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Good Writing

paulgraham.com

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Re: Good Writing

#171

Post by mgfist »

ignoramous wrote: post #132
flipgimble wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> ... he writes mostly to justify his luck in amassing capital as something of intellectual consequence. Strange take, given PG made his billions from actually building something of immense consequence (YC) & provably codifying a blueprint on building fast-growing companies in SV. If PG was a prof at HBS, it is likely he'd be considered in the same bracket as Clayton Christensen.

His comment got deleted but it was funny hearing him say PG hasn't created anything while commenting on a website PG created

Re: Good Writing

#172

Post by kierangill »

I’m a sucker for when the form serves as an example for the author’s idea.

> If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.

From William Zinsser’s On Writing Well:

> The growing acceptance of the split in-finitive, or of the preposition at the end of a sentence, proves that formal syntax can't hold the fort forever against a speaker's more comfortable way of getting the same thing said—and it shouldn't. I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.

Another from the same book:

> CREEPING NOUNISM. This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun—or, better yet, one verb-will do. Nobody goes broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains; we have precipitation activity or a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.

> Today as many as four or five concept nouns will attach themselves to each other, like a molecule chain. Here's a brilliant specimen I recently found: "Communication facilitation skills development intervention." Not a person in sight, or a working verb. I think it's a program to help students write better.

Re: Good Writing

#173

Post by [deleted] »

antirez wrote: post #15

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…

[deleted]

Re: Good Writing

#174

Post by milesrout »

6stringmerc wrote: post #124

Oh Mr. Graham again. I’m not a fan. I tried to read along, I really did, and then I came upon this sentence: “But not without method acting.” This is one of the most terribly written sentences in the English language I’ve seen since getting out of jail in January. It violates every reasonable convention regarding communication. It is terrible and please take note that a person who put this sentence out into the wild,…

[dead]

Re: Good Writing

#175

Post by epolanski »

not_maz wrote: post #145
yojo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some particularly crude alien invaders: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.” Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it. Paul’s…

Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick. That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what he's trying to say. Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.

Idk, I'm conflicted here because PG is the embodiment of a poor amateur writer with good ideas.

He is literally the proof that writing can be bad (albeit we should define what good and bad writing are and agree on it) but still interesting because of the ideas.

Re: Good Writing

#176

Post by adriand »

pdonis wrote: post #165
tshaddox wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I understand what he is saying and it’s precisely what I am disputing.

> I understand what he is saying and it’s precisely what I am disputing. I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of correctness. And that's not the claim PG makes in the article. Your post never disputed the claim PG did make, which is that bad design and craftsmanship, ugliness, etc., are signs of lack of correctness.

In the first paragraph, he writes, ”I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.” So he does indeed make the claim you say he doesn’t make.

The essay itself lacks anything novel, despite the rather breathless framing: “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.” These ideas are a couple of hundred years old at least. Kant: “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good”. This is classic Age of Enlightenment stuff, repackaged in classic Silicon Valley VC style.

Re: Good Writing

#177

Post by enriquto »

What happened to this man? A few years ago he wrote a glorious Rosetta stone of second-order functions in several programmng languages. Now he's spewing tired tropes about journalistic-style writing.

Re: Good Writing

#179

Post by saghm »

kierangill wrote: post #172

I’m a sucker for when the form serves as an example for the author’s idea. > If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications. From William Zinsser’s On Wri…

> the rhythm of writing has to match the ideas in it

It's hard for me to tell what the point of the author was from just the part you quoted, but why does this have to be the case? I don't have trouble believing that many complex ideas require complex language to describe them, but the idea that it's literally a requirement in order for the writing to be "good" rather than just a usual circumstance isn't obvious to me. If anything, the complexity of this quote just seems to hide the dubious premise.

Re: Good Writing

#180

Post by lexandstuff »

antirez wrote: post #15

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…

Presumably, for this concept to stick with you your whole life, you'd have to have heard of "Borges"? From Googling that name, it appears the author you're referring to died in 86. Why would anyone expect him to win the current year's Nobel Prize in Literature?
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