Copywriter here. Sometimes the client gives me the barest thread of a topic, some minor, new product or service or partnership for them, something that could be covered comprehensively in 300 words... and then they say they want a 1000+ word blog post on it (for SEO purposes).
That article is going to end up being mostly fluff, and there’s not much I can do about it. Sure, I can work in some background and play up the implications of the news, but really, it’s just content for content’s sake, so that they can stay in their customers’ feeds.
And, just for the record, those type of articles are not my forte or preference, but are an unavoidable reality in my line of work.
The text is being optimized for an algorithmic reader, not a human reader. For this essay to make any difference to OP, Google's search engineers would have to read it.
I agree. It is an excellent book that will teach you to use fewer and simpler words. I think it makes a lot of sense in technical and business writing.
Aside from knowing this though the most effective thing I've learned to do is to keep re-reading what I wrote. Reorganize phrases to keep connected thoughts nearby in text. In English you have a lot of freedom to put phrases all over the place in a sentence. When I write I very rarely put all the connected phrases next to each other in the first pass.
But I guess I'd generalize that to say: taking the time to re-read what you wrote and edit it actually makes a big difference. It took a lot of shitty writing and overcoming laziness in school before I learned this lesson.
The first review on that page[1] is a well argued counterpoint to Graham's essay. Getting your ideas understood is often only one part of what you're trying to achieve.
If that really is your only goal, then I agree, the simpler the better.
Not the parent poster, but: think of speed bumps. They force you to slow down and pay more attention to the road.
Some writers, particularly post-modern ones, aim at the same thing. By forcing you to read their works carefully, you'll (in theory) be forced to think about them more.
I don’t think this essay precludes that either, the 1% of 1% of books that are made better by being Proust rather than Vonnegut. And the chances of you being Proust are essentially zero.
That feels like the author is saying “I’m so clever you need to be told when to think about this,” whereas i would prefer to think at my own pace, without deliberate obfuscation, thanks very much.
If it’s a work of art, fair enough. If you’re trying to explain or argue something... then you’re probably hiding the holes in your argument or trying to sound smarter than you are.
I agree with you personally. But find that not everyone wants to communicate clearly. Some people have made a career out of impenetrable communication.
If anything, it’s useful that language can sometimes slow you down. It’s one of the things language is able to do. Not everything benefits from sliding in as slickly as possible, letting you use your “mental models” to quickly grasp an idea you don’t already have.
I’m not fond of Foucault, but from time to time I explain to my pragmatic wife what Deleuze or Zizek are all about in $book, and as best as I try to explain them in plain words, much of what I got doesn’t come across. Tradutore traditore.
Although you should probably take into consideration that some professional linguists think the book is trash containing "prescriptivist poppycock" that the author doesn't even follow.
A lot of writing rules are of the "follow it until you know how and when to break it" variety. That way if you never learn how to break them correctly, your writing is still a lot better than it was. It's no surprise that studies of writing already known to be good will find much rule-breaking, as one is not surprised to find race cars on a race track moving faster than we'd want any car to, ordinarily.
> Prescriptivists never seem to add that clarifying nuance to their advice though.
They often do, in my experience. AFAIK it hasn't been common to attempt any kind of real, strict prescriptivism in English since the middle of last century (yes, I'm sure a few examples exist). These days it's mostly "write like this—until you know better" or "avoid X if your audience is Y, for such-and-such reason".
> The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and that makes simple writing even simpler.
ruthless editing seems a pretty big factor in the writing well result.
Achieving simplicity is hard. Allow me to explain, with a software analogy, too many times "customers" or users wants a "simple" solution, wrongly expecting that a simple final product was made with a simple implementation, which is not the case at all. It's the opposite.
I would expect the same process about writing, a final and concise essay requires tons of work, removing a word and replacing it with a common alternative and rewording phrases to make it simpler (for the reader). I understand Paul statement as "use a limited and common vocabulary" rather than complex words and sentences with fluff.
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.“ — Nathaniel Hawthorne (apparently)*
There’s definite value to simplicity in writing. At the same time, like all principles, people tend to run with the idea and misapply it. There are some cases in which your work demands a certain level of precision that’s only possible using complex words or jargon. Not to mention, writing that’s a little complicated can be a lot more fun! There are several novelists, essayists, and poets who are a joy to read not because they express their ideas as clearly and simply as possible, but because they manage linguistic acrobatics that make us realize there are ways to use language we never thought possible—often it takes some extra work to understand such output.
*: Have never taken the time to verify this myself.
It can be a difficult balance. You can provide a lot of information in a few bullet points, but there may also be a lot of contextual information left out that leaves more curious readers wondering "why is like this and not another way".
The most successful (by that I mean, placed the greatest number of ideas in the greatest number of brains) informative writing I've seen is a pleasure to read as well. Humans are capable of deriving multiple rewards from something at the same time. People who fetishize simplicity would take Carl Sagan's:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
And replace it with:
The Earth contains all humans and is far from Voyager I.
An, but there’s a fine line between simplification and reductionism.
For instance, your condensation of the graph completely misses the mention that people misapply general principles, and it also reduced linguistic creativity to “entertainment” which can mean a far different thing (e.g. one can write a book that’s wildly entertaining because of its characters but that sports none of the linguistic ingenuity I mention in the OP). Not to mention, you couldn’t even decide whether to use the word simple or concise! Sometimes you just can’t get around using a couple of “extra” words. Thus the abominable “/“. (Ick)
I think we all know that we should write simply, but not always what needs to be simplified in something we've written. I find http://hemingwayapp.com to be useful here. I don't listen to all recommendations, but it helps me fix some mistakes I make often - using passive voice, unnecessary hedging etc.
I remember seeing the replay of PG writing an essay[^1] back in 2009. To me, this was such a strong way to show (rather than tell) just _how_ hard writing really is.
I think there are two sources of confirmation bias here:
1. People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing. Simple. Precise. Direct. It suits a technical literal mind to have less ambiguity and fewer flourishes.
2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.
Both of these points considered, I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace).
Agreed. Simple writing is perfectly valid in the right time and place. Rich, dense writing also has a place and value. The real answer is understand what type of writing serves your intent and write with deliberate intent towards that style for that impact.
> I think there are two sources of confirmation bias here:
[...]
2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.
Did you see what he wrote in the essay, regarding this:
> Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the future will be in much the same position as people from other countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain for a woodworker to build a chair to last.
Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job.
> I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace).
It seems pretty clear to me that the essay is about non-fiction writing, not fiction. All the arguments in it apply to non-fiction writing.
> On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.
I would argue that academic writing tends to be pretty poor.
> I would argue that academic writing tends to be pretty poor.
The above-namedropped David Foster Wallace certainly thought so.
