
How to Write Usefully - r_singh
http://paulgraham.com/useful.html
======
luord
Interestingly, I saw an example of the phenomenon of people getting mad at the
certainty of an essay in this very site, a few days ago.

Someone was telling the author that he would achieve more if he phrased his
point in a more "polite" way, just because the certainty of the writing made
the critic mad. Thankfully, the author was here in the comments responding,
and he didn't budge.

That interaction was very refreshing for that very reason: The author was
right, knew he was right, someone didn't like that the author knew he was
right, but the author remained steadfast.

~~~
xkemp
I believe people arguing "politeness" are missing the point, though. What I
most value is "dialectics" (not sure if that term is commonly used in
English).

I. e. the willingness to entertain the best argument against your position in
good faith. Two people who are excellent in doing so (and familiar to HN)
would be Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex, and Matt Levine at Bloomberg.

(Someone rather bad at it, usually arguing against some caricature of what he
imagines his opposition to be, and generally tending towards the "either
unactionable, obvious, or wrong" end of the spectrum is, well, Paul Graham.)

~~~
wozniacki
Could you highlight a piece of writing by Matt that appealed to the part you
alluded to:

    
    
      the willingness to entertain the best argument against
      your position in good faith.
    

For example someone quoted this article on Goldman Sachs in previous HN posts
off late

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-05/goldma...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-05/goldman-
wants-to-be-cool-again)

A clear and even-keeled accommodating of an argument - one very discordant
from your own argument - is a rare find these days. People feign even-
handedness but what seems a fair shake to them doesnt to others who happen to
sit a little further, in the spectrum of opinions.

I want to see if Matt measures up.

------
osdiab
While the internet is full of garbage writing, I don't feel like telling
people that they shouldn't say anything wrong or potentially unimportant is
the right way to go. That's a perfectionist attitude that stifles people's
ability to explore, experiment, be wrong, learn, improve, and act. Like
learning a language, if you never speak it because you're afraid to say
something wrong, you'll never learn.

And separately, being enlightened with novel pithy facts isn't the only reason
people write things. There's a lot that can't be transmitted in that form, and
while I appreciate that style of writing for startup advice or a how-to guide,
it's definitely not universally applicable.

~~~
injb
" 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.

~~~
TimPC
Robert Morris's solution is wrong for most of us about casual conversation
because it's valuable to be wrong sometimes. But in terms of deciding which
essays you publish it seems quite valuable. Out of all the media I produce
from conversation, to video, to casual writing, to essays, essays are the ones
I least want to be wrong in. Also, the process of refining an idea is a valid
one. Barring topics on which you are an ideologue, seldom are you so wrong
about an idea that you think it's perfectly correct and nothing bothers you or
makes you question it through many edits.

~~~
injb
"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.

------
danenania
This reminds me of the saying "don't speak unless you can improve upon the
silence" (apparently attributed to many sources, but most commonly Jorge Luis
Borges). The world would certainly be less noisy if we all followed that one.

I've always found this idea helpful when anxious or unsure of myself in social
situations. A lot of the nervousness comes from the pressure to "say the right
thing" and make a good impression, but that very pressure tends to ensure that
I won't say anything of value (often quite to the contrary!), so I'm better
off keeping my mouth shut, or speaking very little, until I relax and start
thinking of truly 'useful' things to say naturally. And if it doesn't happen,
that's ok--I'm fine with being the quiet guy.

It can be applied in many other areas as well. It's amazing how much you can
usually improve a visual design, a piece of writing, or probably any other
creative work just by repeatedly going through and removing or revising
anything that you have even the slightest doubt about.

~~~
gist
> "don't speak unless you can improve upon the silence"

Sounds like one of those things that is meant to keep people in their place
and/or make them feel less worthy or as a put down.

> A lot of the nervousness comes from the pressure to "say the right thing"

I can tell from your bio you are much younger than I am so I will offer this
advice to you as 'an older guy' (note I did not say 'dude' either). Not only
will you care less about that when you get older but you will find that people
very generally will be drawn to you more if you don't appear to be concerned
about what comes out of your mouth (within reason of course and depending on
the precise circumstances meaning sure there are cases where you don't want to
just say or do anything).

~~~
sillysaurusx
_people very generally will be drawn to you more if you don 't appear to be
concerned about what comes out of your mouth_

32yo here. In my experience, the opposite seems to be true. (I've been dragged
to that conclusion despite wanting to believe otherwise.)

More precisely, it might be true that people will be drawn to you more if you
don't _appear_ to be concerned with what comes out of your mouth. But the
climate in 2020 is night-and-day difference from 2009-era. I think the shift
was so subtle that we might not have noticed.

It's true that as one gets older, one generally cares less about such things
though. It was just an interesting and surprising change. Five or so years
ago, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you.

~~~
gist
The problem with the 'game' of worrying about what comes out of your mouth is
that you find over time that if it's not on target all the time and every time
people will still have a problem and hate on you (friends or strangers). So
you might as well just accept (I have found) that fact and be what you want to
be. You are only as good as the last thing that didn't matter. Like if you go
to 5 social functions but miss 1 people will focus on the 1 and the 5 that you
did will not count. (Hence if you go to a funeral of a friend's parents you go
to the 2nd parent's when they die not the first as an extreme example of the
thinking).

