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How to Write Usefully
- xvector 7y agoMy English teachers rewarded flowery, verbose writing. Over time I found this unwieldy and now I find myself re-reading my sentences to see what I can delete. It's satisfying, like deleting unused code in a messy codebase. I envy writers who manage to densely pack information in sentences that are beautiful to read.
- rmason 7y agoI experienced the same thing with English teachers. But I had a friend point out that Hemingway (whom we both adored) wrote sentences that were 7 words shorter than normal. Writing short punchy sentences without a single spare word. Steinbeck wrote that way and so did Elmore Leonard. Leonard said he'd get down a first draft and then go back a second time taking words out that weren't necessary. https://www.litcharts.com/blog/analitics/what-makes-hemingway/ https://www.litcharts.com/blog/analitics/what-makes-hemingwa...
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoEssayists may believe that what they're writing is true, but they're not best placed to judge that. Truth requires objective testing and replication, and essays aren't the right tool for that. So it's useful to remember that the point of an essay is persuasion, not truth. Short sentences and clear points are more persuasive even if they're nonsense. The longer your sentences, the more you'll filter out readers with short attentions spans and limited literacy. Which is why terse novels about dramatic situations sell better than florid novels with academic subtexts. It's also why political campaigns like to reduce slogans to soundbites.
- randcraw 7y ago> Short sentences and clear points are more persuasive even if they're nonsense. What you're describing is propaganda -- an emotional appeal that solicits mindless reaction. That's the basest form of communication -- hardly something to espouse as the paradigm for a good essay. As Graham points out, the best essays often are not intended to persuade as much as inform. The essentials of writing that's useful to the reader are facts and logic, leading intuitively to a conclusion that is meaningful and important to the audience. HOW you achieve these ends matters less, be they short sentences or emotional appeals. But illogic has no place in an informative essay. That's the bailiwick of provocateurs, politicians, and propaganda.
- iamacyborg 7y agoWhen you get to the root of it, there's not much to differentiate between something written to inform versus something written to persuade.
- philwelch 7y agoIs there not? I think a big part of the difference might be how defensive one is against a hostile audience. For example, let’s consider that we’re writing about something like the Monty Hall problem. A piece of writing that explains and informs the reader about the Monty Hall problem will describe and work through all of the counter-intuitive logic involved, but it will do so from a position of (a) absolute certainty about the conclusion and (b) a good-faith assumption that disagreeing with that conclusion is due to an innocent mistake in reasoning, which the writer will want to anticipate and patiently address. And this is probably the right approach for the Monty Hall problem, but most of the time you’re writing persuasively, projecting absolute certainty that you are right and anyone who disagrees with you is confused or mistaken isn’t always the best decision, especially when it’s a disagreement over subjective preferences and value judgments. If I was writing an endorsement of a political candidate, I would approach that much differently than I would approach an explanation of the Monty Hall problem. In both cases you do similar things (in terms of presenting clear and explicit reasoning) but there are more differences than similarities.
- brlewis 7y ago> The longer your sentences, the more you'll filter out readers with short attentions spans and limited literacy. And readers who have not yet been persuaded that your writing is worth their time. If long sentences are essential to a point you're making in a persuasive essay for a non-captive audience, use inverted pyramid style and push the long sentences down.
- throwanem 7y agoOne can idolize Hemingway to a fault. Removing the unnecessary is largely what a second draft is for, no matter who's doing the work; concision is a virtue, but to pursue concision above all else risks erring into insufficiency and rendering oneself unable to write in one's own style and voice, rather than in an emulation of someone else's. Voice elevates an informative essay from a dry recitation of facts, offering the reader little of genuine interest, into a conversation in which the reader is able and welcome to participate. Voice also offers interest of its own, which can help sustain a reader through what might otherwise prove intolerable complexities or difficulties in the subject matter of the work. You may, of course, consider this, and consider the virtues of the Hemingwayesque ultimacy of concision, and decide that the latter outweigh the former. I don't agree, but we all ideally write in our own ways. I would, though, ask that you do consider those virtues - and their contrary vices - rather than partake of the blind veneration of Hemingway so common among the rather dim luminaries of modern literature.
- wenc 7y agoAs someone who admired and aspired to Hemingway's parsimononius style of writing in my youth, nowadays I'm starting to back away from it and am growing to be more inclusive other (less concise) styles of writing. I aspired to concision because I believed I wasn't an interesting person and didn't deserve any attention outside of the little I'm able to grab, so I kept my writing pithy in the hopes that I wouldn't have to "take up too much of anyone's time/attention". Unfortunately, too much concision can lead to short pieces that are tiring to read -- your brain has to work harder to fill in the gaps. Sometimes "unnecessary" words are needed to help the reader feel more comfortable. Not everyone is an engineer or a technocrat. Parsimony isn't always a virtue. There's is a place for concision, but I now believe concision is the wrong goal to aim for. Often the real goal is to create an emotional connection, and if it takes a few more words to achieve it (without belaboring the subject), so be it. People -- often teachers -- think good writing is solely about effective communication -- to me, there has never been a wronger conclusion than this.
- clairity 7y agopacking a lot into sentences is entirely different from writing short sentences. for instance, pynchon packs a ton into his sentences, yet they're long and winding at the same time (confusingly so, sometimes). hemingway's sentences are just short, like playing every note in staccato, which in itself can become tiring (i like, but don't love, hemingway).
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoI tend to be too terse.
- grvdrm 7y agoProfessionally this was described to me as: 1. you write like a salesperson 2. you write like a scientist It's hard to please everyone. The vast majority of writing tilts in one direction or another. Very few writers (in any setting) strike the right balance. Very few readers take off their own lenses to attempt to understand the writer's angle. One tool I like using: Grammarly. It's not fool-proof by any means. But it helps point out verbosity and write more clearly by helping me learn when my writing isn't as clear as it can be.
- TimPC 7y agoI experienced this too. I'm trying my best to unlearn it because I'm writing a novel. I'm not so adept with flowery prose as to write literary fiction, so I want to have more practical sentences that have better pacing.
- combatentropy 7y ago> My English teachers rewarded flowery, verbose writing. Same here, and I suspect the same for most people: "due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature" --- http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html Toward the end of high school I found The Elements of Style by accident and it changed my life. Yes, it changed my life! I was always more interested in art than science. So I didn't become a programmer until I was almost 30. What struck me was how similar it was to prose. 1. There are many ways to write a program 2. Your first draft of a program is usually bad, but you can steadily improve it by rewriting it over and over and over. This unglamourous technique is the secret behind good prose too, as Graham points out. 3. As you rewrite it, you find you can do the same thing in half the space. 4. The programs that are most pleasant to use are ones where the programmer first wrote it for himself. Likewise, as Graham said here, a good strategy for useful essays is to write it first for yourself.
