[HN Gopher] How to Write Usefully
___________________________________________________________________
How to Write Usefully
Author : r_singh
Score : 589 points
Date : 2020-02-21 09:07 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| Cartonju wrote:
| Writing an academic essay means fashioning a coherent set of
| ideas into an argument. Because essays are essentially linear--
| they offer one idea at a time--they must present their ideas in
| the order that makes most sense to a reader. Successfully
| structuring an essay means attending to a reader's logic.
| chadlavi wrote:
| c'mon Paul, get an https cert
| contingencies wrote:
| _Niven 's First Law of Writing: Writers who write for other
| writers should write letters._ - Larry Niven, science fiction
| author (1989)
|
| _Blind monkey at the typewriter._ - Robert Burnham Jr.,
| Astronomer (1983)
|
| _We 'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets,
| visionaries - realists of a larger reality._ - Ursula K. Le Guin
|
| _The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does
| not know what to do._ - Donald Barthelme
|
| _There can be no reliable biography of a writer, 'because a
| writer is too many people if he is any good'._ - Andrew O'Hagan
|
| _Summary of advice from writers: Advice from writers is useful,
| and not only about naming. Writers have been at it for centuries;
| programming is merely decades old. Also, their advice is better
| written. And funnier._ - Peter Hilton
|
| ... from https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
|
| (Edit: One of PG's main points here is succinctly summarized by
| this other pithy _taoup_ quote: _Lest men suspect your tale
| untrue, keep probability in view._ - John Gay (1727))
| soneca wrote:
| Aren't these quotes about fiction writing? Do you think they
| apply to essay writing as well?
|
| I don't think I got your point with this selection of quotes,
| if you don't mind explaining.
| contingencies wrote:
| The article, nominally on 'good (essay format) writing', was
| an example of #1. We here illustrate #2 wonderfully (a quip
| on both communicative fallacy and the human condition). #3 is
| aspirational, but also puts purely functional writing
| (without art) in its place. #4 concerns perhaps pathfinding
| as purpose, in creative intellectual work. #5 suggests
| monodimensionality as a defining quality of poor writers. #6
| ties all of the above in its application to programming.
| soneca wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to explain. I think I do
| understand it now, but I do disagree. I don't think #1 is
| talking about the same type of writing that the OP, I don't
| think it applies at all actually. #3 seems to imply that
| there functional and art are competing types of writing,
| which I also disagree. They are different things, for
| different purposes, for different reading experiences,
| created differently. The same with the general idea of your
| comment.
| oli5679 wrote:
| I also found this summary of the writing process quite
| interesting, by Tyler Cowen:
|
| https://www.writingroutines.com/tyler-cowen/
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I was thinking about the same thing yesterday. I noticed I had a
| bunch of unconscious processes when writing things that are meant
| to be read publicly, so I started writing down the reasons.
| Eventually, I wrote this sentence.
|
| "It seems that because many people are raised with the imperative
| to 'stand up for themselves,' it turns into a need to become
| argumentive when faced with an opposing viewpoint."
|
| The "briars" that pg mentions happened to me when I reread this
| sentence. I was essentially assuming too many things about the
| general population, and also trying to contrast this assumption
| that people are raised to be argumentive with my own mindset
| where I try very hard not to argue about anything.
|
| Every time I write something like this, I picture the first thing
| an HN commenter would say in response. "Well, what about X?" or
| "You assert X, but here's evidence that disproves this," or
| especially "What are the alternatives?" Reading lots of HN
| comments helps with this. The issue is trying not to seem overly
| assertive like pg suggests: putting in quantifiers like "maybe"
| or "perhaps" to give room for error instead of coming off
| universally saying "X is Y." When I imagine the fictional HN
| commenter's response, if the statement itself still seems fine,
| that response is usually the first thing I add to end of the
| comment prefixed by "On the other hand".
|
| I feel like for me this is because I can't take criticism too
| well so I try to imagine all the reasonable criticisms people
| might come up with first and then criticize myself with them
| preemptively. Or, writing about personal experiences - facts, of
| which my personal telling is unique - instead of writing about
| how thing X or Y ought to be in the world. Especially with
| personal experiences I believe they can be useful without having
| to use them as evidence of a larger argument, which opens me up
| to the risk of being flat-out wrong.
| firatcan wrote:
| Hello guys,
|
| I don't know if it's right place to ask this, but do you guys
| have any other resources that I can learn how to write great
| essays.
|
| Because I have started to write essays at our startups blog which
| is called www.jooseph.com . It is basically playlists for
| learning. This resources would be really helpful for me to create
| a list for how to write great essay and also teach myself to how
| write great essays. Thanks in advance
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| You want to read Umberto Eco's seminal "How to write a thesis".
| Not quite the same as an essay. But it does contain tons of
| good stuff on writing.
| seemslegit wrote:
| A true test of good writing is the test of time, the following
| for example was written 15 years ago and remains relevant:
| https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| Wow, I'm not impressed with this at all It's obvious to anyone
| what the ways are in which hackers and painters are completely
| different. Does anyone really need to write lots of vacuous
| commentary on this ? On the other hand, the ways in which they
| are similar are actually interesting to think about.
| iamcurious wrote:
| Another essay about the importance of essays. Another succinct
| lisp. pg seems to be cycling back to something. Maybe we should
| pay special attention to the next batch of yc's investments.
| syndacks wrote:
| The title should be How to Write [an Essay] Usefully.
|
| This blog post is NOT about writing in general. It's not about
| the craft of writing, or the many varied types of writing
| (fiction, memoir, biography, essay, marketing blog, etc).
|
| Instead, it's a formula that Mr. Graham gives the reader:
|
| >I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty +
| correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay.
|
| For a good essay, maybe. For writing in general, no. It's
| formulaic, which may very well be a horrible approach depending
| on the context.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I challenge you to ignore previous history and reputation, and
| evaluate this essay in isolation and according to the very
| principles it lays out. Do we agree with the apparent
| presupposition that this person has valuable instruction to give
| us on writing?
|
| _Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the
| four components are like numbers you can multiply together to get
| a score for usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly
| reductive, but nonetheless true._
| gist wrote:
| Noting also that from my quick reading (note the qualifier
| there btw) I am not seeing the issue of having people review
| the essay mentioned. Most people not only don't have this
| luxury but we also don't know the contributions that those
| reviews have made (or corrections) to the essay.
|
| To me (note the qualifier to lessen the impact there) writing
| is immediate and driven by emotion. To much time lessens the
| ability to say what you really think and having others review
| what you wrote even more so.
| bovermyer wrote:
| There are many ways to write, and many reasons to write. Be
| careful that you do not take one person's advice as the only way
| to write.
| abrax3141 wrote:
| Saying that you should write useful essays isn't really saying
| anything. Presumably you should only do anything that's useful.
| (Which is not to say that everyone always does so.) Being useful
| is a less stringent requirement than being persuasive, so it's
| actually less ambitious, not more so.
| soneca wrote:
| For me it said a lot. Because he doesn't stop at the title,
| it's not a tweet, he goes on to properly explain what he
| consider usefulness and how to achieve it. And the idea that I
| should aim to being useful and not persuasive is pretty
| powerful to me. I do think is more ambitious to be useful in
| the way the described than just persuasive.
| r3vrse wrote:
| Convey a singular point with intent. Below is first paragraph
| rewritten. Just my 2C/.
|
| ---
|
| Essays should be persuasive. But we can aim for something more
| ambitious: that an essay should be useful.
|
| Useful writing makes a strong claim without resorting to
| falsehoods.
|
| It is more useful to say that Pike's Peak is in the center of
| Colorado than somewhere within.
|
| Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. Useful
| writing is bold and true. It tells people something important,
| that they might not have known, without resorting to manufactured
| surprise or equivocality. This is formative of fundamental
| insights.
|
| Any idea will not be novel to all, but may still have impact for
| the many.
|
| In argument: be correct, be important, be strong. This will
| ensure usefulness.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| _It is more useful to say that Pike 's Peak is in the center of
| Colorado than somewhere within._
|
| This kind of thing is taking terseness too far, I think. If I'm
| not immediately familiar with Pike's Peak it takes me a moment
| to unpack your meaning, but I immediately understood the more
| verbose explanation in the original.
| Kye wrote:
| Yep. People often confuse understanding audience with
| verbosity. Waffling and context both add word count.
|
| edit: I could reduce this to "Waffling and context both add
| word count." but then:
|
| 1: It's not clear I agree with you
|
| and
|
| 2: Triplets--like the three sentences I wrote there--are an
| artistic device that improve clarity and help prose flow.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| There's a large international audience here. So, slang like
| "yep" should probably be avoided if one is keen to
| carefully tailor their writing?
|
| (I debated whether to use 'one' or 'someone' here, for
| similar reasons.)
| Kye wrote:
| It never occurred to me that it was American slang.
| That's a new thing to think about.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think this deletes an important sentence. The comment about
| saying Pike's peak is in the centre of Colorado being
| inaccurate and that you can only say it's near the centre is
| showing an example of precision and correctness being
| opposites. You've lost the point of the example in your
| paragraph and the sentence suddenly seems like a completely
| random insertion.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| PG speaks of writing usefully while not writing well. Many of his
| sentences are phrases. The subject of his sentence is often
| unclear. He begins sentences with the preposition, "But". Yet,
| his writing remains useful. I'd rather the latter than the former
| if I had to choose, but considering the volume that he writes,
| it's surprising that he hasn't put effort into writing well. He
| just doesn't care to improve his work.
| injb wrote:
| quote: "...with the preposition, "But". Yet, his writing..."
|
| The word "but" is a conjunction, like "yet". Oh, the ironing!