Among people who spend their days thinking about language I'm pretty sure academese is considered more of an elaborate, extended shibboleth than an effective communication tool, going beyond merely being sprinkled with jargon and fake-fancy clichés (like, say, business language) so that it serves as an effective gatekeeping tool. Hard(er than it needs to be) to read, hard to correctly write.
Because James Joyce's style isn't "simple" by any stretch of the imagination, I would guess? And the essay presents its position as a general statement void of all context. What context are we supposed to assume here?
Everything has context. Paul Graham is a leader in the startup scene so more than likely he's talking about the types text relevant to startups. Blog posts, press releases, etc.
Again, why the fuck would you assume Paul Graham is talking about James Joyce?
If "more than likely" he's talking about "the types of text relevant to startups" then surely that would be stated in an essay tooting the virtues of "simple." However, that doesn't appear to be the case.
It seems more like Paul Graham might be talking about the kind of writing he does himself. Like essays. However, even in such a case, his point is debatable. Which is what people are doing here — debating.
No one is assuming he's "talking about James Joyce." You must be confused. He's talking about a certain type of writing style and making contestable generalizations about it. People are illustrating the contestable points with examples.
I think the essay is clearly about _non-fiction_ writing. It's arguing about how best to communicate ideas (he uses the term 'ideas' several times).
Sure, fiction can be trying to communicate things, and sometimes even ideas, but to me it's pretty obvious that the essay isn't trying to give advice for fiction writing in general.
It's pretty obvious to me too. That's not the point.
The essay makes a generic statement about the superiority of a particular, although loosely defined, writing style.
People debate the edge cases of that statement, showing its limits, and pointing to counter examples.
The result is that the content of the essay is reduced to a very banal statement of the type: "All other things being equal, prefer writing something simple rather than not simple." As an aesthetic preference, it's all well and good. As a persuasive argument, rather lacking. It "tries to prove too much."
The other person (at the top of this sub-thread) did say "Both of these points considered, I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace)." I would not consider these edge cases, because I don't think literature is relevant to the essay and its purposes.
If you want to restrict Graham's argument to non-fiction, I'll happily grant you that.
But let me give you a bit more context:
As a Frenchman, when I think "Essay", my mind almost automatically reaches for two authors: Montaigne and Pascal (e.g. in his Pensées).
"Simple" is probably the last qualifier I would use to describe their works. They're not simple. They're complex, rich, beautiful, copiously quoting from classical authors and yet often crystal clear. They have the same quality poetry has where replacing a word by another damages the precision of the message and images conveyed.
That is also true of non-fiction prose in longer form. I shudder to think what could become of Tocqueville's writing style, a peculiar mix of classical and romantic, if it were translated into "simple" language.
I do not have much of an opinion on the underlying debate happening here^1, but I will disagree with this comment.
I do not believe that the article's prescription is confined to business writing.
> Paul Graham is a leader in the startup scene
That is true. But Graham is also a self-described essayist. He was writing long before he started Y Combinator, and his essays often discuss writing as a thing unto itself. For example, his "Nerds" essay mentions that one of his goals for life in high school was to write well^2.
Given that Graham is deeply interested in writing, and that the article doesn't explicitly confine itself to business writing, I think it's quite a stretch to assume that this essay is only talking about business writing.
> Again, why the fuck would you assume Paul Graham is talking about James Joyce?
This is a strawman (and also unnecessarily combative).
--
[^1]: Well, see my top-level comment. But that's not really relevant to this comment.
[^2]: "There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things." http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Please drop swipes like that from your arguments here, and generally please don't escalate hostility even when someone is wrong or you feel they are. Your comment would be fine without that last sentence.
Edit: as for "Try to not be autistic for a second" - we ban accounts that do that. Please review the guidelines and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, so we won't have to ban you.
> And the essay presents its position as a general statement void of all context.
Are you sure? From the blog (first sentence):
> I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.
Since the "I" in this case refers to someone who does not write poetry, speculative fiction, drama, tragedies, comedies ... and only ever writes for a technical audience, the context is clear: technical[1] audience not seeking poetry, fiction, drama, etc...
Further one he says:
> So you can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can safely use difficult words.
Once again, that indicates to me he is talking about writing something technical[2], not prose or poetry.
[1][2] "Technical" is not limited to IT and engineering; it's about anything that involves technique. Describing dance moves is "technical", as is writing a recipe (which is very similar in technique to writing a tiny program) or anything involving writing down music (Should you use 7/4 for the first verse, or alternate between 3/4 and 4/4? Which will be clearer to the flautist?)
I don't think Paul Graham writes for a "technical" audience only and am fairly certain he would dispute that claim.
I'm also fairly certain that the type of writing he's talking about is mostly non-fiction prose, such as the essays he writes himself (even though he doesn't state that explicitly). Would you consider those "technical" writing?
What is an 'ordinary' word? The first sentence threw me for this precise term, which was internally inconsistent with later in the article talking about second or third+ English language users, or even, not mentioned in the article, first language speakers with differing backgrounds.
A very odd term to use.
I'd open simply with "Think of your audience, think of your goal" and on thinking of audience expand to "Think of your audience, of which there may be some you've not thought of, or it might just be yourself, and think of your goal, if any."
Well okay, who is he addressing? That’s pretty much the only question I had reading it. Surely it isn’t the modern blogger or clickbait ‘journalists’, since they know what they are doing and we know what they are doing.
It reads very much like it's a response to this not-even-particularly-upvoted comment on his last essay, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26377185 "Why does he write like an SAT reading comprehension passage"
Try to not be autistic for a second. Paul Graham is in the tech scene. PERHAPS he's talking about things like coding tutorials, technical blogs, press releases, documentaiton, etc.
I'd argue that simple writing is great in that domain.
You've also crossed into bannable territory. That's not cool, regardless of how bad another comment is. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here (all of them, please—you broke several).
I think the point is that one should use a direct and clear style of writing where the objective is to convey a clear message. Examples include technical papers or journalism. Of course, literature is not included.
That's the main shortcoming of this essay. It doesn't define what it means by "simple". "If you want to be clear, write clearly" is a bromide, not an essay.
The essay is titled "Write Simply". It's about why you should try to write simply, rather than being a how-to. I think that's reasonable. It may be very difficult to precisely define what "simple" means, and it may not be that necessary: it's just telling people why (he thinks) they should aim for simplicity. Most people can make a conscious choice about how simple or complex their writing is - and this essay is advice about which direction to go in.
>People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing.