- jimbokun 7y agoI completely agree. And there are definitely some programmers whose code and prose are both eloquent and beautiful: https://norvig.com/sudoku.html https://norvig.com/sudoku.html This is my all time favorite programming book, both for the prose and the code within it: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp Interestingly, I find that the set of Lisp programmers also contains many of the best writers about programming: Norvig, Graham, Stallman, McCarthy, Steele, Abelson, Sussman, etc.
- safety-third 7y agoThis is how I do it as well. I usually find inspiration that makes my code much better. My secret sauce is telling others I am debugging it instead of making a new draft. This keeps someone from insisting that my first draft is "good enough." In addition, I design my programs such that I can confidently rewrite important sections. This is OOP encapsulation's main purpose. In practice, everyone writes getters and setters until every object is an ugly struct.
- tpaschalis 7y agoIt's satisfying because it's also surprisingly hard! Like Mark Twain once said "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one."
- teddyh 7y ago> Like Mark Twain once said No he didn’t. It was Blaise Pascal: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
- WhompingWindows 7y agoThey're English teachers, they view language through the lens of literature. If you read Faulkner, you'll find extremely long and verbose sentences. If you read Hemingway or McCarthy, you'll find much more economic and sparing use of words. The problem is outside of literature, readers want knowledge, not pretty language. I think many teachers lead their students astray, as the vast majority of us write for knowledge and not for prettiness.
- hnhg 7y agoI'll say it again, it's a piece of writing that wouldn't warrant any attention if it weren't for the author's status here. I'm halfway through and my brain is stunned by the effort of forcing it down. PG needs a break from writing for a while. I enjoyed his early stuff and I hope he gets a return to form. [edit: it's like he's the George Lucas of writing useful articles for hackers: the early ones were classics but he somehow lost the magic for his follow-up series]
- meekstro 7y agoWould you be kind enough to share any links to your own writing and some of the key factors that improved it. I wish to improve my communication and appreciate that Paul Graham thought hard then freely shared his insights on such a difficult topic for a great deal of people. I've always wondered how and why Geoff Bezos ran Amazon with six page essays and now I think I'm a bit closer to understanding.
- rimliu 7y agoDo you also ask cinema critics to show their own movies, food critics to provide their own food, etc.? One does not necessarily need to be able to _make_ something to be able to _tell_ whether something is good or not.
- austhrow743 7y agoNot even cinema critic, cinema viewer. "yeah I don't really like the Marvel movies, I think they're overrated" "oh? Can you show me your movie so I can see what a good movie looks like?" What a complete and utterly garbage thing to say on that guys part.
- meekstro 7y agoI agree. In hindsight you are completely right. My immediate reaction to the essay was I thought it was a brilliant resource. My gut feeling was that criticism of an educational author's writing on the topic of useful essay writing without stating the why wasn't useful. Asking for the critics own writing was a cheap shot and it was wrong. Sorry OP. In hindsight I should have said "That's an interesting insight would you mind sharing some better educational resources on writing a useful essay." If I'd lent greater attention to the essay than its comments, I would have.
- hooande 7y agoThe topic of useful writing is important. The ideas in this essay may not be surprising or unexpected, but the author does lay out a clear formula (importance + novelty + correctness + strength) that probably isn't obvious to most. It seems to be correct and the concrete list of usefulness criteria is strong. Everything seems to check out. The focus on correctness in this style of essay writing seems like a function of an engineer's thought process. If I write an essay about a vacation at the beach there isn't much of a requirement to be correct about the details. The goal could be to share my perspective or observations, which is more about being honest than being right. I like the formula above, I think it clarifies this style of writing well. I plan to pay attention to it in the future.
- Traster 7y agoThe formula is wrong though. To provide a counter-example - Cunningham's Law >the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer. Sometimes saying something wrong, may actually be more useful. Either because you're clarifying a problem or making a connection or drawing a contrast or showing someone else the path by letting them see your chain of logic.
- randcraw 7y agoI agree that inviting contrarianism can be a useful way to communicate (though it probably isn't the best way to present a convincing / 'useful' argument). But the medium for many essays lacks an interactive forum. Reactive comments from the audience is only a recent phenomenon. Before the net/web (~1990), the essay lived strictly in a broadcast-style medium. Then, the message had to live or die on its own merits. Careless or provocateur authors risked quick dismissal by an annoyed readership or eventual decline into insignificance. And the degenerate devolved form of contrarians, media trolls, didn't yet exist. Halcyon days they were.
- webmaven 7y agoAh, but useful to the writer, or the reader?
- timavr 7y agoControversial point, but PGs writing is F-. It seems a lot of effort goes into sounding smart, rather then delivering information required. Who learned anything from above?
- AlwaysBCoding 7y agoThe model of precision and correctness being opposing forces that increase in strength the more you hone in on one is useful for me and something that I had never put into words before.
- jstimpfle 7y agoSame. It isn't a revelation but I still liked the way the idea was put in words. Most articles I've read have less to takeaway.
- friendlybus 7y agoIt simply isn't true though, they are rarely required together. His example of the location of a city could have been replaced with gps co-ordinates in the place of a descriptive phrase. NASA deals with strength and precision together all the time, it's rare that they are both needed on the same task at the same level. The requirements for precision and strength to be shared in an essay is to construct sentences that are clear and cannot be interpreted in multiple ways and then fill in the descriptive detailing with precise information. Strength takes from distilling multiple possible interpretations down into one clear and correct direction. Precision is about highlighting the qualitative properties and exact quantities of your subject. They don't conflict. They are rarely needed together.
- TimPC 7y agoReading random GPS coordinates in an essay without a map in a has high precision but terrible understanding. While it's highly accurate, it's almost useless to the typical reader who would have difficulty knowing that the GPS coordinate is within Colorado. GPS coordinates are for maps not essays.
- peterwwillis 7y agoPublication bias has the nasty effect of changing what you think. You start writing something because you had something you wanted to say, and then you start proofreading and editing and moving things around, and eventually you realize you're cutting entire paragraphs because your entire position has changed. You're not saying what you intended to say, and you're not sure if it's because what you were going to say was wrong, or you just edited yourself into a completely different essay. I sometimes visualize this by writing one rough draft as fast as I can and save it as "v1". Then I create a "v2" and begin my edits, and I can create more versions as I go if I want. When I feel like I'm finally done (hours/days later) I compare it to v1, and try to figure out how the hell the entire thing became so different. On the "novelty+strength pisses people off" part: you don't have to piss people off to write a good essay. One example of a convincing essay argument is to make it depend on the beliefs of the people you're trying to convince, such that Y can only exist if X is right, and they already believe X is right. They won't immediately run to your new idea with open arms, but they'll have a much more open mind about it. Anyway, there's an entire universe of rhetoric you can employ to break down the barriers to new ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
- jmiskovic 7y agoI've also noticed that effect. When you are motivated to sit down and write something, you have a strong point you want to put to words and elaborate. The more effort you put in, the more thinking you do and more related threads to go down, qualifications to elaborate and so on. You say this is a 'nasty effect', but I'm not convinced it is a negative thing. You started off with a black & white idea and ended up with better grasp of matter. Maybe the edited text isn't edgy and pointed, but it is more mature. Do you consider your v1s better than your v2s?