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Good catch. The ironing was intentional.
| hndc wrote:
| In "But I think we can aim...", "but" is a conjunction, not a
| preposition
|
| Also, his writing is fine: simple but clear and effective.
|
| "Many of his sentences are phrases" -- literally every sentence
| in this essay is a complete sentence. What are you talking
| about?
| cneurotic wrote:
| Entering pedantic mode:
|
| "But," in Paul's usage, isn't a preposition. And starting
| sentences with prepositions isn't considered "incorrect" by
| most grammarians[0]. Or even bad style.
|
| If it's good enough for the Bible[1], it's probably good enough
| for you.
|
| [0]https://wordcounter.net/blog/2016/10/26/102560_can-you-
| start...
|
| [1]https://biblehub.com/nlt/genesis/31.htm
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I'm certainly no grammarian or even much of a writer, but the
| Bible seems a particularly odd piece of writing to use as a
| guide.
|
| It's been translated to the nth degree, is ancient &
| frequently obtuse on purpose...
| philwelch wrote:
| Translations of the Bible, at least in historically
| Christian cultures, are usually treated as authoritative
| examples of proper written usage.
| normalnorm wrote:
| No they aren't.
| [deleted]
| tptacek wrote:
| Where did you get this idea?
| philwelch wrote:
| (deleted)
| [deleted]
| tptacek wrote:
| So you derived the idea axiomatically?
| philwelch wrote:
| _sighs_ No, but if you think I'm full of shit, I don't
| really want to waste my time discussing how I developed
| this particular misunderstanding about the world for your
| amusement.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm sorry. It's the game I'm poking fun at, not the
| players (I'm as bad as anyone) and I can see how I could
| have communicated personalized contempt rather than
| general bemusement. I apologize and promise that I don't
| think you're full of shit.
| philwelch wrote:
| Thanks. In retrospect it's kind of funny that I ended up
| making one of those mistaken remarks that the original
| essay explicitly recommends against.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm not sure I even agree with that, since I just spent
| my lunch down a 20 minute rabbit hole of researching the
| regard usage experts have for English translations of the
| bible, and it's actually a pretty interesting digression.
| I shouldn't have jumped on you for it; I made the thread
| worse.
| philwelch wrote:
| I'd be interested to see what you found out!
| TimPC wrote:
| Starting a sentence with But is perfectly fine as long as it's
| actually starting a sentence. We get to not to in grammar
| school only because starting a 'sentence' with But often turns
| that 'sentence' into a phrase.
| jackconway wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with starting a sentence with "but."
| hnarn wrote:
| Starting a sentence with "But I think we can" is neither
| incorrect, nor is it a preposition.
| mellavora wrote:
| This is something up with which we will not put!
|
| --Winston Churchill.
| mellavora wrote:
| allegedly. On the topic of not ending a sentence with a
| preposition.
|
| https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/11/14/churchill-on-prepositions/
| throwawaylolx wrote:
| >He just doesn't care to improve his work.
|
| Alternatively, you may overestimate how objective these rules
| are and how much they must correlate with some universal metric
| for good writing.
| daxaxelrod wrote:
| Agreed. In my opinion, great writing has to be within the
| context of the time. A lot of us speak in a manner similar to
| how PG writes. You wouldn't consider great writing from 1890
| with the same set of rules as you would something written in
| 2020.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > A lot of us speak in a manner similar to how PG writes.
|
| No one speaks with explicit sentence delimiters, and most
| of the criticism made were not of the sequence of words but
| details the additional visual signals of structure that
| appear in written but not spoken language.
| friendlybus wrote:
| Roald Dahl's work is some of the most delightfully readable
| and engaging writing out there in my humble opinion and
| that was written nearly one hundred years ago in the 1930s
| and 1940s.
|
| Good writing is timeless, I may suggest that adding
| hyperlinks under a new word you introduced inside your
| essay that requires clicking on and reading a wholly
| different story to understand the current story you are
| reading, is a terribly under-performant way of
| communicating information inside an essay to the reader.
|
| When did using "+" instead of "&" become acceptable in
| proper English? I understand this is a tech blog and I have
| no problem with "+" used in a tech context, the use in a
| virtue signalling piece on the rules of writing a good
| essay seems misplaced.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think there is plenty of good and great writing that
| isn't timeless. Especially when it comes to essays, where
| the nature of what we know and care about changes so
| dramatically. An essay written to convince a slaver of
| the moral errors of slavery may seem so obvious to the
| modern reader as to be condescending, but, effective in
| it's time period, it was great writing.
| friendlybus wrote:
| True the content of the stories fade in and out of
| relevance and greatness.
|
| The structuring of essays improves and dips in
| transcendent quality over time depending on the behaviour
| of authors at large and human understanding of
| communication through essay. The virtue and successful
| execution of well structured essays is timeless. RD's
| work is well structured. It's possible to learn and
| execute on structures that are proven to work across time
| and speak for themselves in the results.
| rustyminnow wrote:
| I had to go back and search for the "+"es, but I think
| they're well suited to the context.
|
| > I believe the formula I've given you, importance +
| novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a
| good essay.
|
| I wouldn't say he's really using "+" instead of "&".
| "importance & novelty & correctness & strength" doesn't
| provide the same feeling of adding, of mixing, to get a
| formula.
| crb3 wrote:
| > When did using "+" instead of "&" become acceptable in
| proper English? I understand this is a tech blog and I
| have no problem with "+" used in a tech context, the use
| in a virtue signalling piece on the rules of writing a
| good essay seems misplaced.
|
| Could be that tech bias. I've been coding awhile, and '+'
| reads as 'ADD', for inclusion, while '&' reads as
| 'logical AND', for restrictive subsetting. The '&' no
| longer sits right. (Plus, it's a shell and HTML
| metacharacter, thus it's a potential potent piece of
| trouble in casual typing and so something to be avoided.)
| TheRealClassic wrote:
| http://paulgraham.com/talk.html
| tasogare wrote:
| That's because you have very few exposition to 1890
| writing. When I read published book from a hundred years
| ago (in French), I'm often stroke by how much clearer it is
| than say, newspaper garbage for instance. No only in style,
| but also how they write to inform instead of writing to
| hide facts.
|
| It's even more striking when watching archive videos from
| the 60'. People speak more slowly, are more composed and
| use wider vocabulary. It might not be as caricatural as the
| movie Idiocracy portrayed it, but in a way I feel we've
| slided into what they predict.
| throwawaylolx wrote:
| >When I read published book from a hundred years ago (in
| French), I'm often stroke by how much clearer it is than
| say, newspaper garbage for instance. No only in style,
| but also how they write to inform instead of writing to
| hide facts.
|
| For this comparison to hold water, you should compare
| garbage newspapers from each period rather than different
| literary mediums.
| abtinf wrote:
| I wouldn't normally take apart an HN comment on grammar,
| but you are commenting on clarity of writing. If this is
| something you care about, than the following proofing may
| be useful. Format is (delete text)[insert text or
| comment].
|
| --------------
|
| That's because you have very (few exposition)[little
| exposure] to (1890 writing)[writing from 1890]. When I
| read published (book)[books;otherwise "often" in next
| segment doesn't make sense] from a hundred years ago (in
| French), I'm often (stroke)[struck] by how much clearer
| it is than[,] say, (newspaper garbage)[awkward] (for
| instance)[redundant after using "than, say,"]. No[t] only
| in style, but also how (they)[unclear reference, refers
| to books but books don't write, authors do] write to
| inform instead of writing to hide facts. It's even more
| striking when watching archive videos from the 60'[s].
| People speak more slowly, are more composed and use wider
| vocabulary. It might not be as (caricatural)[not a word
| and intended meaning unclear from context] as the movie
| Idiocracy portrayed it, but[,] in a way[,] I feel we've
| (slided)[slid] into what (they)[it] predict[s].
| iamacyborg wrote:
| He said he read something in French, so the obvious
| assumption is that he's French (or French Canadian).
|
| Being a grammar Nazi about what one can assume is a non-
| native English speaker's grammar is just plain 'ol dumb.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I don't think they were being mean. To me that should
| have been a PM, but we don't have those here.
| sjg007 wrote:
| My hypothesis is that our attention spans have decreased
| and this is a function of technological improvements.
| Because we seek out dopamine rewarding experiences we can
| satisfy that brain circuit by consuming novel content
| faster. We are basically attention seeking drug addicts.
| Take for example older movies vs modern movies. Today's
| special effects speeds up the pacing so that older movies
| feel boring. The same can be seen in TV shows. Seasame
| street is almost a case study where you can watch the
| change in realtime. Also older vs modern cartoons follow
| the same pattern. You could say it's almost frenetic. The
| effect holds for older vs modern video games as well
| although some games are different. YouTube as well.
|
| One interesting thing I've observed is that with games
| like Minecraft and YouTube that kids are starting to
| become content creators. Where kids use to put on plays
| for the family in the living room, they can now
| effectively do the same but for the whole world. It's
| really fascinating.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > He begins sentences with the preposition, "But".
|
| But "but", in the use in question, is a conjunction. With which
| one should be less concerned about starting a sentence than one
| would be about a preposition.
| gandutraveler wrote:
| The other day I was helping friend with an essay and i realized
| how 12 years in software programming has changed my writing
| style. Now it seems very awkward to think and write in long
| paragraphs. It feels more natural to use bullet points for
| everything.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I know the feeling; when preparing to write a blog post or a
| presentation I tend to start off with bullet points.
|
| Mind you once I have that down I can churn out improbable
| amounts of text in a relatively short amount of time. The main
| challenge for me is to stop writing and remove unnecessary
| text, which is kinda hard to do given how much nuance is in
| code.
|
| I mean I've been thinking of writing a post (and a knowledge
| sharing session with my mostly C writing, older generation
| developer colleagues) about modern development and I was
| already thinking of painting a picture of how things were 10+
| years ago.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| > I mean I've been thinking of writing a post (and a
| knowledge sharing session with my mostly C writing, older
| generation developer colleagues) about modern development
| [...]
|
| There's a (generally) younger cohort at Handmade Network[0]
| that might be interested in your essay. I'd encourage you to
| make an account and post it on a new thread :-)
|
| [0] https://handmade.network
| netcan wrote:
| I think this is a very modern thing... because internet.
|
| "The medium is the message" applies to writing more than
| anything. The medium has been rapidly evolving.
|
| Average people wrote very little pre-PC, and the contexts are
| totally different. Much higher rates of output, frequency, etc.
| Bullet point style is good for information dense messages,
| provided they are short enough. We do a lot of this now, it's
| how we "talk" at work.
|
| The style isn't new, it's just that many more of us have a use
| for it today. In the past, it was common in a military context,
| for example..
| _Nat_ wrote:
| > What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive.
| That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be.
|
| Yeah, essays written for a class on persuasive writing should be
| persuasive. Because that's what the class is about -- students
| are supposed to be learning how to express their ideas about how
| things should be done to, e.g., their boss, coworkers, clients,
| potential investors, etc..
|
| However, I hope no one's under the misimpression that _all_
| writing should be persuasive writing. Schools also teach classes
| on other types of writing, e.g. creative writing and technical
| writing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Yeah, essays written in a class that's focusing on persuasive
| writing should be persuasive. Because that's what the class is
| about
|
| The five paragraph essay which is typically taught as a
| foundational expository/analytical writing tool is actually
| quite poor for analytical writing, and not great for expository
| writing, but heavily leans on the rule of threes which is a
| guideline for persuasive communication.
|
| > Schools also teach classes on other types of writing, e.g.