My perception is the reverse. Probably 60% of the articles linked on this site, day in and day out, are a thicket of impenetrable jargon. Endless blog posts that make no attempt to explain to the non-initiated what the various acronyms mean or why the concepts might matter for a person who is not deeply, deeply immersed in whatever technical field the author is writing about. I wish more people who write about coding/tech would realize that a larger audience is interested in what is going on, but that the communication of the concepts needs to be approachable. This is not just a shortcoming of this field, obviously, as people in all sorts of technical/specialized fields tend to write the same way, speaking only to the in-crowd.
I think jargonistic writing is typical when trying to impress. Academics have long employed jargon to obfuscate in order to seem more clever and subtle. Expressed simply, ideas seem simple. Among folk who depend on appearing clever, the last thing they want is to appear simple.
Insightful ideas are rare. Hiding mundane thoughts in abstruse verbiage leaves questions in the mind of the readership: "I don't see the author's point. But he seems pretty smart. I must have missed something." Vote up.
Many well established schools of untestable academic thought are often built on foundations as sandy as these, IMHO.
He didn't say it, but I'm pretty sure Graham is talking only about writing non-fiction essays, especially posts in social media. Writing with verve and elan requires variety and timing and imagination, not just clarity and simplicity. Other genres of literature like poetry, fiction, haikus, plays, sonnets, and even longer forms of non-fiction... these are horses best depicted not by monotone but by a rich spectrum of color.
This feels closely related Plain Language [1]. An editor I worked with pointed me to this concept. We were writing documentation for a framework my company was building.
My standard recommendation for writing advice is Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons In Clarity And Grace"[1].
Another good one is George Gopen's "The Sense of Structure". It's less inspirational than Clarity and Grace, but it shows more hands-on how to construct sentences and paragraphs.
[1] or "Lessons in Clarity and Grace" or "Toward Clarity and Grace" – they are all substantially the same book
A related paper is the delightfully titled "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly"[0]. It won the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in Literature but it could've won the Economy one just as well in my opinion.
Seems like this whole essay argues for clarity rather than simplicity — probably a better goal to aim for, too.
He opposes simple to "fancy", but the opposite of simple isn't just "fancy", that's, well, a simplification. The opposite of "simple" writing may be: "rich" writing, "complex" writing, none of which are particularly problematic for Graham's goal provided that they're paired with enough clarity.
That "simple" writing lasts longer is disproved by many works of literature that have made their way to us through history, most of which, by the standard of this essay, could be considered complex.
As someone with a modicum of experience in the philosophy of language, I must also say that I do not look kindly on people who take for granted that there even could be such a thing as a thought without language, a "pure idea", since for all we know such a thing has never been observed.
> That "simple" writing lasts longer is disproved by many works of literature that have made their way to us through history, most of which, by the standard of this essay, could be considered complex.
- Would that literature have been considered complex at the time it was written? How much of that perceived complexity is due to changing writing styles, education standards, etc?
- Writing a book and writing a proposal for the next project/product have entirely different definitions of "lasting". Context matters greatly.
> As someone with a modicum of experience in the philosophy of language, I must also say that I do not look kindly on people who take for granted that there even could be such a thing as a thought without language, a "pure idea", since for all we know such a thing has never been observed.
This sentence is a good example of the kind of unnecessary complexity described by the essay. You seem to be saying that "pure ideas are not possible without language", but that's not clear in your writing. If your intent it to exclude people who do not have a "modicum of experience in the philosophy of language", I have to ask: why?
> - Would that literature have been considered complex at the time it was written? How much of that perceived complexity is due to changing writing styles, education standards, etc?
Great question, can't say I'm able to answer it authoritatively. I would guess most works of literature, essays and speeches, even at the time they were produced, tend to be a fair bit more complex than what the average person is used to. Especially if they come from eras with lower literacy.
> - Writing a book and writing a proposal for the next project/product have entirely different definitions of "lasting". Context matters greatly.
It certainly does.
> This sentence is a good example of the kind of unnecessary complexity described by the essay.
It's a pretty simple sentence. What's tripping you up?
> You seem to be saying that "pure ideas are not possible without language", but that's not clear in your writing.
No. I'm saying that thinking "pure ideas devoid of any language" is a naive concept to anyone who's researched that topic a minimal amount. I wasn't flexing.
> If your intent it to exclude people who do not have a "modicum of experience in the philosophy of language", I have to ask: why?
That's not my intent at all. I'm providing context to my judgment. If that was my intent, I would have said: "If you don't have experience in the philosophy of language, don't write about this topic." Good thing is — I'm not a Nazi, so I tend not to do that kind of stuff.
depending on my purpose and audience, i will write the first draft and then deliver it verbally. at least for me, and i do tend to use far too many words in the first draft, that exercise leads to a much clearer second draft.
Meh. Reducing language to a mere communication tool also destroys much of its beauty, meaning, and ability to inspire or motivate us. I don't think it's a coincidence that the loss of interest in poetry has coincided with a general loss of respect for literary culture.
I had this impression recently while reading the Akbarnama, which is a sort of court-approved biography of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. It was written by his Grand Vizier, the top political advisor, who was also a poet and translator. Indeed it would almost be unheard of for a high governmental official to not be deeply educated in aesthetic matters.
In any case, what immediately struck me was how beautiful the writing itself was. A bit wordy, at times, but in no way simple. Just one line I wrote down from the introduction:
Without the help of Speech, the inner world's capital could not be built, nor this evil outer world's civilization be conceived.
When political leaders put together similar books today, they are inevitably written in the most simple, banal language possible in order to maximize "idea propagation" and book sales. History is all the worse for it.
Most writing on the web (including most of my work) is designed for reach, for all of the narcissistic reasons like retweets and shares, but also the reason that we live in a more democratic world today, and ideas that have more reach often have more impact.
When you write, you want yourself to succeed through your writing, but to me it's far more important that my ideas succeed - that they find life in another mind.
Early writing (especially from the era you mentioned, alongside the vedas and the upanishads before it) was poetic not only for the purpose of aesthetics, but also so that the work can self-select who can understand it. Interpreters and translators were common (and still are when concerning these and religious works), which concentrates power. If I need you to tell me what the mahabharata says, you have more power than if I could understand it myself.
Overall, pulling to either extreme - simplicity or purple prose - is not recommended, but I think everyday writing (especially policy) should be clearer and not cleverer.
The funny thing is that Akbar himself was actually illiterate. He had everything read to him.
Otherwise, sure, I agree. I'd just say that the beauty of democratization and widespread literacy is that we all have access to the high culture of the past.
Early and classic literature was meant solely for the elites, so it featured flamboyant writing styles. Current literature is meant for everyone, and so it focuses on efficiency and effectiveness of communicating the intended idea as unambiguously as possible.
"Beauty" and "inspiration" are subjective and vary with personal preferences. I find simple and concise language much more elegant than the verbose "literary" styles of the past.
