooks rather than only in finished essays. The question assumes that the notebooks exist in order to reveal the process behind the essays. That is partly true. But disclosure is not the principal reason. Publishing notes is not an act of disclosure. It is an act of discipline.

Obligation : One of the most important lessons I learned from teaching is that public speech creates responsibility. The moment a statement enters the public domain, the person making that statement becomes accountable for it. That responsibility exists even when one is simply reporting the views of others...

If I write that the Environmental Party chooses to prioritise a particular issue, I remain accountable for whether I have represented that position fairly, accurately and honestly. Public communication imposes obligations.

It requires care not only in what is said but also in how it is said. A private note can remain vague. A public note demands greater precision. The audience may be large or small. There may be no audience at all. That is beside the point. Publication itself creates a standard to which the author must answer. The public note becomes a challenge: “Are you prepared to stand over this?”

Why the Foundations Matter

Many of my essays, reviews and policy pieces contain observations, interpretations and conclusions. Those observations emerge from somewhere. They arise from notebooks, fragments, field observations, discarded ideas, references, questions, conversations and research. Increasingly, I have felt that if the conclusions are visible, then at least some of their foundations should also be visible.

There is something almost contradictory about that. Foundations are usually hidden. Yet I find myself wanting to expose parts of the structure rather than conceal it. Not because I believe it to be beyond criticism. Almost the opposite. I want it to remain open to criticism. In a sense I am inviting the reader to become an editor and sub-editor peering over my shoulder. The notebooks are not merely supporting documents. They are part of the conversation. The reader is able to examine not only the finished essay but some of the path by which the essay emerged.

Essays and Understanding

I describe my essays as attempts at understanding rather than acts of advocacy. Advocacy begins with a destination. The essay begins with a question. Or a tension. Or a contradiction. Or an observation that refuses to go away.

My task is not primarily to persuade. My task is to understand. And to share that understaning. The closest I come to advocay is the pursuit of a shared understanding. If I claim that my essays pursue understanding rather than advocacy, then I should be accountable to that claim.

The notebooks help provide that accountability. They reveal whether I have genuinely followed the evidence. They reveal whether I have acknowledged ambiguity. They reveal whether reality persuaded me before I attempted to persuade the reader. If I claim merely to illuminate a tension, then I must be prepared to show how I arrived there. The notebooks become part of the discipline of intellectual honesty.

My View of Essay Writing

The essay is not journalism. Neither is it academic writing nor opinion. It is a mode of inquiry. The essay begins with a tension and follows that tension wherever it leads. The essayist starts not with a conclusion but with a problem. Through reflection, observation, research and writing, relationships previously hidden become visible.

The purpose of the essay is not necessarily resolution. Sometimes the deepest achievement of an essay is simply to reveal what is actually being argued about. Or what relationship has remained unseen. The essay is therefore a journey towards perception. Not toward persuasion.

Why Write.as?

The reasons are partly philosophical and partly practical. Write.as allows me to work almost anywhere. I can work from a phone while travelling. I can capture a thought before it disappears. I can draft a paragraph while waiting for a train or sitting in a harbour. Good sentences rarely arrive according to schedule. The platform accommodates that reality.

More importantly, Write.as has altered my relationship with composition. Years ago I would often compose large sections of text in my head before writing them down. The arrival of increasingly sophisticated software encouraged a different habit. Revision became too easy. Drafting became fragmented. Composition increasingly moved from the mind to the screen. Write.as on my phone, nudges me back towards mental composition. I find myself crafting paragraphs internally before typing them. It encourages me to think first and edit later.

The Freedom of Not Knowing

Perhaps the most important characteristic of Write.as is that a piece does not need to know what it is when it begins. I can sketch a structure anonymously. I can create an outline. I can develop an idea. I can begin writing without deciding where it belongs. Indeed, I can finish a piece before making any decision about what sort of piece it is.

