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Good Writing

paulgraham.com

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Re: Good Writing

#91

Post by antirez »

saltwatercowboy wrote: post #83
antirez wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's not a 1:1 map, but often who does an excellent job, does it along all the line: form, content, and the best papers are even shorter normally... They don't have to justify with many pages the lack of real content. About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R…

Perhaps one sniff test for bad writing is presence of a link to the Wikipedia page for rhetoric.

Pontiggia sometimes explained parts of other writers just using rethoric figures, and showing how their application provided new insights into things and concepts.

Re: Good Writing

#92

Post by TimSchumann »

idlewords wrote: post #28

Reading Graham's essays on writing always puts me in mind of the videos where Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA ), or a Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice ( https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226 ).

It helps when you never question if, as in his own essay describing other ‘bad writers’ weaving falsehoods, you’re the one lying to yourself.

Re: Good Writing

#93

Post by pvg »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #81
pvg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott's 'legibility' comes with a very explicit consumer - a large power structure like a state. Written style is not like that at all - pg can't force to anyone to write in his preferred way nor is anyone obliged to like it.

If you understand some area and would like to explain it and use writing as a tool, you need to make it legible to the reader. Good writing is distilling and simplifying and forcing things through an explanatory process that rubs off some of the rough edges while at the same time clarifying. That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.

That’s your thesis but it’s not clear to me how it’s related to those in Seeing like a State

Re: Good Writing

#94

Post by bee_rider »

mykowebhn wrote: post #82

And then you have people like Kant and Hegel who have both been criticized for their writing styles, but I would bet in 200 years time people would still be reading and studying them. And with Paul Graham they'd ask, "Who?"

He’s like some startup guy or something, right? His blog posts are well written, and the arguments seem… I mean, fine. I think there’s a third dimension here; in 200 years people will probably be more likely to talk about Kant or Hegel because Graham’s subject matter is just inherently more ephemeral.

But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.

Re: Good Writing

#96

Post by sctb »

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…

FTA:

> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though.

Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.

Re: Good Writing

#97

Post by -__---____-ZXyw »

vzaliva wrote: post #39

The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything. Musk is a glaring recent example - and now Paul. I do appreciate his essays on tech and related subjects, but not for their literary merit. If I’m seeking advice on writing, I’d turn to actual writers - people who’ve earned recognition and acclaim specifically for their work in that field.

Successful people outgrowing their jodhpurs and losing their reason is a thing, sure, but that does not apply in this specific case. Tech writing is still writing, my friend.

Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?

I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be exquisite.

Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's glorious.

Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have their work cut out for them with those two already.

Re: Good Writing

#98

Post by wat10000 »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #81
pvg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott's 'legibility' comes with a very explicit consumer - a large power structure like a state. Written style is not like that at all - pg can't force to anyone to write in his preferred way nor is anyone obliged to like it.

If you understand some area and would like to explain it and use writing as a tool, you need to make it legible to the reader. Good writing is distilling and simplifying and forcing things through an explanatory process that rubs off some of the rough edges while at the same time clarifying. That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.

I’m pretty sure that “Seeing Like a State” legibility and writing legibility are totally different concepts that happen to share a word. State legibility is all about categorizing and simplifying to allow information processing to happen in a distributed fashion among a large number of bureaucrats. Writing legibility is about conveying information to the individual reader. A hundred pages of prose about a single person is incompatible with the former but can be a great example of the latter if written well.

Re: Good Writing

#99

Post by -__---____-ZXyw »

tzury wrote: post #51
vzaliva wrote: post #39

The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they often become convinced they can succeed at anything. Musk is a glaring recent example - and now Paul. I do appreciate his essays on tech and related subjects, but not for their literary merit. If I’m seeking advice on writing, I’d turn to actual writers - people who’ve earned recognition and acclaim specifically for their work in that field.

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.

Re: Good Writing

#100

Post by adamgordonbell »

wat10000 wrote: post #98
adamgordonbell wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you understand some area and would like to explain it and use writing as a tool, you need to make it legible to the reader. Good writing is distilling and simplifying and forcing things through an explanatory process that rubs off some of the rough edges while at the same time clarifying. That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.

I’m pretty sure that “Seeing Like a State” legibility and writing legibility are totally different concepts that happen to share a word. State legibility is all about categorizing and simplifying to allow information processing to happen in a distributed fashion among a large number of bureaucrats. Writing legibility is about conveying information to the individual reader. A hundred pages of prose about a single pers…

Perhaps ironically, I'm not communicating my point well.

There's a book called 80/20 running and the concept is you should do 80% of your running running slow. To me, that's a very legible concept. It's very clear and small and easy to explain.

I think his book is well packaged by having a title that condenses all of his thoughts into one little sound bite concept.

But actually you know his advice about training for running is much more complex. And you know he puts together running plans and they have a thousand types of running and it's not always 80% slow running. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. It's rarely exactly 80% slow running. There's a million pieces of nuance to how he would train people to run faster but to get the concept across to write it down, he makes it more legible. He simplifies it to 80% of your running should be slow.

To me, and perhaps I'm learning only to me, that concept is very related to the concept of legibility in seeing like a state. You're taking the complicated forest with many different types of trees and you're simplifying it down to one uniform thing. That's much easier to understand and easy to track and communicate. 97 trees in this area.

The same thing can happen to concepts. They have a lot of nuance and complexity but to write them it down so that they can best be communicated, you often need to remove a lot of that.

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