> Early and classic literature was meant solely for the elites, so it featured flamboyant writing styles
That actually isn't universally true. For example, most people today probably consider Shakespeare's writing style to be "flamboyant" yet his audience was a wide swath of the public. The difference today is that we are post-Moderns and so we have inherited the Modernist rejection of the Victorian era and its excessive tendencies.
Akbar was also a contemporary of Shakespeare, interestingly enough.
"[I]t focuses on efficiency and effectiveness of communicating the intended idea as unambiguously".
Is this true? Since the 20th century, there's been a marked subset of literature dedicated toward ambiguity, absurdism, and surrealism brought on by the idea of the subconscious, the theory of relativity, WWII.
In fact, most of these titles arguably don't even have an "intended idea" to impart. E.g. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", Joyce's "Ulysses", Camus's "The Stranger" to name a couple off the top of my head.
"'Beauty and 'inspiration' are subjective...I find simple...language much more elegant than...'literary' styles of the past" Sure, in your subjective opinion you think older literature is not as pleasing to read, but these works objectively changed the use of the English language: that's why they are regarded as literature.
Canonical literature changed not only the way future authors wrote, but also how future generations behold and conceive existence. Both the ideas, and the way they are expressed are the source of many derivative bodies of text including your and my own comments.
Modern works that repackage these ideas, styles, and archetypes in a more diluted way to satisfy one's personal taste and level of reading comprehension does not qualify them to be more "literary" than the original works which created those artifacts. In this sense, the idea of literature and the value of those works is well defined. To reduce literature as merely "verbose" and to quote the word as if it is illegitimate and lacking consensus is highly ignorant and, given the lack of substantive evidence or original arguments supporting it, completely asinine.
He’s being passive aggressive. Orwell had a particular problem with political speech when he gave his rules on writing simply and clearly.
Don’t speak clearly or concisely or with prose or with poetry, if you lack conviction. Who the fuck are you talking to, take your stand. The world is not your school.
But hey, if he meant ‘this ones for the kids’, make it clear by writing simply.
All forms of expression tread on fraud if you lack conviction, and you will have to hide in airy fortifications of [‘that’s not what I meant’, ‘I was misinterpreted’, ‘You only think I meant this’, ‘Your are the problem’].
Well I’m sorry, I was just trying to figure out what you simply meant to say.
There's a difference in writing, like there's a difference in painting. Painting a house is different from painting the Mona Lisa. Writing a work instruction or standard operating procedure is different from writing a poem and both are different from writing pop fiction or non-fiction. You can optimize for meaning, optimize for beauty, or you can optimize for inspiration, but it's hard to get all of them, and this is not a skill that is easy to get.
PG does not really explore that (natch), but that's a point to consider, nonetheless.
I took the objective of the essay to be "communicating ideas."
There is certainly no reason why one can't write well and communicate their ideas at the same time. In fact, I'd argue that well-written ideas spread more quickly. Things like The Bible or The Qur'an would likely be far less influential if they were poorly written.
> It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.
I think that's virtually meaningless unless you define what is meant by "an idea". The Bible, Qu'ran, the story of Gilgamesh, Homer's Illias,... are all ideas, just the same as famous essays by Hemingway or Benjamin Franklin. Even Proust's In Search of Lost Time with it's epic long sentences is a multitude of ideas regarding involuntary memory, separation anxiety and much more.
Everything PG writes after that hinges on a single imperative: That if you intend for your writing to be read, you must write simple.
The trouble is that his argument doesn't challenge that. There's no reflection on the fact that this is by far an universal principle, or that it, paradoxically, defines the relationship with the reader as if the latter always wants simple, digestible reading at every turn.
Hemingway is famous for his terse and simple writing, attributed to his schooling as a journalist. But he also had a critics who simply despised his literary writing for its terse and uncompromising style. And then there's William Faulkner who had this baroque style with long, endless sentences which dug their heels into Big Emotions, trying to convey them in the most sinuous way possible. Faulkner, just like Hemingway having won the Nobel Prize, found himself the butt of criticism on his writing as well.
Sure, these musings pertain to great literators. PG's point could be relegated to articles and essays instead. Or, unspoken yet more to the point, writing as this ephemeral, intangible idea that disolves and dissappear like vapor clouds the second it is published in the digital realm. Unlike words which are printed in respectable paper journals and glossy magazines.
No, the writing style of PG's essay was also part of this expose. Leveraged by the author to drive a point home. I'm still not sure what that point was exactly. PG being PG, chances are he just wanted nothing more then to make a so-called thought-provoking statement. In that regard, simple writing doesn't automatically make for good writing. The idea, the essence, you're trying to sell still needs to be solid and worth telling. That's where PG's essay, ironically, falls flat.
PG's essay doesn't spark a debate because he writes about an idea, it sparks discussion because of quite the opposite: writing about anything except about writing or why one writes. Now, one can fault PG for not providing context, but as with anything in this digital world, PG publishes on his own websites and assumes that the reader had written his other writings as well to understand what he's trying to get at. That's fine. It just doesn't make for compelling reading if one has to pieces together.
Most complicated writing of the kind PG is complaining about isn't beautiful, though. It's verbose and clumsy and full of less good replacements for common words, like "purchase" instead of "buy", "utilize" instead of "use" and so on. Or it has flowery phrases that add nothing. A recent example is Github's recent blog post about a security vulnerability they fixed [0]. Its opening paragraph:
"On the evening of March 8, we invalidated all authenticated sessions on GitHub.com created prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8 out of an abundance of caution to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions."
"out of an abundance of caution" adds nothing other than the faint smell of a desperate attempt to reassure the reader. The sentence would read much better without it.
I'm all for rich language where it's useful or appropriate (a novel, etc) but in most cases I just want to know what's up.
That is interesting, because it implies exactly the opposite of what it seems to.
Mandarin was the official language of the government, and so all regional and local bureaucracies, during the days of dynasties in China. Although it may sound foreign to locals in various provinces, it guaranteed that every part of the government had a common understanding.
I think it does add information. “Out of an abundance of caution” is a stock phrase that means “we don’t think this is currently a problem but it’s a prudent thing to do”. Without it, the statement is open to interpretation: were any users actually affected?
I was hoping you would share your simplified version of the GitHub quote. So let me attempt it instead -
"On the evening of March 8, we logged out all users from GitHub.com who had logged in prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8. This was done to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions. No user accounts were affected"
I really couldn't simplify much without losing information. Logging out users isn't the same as invalidation of authenticated sessions because this probably revoked access to bots / API calls etc.
