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Good Writing

paulgraham.com

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Re: Good Writing

#281

Post by robtherobber »

bgwalter wrote: post #274
erichocean wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Jobs" is too large a category; many specific job categories have limited slots (e.g. medical residencies). But more importantly, slots at e.g. Harvard are limited. Seats at ball games are limited. Etc. Most things in life are, in fact, limited. Graham is purposefully misleading here, and he knows it.

Even construction work in Europe is limited. People from Eastern Europe are undercutting German tradespeople and frankly deliver inferior work. You could hire a German craftsman with the quality of work that was present 30 years ago and the work would last for 30 years. But who is embarking on learning a trade only to be replaced by Poles, Romanians or (in the future) Ukrainians, who will then replace Poles and Roman…

Was there a point to your comment, other than making a racist remark?

Re: Good Writing

#282

Post by gsf_emergency »

sctb wrote: post #96
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…

FTA: > This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.

The idea of "haecceitas" has been floating amongst the ... Pop-literati

https://www.scribblejerk.com/blog/haecceity-rules

My take is that it's "writing that calls attention to itself" (or, if you want, writing that is clearly off the wall)

Not sure if it can't be applied to exposition, Pontiggia managed it as above?

Some pecunious would like it reduced to Jobs ("editing is all you need") but I'd argue Jony has the sparkle, the je ne sais quoi, the more than just functional

Re: Good Writing

#284

Post by bgwalter »

robtherobber wrote: post #281
bgwalter wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even construction work in Europe is limited. People from Eastern Europe are undercutting German tradespeople and frankly deliver inferior work. You could hire a German craftsman with the quality of work that was present 30 years ago and the work would last for 30 years. But who is embarking on learning a trade only to be replaced by Poles, Romanians or (in the future) Ukrainians, who will then replace Poles and Roman…

Was there a point to your comment, other than making a racist remark?

This strawman worked in 2020, not in 2025.

Re: Good Writing

#285

Post by pclmulqdq »

monkeyelite wrote: post #252
pclmulqdq wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Is that "making up concerns before even engaging with the author's ideas"? I am responding to the point that pg’s writing is too reductionist. Comments on these articles often include “what about [obvious exception that distract from the main idea]”. These comments indicate they are trying to dismiss rather than understand (the author didn’t even consider my idea!) As an example, “San Francisco is wealthier than Ba…

PG's writing is often so reductionist it muddies his points and HN commenters are often pedants about meaningless issues. Both can be true.

I don't blame PG for the pedantry over the minutiae. That's on the readers, and people on HN specifically are prone to this kind of pedantry. I do blame him for weakening his points by using bad language to express them.

TFA isn't about how to read, though. It's about writing.

Re: Good Writing

#286

Post by sebastianconcpt »

mkoubaa wrote: post #185
antithesizer wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And yet, countless people bought his deadly equivocated ideas and still want to make it "sound more right".

Paul Graham in that essay is equating "good writing" to "good propaganda" and in it he confesses that truth is treated as a convenient accident.

To truth, that's intellectually amoral. His utilitarian opportunism intensifies.

Re: Good Writing

#287

Post by pvg »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #280
pvg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you think he's not? It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea. I definitely don't think these documents are just "written speech". Some emails are—a quick message asking if you'll be in the office tomorrow, for example—but major ones require significantly more thought.

It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.

Why are there people who make a living as, say, newspaper opinion columnists or magazine staff writers? Or hell, why aren't we all rich substackers given that writing a substack is literally email?

Re: Good Writing

#288

Post by voidhorse »

munificent wrote: post #33
RandomLensman wrote: post #7

What how does that concept work in poetry or lyrics, for example? Something could be completely fictional (and artificial) and still be exceptionally well written.

My weird take on fiction is that much of the appeal is that the entire story is just an elaborate analogy to explain true facts about human nature that are otherwise hard to make clear. You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But t…

Totally, it's not a weird take though. It's actually a pretty standard fare account of the purpose of fiction in literary theory that's been with us for a long time.

There's actually deeper arguments to be made that storytelling was the first form of human abstraction (we only get the essential details pertinent to the story, all else is abstracted away) and much of what's core to all our practices of representation stems from an originary impetus for storytelling as a means of sharing and replicating knowledge. The prosaic, scientific, nonfictional, non hyperbolic writing we have all gotten used to is kind of a late development.

Re: Good Writing

#289

Post by turnsout »

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

Yikes. I stopped reading right there… There's a lot of corrosive, racist writing on social media right now that "sounds good" to a lot of people.

Re: Good Writing

#290

Post by eranation »

I'm sorry, but this is such a risky conclusion (that essays that "sound good" are also "right"). The assumption is that the author is not only with good intentions but also not ill informed. What if an intelligent yet either evil or simply confidently incorrect author falls in love with their ideas, and manages to edit it to perfection by "shaking the bin". Does that make the writing more true? We have seen in the past how very well-written and convincing texts have changed the course of history, some for the better, but sadly, some for the worse.
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