Write Simply

> It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.

I think that's virtually meaningless unless you define what is meant by "an idea". The Bible, Qu'ran, the story of Gilgamesh, Homer's Illias,... are all ideas, just the same as famous essays by Hemingway or Benjamin Franklin. Even Proust's In Search of Lost Time with it's epic long sentences is a multitude of ideas regarding involuntary memory, separation anxiety and much more.

Everything PG writes after that hinges on a single imperative: That if you intend for your writing to be read, you must write simple.

The trouble is that his argument doesn't challenge that. There's no reflection on the fact that this is by far an universal principle, or that it, paradoxically, defines the relationship with the reader as if the latter always wants simple, digestible reading at every turn.

Hemingway is famous for his terse and simple writing, attributed to his schooling as a journalist. But he also had a critics who simply despised his literary writing for its terse and uncompromising style. And then there's William Faulkner who had this baroque style with long, endless sentences which dug their heels into Big Emotions, trying to convey them in the most sinuous way possible. Faulkner, just like Hemingway having won the Nobel Prize, found himself the butt of criticism on his writing as well.

Sure, these musings pertain to great literators. PG's point could be relegated to articles and essays instead. Or, unspoken yet more to the point, writing as this ephemeral, intangible idea that disolves and dissappear like vapor clouds the second it is published in the digital realm. Unlike words which are printed in respectable paper journals and glossy magazines.

No, the writing style of PG's essay was also part of this expose. Leveraged by the author to drive a point home. I'm still not sure what that point was exactly. PG being PG, chances are he just wanted nothing more then to make a so-called thought-provoking statement. In that regard, simple writing doesn't automatically make for good writing. The idea, the essence, you're trying to sell still needs to be solid and worth telling. That's where PG's essay, ironically, falls flat.

PG's essay doesn't spark a debate because he writes about an idea, it sparks discussion because of quite the opposite: writing about anything except about writing or why one writes. Now, one can fault PG for not providing context, but as with anything in this digital world, PG publishes on his own websites and assumes that the reader had written his other writings as well to understand what he's trying to get at. That's fine. It just doesn't make for compelling reading if one has to pieces together.

Writing simply and learning how to present things in such a way that anyone can understand has probably been the most valuable skill for my career progression.

I have seen too many cases where technical/domain experts miss this and instead use words that only people who work in the same domain as them would understand. The result is that when they do a presentation at least half the people in the room have no idea what they are speaking about but are too polite to say anything.

I also live in a country where most of the population are not native english speakers and this has allowed me to understand that a lot of people think by using complicated language they sound smarter, which is the furthest possible thing from the truth. In one incident I actually had someone who liked to show everyone how smart he was ask me, if I can help him find a more complicated way/wording to say something in a presentation he was working on so he can sound smarter. My only assumption was that for him people not understanding acted as a giant ego boost. He was PhD, that was also lecturing at one of the local universities. I can only imagine that his students had absolutely no idea what he was talking about most of the time and I am sure he took great pride in it.

In university, back in Canada where I was born I had a similar experience when one of my math teachers started the year off by telling the entire class how he is very proud of his vocabulary. Needless to say on one of the tests he used a word that no one understood. After numerous students asked him the same question he finally got angry and announced to the entire class what the word meant.

Personally I encourage my team to do the following in every work presentation: 1. Pretend you are presenting to a friend or family member who has no idea about the subject matter 2. Any words that would be known by people who are either inexperienced or outside of your expertise should include a definition the first time you use it. It can be written or it can be verbal, but it needs to be there

I've only read first few chapters, but one of the core ideas is, apart from writing simply, to write concisely:

- If you can use one word instead of three to convey same idea, use one.

- Iterate on what you wrote, and ruthlessly eliminate words that don't add value.

It's illustrated with a real example where he crosses out a dozen of phrases from a short text: https://ibb.co/k62CkLR

It sounds extreme but I found this framework very useful e.g. when writing code comments, wiki docs, pull request info etc.

Ah, condescension. The secret ingredient for a fantastic essay.

"On the evening of March 8, we logged out all users from GitHub.com who had logged in prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8. This was done to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions. No user accounts were affected"

I really couldn't simplify much without losing information. Logging out users isn't the same as invalidation of authenticated sessions because this probably revoked access to bots / API calls etc.