- philwelch 7y ago> You start writing something because you had something you wanted to say, and then you start proofreading and editing and moving things around, and eventually you realize you're cutting entire paragraphs because your entire position has changed. You're not saying what you intended to say, and you're not sure if it's because what you were going to say was wrong, or you just edited yourself into a completely different essay. That’s kind of the point. Writing isn’t just a way to communicate ideas to other people, it’s also a structured way to work through those ideas yourself.
- techbio 7y agoLonger than the usual PG essay, added my to reading list. I like the exploration of writing by a writer who has likely read more bad writing than I ever will.
- dugditches 7y agoWhile the Internet provides a platform for Essays, as he says, I think maybe a bigger point is it allowing the rise of 'Video Essays'. Where now content creators are turning out 30+ minute videos on a single subject. While in the past it used to be more 'dry' things like History and the like it seems more mainstream subjects are being covered. Movies, cars, current social issues, etc. And just how much you actually get from them. They're often spoken from positions of authority on a subject. And slick editing and video may reinforce their credibility to the viewer. But often they just feel like empty stitched together wikipedia clippings with nice effects and humor sprinkled in to keep the viewer interested. Compared to crafting words and language like this Author tried to convey, you just rely on balance between entertainment & information.
- Jaruzel 7y agoLike TV before it, it's the dumbing down the internet.
- TimPC 7y agoA very small portion of video's are video essays even if content creators are turning out 30m on a single topic. The organization and structure of the argument is completely different. Usually the goal of videos are primarily entertainment and occasionally a secondary goal of being informative. Usually the goal of an essay is primarily being informative with an occasional secondary goal of being entertaining.
- osdiab 7y agoWhile the internet is full of garbage writing, I don't feel like telling people that they shouldn't say anything wrong or potentially unimportant is the right way to go. That's a perfectionist attitude that stifles people's ability to explore, experiment, be wrong, learn, improve, and act. Like learning a language, if you never speak it because you're afraid to say something wrong, you'll never learn. And separately, being enlightened with novel pithy facts isn't the only reason people write things. There's a lot that can't be transmitted in that form, and while I appreciate that style of writing for startup advice or a how-to guide, it's definitely not universally applicable.
- throwawaylolx 7y agoI think an otherwise interesting point is obscured by your construing of a strawman argument: >I don't feel like telling people that they shouldn't say anything wrong or potentially unimportant is the right way to go. That's a perfectionist attitude that stifles people's ability to explore, experiment, be wrong, learn, improve, and act. It is dubious to imply that the author is trying to police what people can say and consequently how they can act: he's explicitly talking about _essays_, a literary form typically used for advancing arguments. By reframing his argument as an attempt at "telling people that they shouldn't say anything wrong," you're arguing against a much less interesting argument and sidestepping the central theme of _essays_ altogether. In other words, I think the claim that good essays must not necessarilly show novelty, correctness, strength, and importance is a much more interesting argument, and, against correctness at least, one can probably find intellectual companionship among early 20th century futurists, dadaists, and later on fascists.
- alexandercrohde 7y agoAgree. Also ironic how this is the top-voted comment on an essay that, itself, spends so much time talking about the inevitability of misrepresentation. I could write an essay on that myself.
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- keiferski 7y agoAs a counterpoint, I'd argue that the "mathematical" approach to good writing is inherently flawed. That is, trying to arrive at the formula for the "best" essay via dialectic (argument) is to miss the forest for the trees. Writing is an art, not a science. Formal logic was developed to display arguments, so if you are trying to be as precise and mathematical as possible, use that instead. Instead, I'd suggest reading the great writers of the past and present (but focus more on the past). Study what works, what speaks to you, what stylistic approach you favor, and so on. As a bonus, you'll learn more about what has been said by other intelligent people and subsequently avoid writing over-confident, ill-informed essays... If you're looking for stellar examples of essay-writing, I personally recommend Jorge Luis Borges and David Foster Wallace. Both manage to write in a manner both erudite and coherent, without seeming too florid or too simplistic. Here are a few samples: - A New Refutation of Time, Borges: https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1947-borges-anewrefutationoftime.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1947-borges-anewrefutation... - The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, Borges: http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.htm... - David Lynch and Lost Highway, Wallace: http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html - Laughing with Kafka, Wallace: https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-... - Consider the Lobster, Wallace: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf Edit: added some more essay links.
- artsr 7y ago> Writing is an art, not a science. I agree with this, but avoiding writing nonsense is science, and not art. So there definitely is a scientific aspect to writing.
- vasilipupkin 7y agothere is a difference between a literary essay and the kind PG is talking about here. PG's essays are more like maybe business commentary than literary essays. Some of these insights apply anyway, to all essays - but don't confuse different types of essays.
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- gandutraveler 7y agoThe other day I was helping friend with an essay and i realized how 12 years in software programming has changed my writing style. Now it seems very awkward to think and write in long paragraphs. It feels more natural to use bullet points for everything.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI know the feeling; when preparing to write a blog post or a presentation I tend to start off with bullet points. Mind you once I have that down I can churn out improbable amounts of text in a relatively short amount of time. The main challenge for me is to stop writing and remove unnecessary text, which is kinda hard to do given how much nuance is in code. I mean I've been thinking of writing a post (and a knowledge sharing session with my mostly C writing, older generation developer colleagues) about modern development and I was already thinking of painting a picture of how things were 10+ years ago.
- abnercoimbre 7y ago> I mean I've been thinking of writing a post (and a knowledge sharing session with my mostly C writing, older generation developer colleagues) about modern development [...] There's a (generally) younger cohort at Handmade Network[0] that might be interested in your essay. I'd encourage you to make an account and post it on a new thread :-) [0] https://handmade.network https://handmade.network
- netcan 7y agoI think this is a very modern thing... because internet. "The medium is the message" applies to writing more than anything. The medium has been rapidly evolving. Average people wrote very little pre-PC, and the contexts are totally different. Much higher rates of output, frequency, etc. Bullet point style is good for information dense messages, provided they are short enough. We do a lot of this now, it's how we "talk" at work. The style isn't new, it's just that many more of us have a use for it today. In the past, it was common in a military context, for example..
