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Rules of good writing (2007)

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Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#51

Post by riwsky »

mdorazio wrote: post #46
djoldman wrote: post #6

> Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences. Yes. (Hemingway).

This is great advice if you want to write like Hemingway . Most of the great authors are not so sparing with their words, though. And I often find that people who excessively prune their writing end up with quite generic paragraphs that seem like they were written for elementary school children. I've personally found a better tip for writing is to not use two "cheap" words when one "expensive" one will convey your me…

Most users of written English are not the Great Authors, though, nor are they writing literature. Hemingway is a much more appropriate model for business communication than is, say, Wallace. Though for attention-grabbing copy, you’d probably want Morrison’s or Nabokov’s dynamism. And if you’re code-golfing, nothing beats a Borges, Chiang, or Cusk.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#53

Post by MangoToupe »

riwsky wrote: post #50
MangoToupe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how boring literature (or really most sorts of writing) would be if we optimized it around theories of linguistic efficiency rather than taste. I'm left entirely unconvinced.

Anyone optimizing for some specific taste already has an implicit theory of linguistic efficiency. Most writers aren’t optimizing for anything at all, and they have no taste, and their writing is boring, and it wastes my time, and I hate it.

> Anyone optimizing for some specific taste already has an implicit theory of linguistic efficiency

I don't follow. How do you connect taste and efficiency in your perspective? Efficiency in what terms? They seem almost unrelated from my perspective.

> Most writers aren’t optimizing for anything at all, and they have no taste, and their writing is boring, and it wastes my time, and I hate it.

Wasting time is probably my favorite reason to read. Cannot disagree more.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#54

Post by tomhow »

gammarator wrote: post #47
tomhow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He became well-known via his writing in the early-mid 00s; first his book about Lisp then his essays that became popular on Slashdot. His investing happened as a consequence of his writing.

His investing happened as a consequence of having available capital (and, certainty, forward-looking ideas about how to seed startups). As to the writing, I think its influence (in terms of ideas) makes people overrate its stylistic quality. An enjoyable critique: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

pg writes [1]:

YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis came up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were seniors. Since they'd come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee.

The talk he gave was How To Start A Startup [2]. The reason he was asked to give that talk was not because he had money, but because he was a Harvard CS alum who had built/sold a successful startup then spent the subsequent few years sharing his knowledge/ideas via books and essays.

The reason Steve knew about pg was that he had read/liked his Lisp book and read/liked his essays on Slashdot.

Money was a necessary but not sufficient condition for him to start YC. Nobody would have applied to YC if not for his books and essays.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits

[2] https://paulgraham.com/start.html

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#55

Post by lutusp »

"Rules of good writing", really? The article's title ironically commits a lexical gaffe by presenting its topic as a value instead of a choice.

Whether the title draws more readers than "Rules of clear writing" is a separate topic, one dealing less with principles and more with marketing.

Strunk & White, the source for most of the article's ideas, isn't mentioned. We may bury the past, but we can't deny it.

I recently boiled my copy of Strunk & White until little remained. At the bottom of the pot was "Make every word count."

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#56

Post by GGByron »

"The main technique is keeping things simple."

Orwell also knew to avoid clichés, and lo, he made a much stronger argument for simplicity in his essays. "Keep it simple" means nothing by itself and Adams does not explain the concepts he hints at or even call them by their proper names.

None of the above would seem obnoxious had he actually cited Orwell.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#57

Post by kragen »

treve wrote: post #19
raincole wrote: post #9

Surely. Then you check Paul Graham, whose writing is influential in the world of startup, and find most of them are very long. Arguably unnecessarily so. Perhaps it's a tech startup thing? After all programmers are not famous for their refined literary taste. And then you check the few LitMag that people care enough to pay for even when the content is available for free, like Clarkesworld or BCS. Then you find senten…

PG is not influential because of his writing though. His name is what gets his writing circulated, so I'm not sure if it's a good couter example.

Yes, PG is influential primarily because of his writing. He wrote On Lisp, which is still well-regarded today, before founding Viaweb. Viaweb itself did not make him well-known; there were many newly wealthy dot-com millionaires at the time, and he was just one of many, except that he wrote far more persuasive essays. At the time that I wrote https://paulgraham.com/redund.html we were discussing programming language design on a mailing list, and there was not yet any suggestion of a VC fund.

The reason he got into venture capital was that some of those essays urged ambitious young people to start startups, drawing on his own experience, and specifically to write SaaS software in Lisp, as he had. The Y Combinator fund came afterwards, and its dealflow came from the people who had been persuaded by those essays. That's why the first version of Reddit was written in Lisp.

If Y Combinator had not been successful, he would have remained well known for his essays.

Though some of his ideas were not correct, looking back, it is hard to name any other writer of persuasive essays of the past quarter century whose work has been similarly impactful, except perhaps Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug's work may turn out to be less impactful—I certainly hope it does—but it's too early to tell.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#58

Post by kragen »

lutusp wrote: post #55

"Rules of good writing", really? The article's title ironically commits a lexical gaffe by presenting its topic as a value instead of a choice. Whether the title draws more readers than "Rules of clear writing" is a separate topic, one dealing less with principles and more with marketing. Strunk & White, the source for most of the article's ideas, isn't mentioned. We may bury the past, but we can't deny it. I recentl…

PG's essays are optimized to be persuasive, and probably this choice of title contributes to that. Your alternative title would indeed be more informative.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#59

Post by kens »

Most writing articles (including this one) are rehashes of Strunk & White. One exception is "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace", which provides a new, higher-level way of understanding writing and how to make it better. I highly recommend that book if you're looking for something more advanced than the standard advice.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#60

Post by GGByron »

jameshart wrote: post #29
mtlynch wrote: post #4

> Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. I agree with this, but I doubt that all brains work this way. It's probably true of almost all English speakers. I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sent…

I think the counterargument to this simplistic assertion is that "The boy was hit by a ball" seems equally legible to me to "A ball hit the boy". If you're quickly reporting the details of an accident to a doctor and it's crucial to get the information across quickly, I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, w…

"I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, we're interested in the effects on the boy."

And you don't favor the shorter message?

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