This is good but without the extra words "extremely rare, potential harm.." this feels like it was a dangerous miss. I would worry about future such occurrences rather than just archiving it. Also I would definitely read more details. So perhaps this message works better in educating users
PG is complaining about most complicated writing, which is not beautiful. It uses too many words and the wrong words, like "purchase" instead of "buy" and "utilize" instead of "use". It has complex phrases that add nothing. Github's blog post about fixing a security weakness [0] is a recent example:
"On the evening of March 8, we invalidated all authenticated sessions on GitHub.com created prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8 out of an abundance of caution to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions."
"Out of an abundance of caution" adds only the smell of a desperate attempt to reassure the reader. The sentence would be much better without it.
I like rich language where it is useful or fitting but, usually, I only want to know what the writer is communicating.
Even for poetic or literary writing, a baseline of simple language will tend to make it stronger. “Fancy” language is best used sparingly to add emphasis and emotion. Reaching for the 5 dollar word or complex sentence structure every time is the mark of an amateur. There are some masters who can make it work, but that’s yet another “know the rules so you can break them” type of deal.
>Reducing language to a mere communication tool also destroys much of its beauty, meaning, and ability to inspire or motivate us. I don't think it's a coincidence that the loss of interest in poetry has coincided with a general loss of respect for literary culture.
That's not the argument here. This talks about language and writing as a means of communicating ideas to as broad an audience as possible. There is still a place for dense, poetic, or ambiguous language full of jargon and metaphor and all that good stuff. For example, physicists will communicate amongst themselves in a very inaccessible language of physics because they need precise language in that setting. But a physicists who wants to communicate his ideas to the public, he will simplify it to to make it accessible.
There's two things wrong with this. First taking as self-evident the notion that plain or simple language is necessarily more effective in communicating ideas to a broad audience. That's very questionable. Effective orators don't just communicate simply to 'move ideas around', they also inspire and connect emotionally with their audience, just think of any well-regarded and successful politician.
Secondly implicit in that argument is the notion that ordinary people can only comprehend 'simple speech' and have no appreciation for form or aesthetics, which is pretty arrogant but par for the course for your average PG essay and
captures perfectly the stereotypical software developer developer mindset of completely lacking appreciation for style and thinking one's own ideas are so brilliant they have to be dumbed down for everyone else.
Here's the context for my argument: believe it or not, there are people that will use language to impress or intimidate or to even mask their ignorance, even people who also purport to communicate ideas. Sometimes those people will also purposely use jargon with the aim to do both: direct their message to their in-group and purposely exclude individuals not from their in-group (I can list some examples of groups that do that, but I prefer not to go down that rabbit hole. I'm sure you can come up with some examples as well).
On the other hand, people who genuinely care about communicating ideas as broadly as possible will tailor their speech in such a way as to make it most accessible to as much of the audience as possible, because to them the idea is the important part not the medium. I leave it up to you to define 'accessible speech', but to pg it means communicating with simpler language - I think he makes a reasonable argument. Especially in context of a multicultural society with a sizable (recent) immigrant base and a global audience with various levels of English vocabulary knowledge.
It is also the hallmark of a good teacher when they can tailor the idea to a student who is smart enough to understand it but struggles with overcoming some kind of barrier (from vocabulary, to culture)
Another comment mentioned that using a word with multiple meanings increases confusion.
I would argue that "writing" can mean "writing the tool" as well as "writing the art form." PG is talking about "writing the tool."
Confusingly, both the tool and the art form can convey ideas.
Certain ideas can be conveyed better by art ("a picture is worth a thousand words"). Visual art is typically more accessible than complex prose, but all forms of art can reach levels of inaccessibility that are frustrating to those not "in the know."
I would bet inner world here in Beveridge's translation since God is being addressed is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batin_(Islam). I should find the new edition with Thackston's since I used to have his book on Persian as a kid.
I'd rather "write usefully" than "write simply". If a "fancy" word is more useful for getting my thoughts across, then I will use it.
I think of "useful" language as a balance of precision, concision, and understandability. If I use terms that I don't expect my audience to understand, then my language not very "useful" even if it's the most precise and concise. Conversely, there's no reason for me to refrain from terms which I expect my audience to understand if using them makes my language more precise or concise.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadThat's a great point.
That article is going to end up being mostly fluff, and there’s not much I can do about it. Sure, I can work in some background and play up the implications of the news, but really, it’s just content for content’s sake, so that they can stay in their customers’ feeds.
And, just for the record, those type of articles are not my forte or preference, but are an unavoidable reality in my line of work.
0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well
Aside from knowing this though the most effective thing I've learned to do is to keep re-reading what I wrote. Reorganize phrases to keep connected thoughts nearby in text. In English you have a lot of freedom to put phrases all over the place in a sentence. When I write I very rarely put all the connected phrases next to each other in the first pass.
But I guess I'd generalize that to say: taking the time to re-read what you wrote and edit it actually makes a big difference. It took a lot of shitty writing and overcoming laziness in school before I learned this lesson.
If that really is your only goal, then I agree, the simpler the better.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/755379555?book_show_ac...
Some writers, particularly post-modern ones, aim at the same thing. By forcing you to read their works carefully, you'll (in theory) be forced to think about them more.
If it’s a work of art, fair enough. If you’re trying to explain or argue something... then you’re probably hiding the holes in your argument or trying to sound smarter than you are.
I’m not fond of Foucault, but from time to time I explain to my pragmatic wife what Deleuze or Zizek are all about in $book, and as best as I try to explain them in plain words, much of what I got doesn’t come across. Tradutore traditore.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18345
Also a tiny study on whether adj/adv usage correlates with good/bad writing: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18398
Prescriptivists never seem to add that clarifying nuance to their advice though.
> That way if you never learn how to break them correctly, your writing is still a lot better than it was.
That assumes their advice is good in the first place - when professional linguists call it trash, I'd have to wonder if it is.
They often do, in my experience. AFAIK it hasn't been common to attempt any kind of real, strict prescriptivism in English since the middle of last century (yes, I'm sure a few examples exist). These days it's mostly "write like this—until you know better" or "avoid X if your audience is Y, for such-and-such reason".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51750.Writing_Tools
ruthless editing seems a pretty big factor in the writing well result.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
There’s definite value to simplicity in writing. At the same time, like all principles, people tend to run with the idea and misapply it. There are some cases in which your work demands a certain level of precision that’s only possible using complex words or jargon. Not to mention, writing that’s a little complicated can be a lot more fun! There are several novelists, essayists, and poets who are a joy to read not because they express their ideas as clearly and simply as possible, but because they manage linguistic acrobatics that make us realize there are ways to use language we never thought possible—often it takes some extra work to understand such output.
*: Have never taken the time to verify this myself.
These are the Three Questions.
My advice: answer them before you create a powerpoint, an email, an essay, a policy. They create a sharp tool for thought.