| creative writing and technical writing.
|
| K-12 often has creative writing as an elective, and often
| includes assignments which are superficially intended to be
| something other than persuasive writing on other contexts, but
| rarely does much to _teach_ techniques appropriate to writing
| other than persuasive.
| [deleted]
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| This post could be reduced by 90% itself. Very low signal here.
| mosselman wrote:
| I tried enabling reader mode in Firefox to read this page
| properly, but Firefox didn't offer it in the address bar. So I
| checked the source of the page and I was surprised to find that
| this still uses table layouts!
| luord wrote:
| Interestingly, I saw an example of the phenomenon of people
| getting mad at the certainty of an essay in this very site, a few
| days ago.
|
| Someone was telling the author that he would achieve more if he
| phrased his point in a more "polite" way, just because the
| certainty of the writing made the critic mad. Thankfully, the
| author was here in the comments responding, and he didn't budge.
|
| That interaction was very refreshing for that very reason: The
| author was right, knew he was right, someone didn't like that the
| author knew he was right, but the author remained steadfast.
| xkemp wrote:
| I believe people arguing "politeness" are missing the point,
| though. What I most value is "dialectics" (not sure if that
| term is commonly used in English).
|
| I. e. the willingness to entertain the best argument against
| your position in good faith. Two people who are excellent in
| doing so (and familiar to HN) would be Scott Alexander of
| slatestarcodex, and Matt Levine at Bloomberg.
|
| (Someone rather bad at it, usually arguing against some
| caricature of what he imagines his opposition to be, and
| generally tending towards the "either unactionable, obvious, or
| wrong" end of the spectrum is, well, Paul Graham.)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| brianpan wrote:
| There's a fine line. PG's essay is about usefulness. An essay
| is probably more useful if a point can be made just as
| strongly but in a way that a greater number of readers will
| receive it well.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Drop us a link my man.
| jarnagin wrote:
| Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22372005
| mrandish wrote:
| Good call. That's an excellent example of Paul's idea in
| action.
|
| In calling that OP's style rude, respondents are really
| equivocating on the OP's central point. The OP is
| demonstrating Paul's 'Strength' concept by boldly asserting
| "all encrypted email is not fit for purpose" in an
| unequivocal way. The respondents seem to agree in part but
| disagree at the edges and want the OP to accept qualifiers.
| gfody wrote:
| It's just setting the tone of the discussion. Emotionally
| charged writing can be fun to read but can also be
| tiresome especially at length.
| upofadown wrote:
| That was a straightforward observation that the writer of
| the original article was being pointlessly condescending
| and that they were alienating the people they were
| ostensibly trying to help.
|
| In general, personally attacking your audience is not an
| effective writing technique.
| skybrian wrote:
| That essay was confusing because it says "encrypted email"
| without defining it, and the arguments are too strong; they
| could be used to argue that you shouldn't use email at all.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| The essay isn't confusing in general just because you
| were confused when you read it. There isn't a single
| argument in that essay that depends on which flavor of
| encrypted email is used, so being specific about that
| would only weaken the points being made. The essay is
| also pretty clear in saying that email can be used for
| stuff that doesn't need to be kept secret, and that it's
| not fit for anything that does.
| skybrian wrote:
| So is it saying that big email providers like GMail
| _shouldn 't_ opportunistically encrypt email in transit
| or at rest? Or that we should avoid email services that
| do?
|
| Clearly not as there is no harm in it, the UI is
| unchanged, and it prevents certain attacks. You have to
| know that by "encrypted email" means "end-to-end
| encrypted email" to make any sense of the essay,
| otherwise the claim is too broad. It states the claim
| being defended poorly.
| majormajor wrote:
| If you read the essay, the scenarios being considered and
| the type of security desired are pretty clear from the
| examples.
|
| And then you realize that things like "providers
| opportunistically encrypting in transit or at rest" are
| largely irrelevant to having truly secure communications.
| You could have a conversation about "is Gmail less bad
| than Outlook.com" or whatever, but the whole point of the
| essay is that neither are meaningfully different if you
| have important secrets.
| skybrian wrote:
| "Truly secure communications" isn't all that matters when
| discussing email security.
|
| There are meaningful differences in the scale of access.
| It matters whether the NSA (or China or whoever) can just
| read everyone's email off the network, versus law
| enforcement sending requests to email providers where
| they are verified to be legal. It's the difference
| between lawful access and espionage.
| conductr wrote:
| Gmail.com uses HTTPS. Already encrypted. /s
| Misdicorl wrote:
| The article is clearly discussing E2E encryption between
| consumers of email and quite clearly uses PGP as a
| relevant example.
|
| It even mentions hop-to-hop TLS of email as an obviously
| good idea (and presumably would likewise say at rest
| encryption is a good idea). None of this matters to the
| author's fundamental point. End to end encryption in
| email is silly and can't work because it isn't enforced
| at the protocol level.
|
| You either haven't read the article or haven't understood
| it.
|
| Edit: or disagree with its fundamental claim, but are
| talking about irrelevant issues instead for some reason.
| [deleted]
| Psyladine wrote:
| Policing tone is passive aggressive censorship & bias. It's as
| hideous a concept as 'culture appropriation' or the cult of
| positivity.
|
| https://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977
| firethief wrote:
| Can't you call it microcensorship or something? Actual
| censorship is still very much a thing.
| samatman wrote:
| Censorship is a small subset of the techniques for shutting
| down discussion, and tone policing isn't in that subset at
| all. A diminutive doesn't help here.
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| "Tone policing" is a term made up by rude people in an
| attempt to excuse themselves for being rude. If someone in
| your group is yelling "fuck you" at another group, it's never
| going to help, and it's okay to point that out.
| mozey wrote:
| > Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but in
| this case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble.
| If you know you're an expert on some topic, you can freely admit
| when you learn something you didn't know, because you can be
| confident that most other people wouldn't know it either
|
| This is an excellent point. I'd much rather work with (and aspire
| to be) someone that knows when they don't know, than someone that
| has all the answers.
| thanhkitt wrote:
| X
| quantumwoke wrote:
| I think there's a well-trodden aphorism that seems apt here:
| perfection is the enemy of good. The perfectionism that 'pg
| discusses here seems orthogonal to the goal of useful writing
| which to an extent has an associated time pressure. I would
| rather publish often and usefully to achieve the maximum impact
| on my readers.
| madacol wrote:
| > Sometimes it means telling them something they knew
| unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may be
| the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more
| fundamental.
|
| I now know what I subconsciously already knew. I like readings
| that are _Useful_
| [deleted]
| lidHanteyk wrote:
| You made a fresh account to advertise a billionaire's printed
| collection of bullshit. I encourage you to re-read your comment a
| few more times until you understand how your words come across to
| others.
| pzqmpzqm wrote:
| I don't care how it comes across. Fuck you, asshole.
| luckylion wrote:
| remove this and his main, please.
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| I found this lecture about effective writing to be very useful:
|
| LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively (Larry
| McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing
| Program)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
| DrNuke wrote:
| I can agree to some extent and that's why I'm doing
| tenproblems.com ; good academic writing can be seen nowadays as
| the best shot we have at bonafide or not deceitful, at least,
| discussions. It should really be made accessible to the general
| public as a form of liberal education and to whomever realizes
| that a broader liberal perspective helps their own writing in the
| vocational public arena.
| danenania wrote:
| This reminds me of the saying "don't speak unless you can improve
| upon the silence" (apparently attributed to many sources, but
| most commonly Jorge Luis Borges). The world would certainly be
| less noisy if we all followed that one.
|
| I've always found this idea helpful when anxious or unsure of
| myself in social situations. A lot of the nervousness comes from
| the pressure to "say the right thing" and make a good impression,
| but that very pressure tends to ensure that I won't say anything
| of value (often quite to the contrary!), so I'm better off
| keeping my mouth shut, or speaking very little, until I relax and
| start thinking of truly 'useful' things to say naturally. And if
| it doesn't happen, that's ok--I'm fine with being the quiet guy.
|
| It can be applied in many other areas as well. It's amazing how
| much you can usually improve a visual design, a piece of writing,
| or probably any other creative work just by repeatedly going
| through and removing or revising anything that you have even the
| slightest doubt about.
| gist wrote:
| > "don't speak unless you can improve upon the silence"
|
| Sounds like one of those things that is meant to keep people in
| their place and/or make them feel less worthy or as a put down.
|
| > A lot of the nervousness comes from the pressure to "say the
| right thing"
|
| I can tell from your bio you are much younger than I am so I
| will offer this advice to you as 'an older guy' (note I did not
| say 'dude' either). Not only will you care less about that when
| you get older but you will find that people very generally will
| be drawn to you more if you don't appear to be concerned about
| what comes out of your mouth (within reason of course and
| depending on the precise circumstances meaning sure there are
| cases where you don't want to just say or do anything).
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| _people very generally will be drawn to you more if you don
| 't appear to be concerned about what comes out of your mouth_
|
| 32yo here. In my experience, the opposite seems to be true.
| (I've been dragged to that conclusion despite wanting to
| believe otherwise.)
|
| More precisely, it might be true that people will be drawn to
| you more if you don't _appear_ to be concerned with what
| comes out of your mouth. But the climate in 2020 is night-
| and-day difference from 2009-era. I think the shift was so
| subtle that we might not have noticed.
|
| It's true that as one gets older, one generally cares less
| about such things though. It was just an interesting and
| surprising change. Five or so years ago, I'd wholeheartedly
| agree with you.
| danenania wrote:
| "Sounds like one of those things that is meant to keep people
| in their place and/or make them feel less worthy or as a put
| down."
|
| I suppose it could be used that way, but I think of it more
| as something people should apply to themselves, not as a
| judgment against others. What "improves the silence" is
| obviously subjective and reasonable people will disagree
| about what does or doesn't, but I imagine most of us have
| experienced the feeling that we should say something despite
| not really having anything to say in that particular moment.
| My point is just that it can be liberating to ignore that
| impulse to speak for the sake of speaking and wait until you
| have something you really want to say.
|
| " I can tell from your bio you are much younger than I am so
| I will offer this advice to you as 'an older guy' (note I did
| not say 'dude' either). Not only will you care less about
| that when you get older but you will find that people very
| generally will be drawn to you more if you don't appear to be
| concerned about what comes out of your mouth (within reason
| of course and depending on the precise circumstances meaning
| sure there are cases where you don't want to just say or do
| anything)."
|
| I'm pretty old in internet years (34) and definitely care
| less what anyone thinks than I used to. And from what I can
| tell, a lot less that the average person. But I think almost
| everyone cares about approval to some extent and can feel
| uncomfortable socially if they go outside their comfort zone.