- _Nat_ 7y ago> What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. Yeah, essays written for a class on persuasive writing should be persuasive. Because that's what the class is about -- students are supposed to be learning how to express their ideas about how things should be done to, e.g., their boss, coworkers, clients, potential investors, etc.. However, I hope no one's under the misimpression that all writing should be persuasive writing. Schools also teach classes on other types of writing, e.g. creative writing and technical writing.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Yeah, essays written in a class that's focusing on persuasive writing should be persuasive. Because that's what the class is about The five paragraph essay which is typically taught as a foundational expository/analytical writing tool is actually quite poor for analytical writing, and not great for expository writing, but heavily leans on the rule of threes which is a guideline for persuasive communication. > Schools also teach classes on other types of writing, e.g. creative writing and technical writing. K-12 often has creative writing as an elective, and often includes assignments which are superficially intended to be something other than persuasive writing on other contexts, but rarely does much to teach techniques appropriate to writing other than persuasive.
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- mosselman 7y agoI tried enabling reader mode in Firefox to read this page properly, but Firefox didn't offer it in the address bar. So I checked the source of the page and I was surprised to find that this still uses table layouts!
- quantumwoke 7y agoI think there's a well-trodden aphorism that seems apt here: perfection is the enemy of good. The perfectionism that 'pg discusses here seems orthogonal to the goal of useful writing which to an extent has an associated time pressure. I would rather publish often and usefully to achieve the maximum impact on my readers.
- Traster 7y ago>How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. I learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him, but when you do, they're usually right. How is this useful? How do I say things that are true,novel,important. Oh well, only say things that you're sure they're 'worth hearing' - where presumably, worth hearing is defined as being true, novel and important. This seems like quite a solipsistic view of essay writing. If everyone knew how useful their writing was before anyone else read it then the problem he's describing wouldn't exist. No one would choose to publish bad things - the problem is people publish bad things because they don't know they're bad until other people have pointed out why. All this is really doing is arguing for a bias against publishing - have a high threshold, as a result lots of good ideas will go unpublished, but the few that do get published will make you look good. Is that actually a good solution to provide the most value to the people reading, or is that a good solution to maintain your reputation?
- strongbond 7y agoI know several people who keep silent until they can say something clever, and frankly, in most group situations they stand out as being slightly weird. Keeping your intellectual powder dry is just not a socially 'giving' behaviour. What's wrong with saying something that's not clever? Within a group, it might send the conversation off in a delightfully unanticipated direction. There's more to it all than always being right. Or clever.
- philwelch 7y agoThere’s a difference between interpersonal social behavior and publishing written work, though.
- brlewis 7y agoYes, that's why the paragraph after the one under discussion starts out, "Translated into essay writing...". So the paragraph discussed in this thread is about interpersonal social behavior.
- Kiyumars 7y agoAt first I thought pg implied you can't publish anything that you aren't sure is correct. That surprised me, since he often publishes 'minimal viable' first versions of his essays and then expands on them later (unless I am wrong on this). But perhaps a simplistic initial draft is not the same thing as a badly written, incorrect one.
- mochialex 7y agoDitto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score for usefulness. What is the fourth component?
- iainmerrick 7y agoNovelty.
- pzqmpzqm 7y agoThe first time I read Zero to One by Peter Thiel, I was a bit miffed. Stupid shit stated poorly. The second time, inartful puffery stated overly plainly. The third time, individual brilliance stated clearly. Many replies here would do well to read, re-read, and re-re-read with an introspective mindset. This is perhaps the best quality material I have seen from pg for quite some time. Its clarity is brilliant and the thing I liked most was the second, and to me unexpected section, full of the reasons haters gonna hate. I speak only for myself, and this is a throwaway, so nothing personal is at stake. This is a very lucid and precise examination of the fine controls at stake in writing. Their natural tension, the details of qualification. In my opinion, which may be trash, who knows, this will be cited for years to come because it is, in fact, true.
- rimliu 7y agoSometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
- pzqmpzqm 7y agoSometimes a banal reply is just a banal reply.
- keiferski 7y agoThe ideas in Zero to One are not new and can be summarized in a few paragraphs. As with basically every other book/essay/speech written by a financially-successful person, it is over-valued simply because its author is good at making money. That said, it is certainly better than your typical business book - but that isn't saying much.
- pzqmpzqm 7y agoWe will agree to disagree, I suppose. For you things are simple, and for me they are not. For me, some thinking in Thiel’s book was absolute heresy hiding in plain sight. I suppose we could argue over your concept of over-valued, but I have no interest in doing so.
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- sixhobbits 7y agoThe end notes aren't referenced in the text right? I haven't seen the window/balcony quote before - would be interesting to know which part of the text it links to specifically.
- r3vrse 7y agoConvey a singular point with intent. Below is first paragraph rewritten. Just my 2¢. --- Essays should be persuasive. But we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful. Useful writing makes a strong claim without resorting to falsehoods. It is more useful to say that Pike's Peak is in the center of Colorado than somewhere within. Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. Useful writing is bold and true. It tells people something important, that they might not have known, without resorting to manufactured surprise or equivocality. This is formative of fundamental insights. Any idea will not be novel to all, but may still have impact for the many. In argument: be correct, be important, be strong. This will ensure usefulness.
- iainmerrick 7y agoIt is more useful to say that Pike's Peak is in the center of Colorado than somewhere within. This kind of thing is taking terseness too far, I think. If I’m not immediately familiar with Pike’s Peak it takes me a moment to unpack your meaning, but I immediately understood the more verbose explanation in the original.
- Kye 7y agoYep. People often confuse understanding audience with verbosity. Waffling and context both add word count. edit: I could reduce this to "Waffling and context both add word count." but then: 1: It's not clear I agree with you and 2: Triplets--like the three sentences I wrote there--are an artistic device that improve clarity and help prose flow.
- mozey 7y ago> Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but in this case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble. If you know you're an expert on some topic, you can freely admit when you learn something you didn't know, because you can be confident that most other people wouldn't know it either This is an excellent point. I'd much rather work with (and aspire to be) someone that knows when they don't know, than someone that has all the answers.
- lidHanteyk 7y agoYou made a fresh account to advertise a billionaire's printed collection of bullshit. I encourage you to re-read your comment a few more times until you understand how your words come across to others.
- DrNuke 7y agoI can agree to some extent and that’s why I’m doing tenproblems.com ; good academic writing can be seen nowadays as the best shot we have at bonafide or not deceitful, at least, discussions. It should really be made accessible to the general public as a form of liberal education and to whomever realizes that a broader liberal perspective helps their own writing in the vocational public arena.