Only afterwards do I decide whether it belongs in: • a notebook, • a field note, • a review, • a briefing, • a policy essay, • an essay collection, • or somewhere else entirely. There is enormous freedom in that. The classification follows the writing. The work discovers what it is before being assigned a home.

Publication Architecture

Part of this arises from the way I work. I sometimes think of myself not only as an essayist but as a publication architect. I am often interested in structures before I am interested in destinations. I want to understand the shape of an argument. The relationships between ideas. The route through a landscape.

Only later do I determine where a piece belongs. Write.as makes that possible. A piece can exist before its final form is known.

Revision

Revision occupies a different role in my work than it does for many writers. The important epistemological work often happens in the first draft. The writing itself generates understanding. Relationships emerge. Connections become visible. Assumptions reveal themselves. The first draft is frequently where discovery occurs.

Subsequent revision is something different. Less an act of knowing. More an act of navigation. Like choosing the best line through a bend on a favourite motorcycle. Or selecting the ideal moment to tack in a sailing race. The destination remains unchanged. The craft lies in finding the cleanest route.

The Open Notebook

The various notebooks and publications form something like an open notebook. Most websites display conclusions. These sites document parts of the process that precedes conclusions. Ideas begin as observations. Observations become notes. Notes become briefings. Briefings become essays. Essays become reviews, policy pieces or larger works. Not all observations become essays. Not all notes deserve publication beyond the notebook. Some remain exactly as they began. Yet together they document an attempt to understand rather than to persuade. Persuasion is left to the set of relationships between the revealed in the elements of the source material, and the reader

Appendix: The Write.as Publications

The Marshall Review (rvw.ie) The most polished publication in the network. Essays and reviews concerning culture, ideas, books, music and public life.

An Essayist's Notebook (esy.ie) Questions, fragments, observations and developing ideas. The closest thing to a public working notebook.

Field Notes (notes.marshall.ie) Research notes, sources, references and supporting material. An attempt to make visible some of the foundations from which essays emerge.

Radar Signals (signals.marshall.ie) Observations, anomalies, developments and emerging patterns whose significance may not yet be fully understood.

Briefing Insights (insights.marshall.ie) Short analytical briefings and concise explorations arising from ongoing inquiry.

The Marginalia of Sigi (sigi.ie) Annotations, side notes, reflections and intellectual wanderings that do not naturally belong elsewhere.

Wordpress & Substack

Marshall on Policy (plcy.ie) Essays and reflections dealing with governance, public policy and civic questions.

Ontology (ontology.marshall.ie) Explorations of meaning, relationships, categories and the structures through which ideas acquire significance.

The Writing Network Taken together, these sites function less as separate blogs than as different views of a single intellectual process. Some contain signals. Some contain research. Some contain questions. Some contain essays. All form part of the same endeavour: the attempt to understand the world through inquiry, and to conduct that inquiry in public

Reading Trask (Penguin Guide to Puctuation) on a flight today, I found myself disagreeing with him. Substantially.

Not because he's careless with it. Quite the opposite. His punctuation is disciplined, systematic, almost instructional. He treats it as a framework through which thought is organised and communicated.

I realised that I approach it differently. For me, punctuation has never felt like a set of rules imposed upon language. It feels more like part of the act of expression itself. A comma is not a traffic sign. A dash is not a regulation. A full stop is not an instruction.

They are closer to the traces left by a thought in motion.

When I write, punctuation feels less like the Highway Code and more like the controls of a motorcycle. Not because it governs the journey, but because it becomes part of the journey. Rider and machine gradually disappear into a single act of movement. The controls cease to be separate things. They become extensions of perception.

The same is true of a painter's brush. The brushstroke is not there to organize the painting. It is evidence of the painting being made. And then, because I have spent so much time recently thinking about my next series of articles on music, it occurred to me that the distinction might be even clearer there.

A score is not music.

A score is an extraordinary achievement. It captures relationships, structures, timings, possibilities. But it does not contain music any more than a map contains a landscape.