| So while I agree that people are of course attracted to
| confidence, sometimes you just don't feel it, no matter who
| you are, and that's fine. Trying to force it tends to be
| counterproductive.
| Traster wrote:
| >How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel
| and important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing
| this. I learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror
| of saying anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless
| he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions
| out of him, but when you do, they're usually right.
|
| How is this useful? How do I say things that are
| true,novel,important. Oh well, only say things that you're sure
| they're 'worth hearing' - where presumably, worth hearing is
| defined as being true, novel and important.
|
| This seems like quite a solipsistic view of essay writing. If
| everyone knew how useful their writing was before anyone else
| read it then the problem he's describing wouldn't exist. No one
| would choose to publish bad things - the problem is people
| publish bad things because they don't know they're bad until
| other people have pointed out why.
|
| All this is really doing is arguing for a bias against publishing
| - have a high threshold, as a result lots of good ideas will go
| unpublished, but the few that do get published will make you look
| good. Is that actually a good solution to provide the most value
| to the people reading, or is that a good solution to maintain
| your reputation?
| amiga_500 wrote:
| I assume Mr Morris would have kept that gem to himself.
| strongbond wrote:
| I know several people who keep silent until they can say
| something clever, and frankly, in most group situations they
| stand out as being slightly weird. Keeping your intellectual
| powder dry is just not a socially 'giving' behaviour. What's
| wrong with saying something that's not clever? Within a group,
| it might send the conversation off in a delightfully
| unanticipated direction. There's more to it all than always
| being right. Or clever.
| disiplus wrote:
| i do this. it's not because i want to sound clever but
| because i have nothing of importance to say about the
| subject. and i can usually see if you don't either but won't
| tell you.
|
| i't did not served me great in social circles but honestly as
| im aging am more ok with that. i don't have to have an
| opinion about everything or hang out with everybody.
| philwelch wrote:
| There's a difference between interpersonal social behavior
| and publishing written work, though.
| brlewis wrote:
| Yes, that's why the paragraph after the one under
| discussion starts out, "Translated into essay writing...".
| So the paragraph discussed in this thread is about
| interpersonal social behavior.
| philwelch wrote:
| Ah, yes, thank you. Though as far as I can tell, it's
| brought up, not in the context of saying that it's a
| successful strategy for having engaging dinner parties,
| but in the context of saying it's a good strategy for
| writing essays.
| anon4242 wrote:
| > Within a group, it might send the conversation off in a
| delightfully unanticipated direction.
|
| Or a not so delightfully unanticipated direction. Too many
| times I've realized too late that I was in a "hostile" group,
| so I say something stupid thinking I'm among friends and it's
| like switching a button on the group mood.
| darkerside wrote:
| Then you've discovered something extremely valuable about
| that group
| anon4242 wrote:
| Sure, but as a result I've grown more and more cautious
| about relaxing my guard which has made me more and more
| quiet in social situations.
| darkerside wrote:
| Hopefully it helps to recognize the beneficial outcome of
| your action (which I pointed out). I've been there, so
| I'm trying to help.
| philwelch wrote:
| Eh, I think it depends. I wouldn't go out of my way to
| socialize with people who are uptight and easily offended
| or upset by dumb shit that I might say in a casual social
| setting, but most of us get roped into those situations
| from time to time, and being able to manage them without
| causing offense is worthwhile, even if you can only do
| that by being quiet.
| brlewis wrote:
| That's something I learned in my 20s that I wish I'd learned
| as a child.
| martin-adams wrote:
| I've interpreted this as to hold back on publishing your
| thoughts until you actually are confident in what your thoughts
| are.
|
| I have a habit of forming my ideas in emails before I know the
| conclusion. It's important to edit that work and remove the
| dead ends and keep it concise. It's important to keep it
| useful.
|
| I guess what he's saying is if you still don't know the
| conclusion of your writing, maybe you shouldn't publish it.
|
| This of course is writing for the benefit of the reader. There
| is plenty of writing which is beneficial to the writer.
| timerol wrote:
| PG never justifies this, and just claims that "with essay
| writing, publication bias is the way to go." There are a huge
| number of essayists that I have the option to read. I would
| prefer to read each of their best thoughts, rather than read
| more of their thoughts.
|
| In my life, Twitter is for hot takes, and Feedly is for deep
| thoughts.
| TimPC wrote:
| You actually agree with him then. He's referring to
| publication bias coming from only publishing your best
| essays.
| irchans wrote:
| I loved that essay :)
| Edmond wrote:
| You can start by not using the word: "Usefully" :)
| Kiyumars wrote:
| At first I thought pg implied you can't publish anything that you
| aren't sure is correct. That surprised me, since he often
| publishes 'minimal viable' first versions of his essays and then
| expands on them later (unless I am wrong on this).
|
| But perhaps a simplistic initial draft is not the same thing as a
| badly written, incorrect one.
| friendlybus wrote:
| This reads like a list of bullet points the author dreamed up
| that morning. I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest
| in communicating to the anonymous internet as the self-interested
| writer taps a pen on his computer screen.
|
| A better way for this writer to succeed would have been to wrap
| his list of "rules" around a problem for a character, institution
| or team of people. Placing these imagined rules in story through
| a daily work schedule at the 9-5 software office job would
| greatly improved it's readability.
|
| Bob works at Innitech and he needs to create an essay on the
| latest doodad the boss is craving to provide to his superiors.
| Bob's needs to provide precision only when it is necessary
| because of [humorous anecdote about engineering culture]. Jane
| works at InGen and needs to provide an essay on a C++ based linux
| app that rotates raptor eggs or whatever. This rule X covers the
| strength she needs to convey in her essay and this is how her
| client presentation will be improved by it. The rule on clarity
| of writing is how she can help her co-workers with accurate,
| clear information.
|
| The author would engage a broad set of interests and the reader
| can quickly digest the information that matters to them because
| everybody understands the story format. The author could put down
| his morning coffee and instead describe part of the story to his
| wife or secretary and see the reaction of someone outside the
| field responding to what could be an interesting topic.
|
| We are left with mechanical writing that has to be laboriously
| deconstructed and reconstructed in the reader's mind as context
| that applies somewhere in their life. Nobody is quite sure when,
| where, why or how they are going to be writing an essay, but my
| golly they are prepared with a bullet point list of rules to do
| so.
| alexandercrohde wrote:
| Is this comment satire?
|
| >> I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest
|
| PG admits he rereads some of his sentences up to 100 times in
| his revision process _in the very piece you criticize._
|
| >>The author could put down his morning coffee and instead
| describe part of the story to his wife or secretary and see the
| reaction of someone outside the field responding to what could
| be an interesting topic.
|
| His writing also addresses this in the same writing, advising
| people to specialize with a target audience... Did you read
| this piece?
|
| This is either funny trolling (giving condescending essay
| advice to one of the most succesful essayists of our era, on
| the platform he created), or woefully lazy.
| [deleted]
| throwanem wrote:
| Conversely, anyone who already _does_ write essays almost
| certainly already knows what purpose they serve and how to
| pursue it. Or, if they don 't, that's almost certainly because
| they are new to the form and haven't yet grasped it firmly.
|
| (On the question of whether Graham, in particular, despite
| being not at all new to the form, has likewise not grasped it
| firmly, "further affiant sayeth naught"...)
|
| _edit:_ Naught save that perhaps having a guarantee of an
| audience, as HN 's commentariat furnishes Graham, may not be
| ideal as a means of fostering development in the skill of
| writing. If you're going to be read and discussed regardless of
| merit, how do you know merit when you achieve it? How do you
| avoid mistaking the contingent for the essential? How do you
| refine your craft in the absence of meaningful feedback?
| xvector wrote:
| My English teachers rewarded flowery, verbose writing. Over time
| I found this unwieldy and now I find myself re-reading my
| sentences to see what I can delete.
|
| It's satisfying, like deleting unused code in a messy codebase. I
| envy writers who manage to densely pack information in sentences
| that are beautiful to read.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Professionally this was described to me as: 1. you write like a
| salesperson 2. you write like a scientist
|
| It's hard to please everyone. The vast majority of writing
| tilts in one direction or another. Very few writers (in any
| setting) strike the right balance. Very few readers take off
| their own lenses to attempt to understand the writer's angle.
|
| One tool I like using: Grammarly. It's not fool-proof by any
| means. But it helps point out verbosity and write more clearly
| by helping me learn when my writing isn't as clear as it can
| be.
| tpaschalis wrote:
| It's satisfying because it's also surprisingly hard!
|
| Like Mark Twain once said "I didn't have time to write you a
| short letter, so I wrote you a long one."
| rmason wrote:
| I experienced the same thing with English teachers. But I had a
| friend point out that Hemingway (whom we both adored) wrote
| sentences that were 7 words shorter than normal. Writing short
| punchy sentences without a single spare word.
|
| Steinbeck wrote that way and so did Elmore Leonard. Leonard
| said he'd get down a first draft and then go back a second time
| taking words out that weren't necessary.
|
| https://www.litcharts.com/blog/analitics/what-makes-hemingwa...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Essayists may believe that what they're writing is true, but
| they're not best placed to judge that. Truth requires
| objective testing and replication, and essays aren't the
| right tool for that.
|
| So it's useful to remember that the point of an essay is
| persuasion, not truth.
|
| Short sentences and clear points are more persuasive _even if
| they 're nonsense._
|
| The longer your sentences, the more you'll filter out readers
| with short attentions spans and limited literacy.
|
| Which is why terse novels about dramatic situations sell
| better than florid novels with academic subtexts.
|
| It's also why political campaigns like to reduce slogans to
| soundbites.
| brlewis wrote:
| > The longer your sentences, the more you'll filter out
| readers with short attentions spans and limited literacy.
|
| And readers who have not yet been persuaded that your
| writing is worth their time. If long sentences are
| essential to a point you're making in a persuasive essay
| for a non-captive audience, use inverted pyramid style and
| push the long sentences down.
| randcraw wrote:
| > Short sentences and clear points are more persuasive even
| if they're nonsense.
|
| What you're describing is propaganda -- an emotional appeal
| that solicits mindless reaction. That's the basest form of
| communication -- hardly something to espouse as the
| paradigm for a good essay.
|
| As Graham points out, the best essays often are not
| intended to persuade as much as inform. The essentials of
| writing that's useful to the reader are facts and logic,
| leading intuitively to a conclusion that is meaningful and
| important to the audience. HOW you achieve these ends
| matters less, be they short sentences or emotional appeals.