Reading for pleasure should be entertaining. Reading for knowledge should be simple/concise.
It can be a difficult balance. You can provide a lot of information in a few bullet points, but there may also be a lot of contextual information left out that leaves more curious readers wondering "why is like this and not another way".
There is plenty of writing not meant to entertain or convey knowledge.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
And replace it with:
The Earth contains all humans and is far from Voyager I.
For instance, your condensation of the graph completely misses the mention that people misapply general principles, and it also reduced linguistic creativity to “entertainment” which can mean a far different thing (e.g. one can write a book that’s wildly entertaining because of its characters but that sports none of the linguistic ingenuity I mention in the OP). Not to mention, you couldn’t even decide whether to use the word simple or concise! Sometimes you just can’t get around using a couple of “extra” words. Thus the abominable “/“. (Ick)
[1]https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/05/hard-writing/
Reminds me of Mark Twain: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one."
[^1] Here's the current link if you're interested so watch: http://byronm.com/13sentences.html (Thankfully re-discovered from one of PGs recent tweets: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1365425470318272514)
1. People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing. Simple. Precise. Direct. It suits a technical literal mind to have less ambiguity and fewer flourishes.
2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.
Both of these points considered, I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace).
Fiction and poetry vs whatever type of writing blogging is.
Essayists, pamphleteers, and diarists (blogs), and aphorists (Twitter). Genres with centuries-long histories.
[...]
2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.
Did you see what he wrote in the essay, regarding this:
> Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the future will be in much the same position as people from other countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain for a woodworker to build a chair to last.
Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job.
> I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace).
It seems pretty clear to me that the essay is about non-fiction writing, not fiction. All the arguments in it apply to non-fiction writing.
I would argue that academic writing tends to be pretty poor.
The above-namedropped David Foster Wallace certainly thought so.
Among people who spend their days thinking about language I'm pretty sure academese is considered more of an elaborate, extended shibboleth than an effective communication tool, going beyond merely being sprinkled with jargon and fake-fancy clichés (like, say, business language) so that it serves as an effective gatekeeping tool. Hard(er than it needs to be) to read, hard to correctly write.
Do you really think Paul Graham is arguing against James Joyce style writing? Why would you think that?
Again, why the fuck would you assume Paul Graham is talking about James Joyce?
It seems more like Paul Graham might be talking about the kind of writing he does himself. Like essays. However, even in such a case, his point is debatable. Which is what people are doing here — debating.
No one is assuming he's "talking about James Joyce." You must be confused. He's talking about a certain type of writing style and making contestable generalizations about it. People are illustrating the contestable points with examples.
Sure, fiction can be trying to communicate things, and sometimes even ideas, but to me it's pretty obvious that the essay isn't trying to give advice for fiction writing in general.
The essay makes a generic statement about the superiority of a particular, although loosely defined, writing style.
People debate the edge cases of that statement, showing its limits, and pointing to counter examples.
The result is that the content of the essay is reduced to a very banal statement of the type: "All other things being equal, prefer writing something simple rather than not simple." As an aesthetic preference, it's all well and good. As a persuasive argument, rather lacking. It "tries to prove too much."
But let me give you a bit more context:
As a Frenchman, when I think "Essay", my mind almost automatically reaches for two authors: Montaigne and Pascal (e.g. in his Pensées).
"Simple" is probably the last qualifier I would use to describe their works. They're not simple. They're complex, rich, beautiful, copiously quoting from classical authors and yet often crystal clear. They have the same quality poetry has where replacing a word by another damages the precision of the message and images conveyed.
That is also true of non-fiction prose in longer form. I shudder to think what could become of Tocqueville's writing style, a peculiar mix of classical and romantic, if it were translated into "simple" language.
I do not believe that the article's prescription is confined to business writing.
> Paul Graham is a leader in the startup scene
That is true. But Graham is also a self-described essayist. He was writing long before he started Y Combinator, and his essays often discuss writing as a thing unto itself. For example, his "Nerds" essay mentions that one of his goals for life in high school was to write well^2.
Given that Graham is deeply interested in writing, and that the article doesn't explicitly confine itself to business writing, I think it's quite a stretch to assume that this essay is only talking about business writing.
> Again, why the fuck would you assume Paul Graham is talking about James Joyce?
This is a strawman (and also unnecessarily combative).
--
[^1]: Well, see my top-level comment. But that's not really relevant to this comment.
[^2]: "There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things." http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Please drop swipes like that from your arguments here, and generally please don't escalate hostility even when someone is wrong or you feel they are. Your comment would be fine without that last sentence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: as for "Try to not be autistic for a second" - we ban accounts that do that. Please review the guidelines and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, so we won't have to ban you.
Are you sure? From the blog (first sentence):
> I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.
Since the "I" in this case refers to someone who does not write poetry, speculative fiction, drama, tragedies, comedies ... and only ever writes for a technical audience, the context is clear: technical[1] audience not seeking poetry, fiction, drama, etc...
Further one he says:
> So you can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can safely use difficult words.
Once again, that indicates to me he is talking about writing something technical[2], not prose or poetry.
[1][2] "Technical" is not limited to IT and engineering; it's about anything that involves technique. Describing dance moves is "technical", as is writing a recipe (which is very similar in technique to writing a tiny program) or anything involving writing down music (Should you use 7/4 for the first verse, or alternate between 3/4 and 4/4? Which will be clearer to the flautist?)
I'm also fairly certain that the type of writing he's talking about is mostly non-fiction prose, such as the essays he writes himself (even though he doesn't state that explicitly). Would you consider those "technical" writing?
> That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.
That is a general claim. I agree that it is often good advice, but there are caveats which Graham does not provide.
A very odd term to use.
I'd open simply with "Think of your audience, think of your goal" and on thinking of audience expand to "Think of your audience, of which there may be some you've not thought of, or it might just be yourself, and think of your goal, if any."
It’s possible he simply said nothing.
Kind of incredible.
I'd argue that simple writing is great in that domain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Whoa, you can't do that here—that's bannable territory. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26428045.
(Also, please don't be snarky and please don't use allcaps for emphasis. Your "PERHAPS" breaks both of those guidelines in one go.)
That's the main shortcoming of this essay. It doesn't define what it means by "simple". "If you want to be clear, write clearly" is a bromide, not an essay.
My perception is the reverse. Probably 60% of the articles linked on this site, day in and day out, are a thicket of impenetrable jargon. Endless blog posts that make no attempt to explain to the non-initiated what the various acronyms mean or why the concepts might matter for a person who is not deeply, deeply immersed in whatever technical field the author is writing about. I wish more people who write about coding/tech would realize that a larger audience is interested in what is going on, but that the communication of the concepts needs to be approachable. This is not just a shortcoming of this field, obviously, as people in all sorts of technical/specialized fields tend to write the same way, speaking only to the in-crowd.