Music happens when a performer inhabits those symbols.

Two musicians can play identical notes from the same score and produce entirely different experiences. What changes is not the notation but the performance. Perhaps writing contains a similar tension. Grammar, punctuation, and style guides are forms of notation. They help us record, preserve, and share expression. But they are not the expression itself.

The mistake comes when we confuse one for the other.

The score matters: The performance matters more.

[Trask, I suspect, would disapproved of the colon there, and most defitely of my use of this:– ] (square bracket).

Perhaps that is why I sometimes find myself resisting systems that seek to make writing simpler by turning it into rules. Simplicity can emerge in another way through practice. Not the practise of grammar rules, but the practise of the expression of ones own thought. Not through codification, but through feel.

A motorcyclist does not become graceful by memorising the Highway Code. A musician does not become expressive by memorising notation. A writer does not become eloquent by memorising punctuation rules. Those things matter. But they belong to a different realm.

They are the score: The living thing begins when someone starts to play.

David Marshall Montory

Afterthought: Punctuation, at a minimum, is guidance on cadence.

While reflecting on voice recently, I found myself arriving at an unexpected conclusion. The question was not where my voice came from, but where it should go. Over the years my writing has gradually organised itself into distinct territories. Marshall on Policy deals with policy. The Marshall Review provides a home for commentary and reflection. Marshall on Essays explores essaying itself. My music sites have their own purposes and audiences.

These boundaries are useful. They help readers find what interests them and avoid what doesn't. We do not read newspapers from cover to cover; we navigate them by habit and interest. Websites are no different.

Yet life continually presents things that sit beyond such categories. A queue. A speed bump. A campervan parked outside the house. An overheard remark. An assumption nobody seems to question. A small irritation that turns out to reveal something larger.

These things rarely justify an essay. They are often too slight for policy and too personal for review. Yet they are frequently where thought begins. That realisation has led to the creation of INQ. Unlike my other sites, INQ is not organised around a subject. It is organised around attention. The working strapline is:

INQ.ie Marshall on Things.

It is a place for observations, questions, curiosities, irritations and occasional convictions. A place where the subject need not justify itself before it is allowed onto the page. Perhaps the simplest way of putting it is this: INQ is where I intend to write in my own voice, unboxed.

Not recklessly. Not carelessly. But without feeling obliged to fit every thought into a pre-existing category or publication. If Marshall on Policy asks what should be done, and The Marshall Review asks what should be made of something, INQ asks a simpler question:

What's going on here?

The answer may sometimes turn into an essay. It may occasionally become a policy piece. More often it will remain simply an observation. And that is enough. As a reminder to myself, should I ever become too polite, too cautious, or too eager to self-censor: Speak up, man.

And, oh yeah, it's pronounced ink.

view

Voice

Looking back, I realise I spent decades trying to acquire something for which I had no name. Beginning in my teens, I found myself drawn not to answers but to relationships, not to conclusions but to unfolding processes.

Only much later did I understand that what I had been cultivating was a mode of attention. My writing voice was not something I invented. It was something that emerged from that attention. What emerges from my thinking here is a distinction that feels both simple and significant:

Voice is what readers hear. Attention is what produces it.

Perhaps, too: Style can be learned. Voice can be developed. But a mode of attention is cultivated over a lifetime.

I suspect that my development as a writer owed much to skills learned elsewhere. As a motorcyclist, and later as a volunteer RAC examiner, I was trained to observe systematically. Good riders do not merely look. They follow a disciplined process of observation, anticipation and continuous reassessment. Over time I seem to have applied similar disciplines to perception itself. The road became the world. Hazards became questions. Observation became inquiry.

University lecturing taught me another form of attention. I learned to observe not only what students said, but how understanding emerged within them. Often one could sense comprehension taking shape before a student had the words to express it. Teaching required attentiveness to thought in motion, to the subtle interaction between explanation, confusion, recognition and insight.