|
| But illogic has no place in an informative essay. That's
| the bailiwick of provocateurs, politicians, and propaganda.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| When you get to the root of it, there's not much to
| differentiate between something written to inform versus
| something written to persuade.
| philwelch wrote:
| Is there not? I think a big part of the difference might
| be how defensive one is against a hostile audience. For
| example, let's consider that we're writing about
| something like the Monty Hall problem. A piece of writing
| that explains and informs the reader about the Monty Hall
| problem will describe and work through all of the
| counter-intuitive logic involved, but it will do so from
| a position of (a) absolute certainty about the conclusion
| and (b) a good-faith assumption that disagreeing with
| that conclusion is due to an innocent mistake in
| reasoning, which the writer will want to anticipate and
| patiently address. And this is probably the right
| approach for the Monty Hall problem, but most of the time
| you're writing persuasively, projecting absolute
| certainty that you are right and anyone who disagrees
| with you is confused or mistaken isn't always the best
| decision, especially when it's a disagreement over
| subjective preferences and value judgments. If I was
| writing an endorsement of a political candidate, I would
| approach that much differently than I would approach an
| explanation of the Monty Hall problem. In both cases you
| do similar things (in terms of presenting clear and
| explicit reasoning) but there are more differences than
| similarities.
| throwanem wrote:
| One can idolize Hemingway to a fault. Removing the
| unnecessary is largely what a second draft is _for_ , no
| matter who's doing the work; concision is a virtue, but to
| pursue concision above all else risks erring into
| insufficiency and rendering oneself unable to write in one's
| own style and voice, rather than in an emulation of someone
| else's.
|
| Voice elevates an informative essay from a dry recitation of
| facts, offering the reader little of genuine interest, into a
| conversation in which the reader is able and welcome to
| participate. Voice also offers interest of its own, which can
| help sustain a reader through what might otherwise prove
| intolerable complexities or difficulties in the subject
| matter of the work.
|
| You may, of course, consider this, and consider the virtues
| of the Hemingwayesque ultimacy of concision, and decide that
| the latter outweigh the former. I don't agree, but we all
| ideally write in our own ways. I would, though, ask that you
| do _consider_ those virtues - and their contrary vices -
| rather than partake of the blind veneration of Hemingway so
| common among the rather dim luminaries of modern literature.
| wenc wrote:
| As someone who admired and aspired to Hemingway's
| parsimononius style of writing in my youth, nowadays I'm
| starting to back away from it and am growing to be more
| inclusive other (less concise) styles of writing.
|
| I aspired to concision because I believed I wasn't an
| interesting person and didn't deserve any attention outside
| of the little I'm able to grab, so I kept my writing pithy
| in the hopes that I wouldn't have to "take up too much of
| anyone's time/attention".
|
| Unfortunately, too much concision can lead to short pieces
| that are tiring to read -- your brain has to work harder to
| fill in the gaps. Sometimes "unnecessary" words are needed
| to help the reader feel more comfortable. Not everyone is
| an engineer or a technocrat. Parsimony isn't always a
| virtue.
|
| There's is a place for concision, but I now believe
| concision is the wrong goal to aim for. Often the real goal
| is to create an emotional connection, and if it takes a few
| more words to achieve it (without belaboring the subject),
| so be it.
|
| People -- often teachers -- think good writing is solely
| about effective communication -- to me, there has never
| been a wronger conclusion than this.
| TimPC wrote:
| I experienced this too. I'm trying my best to unlearn it
| because I'm writing a novel. I'm not so adept with flowery
| prose as to write literary fiction, so I want to have more
| practical sentences that have better pacing.
| erikbye wrote:
| Purple prose is not a requirement for literary fiction.
| throwanem wrote:
| Given the entirely performative nature of the genre, purple
| prose well executed almost certainly cannot _hurt_.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I tend to be too terse.
| pwinnski wrote:
| I tend to terse also.
| webmaven wrote:
| Tersing proliferates.
| irchans wrote:
| Somewhat
| autarch wrote:
| ?
| the_other wrote:
| STOP!
| [deleted]
| philshem wrote:
| > Can you elaborate?
|
| > Yes.
| combatentropy wrote:
| > My English teachers rewarded flowery, verbose writing.
|
| Same here, and I suspect the same for most people: "due to a
| series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has
| gotten mixed together with the study of literature" ---
| http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html Toward the end of high
| school I found _The Elements of Style_ by accident and it
| changed my life. Yes, it changed my life!
|
| I was always more interested in art than science. So I didn't
| become a programmer until I was almost 30. What struck me was
| how similar it was to prose.
|
| 1. There are many ways to write a program
|
| 2. Your first draft of a program is usually bad, but you can
| steadily improve it by rewriting it over and over and over.
| This unglamourous technique is the secret behind good prose
| too, as Graham points out.
|
| 3. As you rewrite it, you find you can do the same thing in
| half the space.
|
| 4. The programs that are most pleasant to use are ones where
| the programmer first wrote it for himself. Likewise, as Graham
| said here, a good strategy for useful essays is to write it
| first for yourself.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I completely agree. And there are definitely some programmers
| whose code and prose are both eloquent and beautiful:
|
| https://norvig.com/sudoku.html
|
| This is my all time favorite programming book, both for the
| prose and the code within it:
|
| https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp
|
| Interestingly, I find that the set of Lisp programmers also
| contains many of the best writers about programming: Norvig,
| Graham, Stallman, McCarthy, Steele, Abelson, Sussman, etc.
| safety-third wrote:
| This is how I do it as well. I usually find inspiration that
| makes my code much better. My secret sauce is telling others
| I am debugging it instead of making a new draft. This keeps
| someone from insisting that my first draft is "good enough."
|
| In addition, I design my programs such that I can confidently
| rewrite important sections. This is OOP encapsulation's main
| purpose. In practice, everyone writes getters and setters
| until every object is an ugly struct.
| ahsans wrote:
| I've always found PG's essays to be incredibly intriguing.
|
| I'm working in a startup, and everything he says is just very
| insightful about running one. I hope that PG shares more about
| growing a company that's running on an experimental business
| model.
|
| This is one of his other masterpieces. There is a certain art of
| communicating and he's sharing that with the world for everyone
| to learn. Not many people share their experiences and
| miscellaneous things in detail.
|
| I for one am thankful that PG still writes and I hope that he
| continues.
| friendlybus wrote:
| Masterpeice?
| soneca wrote:
| Well,I can say that I did learn from this essay. I will start
| writing more, the freedom of writing without having to publish is
| as obvious as it's a novelty for me.
| hnhg wrote:
| I'll say it again, it's a piece of writing that wouldn't warrant
| any attention if it weren't for the author's status here.
|
| I'm halfway through and my brain is stunned by the effort of
| forcing it down.
|
| PG needs a break from writing for a while. I enjoyed his early
| stuff and I hope he gets a return to form.
|
| [edit: it's like he's the George Lucas of writing useful articles
| for hackers: the early ones were classics but he somehow lost the
| magic for his follow-up series]
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| Strong disagree there. Sure, quality varies. I thought "The Two
| Kinds of Moderate", which is very recent, was excellent.
| meekstro wrote:
| Would you be kind enough to share any links to your own writing
| and some of the key factors that improved it.
|
| I wish to improve my communication and appreciate that Paul
| Graham thought hard then freely shared his insights on such a
| difficult topic for a great deal of people.
|
| I've always wondered how and why Geoff Bezos ran Amazon with
| six page essays and now I think I'm a bit closer to
| understanding.
| rimliu wrote:
| Do you also ask cinema critics to show their own movies, food
| critics to provide their own food, etc.? One does not
| necessarily need to be able to _make_ something to be able to
| _tell_ whether something is good or not.
| meekstro wrote:
| I agree.
|
| In hindsight you are completely right. My immediate
| reaction to the essay was I thought it was a brilliant
| resource. My gut feeling was that criticism of an
| educational author's writing on the topic of useful essay
| writing without stating the why wasn't useful.
|
| Asking for the critics own writing was a cheap shot and it
| was wrong. Sorry OP.
|
| In hindsight I should have said
|
| "That's an interesting insight would you mind sharing some
| better educational resources on writing a useful essay."
|
| If I'd lent greater attention to the essay than its
| comments, I would have.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Not even cinema critic, cinema _viewer_.
|
| "yeah I don't really like the Marvel movies, I think
| they're overrated"
|
| "oh? Can you show me your movie so I can see what a good
| movie looks like?"
|
| What a complete and utterly garbage thing to say on that
| guys part.
| mesaframe wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one. First few paragraphs lead to a good
| buildup but going on it fell apart.
|
| Further, It's hard to criticise Graham on HN.
| Kiyumars wrote:
| Is it difficult? Most of his articles receive quite a lot of
| criticism on hn.
| abainbridge wrote:
| He used to have interesting things to write about - subjects
| that he'd thought deeply about, had discussed with his peers,
| and could distill into valuable prose.
| blowski wrote:
| I think you're right. He's just churning out banal advice on a
| broad range of topics in which he has limited expertise, in the
| form of long-winded blog posts. It's so different from his
| early stuff, it's almost like he's hired a ghost writer to
| merely give the appearance he's still writing.
| alexandercrohde wrote:
| >> I'll say it again, it's a piece of writing that wouldn't
| warrant any attention if it weren't for the author's status
| here.
|
| This is probably true. If I was the person to write this, and
| post this on my personal blog, and submitted it to HN, nobody
| would give a fuck.
|
| Of course, that may not indicate anything, because that could
| be said for Newton's Principia, Einstein's Relativity, The
| Great Gatsby, Proof of Fermat's last theorom...
|
| I think the question isn't "Would the world appreciate this if
| it weren't by PG?" but "SHOULD the world appreciate this, even
| if it weren't PG?"
| jstummbillig wrote:
| This is incredibly lazy criticism. You add no analysis,
| reasoning or anything of value.
| sjwright wrote:
| At this risk of being accused of snark, _tu quoque._ If you
| don't understand the basis of the OP's opinion, you're
| welcome to ask. There's no need to assume bad faith.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > At this risk of being accused of snark, tu quoque.
|
| How so? I feel I was being quite concise.
|
| > There's no need to assume bad faith
|
| I did not assume anything. There simply was nothing to work
| with.
| deelly wrote:
| Recursive sarcasm?
| sweis wrote:
| This is brilliant unintentional parody.
| crimsonalucard wrote:
| Another type of writing that happens a lot especially on HN that
| is better than essay writing is dialogue. You get immediate
| feedback on what you failed to make clear and what points you
| missed because your intuition skipped over it, or if you're
| genuinely wrong.
|
| Still even in dialogue, arguments become circular because a lot
| of dialogue is selectively interpreted and misinterpreted at a
| subcncious level.