Also noting that the person elected President won by being himself in a super
extreme way and saying all sorts of things that traditionally would have sunk
a political candidate. Now sure with certain age groups that won't go over as
well but people I think hate phony more than they hate real which is
objectionable in some way.

~~~
sillysaurusx
I agree with you in general. Unfortunately, that only applies to people who
are in some sort of position of power. (This is the main crux of what I meant
by "things changed from 2009 until now." Previously, it seemed like what you
were saying mattered more than who you were.) If you are a regular Joe and try
saying everything you want to, you'll find your life gets much harder,
possibly for no benefit.

If there is a benefit, though, I'd be interested to know what it is.

------
tchaffee
The feeling I am left with after reading the essay is that the author is more
interested in being right in an "I've won the debate" kind of way, than he is
interested in being useful. And that the author admires his own writing.

The most useful writing shows more of a willingness to be vulnerable and to
share the human condition. As opposed to reaching for a filter that makes one
always correct, motivated by "a horror of saying anything dumb". Ironically, a
detailed essay around that horror - so strong it often silences you - might
contain more useful truths than this essay.

And useful essays are not limited to the novel ideas the author focuses on.
Considering the author's background, it's predictable but also understandable
to see a focus on novel ideas. But that's an unnecessarily restrictive focus.
The art of writing essays has already demonstrated much wider possibilities.

That's not to say the simplistic formula the author gives won't improve your
writing. It's reasonable to briefly consider. Just that it has limitations,
and a peculiar and very specific motivation when compared to writing that is
more useful and lasting. So also consider less flex, less patting one's self
on the back, and perhaps even saying something dumb. If you want inspiration,
two concrete examples off the top of my head are David Foster Wallace and Dave
Eggers.

------
xvector
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.

~~~
rmason
I experienced the same thing with English teachers. But I had a friend point
out that Hemingway (whom we both adored) wrote sentences that were 7 words
shorter than normal. Writing short punchy sentences without a single spare
word.

Steinbeck wrote that way and so did Elmore Leonard. Leonard said he'd get down
a first draft and then go back a second time taking words out that weren't
necessary.

[https://www.litcharts.com/blog/analitics/what-makes-
hemingwa...](https://www.litcharts.com/blog/analitics/what-makes-hemingway/)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

~~~
randcraw
> Short sentences and clear points are more persuasive even if they're
> nonsense.

What you're describing is propaganda -- an emotional appeal that solicits
mindless reaction. That's the basest form of communication -- hardly something
to espouse as the paradigm for a good essay.

As Graham points out, the best essays often are not intended to persuade as
much as inform. The essentials of writing that's useful to the reader are
facts and logic, leading intuitively to a conclusion that is meaningful and
important to the audience. HOW you achieve these ends matters less, be they
short sentences or emotional appeals.

But illogic has no place in an informative essay. That's the bailiwick of
provocateurs, politicians, and propaganda.

~~~
iamacyborg
When you get to the root of it, there's not much to differentiate between
something written to inform versus something written to persuade.

~~~
philwelch
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.

------
dugditches
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.

~~~
Jaruzel
Like TV before it, it's the dumbing down the internet.

------
contingencies
_Niven 's First Law of Writing: Writers who write for other writers should
write letters._ \- Larry Niven, science fiction author (1989)

 _Blind monkey at the typewriter._ \- Robert Burnham Jr., Astronomer (1983)

 _We 'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists
of a larger reality._ \- Ursula K. Le Guin

 _The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what
to do._ \- Donald Barthelme

 _There can be no reliable biography of a writer, 'because a writer is too
many people if he is any good'._ \- Andrew O'Hagan

 _Summary of advice from writers: Advice from writers is useful, and not only
about naming. Writers have been at it for centuries; programming is merely
decades old. Also, their advice is better written. And funnier._ \- Peter
Hilton

... from
[https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

(Edit: One of PG's main points here is succinctly summarized by this other
pithy _taoup_ quote: _Lest men suspect your tale untrue, keep probability in
view._ \- John Gay (1727))

~~~
soneca
Aren't these quotes about fiction writing? Do you think they apply to essay
writing as well?

I don't think I got your point with this selection of quotes, if you don't
mind explaining.

~~~
contingencies
The article, nominally on 'good (essay format) writing', was an example of #1.
We here illustrate #2 wonderfully (a quip on both communicative fallacy and
the human condition). #3 is aspirational, but also puts purely functional
writing (without art) in its place. #4 concerns perhaps pathfinding as
purpose, in creative intellectual work. #5 suggests monodimensionality as a
defining quality of poor writers. #6 ties all of the above in its application
to programming.

~~~
soneca
Thanks for taking the time to explain. I think I do understand it now, but I
do disagree. I don't think #1 is talking about the same type of writing that
the OP, I don't think it applies at all actually. #3 seems to imply that there
functional and art are competing types of writing, which I also disagree. They
are different things, for different purposes, for different reading
experiences, created differently. The same with the general idea of your
comment.

------
keiferski
As a counterpoint, I'd argue that the "mathematical" approach to good writing
is inherently flawed. That is, trying to arrive at the formula for the "best"
essay via dialectic (argument) is to miss the forest for the trees. Writing is
an art, not a science. Formal logic was developed to display arguments, so if
you are trying to be as precise and mathematical as possible, use that
instead.

Instead, I'd suggest reading the great writers of the past and present (but
focus more on the past). Study what works, what speaks to you, what stylistic
approach you favor, and so on. As a bonus, you'll learn more about _what has
been said by other intelligent people_ and subsequently avoid writing over-
confident, ill-informed essays...

If you're looking for stellar examples of essay-writing, I personally
recommend Jorge Luis Borges and David Foster Wallace. Both manage to write in
a manner both erudite and coherent, without seeming too florid or too
simplistic. Here are a few samples:

\- A New Refutation of Time, Borges:
[https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1947-borges-
anewrefutation...](https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1947-borges-
anewrefutationoftime.pdf)

\- The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, Borges:
[http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.htm...](http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html)

\- David Lynch and Lost Highway, Wallace:
[http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html](http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html)

\- Laughing with Kafka, Wallace: [https://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-...](https://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-07-0059612.pdf)

\- Consider the Lobster, Wallace:
[http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf](http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)

Edit: added some more essay links.

