

A Brief Look At Paul Graham's Writing Habits (with Charts) - andrewacove
http://andrewacove.posterous.com/wip-pg-essays

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keyist
More interesting albeit difficult to quantify would be PG's writing style.

If you've read a PG essay and found yourself agreeing because you're gradually
taken towards a conclusion yourself instead of having it preached to you,
you'll know what I'm referring to.

Turns out there is a style for that.

I am no writing expert, but I feel PG's style is (intentional or otherwise)
most akin to Classic Style as outlined in the book "Clear and Simple as the
Truth" (overview from Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias here:
[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/deceptive-writing-
styl...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/deceptive-writing-styl..). ).

Most telling excerpt: "Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as
the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive
is disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language
with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity."

CaSatT homepage: <http://www.classicprose.com/>

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aaronblohowiak
Did you follow the "it turns out" thread a while back? Some interesting a tuff
was discussed then that you may like.

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Raphomet
That sounds amazing. Link?

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steveklabnik
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965>

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pg
I had no idea I never wrote anything in June.

What happened in the first half of 2010 I wrote about here:
<http://paulgraham.com/top.html>

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duck
Paul, two questions I've always wanted to ask and now seems like the right
time: Why do you use an image for your essay titles? What do you use to write
and publish your essays to your site?

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pg
Both have the same answer: Yahoo Store. It was written in an era when browsers
had about 3 fonts, so when sites wanted to to do anything interesting with
typography the text had to be rendered as images. One day I'll move my site,
but there's a bit of activation energy involved, because I'll have to write
another site builder first.

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cool-RR
It's funny that you don't simply hire someone to do this.

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ericd
Hiring and managing people for a project is a good amount of work in itself.

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photon_off
I don't take taking advice lightly. It really takes a lot to convince me that
what you are preaching is something I should thoroughly consider. Despite this
fact, I find most of PG's essays to really hit the spot.

I've realized that one of the reasons why I trust PG essays, besides the fact
that they are written with the general tone of discovering the truth, rather
than inventing the truth, is because a lot of them are old. Well, relatively
old. And quite plain. A few years ago when I first started reading them, my
instinct was to think less of them for this. But that the essays I like most
are over 5 years old, yet still highly relevant, only adds to their
credibility. I don't think a lot of stuff I read on blogs today will stand the
test of time as well, though I admittedly don't read enough.

Anyway, I realize this is slightly off topic. So, um, nice charts, and keep
'em coming Paul.

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blaines
I would have enjoyed this more if you published a literary analysis of essay
content.

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jseliger
A nitpick: People in English departments would probably call this a
"rhetorical analysis," since "literary analysis" usually refers to fiction.

I would say that Graham tends to have the modernist tendency to cut anything
superfluous; to quote Milan Kundera in _Encounter_, "Almost all great modern
artists mean to do away with 'filler,' do away with whatever comes from habit,
whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential
(the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say)."
Kundera, like Graham, is very good at doing this in his nonfiction; his essays
on the novel contain more in 200 broadly spaced pages than most tomes about
literary theory that I've read.

One other thing: is very, very good at not repeating himself and not having
ideas with an extreme amount of overlap. I think that's one reason he tends to
say things like, "I'm not saying X" as clarification -- to avoid misreadings
that might result from his terseness.

This tendency towards minimalism, by the way, is one of the same things that
John Sculley talks about Steve Jobs having in terms of industrial design:
[http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-
full...](http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-
interview-transcript/63295) . Graham does it in nonfiction writing. Elmore
Leonard does it in fiction; he's incredibly skilled at compacting a lot of
action into a very small space. If you're looking for fiction that's as
"dense" (for lack of a better term) as nonfiction, try Leonard. His
subject—capers of a vaguely criminal and usually underworld nature—might not
appeal to you, but the man has style.

In addition, Graham is very good at using metaphors and comparisons with
history. There isn't really a good way to analyze metaphor that I know of.
Some of the better attempts include Lakoff and Johnson's _Metaphors We Live
By_ and Steven Pinker's _The Stuff of Thought_. But, as far as I know, no one
has a complete theory of why we think associatively and metaphorically. Good
writers, however, will tend to exploit the tendency to view one thing in term
of another.

The problem with these kinds of generalizations is that they're very hard to
make concrete. You might notice that I don't cite a lot of examples from
Graham's writing because it''s harder to prove the absence of perceived filler
than it is to identify filler when you see it.

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blaines
Ah good catch! Thanks!

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lizg
I know the these are "essays," and not blog posts or articles, but it always
niggles me that they aren't precisely dated.

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kristiandupont
Why?

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lizg
Because I want to know when something was first available (am I late to see
it? early?), and where it fits in the context of other things that were
written around that time.

The majority of my information comes in time-based feeds and streams, whereas
these essays have inscrutable URLS and date formatting. I suppose that's by
design but I don't find the lack of information adds significant value.

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Sukotto
I'm a bit loopy after a long day juggling work-from-home and caring for a sick
child.

I think it would be fun to see:

\- number of foot notes written (total and per essay)

\- word cloud(s)

\- number of words written (total, per essay)

\- word lengths

there were a couple of others but I'm too tired to remember them now.

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barmstrong
One thing that always struck me about his writing: he is the freakin master at
metaphors.

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adamc
For me, what has been most noticeable is his shifting focus. When he started
out, he mostly wrote about Lisp and programming languages. Now he primarily
writes about startups. Since I'm a lot more interested in the former than the
latter, I've gradually stopped reading his newer essays. (Usually a paragraph
or two is enough.)

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RiderOfGiraffes
Related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811518>

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andrewacove
I just updated the post to include PG's latest essay. There's a link to the
source data at the end of the post now, too.

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vchien
Great Analysis..impressive. I do find PG's essays inspiring.