|
| I was recently introduced to a way of writing that makes all your
| points unequivocally clear. It may not lend to enjoyable reading
| but it makes your stance and point solid and clear. I post the
| dialogue below and while there's a lot going on (not relevant to
| this post, it's a debate about how function composition is a
| central feature to functional programming) in that dialogue the
| main point is that it evolves into a different format at the end
| to make things completely clear you can see the evolution just by
| scanning the conversation (especially near the end):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290188
| hooande wrote:
| The topic of useful writing is important. The ideas in this essay
| may not be surprising or unexpected, but the author does lay out
| a clear formula (importance + novelty + correctness + strength)
| that probably isn't obvious to most. It seems to be correct and
| the concrete list of usefulness criteria is strong. Everything
| seems to check out.
|
| The focus on correctness in this style of essay writing seems
| like a function of an engineer's thought process. If I write an
| essay about a vacation at the beach there isn't much of a
| requirement to be correct about the details. The goal could be to
| share my perspective or observations, which is more about being
| honest than being right.
|
| I like the formula above, I think it clarifies this style of
| writing well. I plan to pay attention to it in the future.
| Traster wrote:
| The formula is wrong though. To provide a counter-example -
| Cunningham's Law
|
| >the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to
| ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.
|
| Sometimes saying something wrong, may actually be more useful.
| Either because you're clarifying a problem or making a
| connection or drawing a contrast or showing someone else the
| path by letting them see your chain of logic.
| webmaven wrote:
| Ah, but useful to the writer, or the reader?
| randcraw wrote:
| I agree that inviting contrarianism can be a useful way to
| communicate (though it probably isn't the best way to present
| a convincing / 'useful' argument).
|
| But the medium for many essays lacks an interactive forum.
| Reactive comments from the audience is only a recent
| phenomenon. Before the net/web (~1990), the essay lived
| strictly in a broadcast-style medium. Then, the message had
| to live or die on its own merits. Careless or provocateur
| authors risked quick dismissal by an annoyed readership or
| eventual decline into insignificance.
|
| And the degenerate devolved form of contrarians, media
| trolls, didn't yet exist. Halcyon days they were.
| timavr wrote:
| Controversial point, but PGs writing is F-.
|
| It seems a lot of effort goes into sounding smart, rather then
| delivering information required.
|
| Who learned anything from above?
| HereBeBeasties wrote:
| I found the whole thing to read like a set of bullet points.
| Fragmented, rather repetitive in terms of ideas and with no
| flow. Hard to slog through, to be honest.
|
| The author seems to have expended great effort on terseness,
| writing in very short sentences which artificially forced him
| to start more of them with coordinate conjunctions than feels
| comfortable to me. It did not make for an easy read and all
| felt rather too self-conscious. Good writing should focus me on
| the ideas, not the annoying syntactic structure of the writing.
|
| I didn't get on with it.
| AlwaysBCoding wrote:
| The model of precision and correctness being opposing forces
| that increase in strength the more you hone in on one is useful
| for me and something that I had never put into words before.
| friendlybus wrote:
| It simply isn't true though, they are rarely required
| together. His example of the location of a city could have
| been replaced with gps co-ordinates in the place of a
| descriptive phrase.
|
| NASA deals with strength and precision together all the time,
| it's rare that they are both needed on the same task at the
| same level. The requirements for precision and strength to be
| shared in an essay is to construct sentences that are clear
| and cannot be interpreted in multiple ways and then fill in
| the descriptive detailing with precise information.
|
| Strength takes from distilling multiple possible
| interpretations down into one clear and correct direction.
| Precision is about highlighting the qualitative properties
| and exact quantities of your subject.
|
| They don't conflict. They are rarely needed together.
| TimPC wrote:
| Reading random GPS coordinates in an essay without a map in
| a has high precision but terrible understanding. While it's
| highly accurate, it's almost useless to the typical reader
| who would have difficulty knowing that the GPS coordinate
| is within Colorado. GPS coordinates are for maps not
| essays.
| friendlybus wrote:
| I agree. The context of your essay would make clear both
| whether you need that much precision and what format to
| use for the precision.
|
| Three miles east of the center of South Carolina is
| almost accurate enough? Who knows, not accurate enough
| for NASA and accurate enough for giving coworkers the
| idea of where your farmland is located.
| jstimpfle wrote:
| Same. It isn't a revelation but I still liked the way the
| idea was put in words. Most articles I've read have less to
| takeaway.
| WA wrote:
| Tldr to be honest. I kinda clashed right with the premisse:
| "How to write useful" and "What should an essay be?" are
| basically conflicting things in some way.
|
| Didn't pg also have an essay on what an essay is and came to
| the conclusion that an essay is meant to explore a topic for
| oneself? But could also be that I read this somewhere else.
|
| So, an essay is for the writer to explore stuff and have
| interested readers go along.
|
| But _useful writing_ is for the reader only. If pg had cut this
| essay to less than 500 words (and I bet this could 've been
| done without losing information), it'd been a lot more useful,
| although probably not an "essay" anymore.
| lliamander wrote:
| Something I tend to see in online arguments, here and elsewhere,
| is the tendency to throw everything at the other person and see
| what sticks. I've been guilty of it myself.
|
| The result is a wall of text that few will read and will contain
| many points that are easy to knock down, poorly worded, or
| irrelevant.
|
| Now, I try to stick to one point, if possible, that I feel I can
| articulate well and defend.
| mochialex wrote:
| Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the
| four components are like numbers you can multiply together to get
| a score for usefulness.
|
| What is the fourth component?
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Novelty.
| pzqmpzqm wrote:
| The first time I read Zero to One by Peter Thiel, I was a bit
| miffed. Stupid shit stated poorly. The second time, inartful
| puffery stated overly plainly. The third time, individual
| brilliance stated clearly.
|
| Many replies here would do well to read, re-read, and re-re-read
| with an introspective mindset. This is perhaps the best quality
| material I have seen from pg for quite some time. Its clarity is
| brilliant and the thing I liked most was the second, and to me
| unexpected section, full of the reasons haters gonna hate.
|
| I speak only for myself, and this is a throwaway, so nothing
| personal is at stake. This is a very lucid and precise
| examination of the fine controls at stake in writing. Their
| natural tension, the details of qualification. In my opinion,
| which may be trash, who knows, this will be cited for years to
| come because it is, in fact, true.
| keiferski wrote:
| The ideas in _Zero to One_ are not new and can be summarized in
| a few paragraphs. As with basically every other book
| /essay/speech written by a financially-successful person, it is
| over-valued simply because its author is good at making money.
|
| That said, it is certainly better than your typical business
| book - but that isn't saying much.
| pzqmpzqm wrote:
| We will agree to disagree, I suppose. For you things are
| simple, and for me they are not. For me, some thinking in
| Thiel's book was absolute heresy hiding in plain sight. I
| suppose we could argue over your concept of over-valued, but
| I have no interest in doing so.
| [deleted]
| nottorp wrote:
| All self improvement books (and by self improvement i mean
| books that claim to tell you some secret of value, i.e. i'm
| including business advice or drivel like the black swan) have
| at most 2-3 good ideas, mostly common sense, that they repeat
| in different forms until the book is thick enough to get sold
| as a book.
|
| That's the market. You wouldn't pay for a short essay that
| tells you the same ideas in 2000 words but never repeats
| itself would you?
|
| And that's before considering whether those 2-3 ideas are
| even worth the trouble.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sure, I agree, but Thiel hardly needs the money from a
| self-help book. He seems to have chosen the book format in
| order to access the market that you described, though I
| feel like he's smart enough to have put out a more
| significant product. IIRC he went on an interview tour
| promoting the book, so I think it was mostly to get his
| ideas out there.
|
| In any case, it's actually just an edited collection of
| lecture notes from his class on startups. Thus the length
| and repetitiveness. That's fine and I wouldn't expect an
| undergraduate course to deliver some radical new brilliant
| theory, but some people have certainly received it that
| way...
| nottorp wrote:
| Thiel may just be educating his next batch of products
| (he produces startups, right?) and charging for the book
| because he's after all a business man and why not do it
| at zero cost or a small positive.
| TimPC wrote:
| Zero to One was very contrarian at the time it was published.
| The majority of the start-up world was obsessed with lean and
| thought ideas were so cheap that you should try giving them
| away.
| timavr wrote:
| It is brilliant because it is brilliant and if you read 3 times
| and can't see the brilliance, then....
|
| Just stating that something is good doesn't make it good, even
| though people might believe it.
|
| We have a book, which was written quite a long time ago, filled
| with just utter nonsense. According to PG it is useful writing.
| It hits on all his points. It is much easier to be
| persuasive/useful when only you have the light, but when sun is
| out, you just one of em.
| pzqmpzqm wrote:
| You would do well to follow pg's advice. Your post doesn't
| make sense to me and isn't very coherent.
| rimliu wrote:
| Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
| pzqmpzqm wrote:
| Sometimes a banal reply is just a banal reply.
| caligarn wrote:
| Is Paul unfamiliar with what makes good academic writing? He
| starts by digging into academic writing, but I am not sure he
| knows how it functions and what it functions to do. Good and
| great academic writing pushes the envelope on theories and
| frameworks and tends to be the repository for new ideas that
| people like Paul use to make sense of the world. A case in point
| is Clayton Christensen. It's in the forges of his profession and
| writing practice that his Innovator's Dilemma was born. Academic
| writing may not be accessible and easy to read for outsiders, and
| tends towards a high degree of density. But that's the task of
| journalists, business people, educators, and essayists etc. to
| translate and apply it to the real world.
| rdlecler1 wrote:
| Former academic here. I disagree. Academic writing has evolved
| to demonstrate that you are (1) an insider and (2) to obfuscate
| your ideas so that peer reviewers are less likely to challenge
| you.
| TimPC wrote:
| I think this varies a lot by subject. Certain fields reward
| ambiguity and vagueness quite heavily. Good academic writing
| tends to be the exception rather than the rule. This may be
| true of essays as well as good writing is quite rare. I think
| the criticism is less about accessibility and more about the
| general trend towards uselessness of academic writing in a lot
| of fields of academia.
| peterwwillis wrote:
| Publication bias has the nasty effect of changing what you think.
| You start writing something because you had something you wanted
| to say, and then you start proofreading and editing and moving
| things around, and eventually you realize you're cutting entire
| paragraphs because your entire position has changed. You're not
| saying what you intended to say, and you're not sure if it's
| because what you were going to say was wrong, or you just edited
| yourself into a completely different essay.