~~~
CaptArmchair
I think the fallacy is in the premise: "An essay should be useful."

Well, useful is always in the eye of the beholder. There is no such thing as
an absolute truth, after all. And pretending there is, and it's even
attainable, is intellectually dishonest.

Sure, an essay could be a formal piece that approaches an almost
"mathematical" approach. After all, an essay a first and foremost an argument
presented by the author. Even a flawed argument is still an argument. And a
flawed essay is still an essay.

The fallacy here is being implicitly reductionist. If your premise states "an
essay should be useful" then you're basically reducing the definition of what
an essay is to a formal argument based on logic and falsifiable facts, and
rejecting any other text as "not an essay" or, worse, "not useful" \- whatever
that might mean - or, worse, "nonsenses" or "a dumb thing to say".

A quick glance on Wikipedia dispenses such reductionism rather swiftly:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay](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.

~~~
kragen
> _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.

~~~
CaptArmchair
Entire libraries, fields of study and lives have been dedicated to the topic
with no formal conclusion.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth)

With great minds such as
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Baudrillard_(1929%E2%80%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Baudrillard_\(1929%E2%80%932007\))
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Foucault_(1926%E2%80%931...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Foucault_\(1926%E2%80%931984\))

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.

~~~
kragen
> _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.

------
hooande
The topic of useful writing is important. The ideas in this essay may not be
surprising or unexpected, but the author does lay out a clear formula
(importance + novelty + correctness + strength) that probably isn't obvious to
most. It seems to be correct and the concrete list of usefulness criteria is
strong. Everything seems to check out.

The focus on correctness in this style of essay writing seems like a function
of an engineer's thought process. If I write an essay about a vacation at the
beach there isn't much of a requirement to be correct about the details. The
goal could be to share my perspective or observations, which is more about
being honest than being right.

I like the formula above, I think it clarifies this style of writing well. I
plan to pay attention to it in the future.

~~~
Traster
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.

~~~
randcraw
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.

------
Traster
>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?

~~~
strongbond
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.

~~~
philwelch
There’s a difference between interpersonal social behavior and publishing
written work, though.

~~~
brlewis
Yes, that's why the paragraph after the one under discussion starts out,
"Translated into essay writing...". So the paragraph discussed in this thread
is about interpersonal social behavior.

~~~
philwelch
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.

------
rdiddly
I challenge you to ignore previous history and reputation, and evaluate this
essay in isolation and according to the very principles it lays out. Do we
agree with the apparent presupposition that this person has valuable
instruction to give us on writing?

 _Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four
components are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score for
usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, but nonetheless
true._

~~~
gist
Noting also that from my quick reading (note the qualifier there btw) I am not
seeing the issue of having people review the essay mentioned. Most people not
only don't have this luxury but we also don't know the contributions that
those reviews have made (or corrections) to the essay.

To me (note the qualifier to lessen the impact there) writing is immediate and
driven by emotion. To much time lessens the ability to say what you really
think and having others review what you wrote even more so.

------
pzqmpzqm
The first time I read Zero to One by Peter Thiel, I was a bit miffed. Stupid
shit stated poorly. The second time, inartful puffery stated overly plainly.
The third time, individual brilliance stated clearly.

Many replies here would do well to read, re-read, and re-re-read with an
introspective mindset. This is perhaps the best quality material I have seen
from pg for quite some time. Its clarity is brilliant and the thing I liked
most was the second, and to me unexpected section, full of the reasons haters
gonna hate.

I speak only for myself, and this is a throwaway, so nothing personal is at
stake. This is a very lucid and precise examination of the fine controls at
stake in writing. Their natural tension, the details of qualification. In my
opinion, which may be trash, who knows, this will be cited for years to come
because it is, in fact, true.

~~~
keiferski
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.

~~~
nottorp
All self improvement books (and by self improvement i mean books that claim to
tell you some secret of value, i.e. i'm including business advice or drivel
like the black swan) have at most 2-3 good ideas, mostly common sense, that
they repeat in different forms until the book is thick enough to get sold as a
book.

That's the market. You wouldn't pay for a short essay that tells you the same
ideas in 2000 words but never repeats itself would you?

