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Good Writing

paulgraham.com

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Re: Good Writing

#221

Post by machinelearning »

rossdavidh wrote: post #30

So, this would seem to be fairly easy to test empirically. Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing, and use it on something where you know if it's true: 1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true 2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not 3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with h…

So one thing to note is that the essay mentions that it refers specifically to "writing that is used to develop ideas" vs. "writing meant to describe others ideas".

The way I interpret this is that it refers to claims that build on each other to come to a conclusion. So the way to test for truth is to somehow test each claim and the conclusion, which could vary in difficulty based on the kind of claims being made.

As this essay exemplifies, it is difficult to test for truth if you make broad claims that are so imprecise that they can't be verified or don't tell you anything interesting when verified using reasonable assumptions.

Re: Good Writing

#223

Post by __mharrison__ »

DavidPiper wrote: post #182

> 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 wr…

TBH, I've written 12 books and rarely deal with orphans or widows. Good typesetting helps take care of this.

(LaTeX previously and now Typst.)

Re: Good Writing

#224

Post by pvg »

the_af wrote: post #204
pvg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a median human to write some elevator or hold music and see how that goes. There's an entire business of making and licensing such music which would not be the case if any rando could just crank it out. Emails, etc, are just 'communication but over text' - it's 'writing' in the very basic sense but it's not the sort of writing people concerned with style and quality care about, either as consumers or producers. M…

I think emails summarizing meetings, or making a case for something, or describing something, match the kind of writing PG means in his essay. And like the commenter you're replying to, I think that LLMs today can write far better than your average coworker (assuming they don't go on a hallucinated tangent; then again some coworkers also do!). So it's fair to compare LLMs and work emails. Not to speak of work wiki pa…

Why do you think pg is writing about emails and meeting notes? I don't readily see anything in the piece to suggest that. 'making a case for something' or 'describing something' covers the bulk of writing, the piece is quite explicit about not being about all writing.

Re: Good Writing

#225

Post by y1n0 »

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…

I can tell you that loading down your writing with parentheticals objectively makes your writing worse.

Re: Good Writing

#226

Post by baxtr »

machinelearning wrote: post #215
pdonis wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That writing that sounds bad is likely to be wrong.

The issue with this article is that it is very imprecise. Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience. In its most general form (how the median article sounds to the median person), the argument is pretty vacuous. Most writing discusses simple ideas and they should sound good (familiar, easy, pleasurable) to the median person. But the most valuab…

Thanks. The way you describe the topic, a dimension is missing in the article: who am I writing for?

Related: I think pg would benefit from graphics here and there. Creating visuals like the 2x2 matrix you describe help tremendously to make ideas more comprehensible.

Re: Good Writing

#228

Post by f30e3dfed1c9 »

I'm solidly in the camp that believes that if Graham wasn't rich no one would read this stuff or claim to admire it. He also should have run this through a spell checker.

Re: Good Writing

#229

Post by asadm »

f30e3dfed1c9 wrote: post #228

I'm solidly in the camp that believes that if Graham wasn't rich no one would read this stuff or claim to admire it. He also should have run this through a spell checker.

i don’t think he was rich when he first started?

also other rich people also write stuff. nobody reads that shit.

Re: Good Writing

#230

Post by pclmulqdq »

monkeyelite wrote: post #219
pclmulqdq wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great author drags you into their PoV whether you want to see it or not.

And a bad reader makes up concerns before even engaging with the authors ideas.

Wait, I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. Is it that I commented about Paul Graham's writing style in response to a PG essay on writing style? Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"? The whole point of the essay we're discussing is writing style, and in particular a set of suggestions he has based on his own work.

It's valid to criticize someone for not giving a piece of writing a charitable read before criticising the author's style, but that does not seem to apply when the topic of the essay is the author's style. Writing style is largely about figuring out how to direct the reader to your ideas, so it seems axiomatic that any piece of writing that needs a high-effort charitable read is poorly written (this, by the way, is in TFA).

As to your original point, being too vague also doesn't increase signal to noise ratio. It just lets you write as though a lot of noise is signal.

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