|
| I sometimes visualize this by writing one rough draft as fast as
| I can and save it as "v1". Then I create a "v2" and begin my
| edits, and I can create more versions as I go if I want. When I
| feel like I'm finally done (hours/days later) I compare it to v1,
| and try to figure out how the hell the entire thing became so
| different.
|
| On the "novelty+strength pisses people off" part: you don't have
| to piss people off to write a good essay. One example of a
| convincing essay argument is to make it depend on the beliefs of
| the people you're trying to convince, such that Y can only exist
| if X is right, and they already believe X is right. They won't
| immediately run to your new idea with open arms, but they'll have
| a much more open mind about it. Anyway, there's an entire
| universe of rhetoric you can employ to break down the barriers to
| new ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
| jmiskovic wrote:
| I've also noticed that effect. When you are motivated to sit
| down and write something, you have a strong point you want to
| put to words and elaborate. The more effort you put in, the
| more thinking you do and more related threads to go down,
| qualifications to elaborate and so on.
|
| You say this is a 'nasty effect', but I'm not convinced it is a
| negative thing. You started off with a black & white idea and
| ended up with better grasp of matter. Maybe the edited text
| isn't edgy and pointed, but it is more mature. Do you consider
| your v1s better than your v2s?
| philwelch wrote:
| > You start writing something because you had something you
| wanted to say, and then you start proofreading and editing and
| moving things around, and eventually you realize you're cutting
| entire paragraphs because your entire position has changed.
| You're not saying what you intended to say, and you're not sure
| if it's because what you were going to say was wrong, or you
| just edited yourself into a completely different essay.
|
| That's kind of the point. Writing isn't just a way to
| communicate ideas to other people, it's also a structured way
| to work through those ideas yourself.
| alexandercrohde wrote:
| tl; dr:
|
| 1. Sets the topic of "What is a good essay?"
|
| 2. Asserts that correctness is necessary, but not sufficient
| condition for a good essay.
|
| 3. Illustrates 2 by pointing out that by increasing vagueness,
| complete correctness is always possible. Characterizes
| correctness/precision as opposing forces.
|
| 4. Adds two more criteria for a good essay - telling people
| something important, and that they don't know
|
| 5. Adds the essential caveat that things we know subconsciously
| may be worth restating [crucially, as points 1-5 we all certainly
| subconsciously knew]
|
| 6. Adds a fourth dimension to a good essay: "as unequivocal as
| possible" [aka strength]
|
| 7. Highlights the inherent tradeoffs in satisfying these
| conditions. Increasing one dimension may reduce audience size.
|
| 8. Details an simple algorithm for only writing important/true
| things -- reviewing/revising one's own ideas heavily before
| publishing (up to 100 times)
|
| 9. Proposes a technique to find important topics: by examining
| the pool topics one cares about
|
| 10. Proposes a technique to find novel topics: By examining
| topics that you've thought about a lot [and surprised yourself
| with when you found a connection]
|
| 11. Suggests "strength" [6] comes from thinking well and skillful
| use of qualifiers.
|
| 12. Adds another quality to what makes a good essay -- simplicity
|
| -
|
| 13. Proposes that good essays (by this formula) are particularly
| likely to make people mad
|
| 14. Identifies one cause of anger is that some widely-held
| incorrect beliefs an essay calls out are likely to be cherished
| beliefs
|
| 15. Mentions the strength component of very precise writing (as
| well as brevity) can come across as incredibly confident, and
| exacerbate the ruffling of feathers
|
| 16. Proposes that being misrepresented is particularly likely
| with this essay style, and isn't avoidable generally, but doesn't
| think one should worry too much about disingenuous
| misinterpretation.
|
| -
|
| 17. Advises aspiring essayists to relax the constraint of
| breadth-of-audience/topics. Suggests publication isn't a
| necessity.
|
| 18. Provides some hopeful thoughts on the future of essays
| jfarmer wrote:
| we all spinoza now
| alexandercrohde wrote:
| Observations.
|
| This is one of my longest tl; drs, particularly for a short
| essay. This to me signals high content ratio (low
| compressibility).
|
| As somebody who tried for years to get people online to pay
| attention to my essays, I am not super confident that we have
| good content-discovery mechanisms for essays online [except
| video essays, which seem to thrive]. Thus I don't take this
| essay as personally relevant, as I am not personally convinced
| that a good essay written by an unfamous person, would warrant
| enough attention to justify the rigorous revision process.
|
| I notice PG chooses to view the essay through an
| artistic/historic lens that puts him in the minority. It seems
| to me he strives very hard to stay above the primal desires
| that dominate the internet-attention-economy. A very tough
| challenge.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| ,,It's easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. ''
|
| What's funny is that the last dataset that Google built for
| evaluating dialogues has exactly these 2 metrics: correctness and
| specificity.
| techbio wrote:
| Longer than the usual PG essay, added my to reading list.
|
| I like the exploration of writing by a writer who has likely read
| more bad writing than I ever will.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I don't know. I get what pg is saying but I feel like he's
| missing some huge points here.
|
| I find that emotionally-laden content with overly-specified
| points combined with extreme surety sells better than more
| intellectual content that leaves many questions open to the
| reader. I find that in my own writing, over the years I'll take
| the same subject and move slowly from generalisms to specifics,
| and that *the process of reading, writing, and thinking about the
| generalisms are what drive the eventual specificity an
| confidence. I also find that writing and editing is itself
| thinking, that many times I don't slowly advance towards a goal
| until I've flailed around at the edges for a while. (Which he
| says as well, I think)
|
| Being wrong a lot in public helps to be eventually be right.
| There are things you'll never see unless you establish feedback
| mechanisms and run through them several times. There's a popular
| idea among some intellectuals that most books don't deserve to
| exist. I understand and mostly agree with that; there's been a
| ton of books that are supposed to say something that don't.
| There's also a ton of essays that show a writer wondering around
| in a field, circling around some idea they can barely express and
| how no idea how to understand.
|
| I'm okay with all of that. In fact, I think it's a good thing. I
| might not read any of it, but we need lots of people thinking
| about important things and trying to work through the issues.
| That's going to mean breaking a lot of these rules (or scoring
| low on the multiplied metric).
|
| Don't get me wrong, I like the metrics and they're a goal of
| mine. But you shouldn't write for other people, you should write
| for yourself. Otherwise you'll spend a lot of time worrying about
| what other people say about you. Write for yourself, figure out
| what's important to you, then work through becoming more and more
| specific as you grow. You don't play tennis by watching the
| scoreboard, you play by hitting the ball and engaging in the
| game. Likewise while you want to score high on these metrics,
| you've got to spread your intellectual wings and grow some.
| Otherwise it's just somebody talking to himself in an interesting
| manner. That might make a great thing to consume, but how useful
| is it actually?
|
| tl;dr it's better to write a lot, continue to score low on all of
| this as long as you're learning. Much better than scoring high
| and never changing.
| dugditches wrote:
| While the Internet provides a platform for Essays, as he says, I
| think maybe a bigger point is it allowing the rise of 'Video
| Essays'.
|
| Where now content creators are turning out 30+ minute videos on a
| single subject. While in the past it used to be more 'dry' things
| like History and the like it seems more mainstream subjects are
| being covered. Movies, cars, current social issues, etc.
|
| And just how much you actually get from them. They're often
| spoken from positions of authority on a subject. And slick
| editing and video may reinforce their credibility to the viewer.
| But often they just feel like empty stitched together wikipedia
| clippings with nice effects and humor sprinkled in to keep the
| viewer interested.
|
| Compared to crafting words and language like this Author tried to
| convey, you just rely on balance between entertainment &
| information.
| TimPC wrote:
| A very small portion of video's are video essays even if
| content creators are turning out 30m on a single topic. The
| organization and structure of the argument is completely
| different. Usually the goal of videos are primarily
| entertainment and occasionally a secondary goal of being
| informative. Usually the goal of an essay is primarily being
| informative with an occasional secondary goal of being
| entertaining.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| Like TV before it, it's the dumbing down the internet.
| [deleted]
| wellpast wrote:
| > How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel
| and important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this
| ... ... trick is not to say anything unless he's sure it's worth
| hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him, but when
| you do, they're usually right.
|
| I wish I could do this.
|
| I have to vocalize bad ideas at times & almost with surety to
| draw out all of the opposition so as to whittle the idea down to
| sharp and solid -- and to make it robust against the array of
| slings it could possibly face.
|
| I do not know how people can go through a dialectic process like
| this in their own silent mind. Or if anyone truly does. Or if
| they do, if this process trends toward "safe-ish" ideas only.
| osdiab wrote:
| While the internet is full of garbage writing, I don't feel like
| telling people that they shouldn't say anything wrong or
| potentially unimportant is the right way to go. That's a
| perfectionist attitude that stifles people's ability to explore,
| experiment, be wrong, learn, improve, and act. Like learning a
| language, if you never speak it because you're afraid to say
| something wrong, you'll never learn.
|
| And separately, being enlightened with novel pithy facts isn't
| the only reason people write things. There's a lot that can't be
| transmitted in that form, and while I appreciate that style of
| writing for startup advice or a how-to guide, it's definitely not
| universally applicable.
| injb wrote:
| " if you never speak it because you're afraid to say something
| wrong, you'll never learn"
|
| If you're afraid to say your idea because you know (or suspect)
| that it's wrong, then you have already learned the hardest part
| of the lesson. Of course, it still remains to find out what the
| right idea is, but voicing one that you know to be wrong is
| hardly going to help with that.
| friendlybus wrote:
| Hitting the ball wrong in tennis can be answered by the high
| school kid with one technique, and by Novak Djokovic with
| another technique. Novak will have a far more complete, in
| depth and transcendent answer than someone else, but both are
| "correct" in that they solve the problem of hitting the ball
| wrong.
|
| Knowing you're wrong is the threshold guardian to the
| adventure of hitting the mark correctly. I don't know how you
| embark on that journey without voicing it multiple times to
| multiple people.
| Swizec wrote:
| Best way to learn on the internet is to give the wrong answer
| and get corrected
| injb wrote:
| That's the best way if you don't know that you're wrong,
| sure. If you _do_ know, why not just ask what the right
| answer is?
| illvm wrote:
| This isn't always true, though. History of full of examples
| of people returning to "wrong" ideas only to find them not
| wrong at all.
| TimPC wrote:
| Robert Morris's solution is wrong for most of us about casual
| conversation because it's valuable to be wrong sometimes. But
| in terms of deciding which essays you publish it seems quite
| valuable. Out of all the media I produce from conversation,
| to video, to casual writing, to essays, essays are the ones I
| least want to be wrong in. Also, the process of refining an
| idea is a valid one. Barring topics on which you are an
| ideologue, seldom are you so wrong about an idea that you
| think it's perfectly correct and nothing bothers you or makes
| you question it through many edits.