And that's before considering whether those 2-3 ideas are even worth the
trouble.

~~~
keiferski
Sure, I agree, but Thiel hardly needs the money from a self-help book. He
seems to have chosen the book format in order to access the market that you
described, though I feel like he’s smart enough to have put out a more
significant product. IIRC he went on an interview tour promoting the book, so
I think it was mostly to get his ideas out there.

In any case, it’s actually just an edited collection of lecture notes from his
class on startups. Thus the length and repetitiveness. That’s fine and I
wouldn’t expect an undergraduate course to deliver some radical new brilliant
theory, but some people have certainly received it that way...

~~~
nottorp
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.

------
dvdsgl
Before I make some caustic remarks, I’d like to say that I think pg is a
curious, genuine, and beneficent person. I am not trying to troll or to be
cruel, but rather to give a negative but sincere response, as contrast, in a
community that tends to adulate pg.

Reading this essay was like kissing a person you didn’t know died six hours
ago—you expect warmth, but instead, your vivid lips collide with a cold,
bloodless, unresponsive substance.

This is tedious stuff. Not one hint of humor, no detectable pulse. Pedestrian
truths expressed in the dullest possible language. Lifeless.

For an essay that starts with the question “What should an essay be?”, I hope
not to read many more essays like this.

The fact that this boring essay is so popular here lowers my opinion of HN.

------
r3vrse
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.

~~~
iainmerrick
_It is more useful to say that Pike 's Peak is in the center of Colorado than
somewhere within._

This kind of thing is taking terseness too far, I think. If I’m not
immediately familiar with Pike’s Peak it takes me a moment to unpack your
meaning, but I immediately understood the more verbose explanation in the
original.

~~~
Kye
Yep. People often confuse understanding audience with verbosity. Waffling and
context both add word count.

edit: I could reduce this to "Waffling and context both add word count." but
then:

1: It's not clear I agree with you

and

2: Triplets--like the three sentences I wrote there--are an artistic device
that improve clarity and help prose flow.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
There's a large international audience here. So, slang like "yep" should
probably be avoided if one is keen to carefully tailor their writing?

(I debated whether to use 'one' or 'someone' here, for similar reasons.)

~~~
Kye
It never occurred to me that it was American slang. That's a new thing to
think about.

------
lliamander
Something I tend to see in online arguments, here and elsewhere, is the
tendency to throw everything at the other person and see what sticks. I've
been guilty of it myself.

The result is a wall of text that few will read and will contain many points
that are easy to knock down, poorly worded, or irrelevant.

Now, I try to stick to one point, if possible, that I feel I can articulate
well and defend.

~~~
vinliao
This remind me of a quote: "if you're saying ten things, you're not saying
anything."

------
gandutraveler
The other day I was helping friend with an essay and i realized how 12 years
in software programming has changed my writing style. Now it seems very
awkward to think and write in long paragraphs. It feels more natural to use
bullet points for everything.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I know the feeling; when preparing to write a blog post or a presentation I
tend to start off with bullet points.

Mind you once I have that down I can churn out improbable amounts of text in a
relatively short amount of time. The main challenge for me is to stop writing
and remove unnecessary text, which is kinda hard to do given how much nuance
is in code.