- Edmond 7y agoYou can start by not using the word: "Usefully" :)
- heyyyouu 7y agoNot only is it a horrible word it's not even accurate in this context -- it's modifying "To Write" which is the infinitive verb, which really is the action of the writing, not the result, which is what the author actually wants to convey. Normally this wouldn't bug me so much but on an essay about effective writing....urgh.
- ahsans 7y agoI've always found PG's essays to be incredibly intriguing. I'm working in a startup, and everything he says is just very insightful about running one. I hope that PG shares more about growing a company that's running on an experimental business model. This is one of his other masterpieces. There is a certain art of communicating and he's sharing that with the world for everyone to learn. Not many people share their experiences and miscellaneous things in detail. I for one am thankful that PG still writes and I hope that he continues.
- friendlybus 7y agoMasterpeice?
- bovermyer 7y agoThere are many ways to write, and many reasons to write. Be careful that you do not take one person's advice as the only way to write.
- say_it_as_it_is 7y agoPG speaks of writing usefully while not writing well. Many of his sentences are phrases. The subject of his sentence is often unclear. He begins sentences with the preposition, "But". Yet, his writing remains useful. I'd rather the latter than the former if I had to choose, but considering the volume that he writes, it's surprising that he hasn't put effort into writing well. He just doesn't care to improve his work.
- cneurotic 7y agoEntering pedantic mode: "But," in Paul's usage, isn't a preposition. And starting sentences with prepositions isn't considered "incorrect" by most grammarians[0]. Or even bad style. If it's good enough for the Bible[1], it's probably good enough for you. [0]https://wordcounter.net/blog/2016/10/26/102560_can-you-start-a-sentence-with-but.html https://wordcounter.net/blog/2016/10/26/102560_can-you-start... [1]https://biblehub.com/nlt/genesis/31.htm https://biblehub.com/nlt/genesis/31.htm
- kasey_junk 7y agoI’m certainly no grammarian or even much of a writer, but the Bible seems a particularly odd piece of writing to use as a guide. It’s been translated to the nth degree, is ancient & frequently obtuse on purpose...
- philwelch 7y agoTranslations of the Bible, at least in historically Christian cultures, are usually treated as authoritative examples of proper written usage.
- normalnorm 7y agoNo they aren't.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- contingencies 7y agoNiven's First Law of Writing: Writers who write for other writers should write letters. - Larry Niven, science fiction author (1989) Blind monkey at the typewriter. - Robert Burnham Jr., Astronomer (1983) We'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality. - Ursula K. Le Guin The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do. - Donald Barthelme There can be no reliable biography of a writer, 'because a writer is too many people if he is any good'. - Andrew O'Hagan Summary of advice from writers: Advice from writers is useful, and not only about naming. Writers have been at it for centuries; programming is merely decades old. Also, their advice is better written. And funnier. - Peter Hilton ... from https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup (Edit: One of PG's main points here is succinctly summarized by this other pithy taoup quote: Lest men suspect your tale untrue, keep probability in view. - John Gay (1727))
- soneca 7y agoAren't these quotes about fiction writing? Do you think they apply to essay writing as well? I don't think I got your point with this selection of quotes, if you don't mind explaining.
- contingencies 7y agoThe article, nominally on 'good (essay format) writing', was an example of #1. We here illustrate #2 wonderfully (a quip on both communicative fallacy and the human condition). #3 is aspirational, but also puts purely functional writing (without art) in its place. #4 concerns perhaps pathfinding as purpose, in creative intellectual work. #5 suggests monodimensionality as a defining quality of poor writers. #6 ties all of the above in its application to programming.
- soneca 7y agoThanks for taking the time to explain. I think I do understand it now, but I do disagree. I don't think #1 is talking about the same type of writing that the OP, I don't think it applies at all actually. #3 seems to imply that there functional and art are competing types of writing, which I also disagree. They are different things, for different purposes, for different reading experiences, created differently. The same with the general idea of your comment.
- oli5679 7y agoI also found this summary of the writing process quite interesting, by Tyler Cowen: https://www.writingroutines.com/tyler-cowen/ https://www.writingroutines.com/tyler-cowen/
- firatcan 7y agoHello guys, I don't know if it's right place to ask this, but do you guys have any other resources that I can learn how to write great essays. Because I have started to write essays at our startups blog which is called www.jooseph.com . It is basically playlists for learning. This resources would be really helpful for me to create a list for how to write great essay and also teach myself to how write great essays. Thanks in advance
- CaptArmchair 7y agoYou want to read Umberto Eco's seminal "How to write a thesis". Not quite the same as an essay. But it does contain tons of good stuff on writing.
- firatcan 7y agoThank you for your suggestion :)
- madacol 7y ago> Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more fundamental. I now know what I subconsciously already knew. I like readings that are Useful
- xiphias2 7y ago,,It's easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. '' What's funny is that the last dataset that Google built for evaluating dialogues has exactly these 2 metrics: correctness and specificity.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- seemslegit 7y agoA true test of good writing is the test of time, the following for example was written 15 years ago and remains relevant: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
- vasilipupkin 7y agoWow, I’m not impressed with this at all It’s obvious to anyone what the ways are in which hackers and painters are completely different. Does anyone really need to write lots of vacuous commentary on this ? On the other hand, the ways in which they are similar are actually interesting to think about.
- Cartonju 7y agoWriting an academic essay means fashioning a coherent set of ideas into an argument. Because essays are essentially linear—they offer one idea at a time—they must present their ideas in the order that makes most sense to a reader. Successfully structuring an essay means attending to a reader's logic.
- luord 7y agoInterestingly, I saw an example of the phenomenon of people getting mad at the certainty of an essay in this very site, a few days ago. Someone was telling the author that he would achieve more if he phrased his point in a more "polite" way, just because the certainty of the writing made the critic mad. Thankfully, the author was here in the comments responding, and he didn't budge. That interaction was very refreshing for that very reason: The author was right, knew he was right, someone didn't like that the author knew he was right, but the author remained steadfast.
- metalliqaz 7y agoDrop us a link my man.
- jarnagin 7y agoHere it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22372005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22372005
- mrandish 7y agoGood call. That's an excellent example of Paul's idea in action. In calling that OP's style rude, respondents are really equivocating on the OP's central point. The OP is demonstrating Paul's 'Strength' concept by boldly asserting "all encrypted email is not fit for purpose" in an unequivocal way. The respondents seem to agree in part but disagree at the edges and want the OP to accept qualifiers.
- soneca 7y agoWell,I can say that I did learn from this essay. I will start writing more, the freedom of writing without having to publish is as obvious as it's a novelty for me.