| injb wrote:
| "Robert Morris's solution is wrong for most of us about
| casual conversation because it's valuable to be wrong
| sometimes".
|
| I don't think this is quite right. Of course I don't know
| RM, but given PG's characterization of him, there's nothing
| to indicate that he never asks when he's unsure about
| something. PG only says that he never offers an opinion
| when he's unsure. I doubt that this interferes with
| learning. Saying something that's wrong to provoke a
| correction is not the only way to get the right answer. In
| fact I doubt that it's the best way, or even a good way .
| Many of us have learned the hard way that when someone says
| something wrong, they're not always interested in being
| corrected. Instead, if you want the right answer, you can
| always just ask, which doesn't involve being wrong, and
| makes it clear that you are ready to be instructed.
| throwawaylolx wrote:
| I think an otherwise interesting point is obscured by your
| construing of a strawman argument:
|
| >I don't feel like telling people that they shouldn't say
| anything wrong or potentially unimportant is the right way to
| go. That's a perfectionist attitude that stifles people's
| ability to explore, experiment, be wrong, learn, improve, and
| act.
|
| It is dubious to imply that the author is trying to police what
| people can say and consequently how they can act: he's
| explicitly talking about _essays_, a literary form typically
| used for advancing arguments. By reframing his argument as an
| attempt at "telling people that they shouldn't say anything
| wrong," you're arguing against a much less interesting argument
| and sidestepping the central theme of _essays_ altogether.
|
| In other words, I think the claim that good essays must not
| necessarilly show novelty, correctness, strength, and
| importance is a much more interesting argument, and, against
| correctness at least, one can probably find intellectual
| companionship among early 20th century futurists, dadaists, and
| later on fascists.
| [deleted]
| alexandercrohde wrote:
| Agree.
|
| Also ironic how this is the top-voted comment on an essay
| that, itself, spends so much time talking about the
| inevitability of misrepresentation.
|
| I could write an essay on that myself.
| lliamander wrote:
| Writing is hard. for many people, writing anything at all is a
| struggle. That struggle also can go away with practice.
| Eventually you get to the point where expressing yourself with
| the written word becomes very natural.
|
| Of the criteria that Paul suggested (true, important, novel,
| clear) I would say that novice writers should strive to write
| with just one of those qualities (which can vary from one piece
| of writing to another).
|
| As you achieve fluency and words just flow from the pen (or
| keyboard) and the focus shifts away from being able to express
| yourself, you add the other criteria to improve the quality of
| the ideas you express.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| >... I don't feel like telling people that they shouldn't say
| anything wrong or potentially unimportant is the right way to
| go.
|
| I think you're putting words in his mouth. You seem to be
| reading it as "only write useful things" rather than "how to
| write usefully." You laid out a number of reasons that writing
| doesn't need to be useful to others, which is great, but
| doesn't contradict the essay how you seem to think it does.
| jimbokun wrote:
| "I don't feel like telling people that they shouldn't say
| anything wrong or potentially unimportant is the right way to
| go."
|
| The problem is far too many people err in the opposite
| direction. I don't see an Internet only consisting of perfectly
| reasoned and argued content, with everyone else fearfully
| staying quiet. I see countless comments suggesting the writer
| didn't take a second to consider contrary viewpoints, or facts
| that might undermine their argument, or stating things with
| certainty without regard to whether or not they have a factual
| basis.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| The end notes aren't referenced in the text right? I haven't seen
| the window/balcony quote before - would be interesting to know
| which part of the text it links to specifically.
| keiferski wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I'd argue that the "mathematical" approach to
| good writing is inherently flawed. That is, trying to arrive at
| the formula for the "best" essay via dialectic (argument) is to
| miss the forest for the trees. Writing is an art, not a science.
| Formal logic was developed to display arguments, so if you are
| trying to be as precise and mathematical as possible, use that
| instead.
|
| Instead, I'd suggest reading the great writers of the past and
| present (but focus more on the past). Study what works, what
| speaks to you, what stylistic approach you favor, and so on. As a
| bonus, you'll learn more about _what has been said by other
| intelligent people_ and subsequently avoid writing over-
| confident, ill-informed essays...
|
| If you're looking for stellar examples of essay-writing, I
| personally recommend Jorge Luis Borges and David Foster Wallace.
| Both manage to write in a manner both erudite and coherent,
| without seeming too florid or too simplistic. Here are a few
| samples:
|
| - A New Refutation of Time, Borges:
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1947-borges-anewrefutation...
|
| - The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, Borges:
| http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.htm...
|
| - David Lynch and Lost Highway, Wallace:
| http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html
|
| - Laughing with Kafka, Wallace: https://harpers.org/wp-
| content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-...
|
| - Consider the Lobster, Wallace:
| http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
|
| Edit: added some more essay links.
| randcraw wrote:
| > Writing is an art, not a science.
|
| Writing fiction may be an art, but writing nonfiction is a
| craft. And essays are nonfiction.
|
| The creator of art seeks somehow to offer fresh insight, often
| employing some form of novelty, be it technique, medium,
| context, perspective, etc.
|
| Craft, however, isn't about novelty; it's about engineering a
| clear convincing message effectively, efficiently, and
| ideally... memorably and with elan.
|
| I admit the line between art and craft is often blurry
| (probably because the craftsman has taken too much artistic
| license). Unlike art, the techniques employed in an essay
| should never impede its purpose. There, it's only the message
| that matters, not the medium.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| >Unlike art, the techniques employed in an essay should never
| impede its purpose. There, it's only the message that
| matters, not the medium.
|
| On the other hand, it's very possible for the techniques
| employed to work in service of its purpose. Many of Adorno's
| essays are arguing for a point of view both aesthetically, in
| form, and argumentatively, in content.
| atomack wrote:
| I'm not sure I quite share your view of what art aims to do.
| Iris Murdoch had a line that tyrants fear art because art
| forces them to confront the truth.
|
| If one believes, as Murdoch suggests, that art aims to
| express a truth as clearly as possible then the qualities of
| good technical writing and good fiction are entirely
| compatible. I'd suggest the distinction lies more in the
| extent to which the sensibilities of the author are present
| in the writing.
|
| For instance, Vonnegut's guidelines on good writing
| (summarised here:
| https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/14/how-to-write-
| with-s...) could equally be applied to technical writing as
| fiction, I think.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| I think the fallacy is in the premise: "An essay should be
| useful."
|
| Well, useful is always in the eye of the beholder. There is no
| such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And pretending
| there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually
| dishonest.
|
| Sure, an essay could be a formal piece that approaches an
| almost "mathematical" approach. After all, an essay a first and
| foremost an argument presented by the author. Even a flawed
| argument is still an argument. And a flawed essay is still an
| essay.
|
| The fallacy here is being implicitly reductionist. If your
| premise states "an essay should be useful" then you're
| basically reducing the definition of what an essay is to a
| formal argument based on logic and falsifiable facts, and
| rejecting any other text as "not an essay" or, worse, "not
| useful" - whatever that might mean - or, worse, "nonsenses" or
| "a dumb thing to say".
|
| A quick glance on Wikipedia dispenses such reductionism rather
| swiftly:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay
|
| Not-withstanding, I think PG's essay does contain some
| excellent personal advice on writing style and technique
| itself. No more, no less. His sin is confounding form and
| function. The former always follows the latter, never the
| inverse.
| jdgiese wrote:
| Generally, I agree with what you are saying about essays and
| stating that "they should be useful."
|
| But I was surprised by your comments about truth:
|
| > There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And
| pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is
| intellectually dishonest.
|
| Could you expand on what you mean by "an absolute truth?"
|
| I may be misunderstanding you, but I suspect you mean that we
| can never know anything with absolute certainty. For example,
| it may _seem_ that I typing on a keyboard, but in actual
| fact, I am dreaming.
|
| In this example, there _is_ an absolute truth. I am typing on
| my keyboard, or I am not. But that truth is not knowable
| without any doubt.
|
| If we use "truth" as high as knowing without any possible
| doubt, then nothing is "true." Thus, the word true is useless
| during everyday communication. For this reason I don't think
| it is appropriate to qualify everything we say with, "we
| don't know with absolute certainty this is true, but here is
| my best guess." Rather, we just say it is true.
| Lord_Baltimore wrote:
| >There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And
| pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is
| intellectually dishonest.
|
| You seem to be stating this as an absolute truth.
| philwelch wrote:
| I like David Foster Wallace as a writer and he's as much an
| authority as anyone when it comes to writing well, but I think
| there's a pretty major difference in terms of goals and
| priorities. PG is writing about writing as a means of
| processing ideas. He's taking the perspective of a structural
| engineer, not an architect. While Wallace wrote beautifully, PG
| is writing about writing usefully, even if that writing is bare
| and unornamented. And while that may not be your preferred
| style, I wouldn't dismiss it as something that someone would
| want to do.
| keiferski wrote:
| Have you read _Consider the Lobster_? It is absolutely a
| clear, informative, educational essay that also happens to be
| beautifully written.
| philwelch wrote:
| I have. And to my analogy, some architects can also design
| buildings that are structurally sound ;)
| artsr wrote:
| > Writing is an art, not a science.
|
| I agree with this, but _avoiding writing nonsense_ is science,
| and not art. So there definitely is a scientific aspect to
| writing.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| there is a difference between a literary essay and the kind PG
| is talking about here. PG's essays are more like maybe business
| commentary than literary essays. Some of these insights apply
| anyway, to all essays - but don't confuse different types of
| essays.
| the_af wrote:
| First of all: interesting post!
|
| But since you mentioned Borges let me offer a counter-
| counterpoint: Borges was obsessive about his writings and can
| be considered "mathematical" about them. He chopped away
| anything that didn't fit and was very careful about the
| construction of sentences. He was so obsessed that he recalled
| -- or so I read somewhere -- something that was already printed
| in order to make corrections to it.
|
| Poe claimed he was quite "mathematical" (or maybe the word is
| "methodical", or "analytical") about the construction of his
| famous poem The Raven. While this claim is disputed, or maybe
| he exaggerated, at least it's something he liked to claim about
| some of his work.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sorry if I was unclear. By "mathematical" I meant looking for
| an underlying rule, a universal applicable to all particulars
| - which is essentially what the original essay is looking
| for.
|
| Borges absolutely was extremely specific and analytical, but
| that's not what I meant.
| the_af wrote:
| Oh. I misunderstood. In that case, we agree.
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