I mean I've been thinking of writing a post (and a knowledge sharing session
with my mostly C writing, older generation developer colleagues) about modern
development and I was already thinking of painting a picture of how things
were 10+ years ago.

~~~
abnercoimbre
> I mean I've been thinking of writing a post (and a knowledge sharing session
> with my mostly C writing, older generation developer colleagues) about
> modern development [...]

There's a (generally) younger cohort at Handmade Network[0] that might be
interested in your essay. I'd encourage you to make an account and post it on
a new thread :-)

[0] [https://handmade.network](https://handmade.network)

------
nonbirithm
I was thinking about the same thing yesterday. I noticed I had a bunch of
unconscious processes when writing things that are meant to be read publicly,
so I started writing down the reasons. Eventually, I wrote this sentence.

"It seems that because many people are raised with the imperative to 'stand up
for themselves,' it turns into a need to become argumentive when faced with an
opposing viewpoint."

The "briars" that pg mentions happened to me when I reread this sentence. I
was essentially assuming too many things about the general population, and
also trying to contrast this assumption that people are raised to be
argumentive with my own mindset where I try very hard not to argue about
anything.

Every time I write something like this, I picture the first thing an HN
commenter would say in response. "Well, what about X?" or "You assert X, but
here's evidence that disproves this," or especially "What are the
alternatives?" Reading lots of HN comments helps with this. The issue is
trying not to seem overly assertive like pg suggests: putting in quantifiers
like "maybe" or "perhaps" to give room for error instead of coming off
universally saying "X is Y." When I imagine the fictional HN commenter's
response, if the statement itself still seems fine, that response is usually
the first thing I add to end of the comment prefixed by "On the other hand".

I feel like for me this is because I can't take criticism too well so I try to
imagine all the reasonable criticisms people might come up with first and then
criticize myself with them preemptively. Or, writing about personal
experiences - facts, of which my personal telling is unique - instead of
writing about how thing X or Y ought to be in the world. Especially with
personal experiences I believe they can be useful without having to use them
as evidence of a larger argument, which opens me up to the risk of being flat-
out wrong.

------
wildermuthn
An unpersuasive essay is never useful.

While I don’t think PG’s logical mindset would dispute this fact, I do wish
his essay explored more pointedly the tension between persuasiveness and
usefulness. His essay has a hint of despair: that it is impossible to persuade
most people, and that the minority of humanity that are open to being
persuaded (i.e., to learning something novel) are precisely the kind of people
who are too intellectually rigorous to be influenced by rhetoric. Thus,
persuasive writing is a waste of time?

Not a week goes by where I am persuaded of something that is true, that I had
not previously accepted as true because... well... because I had not yet been
persuaded.

PG isn’t really arguing that persuasion is unimportant. He is trying to
persuade us that persuasion, as a rhetorical art, is a fools errand. And to
give him credit, he uses the very method of persuasion in his essay that he
promotes: unvarnished condensed truth.

“People believe whatever they want to believe, so you might as well tell them
the truth bluntly, accurately, and simply. Even though they won’t listen to
you, you’ll be better off for it. And who knows, if you reach 10 other people
it will have been worth it. See the single starfish thrown back into the
ocean? It mattered to her.”

Having said all that, I’m inclined to agree with PG, because almost no one
will change a belief they already hold because of an essay. There’s a good
book called “Changing Minds” that explores why people change their beliefs,
and very low on a long list is intellectual insight. High on the list is what
your peers believe and what beliefs serve your self-interest. It takes a heart
of a hero to believe something no one else believes, especially when such a
belief requires you to act against your own welfare.

The most useful essays are those that change lives. The sweet spot is to
attack those areas of life that people tend to not have a formed opinion
about. And this is where PG’s genius lives: at the edge of technology, where
few live, let alone believe. That’s where he is at his best. I for one would
devour and re-devour an essay about privacy, or AGI, or VR, or even about
Twitter. Here’s hoping that this is PG’s opening salvo in more essays that are
as powerful as this one, but as relevant to startups as his earlier writings.
As he wrote: there is still much left unwritten and undiscovered!

------
ahsans
I've always found PG's essays to be incredibly intriguing.

I'm working in a startup, and everything he says is just very insightful about
running one. I hope that PG shares more about growing a company that's running
on an experimental business model.

This is one of his other masterpieces. There is a certain art of communicating
and he's sharing that with the world for everyone to learn. Not many people
share their experiences and miscellaneous things in detail.

I for one am thankful that PG still writes and I hope that he continues.

~~~
friendlybus
Masterpeice?

------
peterwwillis
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric)

~~~
philwelch
> 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.

------
mozey
> 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.

------
xiphias2
,,It's easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. ''

What's funny is that the last dataset that Google built for evaluating
dialogues has exactly these 2 metrics: correctness and specificity.

------
grappler

        Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength.
        In effect the four components are like numbers you
        can multiply together to get a score for
        usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly
        reductive, but nonetheless true.
    

Cue the page ripping scene from Dead Poets Society...

    
    
        PERRY: Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans
        Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully understand poetry, we
        must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and
        figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One,
        how artfully has the objective of the poem been 
        rendered, and two, how important is that objective. 
        Question one rates the poem's perfection, question
        two rates its importance. And once these questions
        have been answered, determining a poem's greatness
        becomes a relatively simple matter.
       
        Keating gets up from his desk and prepares to draw on
        the chalk board.
       
        PERRY: If the poem's score for perfection is
        plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its
        importance is plotted on the vertical, then
        calculating the total area of the poem yields the
        measure of its greatness.
       
        Keating draws a corresponding graph on the board and
        the students dutifully copy it down.
    

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHORRHXtyI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHORRHXtyI)

:)

------
say_it_as_it_is
PG speaks of writing usefully while not writing well. Many of his sentences
are phrases. The subject of his sentence is often unclear. He begins sentences
with the preposition, "But". Yet, his writing remains useful. I'd rather the
latter than the former if I had to choose, but considering the volume that he
writes, it's surprising that he hasn't put effort into writing well. He just
doesn't care to improve his work.

~~~
throwawaylolx
>He just doesn't care to improve his work.

Alternatively, you may overestimate how objective these rules are and how much
they must correlate with some universal metric for good writing.

~~~
daxaxelrod
Agreed. In my opinion, great writing has to be within the context of the time.
A lot of us speak in a manner similar to how PG writes. You wouldn't consider
great writing from 1890 with the same set of rules as you would something
written in 2020.

~~~
friendlybus
Roald Dahl's work is some of the most delightfully readable and engaging
writing out there in my humble opinion and that was written nearly one hundred
years ago in the 1930s and 1940s.

Good writing is timeless, I may suggest that adding hyperlinks under a new
word you introduced inside your essay that requires clicking on and reading a
wholly different story to understand the current story you are reading, is a
terribly under-performant way of communicating information inside an essay to
the reader.

When did using "+" instead of "&" become acceptable in proper English? I
understand this is a tech blog and I have no problem with "+" used in a tech
context, the use in a virtue signalling piece on the rules of writing a good
essay seems misplaced.

~~~
TimPC
I think there is plenty of good and great writing that isn't timeless.
Especially when it comes to essays, where the nature of what we know and care
about changes so dramatically. An essay written to convince a slaver of the
moral errors of slavery may seem so obvious to the modern reader as to be
condescending, but, effective in it's time period, it was great writing.

~~~
friendlybus
True the content of the stories fade in and out of relevance and greatness.

