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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
packing a lot into sentences is entirely different from writing short sentences. for instance, pynchon packs a ton into his sentences, yet they're long and winding at the same time (confusingly so, sometimes).
hemingway's sentences are just short, like playing every note in staccato, which in itself can become tiring (i like, but don't love, hemingway).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
They're English teachers, they view language through the lens of literature. If you read Faulkner, you'll find extremely long and verbose sentences. If you read Hemingway or McCarthy, you'll find much more economic and sparing use of words.
The problem is outside of literature, readers want knowledge, not pretty language. I think many teachers lead their students astray, as the vast majority of us write for knowledge and not for prettiness.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And so does the OP, I'd wager. Personally I found the basis of the OP's criticism sufficiently self-evident to not require dissertation. If you didn't, that's fine too—but it's lazy criticism to declare that because YOU formed a different opinion that the OP was being lazy.
>> 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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
" 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.
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.
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.
"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.
>... 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.
"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.
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.
It's the sort of advice you get from either a worrier or someone who has already perfected their craft.
And in an era where people talk a lot about how others achieve something and then 'close the door behind them', well, this is closing the door behind you, Paul.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
> There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all.
In a relative sense, it's true that there's no such thing as an absolute truth, but it's also true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth. However, in an absolute sense — the sense in which, for example, real-number multiplication is commutative — it is only true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth, and the assertion that "there's no such thing as an absolute truth" is simply an error of reasoning.
> And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest.
No. You know what's intellectually dishonest? Asserting that your viewpoint is so obviously correct that nobody could possibly disagree with it sincerely, and that if they claim to disagree, they are simply being dishonest.
Given the self-referential and self-refuting nature of your comment, I'm guessing that it's merely an elaborate joke, intended to expose the moral relativism it ostensibly espouses to ridicule.
I'm not interested in discussing various epistemic theories of truth as such. That's entirely besides the point I'm trying to make.
It's that the word "useful" used by PG hides a potential tyranny of truth. The notion that one can refute any argument or claim with the criticism "not useful" because it was "not novel, not important, too florid" and so on. As if there is some universal definition or bar that describes what "useful" is outside of our experience. A false presumption. "useful" in this context risks being used as a crutch to dismiss any opinion without having to critically consider your own thoughts and feelings.
An essay geared towards making a formal argument based on falsifiable facts may be "useful" to a specific audience, or may enshrine a particular genre - academic publishing - but how PG constructs his article may - erroneously - be applied to any form of essay writing. Which would be quite a reductionist take.
> Entire libraries, fields of study and lives have been dedicated to the topic with no formal conclusion.
On the contrary, many formal conclusions have been reached. One of them is that it is self-contradictory to say that it is an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth, which is what you seemed to be saying, and that it is meaningless to say that it is a relative truth that all truth is relative. These are ontological propositions, not epistemological propositions.
I don't think the reductionism/wholism axis is really relevant here. I don't read Paul as making any reductionist claims; I think they're much more easily read as wholist claims.
It's true that Paul is making objectivist normative claims about essays, which is to say, claims about what is good or bad in an essay — what kinds of essays people should or shouldn't write. That seems to be what you object to; you're a subjectivist. The same self-contradiction objection applies: you're implicitly claiming that it's objectively bad to make claims about what is objectively bad. (So it is not in fact entirely beside the point you were trying to make.) If you really believed that, you wouldn't be doing it.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 :-)
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..
> 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.
> 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.
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!
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score for usefulness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Convey a singular point with intent. Below is first paragraph rewritten. Just my 2¢.
---
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Not only is it a horrible word it's not even accurate in this context -- it's modifying "To Write" which is the infinitive verb, which really is the action of the writing, not the result, which is what the author actually wants to convey.
Normally this wouldn't bug me so much but on an essay about effective writing....urgh.
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.
307 comments
[ 172 ms ] story [ 5272 ms ] threadIt'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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
hemingway's sentences are just short, like playing every note in staccato, which in itself can become tiring (i like, but don't love, hemingway).
> Yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like Mark Twain once said "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one."
