5 ms·
Probably the revised version is "better", but I enjoyed reading the deleted parts. By condensing an essay you can make it more syropy and thus increase the numb
by mdemare 19y ago
Probably the revised version is "better", but I enjoyed reading the deleted parts. By condensing an essay you can make it more syropy and thus increase the number of people who will consider it worth reading. But I think it's doubtful whether you're doing a service for the readers who would have liked the original version.
The same phenomenon is being played out with music and bootlegs, and movies and director's cuts. Most people want the short version, the fans want as much as they can get.
- gnaritas 19y agoNah, it's the lack of all that unsupported unnecessary fluff that makes Paul's writing enjoyable. This is a critical step in good writing, stop trying boring your reader to death and get to the damn point already, and Paul does it well, Steve Yeggi on the other hand must have missed this lesson. If you had to read all that stuff everytime, you may not come to enjoy Paul's writing as much as you do now in the first place. Fans only want more after they've become fans.
- mdemare 19y agoSpeak for yourself. Yegge was never terse, yet he may count me a fan.
- gnaritas 19y agoI didn't say he didn't have fans, some people like all that verbal diarrhea!
- wanorris 19y agoSteve Yegge generally makes unfiltered work for him. PG treats his essays like oil paintings, and keeps working on them over time until he's satisfied with the results. Yegge's "drunken blog rants" are more like sketches -- when they work, the spontaneity is part of the appeal, but they tend to be much more uneven. Neither style is necessarily better than the other, just very different.
- phaedrus 19y agoI agree with your first premise - Paul Graham's writing is enjoyable because it is terse. I can't support your second premise. Just because Steve Yeggi's writing is long, doesn't mean it's full of fluff. It may not be as compact as a PG essay, but Steve Yeggi is also expressing very complex ideas and I think he uses just as many words as he needs to, to get the whole point across.
- gnaritas 19y agoBut it is full of fluff, metaphor after metaphor or personal example after personal example repeatedly hammering at a point he could have gotten across much simpler if he tried. I'm usually so bored a quarter the way through I start skimming looking for some point worth reading. Paul's writing on the other hand is of a much higher quality, doesn't assume the reader is so dense that he needs to keep hammering on the point, and recognizes that I don't care about fluff, but look for the meat. Yeggi thinks every though he has is worth reading, Paul knows better.
- allenbrunson 19y agoi also enjoyed reading the deleted parts. obviously pg is aiming for "terse" in most of his essays. but if he left in a few of the diversions, personal feelings, reactions to others, etc, he would seem more human. fewer people would have the occasional violent negative reactions to him that we've been seeing lately.