The structuring of essays improves and dips in transcendent quality over time
depending on the behaviour of authors at large and human understanding of
communication through essay. The virtue and successful execution of well
structured essays is timeless. RD's work is well structured. It's possible to
learn and execute on structures that are proven to work across time and speak
for themselves in the results.

------
DrNuke
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.

------
alexandercrohde
tl; dr:

1\. Sets the topic of "What is a good essay?"

2\. Asserts that correctness is necessary, but not sufficient condition for a
good essay.

3\. Illustrates 2 by pointing out that by increasing vagueness, complete
correctness is always possible. Characterizes correctness/precision as
opposing forces.

4\. Adds two more criteria for a good essay - telling people something
important, and that they don't know

5\. Adds the essential caveat that things we know subconsciously may be worth
restating [crucially, as points 1-5 we all certainly subconsciously knew]

6\. Adds a fourth dimension to a good essay: "as unequivocal as possible" [aka
strength]

7\. Highlights the inherent tradeoffs in satisfying these conditions.
Increasing one dimension may reduce audience size.

8\. Details an simple algorithm for only writing important/true things --
reviewing/revising one's own ideas heavily before publishing (up to 100 times)

9\. Proposes a technique to find important topics: by examining the pool
topics one cares about

10\. Proposes a technique to find novel topics: By examining topics that
you've thought about a lot [and surprised yourself with when you found a
connection]

11\. Suggests "strength" [6] comes from thinking well and skillful use of
qualifiers.

12\. Adds another quality to what makes a good essay -- simplicity

-

13\. Proposes that good essays (by this formula) are particularly likely to
make people mad

14\. Identifies one cause of anger is that some widely-held incorrect beliefs
an essay calls out are likely to be cherished beliefs

15\. Mentions the strength component of very precise writing (as well as
brevity) can come across as incredibly confident, and exacerbate the ruffling
of feathers

16\. Proposes that being misrepresented is particularly likely with this essay
style, and isn't avoidable generally, but doesn't think one should worry too
much about disingenuous misinterpretation.

-

17\. Advises aspiring essayists to relax the constraint of breadth-of-
audience/topics. Suggests publication isn't a necessity.

18\. Provides some hopeful thoughts on the future of essays

~~~
alexandercrohde
Observations.

This is one of my longest tl; drs, particularly for a short essay. This to me
signals high content ratio (low compressibility).

As somebody who tried for years to get people online to pay attention to my
essays, I am not super confident that we have good content-discovery
mechanisms for essays online [except video essays, which seem to thrive]. Thus
I don't take this essay as personally relevant, as I am not personally
convinced that a good essay written by an unfamous person, would warrant
enough attention to justify the rigorous revision process.

I notice PG chooses to view the essay through an artistic/historic lens that
puts him in the minority. It seems to me he strives very hard to stay above
the primal desires that dominate the internet-attention-economy. A very tough
challenge.

------
bovermyer
There are many ways to write, and many reasons to write. Be careful that you
do not take one person's advice as the only way to write.

------
DanielBMarkham
I don't know. I get what pg is saying but I feel like he's missing some huge
points here.

I find that emotionally-laden content with overly-specified points combined
with extreme surety sells better than more intellectual content that leaves
many questions open to the reader. I find that in my own writing, over the
years I'll take the same subject and move slowly from generalisms to
specifics, and that *the process of reading, writing, and thinking about the
generalisms are what drive the eventual specificity an confidence. I also find
that writing and editing is itself thinking, that many times I don't slowly
advance towards a goal until I've flailed around at the edges for a while.
(Which he says as well, I think)

Being wrong a lot in public helps to be eventually be right. There are things
you'll never see unless you establish feedback mechanisms and run through them
several times. There's a popular idea among some intellectuals that most books
don't deserve to exist. I understand and mostly agree with that; there's been
a ton of books that are supposed to say something that don't. There's also a
ton of essays that show a writer wondering around in a field, circling around
some idea they can barely express and how no idea how to understand.

I'm okay with all of that. In fact, I think it's a good thing. I might not
read any of it, but we need lots of people thinking about important things and
trying to work through the issues. That's going to mean breaking a lot of
these rules (or scoring low on the multiplied metric).

Don't get me wrong, I like the metrics and they're a goal of mine. But you
shouldn't write for other people, you should write for yourself. Otherwise
you'll spend a lot of time worrying about what other people say about you.
Write for yourself, figure out what's important to you, then work through
becoming more and more specific as you grow. You don't play tennis by watching
the scoreboard, you play by hitting the ball and engaging in the game.
Likewise while you want to score high on these metrics, you've got to spread
your intellectual wings and grow some. Otherwise it's just somebody talking to
himself in an interesting manner. That might make a great thing to consume,
but how useful is it actually?

tl;dr it's better to write a lot, continue to score low on all of this as long
as you're learning. Much better than scoring high and never changing.

------
Kiyumars
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.

------
quantumwoke
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.

------
hnhg
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]

~~~
mesaframe
Glad I'm not the only one. First few paragraphs lead to a good buildup but
going on it fell apart.

