Good Writing
97 comments
·May 24, 2025antirez
yojo
Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some particularly crude alien invaders:
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
sctb
FTA:
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though.
Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.
antirez
Great example, love this.
qsort
I think the intended implication goes the other way:
"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
layer8
I’m not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of writing, that’s in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the existence of language barriers rather disprove that hypothesis.
Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some food for thought, I’m not sure what point exactly it is intended to make.
antirez
Sure, it's not a 1:1 map, but often who does an excellent job, does it along all the line: form, content, and the best papers are even shorter normally... They don't have to justify with many pages the lack of real content.
About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
SpicyLemonZest
> Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently?
It's about the process, not the talent. When you've carefully thought through and refined an idea to understand whether it makes sense yourself, that usually provides a lot of guidance on how you can express the idea eloquently to others. You know the questions they'll have and the answers they'll find satisfying, because you already went through the same process. When you're just tossing out your first half-baked impression, it's a lot harder to communicate it well, although some people do have the orthogonal talent of making it up on the fly.
antirez
Yep I guess that's true, I often times see that the best papers are written better and make broader cultural references. However, recently, with all the non mother tongue English speakers around, especially from China, I often see great ideas exposed in a bad way. So this link starts to be weaker and weaker.
Waterluvian
I think a strong sense of confidence (perhaps overconfidence) and inflated self-worth are likely closely related to increased likelihood of success. “Those who dare, win” and all that.
But I think most of the opinions and advice rich, successful people like to share is just a side-effect, not a productive output, of these traits.
idlewords
Reading Graham's essays on writing always puts me in mind of the videos where Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA), or a Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226).
TimSchumann
It helps when you never question if, as in his own essay describing other ‘bad writers’ weaving falsehoods, you’re the one lying to yourself.
hnhg
He carries the self-confidence that billions of dollars in wealth can give you.
mykowebhn
And then you have people like Kant and Hegel who have both been criticized for their writing styles, but I would bet in 200 years time people would still be reading and studying them. And with Paul Graham they'd ask, "Who?"
bee_rider
He’s like some startup guy or something, right? His blog posts are well written, and the arguments seem… I mean, fine. I think there’s a third dimension here; in 200 years people will probably be more likely to talk about Kant or Hegel because Graham’s subject matter is just inherently more ephemeral.
But, most of humanity’s endeavors have been ephemeral.
kaushalvivek
I feel the essence here is -- iterative writing improves both the prose and the core point.
When you write well, you iterate. When you iterate, you improve both the prose and the core point -- because you crystalize ideas further.
This makes improvements in these seemingly perpendicular directions counterintuitively correlated.
Ironically I found this specific PG essay uncharacteristically obtuse. This could have been much shorter.
tptacek
Look, anything that gets HN people to write second drafts of comments, I'm fine with it. I mean... no, ok, just going to leave it there.
gist
Writing wise I have a great deal of respect for you (and other top commenters) because you don't have people edit and review what you say you just write it (and take lumps or accolaydes).
Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).
I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
tptacek
I think, as is often the case, there is something to the idea in the post we're commenting on, but it's been taken way too far.
luispauloml
There are two sentences in this essay that I couldn't understand. Can someone help me?
1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"
I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?
2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."
What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?
Also, did anybody else got confused too?
raincole
Conversation is when you talk to people in your daily life. Dialogue is something from books or movies.
gizmo
- He means written dialogue. Think Plato.
- It’s an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
thundergolfer
Dialogue and conversation are not the same thing, though they’re related, just in the same way that stress and anxiety are related but not the same. The task of reading comprehension involves being able to track important distinctions between synonyms.
The second is a counterfactual, and it is correctly deployed to help show the difference between a valid argument and a sound argument. Graham is saying that a good liar presents pleasing and valid but unsound arguments, or rather sophistry.
I think your confusion here is from reading comprehension problems.
erichocean
"Jobs" is too large a category; many specific job categories have limited slots (e.g. medical residencies).
But more importantly, slots at e.g. Harvard are limited. Seats at ball games are limited. Etc. Most things in life are, in fact, limited.
Graham is purposefully misleading here, and he knows it.
wat10000
Slots at Harvard may be limited but slots at excellent institutions of higher education are not. Seats at ball games are not. Medical residencies are only limited by fiat. That could be fixed if we wanted to. The problem is the artificial limit, not the people getting the limited placements.
What people fail to understand is that immigrants add to both the supply and demand side. An immigrant sitting in a stadium seat is taking a place that could have gone to someone else. But their presence also drives the capacity to build more seats. More demand for higher education results in more capacity for higher education.
fogleman
Possible counterpoint: LLMs are notoriously good at writing plausible sounding ideas that are wrong.
null
MinimalAction
I do not agree with the premise of the article --- writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. I've seen enough beautiful lies, fictionalized versions of the truth, and cunning orchestrations of a string of well-woven sentences, none of which had any intention of revealing the truth, but of convincing the reader to believe it's true.
I propose the following -- writing the sounds good manipulates the reader into thinking that it is right. Feels better to believe it.
MinimalAction
Also, this article is ironically long and quite vague for PG's standards. The writing doesn't feel sound enough to be right.
breckinloggins
Didn’t the ancients define “sophistry” as (in part) exactly the kind of writing one does when influence is more important than truth?
It might be that it’s hard to create sophistry accidentally in one’s writing, but it’s certainly a possible - and common - trick.
The danger is when you convince yourself that what you’re writing isn’t sophistry… because - after all - it looks good.
rossdavidh
So, this would seem to be fairly easy to test empirically. Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing, and use it on something where you know if it's true:
1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is either true or not true 2) scientific papers which we know to have been reproducible, or not 3) stock pundits predictions about the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight to have been accurate or not
Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
dragonwriter
> Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing
There are objective features of writing, but quality is subjective.
Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the presentation that are correlated.
It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities) can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more signal.
I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):
"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".
This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.