No he didn’t. It was Blaise Pascal:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
The problem is outside of literature, readers want knowledge, not pretty language. I think many teachers lead their students astray, as the vast majority of us write for knowledge and not for prettiness.
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]
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.
"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.
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.
Further, It's hard to criticise Graham on HN.
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.
And so does the OP, I'd wager. Personally I found the basis of the OP's criticism sufficiently self-evident to not require dissertation. If you didn't, that's fine too—but it's lazy criticism to declare that because YOU formed a different opinion that the OP was being lazy.
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?"
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.
>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.
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.
It seems a lot of effort goes into sounding smart, rather then delivering information required.
Who learned anything from above?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
I like the exploration of writing by a writer who has likely read more bad writing than I ever will.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
“RTFM”
“Nobody’s going to do your homework for you”
“whathaveyoutried.com”
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.
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.
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.
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.
And in an era where people talk a lot about how others achieve something and then 'close the door behind them', well, this is closing the door behind you, Paul.
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.
I agree with this, but avoiding writing nonsense is science, and not art. So there definitely is a scientific aspect to writing.
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.
Borges absolutely was extremely specific and analytical, but that’s not what I meant.
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.
You seem to be stating this as an absolute truth.
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.
In a relative sense, it's true that there's no such thing as an absolute truth, but it's also true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth. However, in an absolute sense — the sense in which, for example, real-number multiplication is commutative — it is only true that there is such a thing as an absolute truth, and the assertion that "there's no such thing as an absolute truth" is simply an error of reasoning.
> And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest.
No. You know what's intellectually dishonest? Asserting that your viewpoint is so obviously correct that nobody could possibly disagree with it sincerely, and that if they claim to disagree, they are simply being dishonest.
Given the self-referential and self-refuting nature of your comment, I'm guessing that it's merely an elaborate joke, intended to expose the moral relativism it ostensibly espouses to ridicule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth
With great minds such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Baudrillard_(1929%E2%80%... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Foucault_(1926%E2%80%931...
I'm not interested in discussing various epistemic theories of truth as such. That's entirely besides the point I'm trying to make.
It's that the word "useful" used by PG hides a potential tyranny of truth. The notion that one can refute any argument or claim with the criticism "not useful" because it was "not novel, not important, too florid" and so on. As if there is some universal definition or bar that describes what "useful" is outside of our experience. A false presumption. "useful" in this context risks being used as a crutch to dismiss any opinion without having to critically consider your own thoughts and feelings.
An essay geared towards making a formal argument based on falsifiable facts may be "useful" to a specific audience, or may enshrine a particular genre - academic publishing - but how PG constructs his article may - erroneously - be applied to any form of essay writing. Which would be quite a reductionist take.
On the contrary, many formal conclusions have been reached. One of them is that it is self-contradictory to say that it is an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth, which is what you seemed to be saying, and that it is meaningless to say that it is a relative truth that all truth is relative. These are ontological propositions, not epistemological propositions.
I don't think the reductionism/wholism axis is really relevant here. I don't read Paul as making any reductionist claims; I think they're much more easily read as wholist claims.
It's true that Paul is making objectivist normative claims about essays, which is to say, claims about what is good or bad in an essay — what kinds of essays people should or shouldn't write. That seems to be what you object to; you're a subjectivist. The same self-contradiction objection applies: you're implicitly claiming that it's objectively bad to make claims about what is objectively bad. (So it is not in fact entirely beside the point you were trying to make.) If you really believed that, you wouldn't be doing it.
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.
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.
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.
Beautiful writing is useful.
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.
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
"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..
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
In my life, Twitter is for hot takes, and Feedly is for deep thoughts.
But perhaps a simplistic initial draft is not the same thing as a badly written, incorrect one.
What is the fourth component?
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.
That said, it is certainly better than your typical business book - but that isn't saying much.
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.
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...
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.
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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.
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.
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.
(I debated whether to use 'one' or 'someone' here, for similar reasons.)
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.
Normally this wouldn't bug me so much but on an essay about effective writing....urgh.
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.