- syndacks 7y agoThe title should be How to Write [an Essay] Usefully. This blog post is NOT about writing in general. It's not about the craft of writing, or the many varied types of writing (fiction, memoir, biography, essay, marketing blog, etc). Instead, it's a formula that Mr. Graham gives the reader: >I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay. For a good essay, maybe. For writing in general, no. It's formulaic, which may very well be a horrible approach depending on the context.
- abrax3141 7y agoSaying that you should write useful essays isn’t really saying anything. Presumably you should only do anything that’s useful. (Which is not to say that everyone always does so.) Being useful is a less stringent requirement than being persuasive, so it’s actually less ambitious, not more so.
- soneca 7y agoFor me it said a lot. Because he doesn't stop at the title, it's not a tweet, he goes on to properly explain what he consider usefulness and how to achieve it. And the idea that I should aim to being useful and not persuasive is pretty powerful to me. I do think is more ambitious to be useful in the way the described than just persuasive.
- caligarn 7y agoIs Paul unfamiliar with what makes good academic writing? He starts by digging into academic writing, but I am not sure he knows how it functions and what it functions to do. Good and great academic writing pushes the envelope on theories and frameworks and tends to be the repository for new ideas that people like Paul use to make sense of the world. A case in point is Clayton Christensen. It's in the forges of his profession and writing practice that his Innovator's Dilemma was born. Academic writing may not be accessible and easy to read for outsiders, and tends towards a high degree of density. But that's the task of journalists, business people, educators, and essayists etc. to translate and apply it to the real world.
- rdlecler1 7y agoFormer academic here. I disagree. Academic writing has evolved to demonstrate that you are (1) an insider and (2) to obfuscate your ideas so that peer reviewers are less likely to challenge you.
- TimPC 7y agoI think this varies a lot by subject. Certain fields reward ambiguity and vagueness quite heavily. Good academic writing tends to be the exception rather than the rule. This may be true of essays as well as good writing is quite rare. I think the criticism is less about accessibility and more about the general trend towards uselessness of academic writing in a lot of fields of academia.
- alexandercrohde 7y agotl; dr: 1. Sets the topic of "What is a good essay?" 2. Asserts that correctness is necessary, but not sufficient condition for a good essay. 3. Illustrates 2 by pointing out that by increasing vagueness, complete correctness is always possible. Characterizes correctness/precision as opposing forces. 4. Adds two more criteria for a good essay - telling people something important, and that they don't know 5. Adds the essential caveat that things we know subconsciously may be worth restating [crucially, as points 1-5 we all certainly subconsciously knew] 6. Adds a fourth dimension to a good essay: "as unequivocal as possible" [aka strength] 7. Highlights the inherent tradeoffs in satisfying these conditions. Increasing one dimension may reduce audience size. 8. Details an simple algorithm for only writing important/true things -- reviewing/revising one's own ideas heavily before publishing (up to 100 times) 9. Proposes a technique to find important topics: by examining the pool topics one cares about 10. Proposes a technique to find novel topics: By examining topics that you've thought about a lot [and surprised yourself with when you found a connection] 11. Suggests "strength" [6] comes from thinking well and skillful use of qualifiers. 12. Adds another quality to what makes a good essay -- simplicity - 13. Proposes that good essays (by this formula) are particularly likely to make people mad 14. Identifies one cause of anger is that some widely-held incorrect beliefs an essay calls out are likely to be cherished beliefs 15. Mentions the strength component of very precise writing (as well as brevity) can come across as incredibly confident, and exacerbate the ruffling of feathers 16. Proposes that being misrepresented is particularly likely with this essay style, and isn't avoidable generally, but doesn't think one should worry too much about disingenuous misinterpretation. - 17. Advises aspiring essayists to relax the constraint of breadth-of-audience/topics. Suggests publication isn't a necessity. 18. Provides some hopeful thoughts on the future of essays
- jfarmer 7y agowe all spinoza now
- alexandercrohde 7y agoObservations. This is one of my longest tl; drs, particularly for a short essay. This to me signals high content ratio (low compressibility). As somebody who tried for years to get people online to pay attention to my essays, I am not super confident that we have good content-discovery mechanisms for essays online [except video essays, which seem to thrive]. Thus I don't take this essay as personally relevant, as I am not personally convinced that a good essay written by an unfamous person, would warrant enough attention to justify the rigorous revision process. I notice PG chooses to view the essay through an artistic/historic lens that puts him in the minority. It seems to me he strives very hard to stay above the primal desires that dominate the internet-attention-economy. A very tough challenge.
- wellpast 7y ago> How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this ... ... trick is not to say anything unless he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him, but when you do, they're usually right. I wish I could do this. I have to vocalize bad ideas at times & almost with surety to draw out all of the opposition so as to whittle the idea down to sharp and solid -- and to make it robust against the array of slings it could possibly face. I do not know how people can go through a dialectic process like this in their own silent mind. Or if anyone truly does. Or if they do, if this process trends toward "safe-ish" ideas only.
- irchans 7y agoI loved that essay :)
- crimsonalucard 7y agoAnother type of writing that happens a lot especially on HN that is better than essay writing is dialogue. You get immediate feedback on what you failed to make clear and what points you missed because your intuition skipped over it, or if you're genuinely wrong. Still even in dialogue, arguments become circular because a lot of dialogue is selectively interpreted and misinterpreted at a subcncious level. I was recently introduced to a way of writing that makes all your points unequivocally clear. It may not lend to enjoyable reading but it makes your stance and point solid and clear. I post the dialogue below and while there's a lot going on (not relevant to this post, it's a debate about how function composition is a central feature to functional programming) in that dialogue the main point is that it evolves into a different format at the end to make things completely clear you can see the evolution just by scanning the conversation (especially near the end): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290188
- chadlavi 7y agoc'mon Paul, get an https cert
- friendlybus 7y agoThis reads like a list of bullet points the author dreamed up that morning. I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest in communicating to the anonymous internet as the self-interested writer taps a pen on his computer screen. A better way for this writer to succeed would have been to wrap his list of "rules" around a problem for a character, institution or team of people. Placing these imagined rules in story through a daily work schedule at the 9-5 software office job would greatly improved it's readability. Bob works at Innitech and he needs to create an essay on the latest doodad the boss is craving to provide to his superiors. Bob's needs to provide precision only when it is necessary because of [humorous anecdote about engineering culture]. Jane works at InGen and needs to provide an essay on a C++ based linux app that rotates raptor eggs or whatever. This rule X covers the strength she needs to convey in her essay and this is how her client presentation will be improved by it. The rule on clarity of writing is how she can help her co-workers with accurate, clear information. The author would engage a broad set of interests and the reader can quickly digest the information that matters to them because everybody understands the story format. The author could put down his morning coffee and instead describe part of the story to his wife or secretary and see the reaction of someone outside the field responding to what could be an interesting topic. We are left with mechanical writing that has to be laboriously deconstructed and reconstructed in the reader's mind as context that applies somewhere in their life. Nobody is quite sure when, where, why or how they are going to be writing an essay, but my golly they are prepared with a bullet point list of rules to do so.