Social action taught me yet another form of attention. If advanced motorcycling trained me to observe situations and lecturing trained me to observe understanding, social action trained me to observe underlying conditions. It encouraged me to look beyond individual events towards the forces that made them possible. Repeatedly I found that what was visible was only the surface expression of deeper relationships and structures. This habit of looking beneath appearances became part of my writing. It reinforced a tendency to ask not merely what is happening, but what conditions are giving rise to what is happening.

Taken together, these experiences seem less like separate chapters in a life than different expressions of the same discipline. They cultivated habits of watching carefully, tracing relationships, recognising patterns and resisting premature conclusions. If I were to sketch the progression, it might look something like this:

Observation → Systematic Observation → Disciplined Attention → Insight → Voice

The voice comes last. What comes first is the trained capacity to see what others overlook. That capacity was not developed primarily through writing. Writing became the place where the results of that lifelong training found expression.

I was reminded of this some years ago while trying a guitar amplifier in a music shop. Another customer, a landscape gardener in his fifties, recognised my name and struck up a conversation about writing. He told me he wanted to start a blog but had been attending a creative writing course and had come away with the belief that he first needed to acquire a voice.

This took me aback.

Within minutes it was obvious to me that he already had one. He had spent half a century working, observing, thinking, solving problems and making sense of the world. He had a perspective. He had a way of seeing. In short, he had a voice.

What he lacked was not a voice but confidence in it.

He began talking about grammar. I told him to forget grammar for the moment. Write about what you know. Readers will come for your perspective, not your punctuation. Grammar and style can be learned. What mattered was that he had already spent decades cultivating a way of seeing the world. The writing would develop in time.

The encounter stayed with me because it revealed a common misunderstanding. Voice is often treated as though it were a literary technique that must be acquired before one can begin writing. Yet my experience suggests the reverse. Most people acquire a voice through living. They acquire writing through writing.

I do not suggest that every essayist arrives at a voice in this way. This is simply an attempt to understand how my own voice emerged. What continues to deepen it is a subject for another note. Yet the reflection does raise a further question. If my voice emerged from a lifelong mode of attention, what lies behind the voices of other essayists?

I suspect the answer is rarely a matter of style alone. Behind every distinctive voice there may be some equally deep disposition, habit of mind, preoccupation or way of attending to experience. Long before the pen touches paper or the fingers strike the keys, the writer has already spent years, perhaps decades, learning what to notice and what questions cannot be left alone.

Perhaps a mature voice is not something a writer acquires. Perhaps it is what becomes audible when a lifelong way of paying attention finally finds its form.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

This is an ambition for three websites.

Together they publish essays, explore the craft of essay writing, and encourage others to engage in the practice. Each serves a different purpose...

esy.ie · The Essayist's Notebook. A personal notebook with public access. A place to record thoughts, notions and realisations as they arrive. Fragments, observations and questions. Nothing more. The notebook is already underway, with several new posts appearing each week.

essayist.ie · Learning the Craft. A record of what I have learned about essay writing. Part reflection, part practical guide, it explores the craft of constructing and delivering essays, and the lessons discovered along the way. Planned launch: before the end of 2026.

essays.ie · Essays. A home for essays that do not naturally belong elsewhere. The more reflective pieces. The longer explorations. The essays that sit outside Marshall on Policy, The Marshall Review, and An Activist's Notebook. The foundation essays are already in place. The next essay, The Espadrilles, is currently emerging through the process that gives essays their value: following a question wherever intellectual honesty leads.

Progress

esy.ie: active and growing. essays.ie: foundation collection established, new essays in development. essayist.ie: planned and expected to emerge before 2027.

Together, the three sites explore not simply essays as a form of writing, but the essay as a way of thinking. David Marshall Sna Sceirí

The best policy writing does not corner politicians with gotcha questions.

It changes the terms of the conversation so that simplistic answers become harder to give.