Insightful ideas are rare. Hiding mundane thoughts in abstruse verbiage leaves questions in the mind of the readership: "I don't see the author's point. But he seems pretty smart. I must have missed something." Vote up.
Many well established schools of untestable academic thought are often built on foundations as sandy as these, IMHO.
Most of us are not creating greatest works of English literature and me or many others are not James Joyce neither David Foster Wallace.
If you are writing some greatest work of literature please use all the tools that language gives you.
But for clear communication use simple language, please.
[1] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...
Another good one is George Gopen's "The Sense of Structure". It's less inspirational than Clarity and Grace, but it shows more hands-on how to construct sentences and paragraphs.
[1] or "Lessons in Clarity and Grace" or "Toward Clarity and Grace" – they are all substantially the same book
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/acp.1178
He opposes simple to "fancy", but the opposite of simple isn't just "fancy", that's, well, a simplification. The opposite of "simple" writing may be: "rich" writing, "complex" writing, none of which are particularly problematic for Graham's goal provided that they're paired with enough clarity.
That "simple" writing lasts longer is disproved by many works of literature that have made their way to us through history, most of which, by the standard of this essay, could be considered complex.
As someone with a modicum of experience in the philosophy of language, I must also say that I do not look kindly on people who take for granted that there even could be such a thing as a thought without language, a "pure idea", since for all we know such a thing has never been observed.
- Would that literature have been considered complex at the time it was written? How much of that perceived complexity is due to changing writing styles, education standards, etc?
- Writing a book and writing a proposal for the next project/product have entirely different definitions of "lasting". Context matters greatly.
> As someone with a modicum of experience in the philosophy of language, I must also say that I do not look kindly on people who take for granted that there even could be such a thing as a thought without language, a "pure idea", since for all we know such a thing has never been observed.
This sentence is a good example of the kind of unnecessary complexity described by the essay. You seem to be saying that "pure ideas are not possible without language", but that's not clear in your writing. If your intent it to exclude people who do not have a "modicum of experience in the philosophy of language", I have to ask: why?
Great question, can't say I'm able to answer it authoritatively. I would guess most works of literature, essays and speeches, even at the time they were produced, tend to be a fair bit more complex than what the average person is used to. Especially if they come from eras with lower literacy.
> - Writing a book and writing a proposal for the next project/product have entirely different definitions of "lasting". Context matters greatly.
It certainly does.
> This sentence is a good example of the kind of unnecessary complexity described by the essay.
It's a pretty simple sentence. What's tripping you up?
> You seem to be saying that "pure ideas are not possible without language", but that's not clear in your writing.
No. I'm saying that thinking "pure ideas devoid of any language" is a naive concept to anyone who's researched that topic a minimal amount. I wasn't flexing.
> If your intent it to exclude people who do not have a "modicum of experience in the philosophy of language", I have to ask: why?
That's not my intent at all. I'm providing context to my judgment. If that was my intent, I would have said: "If you don't have experience in the philosophy of language, don't write about this topic." Good thing is — I'm not a Nazi, so I tend not to do that kind of stuff.
"How would it sound if somebody spoke it out loud?"
I've found that to be a very accurate way to check sentences for too much fluff.
Complex sentences just sound "off" when spoken.
'write like you are speaking'
depending on my purpose and audience, i will write the first draft and then deliver it verbally. at least for me, and i do tend to use far too many words in the first draft, that exercise leads to a much clearer second draft.
Here's a place to start: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/punctuating-sentences.html
I had this impression recently while reading the Akbarnama, which is a sort of court-approved biography of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. It was written by his Grand Vizier, the top political advisor, who was also a poet and translator. Indeed it would almost be unheard of for a high governmental official to not be deeply educated in aesthetic matters.
In any case, what immediately struck me was how beautiful the writing itself was. A bit wordy, at times, but in no way simple. Just one line I wrote down from the introduction:
Without the help of Speech, the inner world's capital could not be built, nor this evil outer world's civilization be conceived.
When political leaders put together similar books today, they are inevitably written in the most simple, banal language possible in order to maximize "idea propagation" and book sales. History is all the worse for it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbarnama
Most writing on the web (including most of my work) is designed for reach, for all of the narcissistic reasons like retweets and shares, but also the reason that we live in a more democratic world today, and ideas that have more reach often have more impact.
When you write, you want yourself to succeed through your writing, but to me it's far more important that my ideas succeed - that they find life in another mind.
Early writing (especially from the era you mentioned, alongside the vedas and the upanishads before it) was poetic not only for the purpose of aesthetics, but also so that the work can self-select who can understand it. Interpreters and translators were common (and still are when concerning these and religious works), which concentrates power. If I need you to tell me what the mahabharata says, you have more power than if I could understand it myself.
Overall, pulling to either extreme - simplicity or purple prose - is not recommended, but I think everyday writing (especially policy) should be clearer and not cleverer.
Otherwise, sure, I agree. I'd just say that the beauty of democratization and widespread literacy is that we all have access to the high culture of the past.
"Beauty" and "inspiration" are subjective and vary with personal preferences. I find simple and concise language much more elegant than the verbose "literary" styles of the past.
That actually isn't universally true. For example, most people today probably consider Shakespeare's writing style to be "flamboyant" yet his audience was a wide swath of the public. The difference today is that we are post-Moderns and so we have inherited the Modernist rejection of the Victorian era and its excessive tendencies.
Akbar was also a contemporary of Shakespeare, interestingly enough.
Is this true? Since the 20th century, there's been a marked subset of literature dedicated toward ambiguity, absurdism, and surrealism brought on by the idea of the subconscious, the theory of relativity, WWII.
In fact, most of these titles arguably don't even have an "intended idea" to impart. E.g. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", Joyce's "Ulysses", Camus's "The Stranger" to name a couple off the top of my head.
"'Beauty and 'inspiration' are subjective...I find simple...language much more elegant than...'literary' styles of the past" Sure, in your subjective opinion you think older literature is not as pleasing to read, but these works objectively changed the use of the English language: that's why they are regarded as literature.
Canonical literature changed not only the way future authors wrote, but also how future generations behold and conceive existence. Both the ideas, and the way they are expressed are the source of many derivative bodies of text including your and my own comments.
Modern works that repackage these ideas, styles, and archetypes in a more diluted way to satisfy one's personal taste and level of reading comprehension does not qualify them to be more "literary" than the original works which created those artifacts. In this sense, the idea of literature and the value of those works is well defined. To reduce literature as merely "verbose" and to quote the word as if it is illegitimate and lacking consensus is highly ignorant and, given the lack of substantive evidence or original arguments supporting it, completely asinine.