Further, It's hard to criticise Graham on HN.

~~~
Kiyumars
Is it difficult? Most of his articles receive quite a lot of criticism on hn.

------
caligarn
Is Paul unfamiliar with what makes good academic writing? He starts by digging
into academic writing, but I am not sure he knows how it functions and what it
functions to do. Good and great academic writing pushes the envelope on
theories and frameworks and tends to be the repository for new ideas that
people like Paul use to make sense of the world. A case in point is Clayton
Christensen. It's in the forges of his profession and writing practice that
his Innovator's Dilemma was born. Academic writing may not be accessible and
easy to read for outsiders, and tends towards a high degree of density. But
that's the task of journalists, business people, educators, and essayists etc.
to translate and apply it to the real world.

~~~
rdlecler1
Former academic here. I disagree. Academic writing has evolved to demonstrate
that you are (1) an insider and (2) to obfuscate your ideas so that peer
reviewers are less likely to challenge you.

------
wellpast
> How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and important?
> Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this ... ... trick is not to
> say anything unless he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get
> opinions out of him, but when you do, they're usually right.

I wish I could do this.

I have to vocalize bad ideas at times & almost with surety to draw out all of
the opposition so as to whittle the idea down to sharp and solid -- and to
make it robust against the array of slings it could possibly face.

I do not know how people can go through a dialectic process like this in their
own silent mind. Or if anyone truly does. Or if they do, if this process
trends toward "safe-ish" ideas only.

------
kashyapc
On the essay form, I don't yet see a mention of the excellent _Essays of E. B.
White_ [1]. Yes, the same one from 'Strunk and White' of _The Elements of
Style_.

Two essays that I still vividly remember from the book (both were written
around 1940s):

(1) _Coon Tree_

(2) _Death of a Pig_

These are indeed essays with an "an odor of durability", as White puts it
while he ruminates in the preface about what he was considering to publish.

Get the entire book[1], his writing _reeks_ with humanity.

[1][https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-
wh...](https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060932237/essays-of-e-b-white/)

------
mosselman
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!

------
seemslegit
A true test of good writing is the test of time, the following for example was
written 15 years ago and remains relevant:
[https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm](https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm)

~~~
vasilipupkin
Wow, I’m not impressed with this at all It’s obvious to anyone what the ways
are in which hackers and painters are completely different. Does anyone really
need to write lots of vacuous commentary on this ? On the other hand, the ways
in which they are similar are actually interesting to think about.

------
vogtb
A lot in common with Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing [1] which was
previously on HN. [2]

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/24/elmore-
leonard...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/24/elmore-leonard-
rules-for-writers)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16422686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16422686)

------
firatcan
Hello guys,

I don't know if it's right place to ask this, but do you guys have any other
resources that I can learn how to write great essays.

Because I have started to write essays at our startups blog which is called
www.jooseph.com . It is basically playlists for learning. This resources would
be really helpful for me to create a list for how to write great essay and
also teach myself to how write great essays. Thanks in advance

~~~
CaptArmchair
You want to read Umberto Eco's seminal "How to write a thesis". Not quite the
same as an essay. But it does contain tons of good stuff on writing.

~~~
firatcan
Thank you for your suggestion :)

------
Attained
The writer does not mention eliminating complex grammar, and uses pronouns a
lot. I find using pronouns greatly dilutes meaning and efficiency for non-
native English speakers and requires more attentive reading even for native
English speakers. The writer is not using simple direct language in my
opinion, and being both simple and direct are critical for useful writing.

------
miguelrochefort
I found this lecture about effective writing to be very useful:

LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively (Larry McEnerney, Director of
the University of Chicago's Writing Program)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM)

------
crimsonalucard
Another type of writing that happens a lot especially on HN that is better
than essay writing is dialogue. You get immediate feedback on what you failed
to make clear and what points you missed because your intuition skipped over
it, or if you're genuinely wrong.

Still even in dialogue, arguments become circular because a lot of dialogue is
selectively interpreted and misinterpreted at a subcncious level.

I was recently introduced to a way of writing that makes all your points
unequivocally clear. It may not lend to enjoyable reading but it makes your
stance and point solid and clear. I post the dialogue below and while there's
a lot going on (not relevant to this post, it's a debate about how function
composition is a central feature to functional programming) in that dialogue
the main point is that it evolves into a different format at the end to make
things completely clear you can see the evolution just by scanning the
conversation (especially near the end):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290188)

------
abrax3141
Saying that you should write useful essays isn’t really saying anything.
Presumably you should only do anything that’s useful. (Which is not to say
that everyone always does so.) Being useful is a less stringent requirement
than being persuasive, so it’s actually less ambitious, not more so.

~~~
soneca
For me it said a lot. Because he doesn't stop at the title, it's not a tweet,
he goes on to properly explain what he consider usefulness and how to achieve
it. And the idea that I should aim to being useful and not persuasive is
pretty powerful to me. I do think is more ambitious to be useful in the way
the described than just persuasive.

------
madacol
> Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had
> never put into words. In fact those may be the more valuable insights,
> because they tend to be more fundamental.

I now know what I subconsciously already knew. I like readings that are
_Useful_

------
oli5679
I also found this summary of the writing process quite interesting, by Tyler
Cowen:

[https://www.writingroutines.com/tyler-
cowen/](https://www.writingroutines.com/tyler-cowen/)

------
rossdavidh
Oddly, coming from an author who has written so many essays which I find
incredibly useful and interesting, this essay I found not especially useful,
and not especially interesting.

~~~
techiferous
I found it both useful and interesting. To each their own, I guess.

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soneca
Well,I can say that I did learn from this essay. I will start writing more,
the freedom of writing without having to publish is as obvious as it's a
novelty for me.

------
mochialex
Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four components
are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score for usefulness.

What is the fourth component?