- throwanem 7y agoConversely, anyone who already does write essays almost certainly already knows what purpose they serve and how to pursue it. Or, if they don't, that's almost certainly because they are new to the form and haven't yet grasped it firmly. (On the question of whether Graham, in particular, despite being not at all new to the form, has likewise not grasped it firmly, "further affiant sayeth naught"...) edit: Naught save that perhaps having a guarantee of an audience, as HN's commentariat furnishes Graham, may not be ideal as a means of fostering development in the skill of writing. If you're going to be read and discussed regardless of merit, how do you know merit when you achieve it? How do you avoid mistaking the contingent for the essential? How do you refine your craft in the absence of meaningful feedback?
- sweis 7y agoThis is brilliant unintentional parody.
- iamcurious 7y agoAnother essay about the importance of essays. Another succinct lisp. pg seems to be cycling back to something. Maybe we should pay special attention to the next batch of yc's investments.
- danenania 7y agoThis reminds me of the saying "don't speak unless you can improve upon the silence" (apparently attributed to many sources, but most commonly Jorge Luis Borges). The world would certainly be less noisy if we all followed that one. I've always found this idea helpful when anxious or unsure of myself in social situations. A lot of the nervousness comes from the pressure to "say the right thing" and make a good impression, but that very pressure tends to ensure that I won't say anything of value (often quite to the contrary!), so I'm better off keeping my mouth shut, or speaking very little, until I relax and start thinking of truly 'useful' things to say naturally. And if it doesn't happen, that's ok--I'm fine with being the quiet guy. It can be applied in many other areas as well. It's amazing how much you can usually improve a visual design, a piece of writing, or probably any other creative work just by repeatedly going through and removing or revising anything that you have even the slightest doubt about.
- gist 7y ago> "don't speak unless you can improve upon the silence" Sounds like one of those things that is meant to keep people in their place and/or make them feel less worthy or as a put down. > A lot of the nervousness comes from the pressure to "say the right thing" I can tell from your bio you are much younger than I am so I will offer this advice to you as 'an older guy' (note I did not say 'dude' either). Not only will you care less about that when you get older but you will find that people very generally will be drawn to you more if you don't appear to be concerned about what comes out of your mouth (within reason of course and depending on the precise circumstances meaning sure there are cases where you don't want to just say or do anything).
- sillysaurusx 7y agopeople very generally will be drawn to you more if you don't appear to be concerned about what comes out of your mouth 32yo here. In my experience, the opposite seems to be true. (I've been dragged to that conclusion despite wanting to believe otherwise.) More precisely, it might be true that people will be drawn to you more if you don't appear to be concerned with what comes out of your mouth. But the climate in 2020 is night-and-day difference from 2009-era. I think the shift was so subtle that we might not have noticed. It's true that as one gets older, one generally cares less about such things though. It was just an interesting and surprising change. Five or so years ago, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you.
- DanielBMarkham 7y agoI don't know. I get what pg is saying but I feel like he's missing some huge points here. I find that emotionally-laden content with overly-specified points combined with extreme surety sells better than more intellectual content that leaves many questions open to the reader. I find that in my own writing, over the years I'll take the same subject and move slowly from generalisms to specifics, and that *the process of reading, writing, and thinking about the generalisms are what drive the eventual specificity an confidence. I also find that writing and editing is itself thinking, that many times I don't slowly advance towards a goal until I've flailed around at the edges for a while. (Which he says as well, I think) Being wrong a lot in public helps to be eventually be right. There are things you'll never see unless you establish feedback mechanisms and run through them several times. There's a popular idea among some intellectuals that most books don't deserve to exist. I understand and mostly agree with that; there's been a ton of books that are supposed to say something that don't. There's also a ton of essays that show a writer wondering around in a field, circling around some idea they can barely express and how no idea how to understand. I'm okay with all of that. In fact, I think it's a good thing. I might not read any of it, but we need lots of people thinking about important things and trying to work through the issues. That's going to mean breaking a lot of these rules (or scoring low on the multiplied metric). Don't get me wrong, I like the metrics and they're a goal of mine. But you shouldn't write for other people, you should write for yourself. Otherwise you'll spend a lot of time worrying about what other people say about you. Write for yourself, figure out what's important to you, then work through becoming more and more specific as you grow. You don't play tennis by watching the scoreboard, you play by hitting the ball and engaging in the game. Likewise while you want to score high on these metrics, you've got to spread your intellectual wings and grow some. Otherwise it's just somebody talking to himself in an interesting manner. That might make a great thing to consume, but how useful is it actually? tl;dr it's better to write a lot, continue to score low on all of this as long as you're learning. Much better than scoring high and never changing.
- rdiddly 7y agoI challenge you to ignore previous history and reputation, and evaluate this essay in isolation and according to the very principles it lays out. Do we agree with the apparent presupposition that this person has valuable instruction to give us on writing? Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score for usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, but nonetheless true.
- gist 7y agoNoting also that from my quick reading (note the qualifier there btw) I am not seeing the issue of having people review the essay mentioned. Most people not only don't have this luxury but we also don't know the contributions that those reviews have made (or corrections) to the essay. To me (note the qualifier to lessen the impact there) writing is immediate and driven by emotion. To much time lessens the ability to say what you really think and having others review what you wrote even more so.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nonbirithm 7y agoI was thinking about the same thing yesterday. I noticed I had a bunch of unconscious processes when writing things that are meant to be read publicly, so I started writing down the reasons. Eventually, I wrote this sentence. "It seems that because many people are raised with the imperative to 'stand up for themselves,' it turns into a need to become argumentive when faced with an opposing viewpoint." The "briars" that pg mentions happened to me when I reread this sentence. I was essentially assuming too many things about the general population, and also trying to contrast this assumption that people are raised to be argumentive with my own mindset where I try very hard not to argue about anything. Every time I write something like this, I picture the first thing an HN commenter would say in response. "Well, what about X?" or "You assert X, but here's evidence that disproves this," or especially "What are the alternatives?" Reading lots of HN comments helps with this. The issue is trying not to seem overly assertive like pg suggests: putting in quantifiers like "maybe" or "perhaps" to give room for error instead of coming off universally saying "X is Y." When I imagine the fictional HN commenter's response, if the statement itself still seems fine, that response is usually the first thing I add to end of the comment prefixed by "On the other hand". I feel like for me this is because I can't take criticism too well so I try to imagine all the reasonable criticisms people might come up with first and then criticize myself with them preemptively. Or, writing about personal experiences - facts, of which my personal telling is unique - instead of writing about how thing X or Y ought to be in the world. Especially with personal experiences I believe they can be useful without having to use them as evidence of a larger argument, which opens me up to the risk of being flat-out wrong.
