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Good Writing

paulgraham.com

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Re: Good Writing

#261

Post by tzury »

-__---____-ZXyw wrote: post #99
tzury wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham doesn’t moon-light as a writer, rather, writing is one of the core skills that made YC what it is. He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose. Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like trashing Stephen King’s storytelling because he can ride a bike. If you only grant “literary merit” to people who never shipped a line of…

> He spends months chiseling each essay I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it sure is intense.

I'll do it once for the sake of the rest of us.

this is April 6th -

    https://x.com/paulg/status/1908894070765695144
Essay was published May 24th, that is the better part of two months.

Fact is you are most likely one of those:

    https://x.com/paulg/status/1903066759302725698
Therefore, my advice to you is simple, care less about "what his writing does for me", and focus only on what is your own writing does for you.

I pity you and the likes of you who are coming here to shit all over as if there aren't any better things to do during the day.

Re: Good Writing

#262

Post by machinelearning »

pdonis wrote: post #244
machinelearning wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Are the standards for whether something “sounds bad” based on the average person’s reading or the intended audience. As pg describes it in the article, it's neither; it's based on the writer's judgment. The writer of course is writing for some intended audience, and their judgment of what sounds good or sounds bad should be influenced by that. But pg is describing the writer's process of judging what they write.

> The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read. It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader

Note that the writer's judgement only serves as an initial proxy for how well the essay reads. This implies that the reader, whoever that is, is the true judge of how well it reads. My point is that that group is ill defined.

If it were sufficient for the writer to be the only judge of how well something reads, surely PG wouldn't feel the need to have other proofread his essays. And surely it is not sufficient for someone who lacks taste to judge their own writing as good.

The way I read that statement is the same as the startup advice of "build what you would yourself want". However you still have to validate that the market exists and is big.

There is really nothing profound in that paragraph anyway, all it is saying is that a writer should edit and proofread their work. That whole paragraph could be deleted honestly. It is obvious table stakes for one to edit their work. What differentiates good from bad is a matter of taste + who is judging it.

Re: Good Writing

#263

Post by leononame »

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…

The quote reminds me of Tucholsky, a German journalist known for this style. An example that comes to mind was his review of James Joyce's Ulysses: "It's like meat extract: you can't eat it, but many soups will be made with it".

I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."

Good writing goes a long way

Re: Good Writing

#264

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

yojo wrote: post #65
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…

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…

Dave Barry writes like that, all the time (a lot less so, these days). He uses it for comedic twists, and usually integrated with other tricks.

His writing is known for a very smooth cadence. You reach these “lumps” in the narrative, and can almost miss them, which, for me, multiplies their impact.

I’ve always considered him one of the best writers that I’ve read. He probably gets less credit than he deserves (although I think he’s won a Pulitzer), because of his subject matter; sort of like Leslie Nielsen, or Victor Borge, who were both masters of their art.

Re: Good Writing

#266

Post by bsaul »

antithesizer wrote: post #135
bsaul wrote: post #130

In french we have this very old expression : "ce qui se conçoit bien s'énonce clairement". "what is well understood will be clearly phrased". It's been consistently used by parents and teachers since the 17th century, so i guess there must be some truth to it.

Lacan developed the idea of "deferred understanding" in his clinical practice and (infamously) deployed it in his teaching as well. It sounds a little suspicious at first, but it's not difficult to grasp what it is or why it might be beneficial in certain contexts where repression is faced. For example, it's a cliche on the left that far more people like the idea of socialism when it's described to them piecemeal wit…

interesting, thanks. But isn't this just playing with definitions ? It seems like what lacan described was a way to fight against pre-judgement, in order to reach a better understanding of the subject.

Re: Good Writing

#267

Post by bgwalter »

Paul Graham clearly loves writing and spending many iterations on producing something perfect. That was also his approach with the Arc language.

I may be projecting my own preferences here, but such a person is likely to have an ambivalent relationship with LLMs, which just output bland mediocrity or falsehoods.

In his previous essay, he warned that one should not create things that make the world worse. He softened it up by saying, without proof, that creating awesome things is probably fine (are LLMs awesome, I don't think so?).

Now he talks about good writing. I get the impression that he is one of the last remaining humanists in Silicon Valley, who at least has doubts about the direction we are going in and would be happy if YC startups created something else.

Re: Good Writing

#268

Post by officehero »

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…

Who reads the latest "Nobel winner" anyway? Or, think about the person complaining "why didn't this movie get an Oscar?" in the Youtube comments. There's only 5 people in the Nobel literature committee and the person they elect says more about them than about what good writing is.

Re: Good Writing

#270

Post by thih9 »

> If you have to rewrite an awkward passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it less true. You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas has to be a change for the better.

I don't get that point. I'd say that there are many ways a thought could get diluted, misinterpreted, turned into wrong conclusions, or made less clear on subsequent iterations.

Just like the metaphor of shaking a bin with different objects doesn't work if the objects are tomatoes, glass or cats.

PG's essays could be a case of this; other examples are often seen in politics, when complex topics are trivialized by demagogues. A lighter example could be "Uncleftish Beholding"[1], an attempt to write about the atomic theory in a way that (very arguably) reads better.

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

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