~~~
iainmerrick
Novelty.

------
_Nat_
> What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot
> of us were taught essays should be.

Yeah, essays written for a class on persuasive writing should be persuasive.
Because that's what the class is about -- students are supposed to be learning
how to express their ideas about how things should be done to, e.g., their
boss, coworkers, clients, potential investors, etc..

However, I hope no one's under the misimpression that _all_ writing should be
persuasive writing. Schools also teach classes on other types of writing, e.g.
creative writing and technical writing.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

------
syndacks
The title should be How to Write [an Essay] Usefully.

This blog post is NOT about writing in general. It's not about the craft of
writing, or the many varied types of writing (fiction, memoir, biography,
essay, marketing blog, etc).

Instead, it's a formula that Mr. Graham gives the reader:

>I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty + correctness +
strength, is the recipe for a good essay.

For a good essay, maybe. For writing in general, no. It's formulaic, which may
very well be a horrible approach depending on the context.

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nazgulnarsil
A useful concept is decision leverage. As in, notice when you're expending
effort on things that don't have any.

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chadlavi
c'mon Paul, get an https cert

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iamcurious
Another essay about the importance of essays. Another succinct lisp. pg seems
to be cycling back to something. Maybe we should pay special attention to the
next batch of yc's investments.

------
techbio
Longer than the usual PG essay, added my to reading list.

I like the exploration of writing by a writer who has likely read more bad
writing than I ever will.

------
timavr
Controversial point, but PGs writing is F-.

It seems a lot of effort goes into sounding smart, rather then delivering
information required.

Who learned anything from above?

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
The model of precision and correctness being opposing forces that increase in
strength the more you hone in on one is useful for me and something that I had
never put into words before.

~~~
friendlybus
It simply isn't true though, they are rarely required together. His example of
the location of a city could have been replaced with gps co-ordinates in the
place of a descriptive phrase.

NASA deals with strength and precision together all the time, it's rare that
they are both needed on the same task at the same level. The requirements for
precision and strength to be shared in an essay is to construct sentences that
are clear and cannot be interpreted in multiple ways and then fill in the
descriptive detailing with precise information.

Strength takes from distilling multiple possible interpretations down into one
clear and correct direction. Precision is about highlighting the qualitative
properties and exact quantities of your subject.

They don't conflict. They are rarely needed together.

~~~
TimPC
Reading random GPS coordinates in an essay without a map in a has high
precision but terrible understanding. While it's highly accurate, it's almost
useless to the typical reader who would have difficulty knowing that the GPS
coordinate is within Colorado. GPS coordinates are for maps not essays.

~~~
friendlybus
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.

------
irchans
I loved that essay :)

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sweis
This is brilliant unintentional parody.

------
Edmond
You can start by not using the word: "Usefully" :)

~~~
heyyyouu
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.

------
Cartonju
Writing an academic essay means fashioning a coherent set of ideas into an
argument. Because essays are essentially linear—they offer one idea at a
time—they must present their ideas in the order that makes most sense to a
reader. Successfully structuring an essay means attending to a reader's logic.

------
sixhobbits
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.

------
lidHanteyk
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.

------
friendlybus
This reads like a list of bullet points the author dreamed up that morning. I
can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest in communicating to the
anonymous internet as the self-interested writer taps a pen on his computer
screen.

A better way for this writer to succeed would have been to wrap his list of
"rules" around a problem for a character, institution or team of people.
Placing these imagined rules in story through a daily work schedule at the 9-5
software office job would greatly improved it's readability.

Bob works at Innitech and he needs to create an essay on the latest doodad the
boss is craving to provide to his superiors. Bob's needs to provide precision
only when it is necessary because of [humorous anecdote about engineering
culture]. Jane works at InGen and needs to provide an essay on a C++ based
linux app that rotates raptor eggs or whatever. This rule X covers the
strength she needs to convey in her essay and this is how her client
presentation will be improved by it. The rule on clarity of writing is how she
can help her co-workers with accurate, clear information.

The author would engage a broad set of interests and the reader can quickly
digest the information that matters to them because everybody understands the
story format. The author could put down his morning coffee and instead
describe part of the story to his wife or secretary and see the reaction of
someone outside the field responding to what could be an interesting topic.

We are left with mechanical writing that has to be laboriously deconstructed
and reconstructed in the reader's mind as context that applies somewhere in
their life. Nobody is quite sure when, where, why or how they are going to be
writing an essay, but my golly they are prepared with a bullet point list of
rules to do so.

~~~
alexandercrohde
Is this comment satire?

>> I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest

PG admits he rereads some of his sentences up to 100 times in his revision
process _in the very piece you criticize._

>>The author could put down his morning coffee and instead describe part of
the story to his wife or secretary and see the reaction of someone outside the
field responding to what could be an interesting topic.

His writing also addresses this in the same writing, advising people to
specialize with a target audience... Did you read this piece?

This is either funny trolling (giving condescending essay advice to one of the
most succesful essayists of our era, on the platform he created), or woefully
lazy.