- thanhkitt 7y agoX
- mrmonkeyman 7y agoThis post could be reduced by 90% itself. Very low signal here.
- miguelrochefort 7y agoI found this lecture about effective writing to be very useful: LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively (Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing Program) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
- lliamander 7y agoSomething I tend to see in online arguments, here and elsewhere, is the tendency to throw everything at the other person and see what sticks. I've been guilty of it myself. The result is a wall of text that few will read and will contain many points that are easy to knock down, poorly worded, or irrelevant. Now, I try to stick to one point, if possible, that I feel I can articulate well and defend.
- vinliao 7y agoThis remind me of a quote: "if you're saying ten things, you're not saying anything."
- nazgulnarsil 7y agoA useful concept is decision leverage. As in, notice when you're expending effort on things that don't have any.
- wildermuthn 7y agoAn unpersuasive essay is never useful. While I don’t think PG’s logical mindset would dispute this fact, I do wish his essay explored more pointedly the tension between persuasiveness and usefulness. His essay has a hint of despair: that it is impossible to persuade most people, and that the minority of humanity that are open to being persuaded (i.e., to learning something novel) are precisely the kind of people who are too intellectually rigorous to be influenced by rhetoric. Thus, persuasive writing is a waste of time? Not a week goes by where I am persuaded of something that is true, that I had not previously accepted as true because... well... because I had not yet been persuaded. PG isn’t really arguing that persuasion is unimportant. He is trying to persuade us that persuasion, as a rhetorical art, is a fools errand. And to give him credit, he uses the very method of persuasion in his essay that he promotes: unvarnished condensed truth. “People believe whatever they want to believe, so you might as well tell them the truth bluntly, accurately, and simply. Even though they won’t listen to you, you’ll be better off for it. And who knows, if you reach 10 other people it will have been worth it. See the single starfish thrown back into the ocean? It mattered to her.” Having said all that, I’m inclined to agree with PG, because almost no one will change a belief they already hold because of an essay. There’s a good book called “Changing Minds” that explores why people change their beliefs, and very low on a long list is intellectual insight. High on the list is what your peers believe and what beliefs serve your self-interest. It takes a heart of a hero to believe something no one else believes, especially when such a belief requires you to act against your own welfare. The most useful essays are those that change lives. The sweet spot is to attack those areas of life that people tend to not have a formed opinion about. And this is where PG’s genius lives: at the edge of technology, where few live, let alone believe. That’s where he is at his best. I for one would devour and re-devour an essay about privacy, or AGI, or VR, or even about Twitter. Here’s hoping that this is PG’s opening salvo in more essays that are as powerful as this one, but as relevant to startups as his earlier writings. As he wrote: there is still much left unwritten and undiscovered!
- wcr3 7y agoHow to Climb Safely, by H. Dumpty
- lngnmn1 7y agoTrying to surpass Arthur Schopenhauer with advice on writing is a bit too arrogant, but not for pg. I also like obligatory mentioning of rtm as a role model. Even since the days of arc.arc rtm is the driving force. As for writing - some selected Upanishads and Buddha's sutras still have no equal. It is a written communication in the highest form. And yes, it is that simple.
- dvdsgl 7y agoBefore I make some caustic remarks, I’d like to say that I think pg is a curious, genuine, and beneficent person. I am not trying to troll or to be cruel, but rather to give a negative but sincere response, as contrast, in a community that tends to adulate pg. Reading this essay was like kissing a person you didn’t know died six hours ago—you expect warmth, but instead, your vivid lips collide with a cold, bloodless, unresponsive substance. This is tedious stuff. Not one hint of humor, no detectable pulse. Pedestrian truths expressed in the dullest possible language. Lifeless. For an essay that starts with the question “What should an essay be?”, I hope not to read many more essays like this. The fact that this boring essay is so popular here lowers my opinion of HN.
- vogtb 7y agoA lot in common with Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing [1] which was previously on HN. [2] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/24/elmore-leonard-rules-for-writers https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/24/elmore-leonard... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16422686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16422686
- tchaffee 7y agoThe feeling I am left with after reading the essay is that the author is more interested in being right in an "I've won the debate" kind of way, than he is interested in being useful. And that the author admires his own writing. The most useful writing shows more of a willingness to be vulnerable and to share the human condition. As opposed to reaching for a filter that makes one always correct, motivated by "a horror of saying anything dumb". Ironically, a detailed essay around that horror - so strong it often silences you - might contain more useful truths than this essay. And useful essays are not limited to the novel ideas the author focuses on. Considering the author's background, it's predictable but also understandable to see a focus on novel ideas. But that's an unnecessarily restrictive focus. The art of writing essays has already demonstrated much wider possibilities. That's not to say the simplistic formula the author gives won't improve your writing. It's reasonable to briefly consider. Just that it has limitations, and a peculiar and very specific motivation when compared to writing that is more useful and lasting. So also consider less flex, less patting one's self on the back, and perhaps even saying something dumb. If you want inspiration, two concrete examples off the top of my head are David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers.
- rossdavidh 7y agoOddly, coming from an author who has written so many essays which I find incredibly useful and interesting, this essay I found not especially useful, and not especially interesting.
- techiferous 7y agoI found it both useful and interesting. To each their own, I guess.
- grappler 7y agoDitto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score for usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, but nonetheless true. Cue the page ripping scene from Dead Poets Society... PERRY: Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered, and two, how important is that objective. Question one rates the poem's perfection, question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining a poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter. Keating gets up from his desk and prepares to draw on the chalk board. PERRY: If the poem's score for perfection is plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness. Keating draws a corresponding graph on the board and the students dutifully copy it down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHORRHXtyI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHORRHXtyI :)
- Attained 7y agoThe writer does not mention eliminating complex grammar, and uses pronouns a lot. I find using pronouns greatly dilutes meaning and efficiency for non-native English speakers and requires more attentive reading even for native English speakers. The writer is not using simple direct language in my opinion, and being both simple and direct are critical for useful writing.
- kashyapc 7y agoOn the essay form, I don't yet see a mention of the excellent Essays of E. B. White[1]. Yes, the same one from 'Strunk and White' of The Elements of Style. Two essays that I still vividly remember from the book (both were written around 1940s): (1) Coon Tree (2) Death of a Pig These are indeed essays with an "an odor of durability", as White puts it while he ruminates in the preface about what he was considering to publish. Get the entire book[1], his writing reeks with humanity. [1]https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-white/ https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-wh...
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