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Good Writing

paulgraham.com

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Re: Good Writing

#181

Post by kierangill »

saghm wrote: post #179
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 m…

> but why does this have to be the case?

From the essay’s context, I take it to mean “is benefitted by” rather than “must absolutely”. Maybe my world view is distorted by Zinsser but I see this as an authorism.

A writer can choose to trade off vigor for nuance by hedging. They can preempt arguments with “it is my opinion that” and “one ought to”. But, it is my opinion that, exhaustive disclaimers are not fun to read. I know it’s his opinion — this is posted to his Internet Blog, not a textbook.

> Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

Re: Good Writing

#182

Post by DavidPiper »

> The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better.

This is a well-known phenomenon, and yes, "ordinary" writers and typesetters do this too. These visual loose ends are called Widows, Orphans and Runts [1]. Writing that is less visually ugly on the page will seem to read better.

> Because the writer is the first reader

This seems like a derivative of a zen-like koan from jazz musician Winton Marsalis' "Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is the player" [2]. Interesting that he immediately starts talking about music there too.

> But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.

I think I would have enjoyed this read more if it was clear at the top that by the time he'd finished writing it, he disagreed with his initial assertion ("I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.") Without that, the article kind of feels like bait, and reading it plus writing this comment feels like me taking it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

[2] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=162573063275994

Re: Good Writing

#183

Post by [deleted] »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #161
pclmulqdq wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Paul Graham's writing style to be a bit off. I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic in his use of language and imprecise in his choice of words, and I genuinely don't understand the praise for his writing. You should read his work because these are the thoughts of a highly influential VC, not because they are gems of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Sometimes a longer, more nuanced word has all the rig…

Same. I always get the feeling his ideas aren’t sufficiently thought through or communicated well enough to be actually be useful. On the other hand, I may know too much about what he writes about to benefit from it. Which means I’m not the target audience. And I don’t say this to sound smart. I’m a generalist. I know a little about a lot. Plenty of people are far more intelligent than I am.

[deleted]

Re: Good Writing

#185

Post by mkoubaa »

antithesizer wrote: post #143
roxolotl wrote: post #136

> I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. This is a wild belief to hold in the post truth age of bs generation machines.

Marx wrote the following about Proudhon: >M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest agains…

Marx and his hot takes are highly overrated

Re: Good Writing

#186

Post by brians »

lexandstuff wrote: post #180
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?

He was a titan for more than half of the twentieth century. His shadow will extend far into human influence beyond that of many names that won prizes.

Re: Good Writing

#187

Post by mkoubaa »

Veen wrote: post #123
kristianc wrote: post #103

Interested to know how much Immanuel Kant pg has read. Kant's whole project was about grappling with how the mind structures experience—and how language mediates, rather than transparently transmits, thought. You can never fully get to the thing in itself. I can see how re-editing can make the ideas more coherent within pg's frame of representation, but I'm struggling with the idea that it makes them any more true.

I would like to imagine that pg's obsession with pared-down, simple sentences is a post-traumatic stress response to an early encounter with Kant's prose.

Kant was an awful writer and _nobody_ thinks otherwise.

Re: Good Writing

#189

Post by kurko »

> I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.

Paul's point would make sense if his case was about greater verisimilitude, which might sound like splitting hairs, but is an important phenomenon in philosophy. Many dictators have sounded good but their core messages were abhorrent.

In the same vein, there are thousands of fiction books, some more brilliantly written than others, but nothing in that spectrum makes any of their stories any more real or true.

> I know it's true from writing.

Well, some things just appear to be true. I admire Paul's writings and I believe his honesty in trying to get to the truth, but in this specific essay, it seems like what he's alluding to is the appearance of truth. Good writing makes core ideas look more true, but it can't objectively have a relation to truth itself, only with our description of said idea.

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