Don’t speak clearly or concisely or with prose or with poetry, if you lack conviction. Who the fuck are you talking to, take your stand. The world is not your school.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Lan...
But hey, if he meant ‘this ones for the kids’, make it clear by writing simply.
All forms of expression tread on fraud if you lack conviction, and you will have to hide in airy fortifications of [‘that’s not what I meant’, ‘I was misinterpreted’, ‘You only think I meant this’, ‘Your are the problem’].
Well I’m sorry, I was just trying to figure out what you simply meant to say.
PG does not really explore that (natch), but that's a point to consider, nonetheless.
There is certainly no reason why one can't write well and communicate their ideas at the same time. In fact, I'd argue that well-written ideas spread more quickly. Things like The Bible or The Qur'an would likely be far less influential if they were poorly written.
> It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.
I think that's virtually meaningless unless you define what is meant by "an idea". The Bible, Qu'ran, the story of Gilgamesh, Homer's Illias,... are all ideas, just the same as famous essays by Hemingway or Benjamin Franklin. Even Proust's In Search of Lost Time with it's epic long sentences is a multitude of ideas regarding involuntary memory, separation anxiety and much more.
Everything PG writes after that hinges on a single imperative: That if you intend for your writing to be read, you must write simple.
The trouble is that his argument doesn't challenge that. There's no reflection on the fact that this is by far an universal principle, or that it, paradoxically, defines the relationship with the reader as if the latter always wants simple, digestible reading at every turn.
Hemingway is famous for his terse and simple writing, attributed to his schooling as a journalist. But he also had a critics who simply despised his literary writing for its terse and uncompromising style. And then there's William Faulkner who had this baroque style with long, endless sentences which dug their heels into Big Emotions, trying to convey them in the most sinuous way possible. Faulkner, just like Hemingway having won the Nobel Prize, found himself the butt of criticism on his writing as well.
Sure, these musings pertain to great literators. PG's point could be relegated to articles and essays instead. Or, unspoken yet more to the point, writing as this ephemeral, intangible idea that disolves and dissappear like vapor clouds the second it is published in the digital realm. Unlike words which are printed in respectable paper journals and glossy magazines.
No, the writing style of PG's essay was also part of this expose. Leveraged by the author to drive a point home. I'm still not sure what that point was exactly. PG being PG, chances are he just wanted nothing more then to make a so-called thought-provoking statement. In that regard, simple writing doesn't automatically make for good writing. The idea, the essence, you're trying to sell still needs to be solid and worth telling. That's where PG's essay, ironically, falls flat.
PG's essay doesn't spark a debate because he writes about an idea, it sparks discussion because of quite the opposite: writing about anything except about writing or why one writes. Now, one can fault PG for not providing context, but as with anything in this digital world, PG publishes on his own websites and assumes that the reader had written his other writings as well to understand what he's trying to get at. That's fine. It just doesn't make for compelling reading if one has to pieces together.
"On the evening of March 8, we invalidated all authenticated sessions on GitHub.com created prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8 out of an abundance of caution to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions."
"out of an abundance of caution" adds nothing other than the faint smell of a desperate attempt to reassure the reader. The sentence would read much better without it.
I'm all for rich language where it's useful or appropriate (a novel, etc) but in most cases I just want to know what's up.
[0] https://github.blog/2021-03-08-github-security-update-a-bug-...
Mandarin was the official language of the government, and so all regional and local bureaucracies, during the days of dynasties in China. Although it may sound foreign to locals in various provinces, it guaranteed that every part of the government had a common understanding.
Quite the opposite of fluff for fluff's sake.
"On the evening of March 8, we logged out all users from GitHub.com who had logged in prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8. This was done to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions. No user accounts were affected"
I really couldn't simplify much without losing information. Logging out users isn't the same as invalidation of authenticated sessions because this probably revoked access to bots / API calls etc.
Last night, we logged out your Github account to fix a security flaw. Your account was not breached. You can read more details here [1].
[1] https://github.blog/2021-03-08-github-security-update-a-bug-...
"On the evening of March 8, we invalidated all authenticated sessions on GitHub.com created prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8 out of an abundance of caution to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions."
"Out of an abundance of caution" adds only the smell of a desperate attempt to reassure the reader. The sentence would be much better without it.
I like rich language where it is useful or fitting but, usually, I only want to know what the writer is communicating.
Hmm. You may be right.
like this:
> Hmm. You may be right.
thats all i ask
That's not the argument here. This talks about language and writing as a means of communicating ideas to as broad an audience as possible. There is still a place for dense, poetic, or ambiguous language full of jargon and metaphor and all that good stuff. For example, physicists will communicate amongst themselves in a very inaccessible language of physics because they need precise language in that setting. But a physicists who wants to communicate his ideas to the public, he will simplify it to to make it accessible.
Secondly implicit in that argument is the notion that ordinary people can only comprehend 'simple speech' and have no appreciation for form or aesthetics, which is pretty arrogant but par for the course for your average PG essay and captures perfectly the stereotypical software developer developer mindset of completely lacking appreciation for style and thinking one's own ideas are so brilliant they have to be dumbed down for everyone else.
Here's the context for my argument: believe it or not, there are people that will use language to impress or intimidate or to even mask their ignorance, even people who also purport to communicate ideas. Sometimes those people will also purposely use jargon with the aim to do both: direct their message to their in-group and purposely exclude individuals not from their in-group (I can list some examples of groups that do that, but I prefer not to go down that rabbit hole. I'm sure you can come up with some examples as well).
On the other hand, people who genuinely care about communicating ideas as broadly as possible will tailor their speech in such a way as to make it most accessible to as much of the audience as possible, because to them the idea is the important part not the medium. I leave it up to you to define 'accessible speech', but to pg it means communicating with simpler language - I think he makes a reasonable argument. Especially in context of a multicultural society with a sizable (recent) immigrant base and a global audience with various levels of English vocabulary knowledge.
It is also the hallmark of a good teacher when they can tailor the idea to a student who is smart enough to understand it but struggles with overcoming some kind of barrier (from vocabulary, to culture)
I would argue that "writing" can mean "writing the tool" as well as "writing the art form." PG is talking about "writing the tool."
Confusingly, both the tool and the art form can convey ideas.
Certain ideas can be conveyed better by art ("a picture is worth a thousand words"). Visual art is typically more accessible than complex prose, but all forms of art can reach levels of inaccessibility that are frustrating to those not "in the know."
I think of "useful" language as a balance of precision, concision, and understandability. If I use terms that I don't expect my audience to understand, then my language not very "useful" even if it's the most precise and concise. Conversely, there's no reason for me to refrain from terms which I expect my audience to understand if using them makes my language more precise or concise.