Good Writing

Good writing has the benefit of helping others for many decades and centuries. That's a realization I came to recently. My goal now is to write a variety of essays, articles, and books on topics that I excel in.

It doesn’t, really, which is okay, because the subtext here is that Pg is writing about essayistic writing, or more specifically, communicating ideas in the form of written words. I don’t think he is commenting on “good writing” in the sense of a novel or line of poetry.

Moby Dick is my go-to example of a novel that is incredibly well-written, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly clear or straightforward in its presentation of ideas.

An example, if you haven’t read it:

”The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”

I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities) can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more signal.

I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):

"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".

This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.

I don't think Paul knows that he's writing rhetoric and not prose.

...I find it a bit surprising that Paul Graham of all people, writing in May of 2025, managed to get through this entire essay without mentioning LLMs.

Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect, but probably much better than the median human--and they are just as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.

So while I agree that for humans, writing that sounds good tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent in all writing.