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

The Israel bonds debate offers a window into one of the central challenges of modern democracy: reconciling legal constraints, moral imperatives and democratic choice.

When I began exploring the efficacy of Amnesty International's petition concerning the sale of Israel Government bonds, I quickly found myself sinking into a quagmire of imperatives, standards, legislation and statutory orders.

Even during the initial research, fact-checking and drafting, the piece expanded from a planned 1,500 words to more than 5,000. Then it became two essays. I split it again, allowing breakout boxes to carry some of the technical detail. Yet it still felt like wading through a bog. And that's something I used to enjoy. So I stopped and let the sediment settle.

Three days later, I sat down at my desk with a blank page and asked myself a simple question: What actually matters here? The answer turned out to be surprisingly short.

1: Ireland's Constitution commits the State to peace, international justice and respect for international law.

2; The Central Bank is legally structured to apply financial law and regulation, not to make independent foreign-policy or moral judgments about states.

3; The Irish Government may believe stronger action is justified, but argues that EU treaty arrangements limit how far a single member state can act alone.

4: EU sanctions policy generally depends on unanimity, meaning one state's position can be blocked by disagreement among the others.

That was it. Everything else seemed to arise from the interaction between those four statements. At that point I realised I was no longer writing about Israel bonds. I was looking at a recurring tension within modern democratic governance: the relationship between legal frameworks, moral imperatives and democratic authority.

Once that became clear, a new essay almost wrote itself.

The insight gained from that detour will now inform my return to the original question: not whether the tension exists, but whether campaigns such as Amnesty International's can play a meaningful role in testing it.

Read the essay https://rvw.ie/the-useful-tension>

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

Starting with a tension and staying with it long enough for something previously invisible to become visible has increasingly become the centre of my writing practice.

The essay linked below is an example of that approach. It begins with work that shaped my belief in the possibilities of dialogue, participation and persuasion, then follows a line of enquiry towards a conclusion I had resisted for many years.

Rather than resolving the tension, the piece attempts to remain with it long enough for its underlying structure to reveal itself.

Published in The Marshall Review: rvw.ie

Read the essay

David Marshall Sna Sceirí

I learned the word decimate in a school history lesson. I remember it well. Later, in an inter-school debating competition, I remember the pleasure of using it myself.

I was arguing that the proposal advanced by the opposing team was not merely damaging to society. It was asking people to participate in their own ruin. Rather like removing stones from the building's foundations in order to strengthen its walls.

Decimate seemed the perfect word.

The practice from which it emerged belonged to the Roman legions. A military unit judged guilty of an offence could be ordered to decimate itself. The punishment was horrifying precisely because it was collective and self-inflicted. One man in every ten was selected and killed by his comrades. The unit itself carried out the sentence.

That is what gave the word its extraordinary power. It did not simply describe destruction. It described a group compelled to become an instrument of its own punishment. Self-harm elevated to public policy.

Few English speakers hear that meaning today.

Ask someone what decimate means and they will probably say “destroy”, “devastate”, or “wipe out”. Dictionaries now largely accept those broader definitions because common usage has long since moved on. Language, after all, follows speakers rather than historians.

Yet something has been lost.

The older meaning carried a flavour that the modern one lacks. It contained ideas of complicity, discipline, participation and sacrifice. A forest may be devastated by fire. A city may be destroyed by war. But a legion decimated itself.

That distinction mattered.

So what should writers do with words like this? If you are writing for specialists, the historical meaning may still survive. But what if your audience hears only the modern sense? Do you continue to defend the older usage in the hope of preserving a fragment of linguistic history? Or do you accept that language changes, surrender gracefully, and move on?

I have chosen the latter.

This is probably the last time I will use the word decimate. Not because I have stopped admiring it, but because the meaning I admire is no longer the meaning most people hear.

So farewell, old friend.

May some future generation rediscover you, and understand why you once seemed such a remarkable word. David Marshall Sna Sceirí