Write simply (2021)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
The best prose is that which conveys the intended message for the intended audience in the best way possible. I think it's also a revealed vs stated preferences problem. People state they want/like simple writing but revealed preferences show otherwise.
I think the reason why so many business authors give this advice is confusing cause and effect. Writing simply does not make you successful or persuasive, but that people who are involved in business write that way naturally, but success at one does not follow from the other. Just like Bill Gates did not get rich by being good at bridge.
I have a service to use AI together with expertise in guiding beginner authors, writers for whom English is not the primary language, and for experienced casual writers. There are many heuristics that can be shown to writers to make the message clear, more impactful, in essay writing, short fiction, poetry, etc. If anyone's willing to beta test the service, contact me on reddit /u/goldfeld.
It could also be about appreciating subtler aspects of life as I grow older. Regardless, the net result is my impressions about "write simply" suggestions are exactly what you stated.
He has written excellent technical books that are both deep and a pleasure to read.
He is not in the business of writing the next War and Peace, i.e. aesthetics is secondary to his goals.
Just say what you mean. Text is beautiful because it flows, the sentence might evoke the thing it's describing by its sounds or rhythm or structure. It's not beautiful because it uses big words.
I agree with you.The point of language is to get an idea from my head into your head with as little loss-of-signal as possible. That is much more challenging than it might sound. Note: an idea might be an emotion.
If I were to write that as simply as possible, I might say: "Yes. Talk is communication. That is hard", or even more simply "Talk hard!!!"
Too much simplification is reductionist, and something is lost. Excessive verboseness is too high a noise-to-signal ratio, and something is lost. There is a balance to be had, and that balance is a moving target, depending on the complexity and importance of the idea and your audience. If I'm trying to convey deep-technical knowledge to a fellow engineer, then I'll be precise and "jargony" - it won't be "simple"; if I'm trying to show that I'm having a good time to my inlaws with whom I don't share a common verbal language, then a beaming smile may be all that's needed.
If anything, your point makes the joke funnier - he's managed to make the sentence longer than has to be, in addition to grammatically incorrect, to express the same idea.
Let's make yet another analogy with the body: "Why spend time in the gym working with barbells and dumbbells to achieve a shape and tone that would make you look like a Bronze of Riace instead of doing "just" 10k steps a day?"
Perhaps a dress can be too flowery or stiff; appropriate for a wedding, inappropriate for a day in the woods. A body may be too muscular for a marathon, not enough for a bodybuilding competition.
It is a matter of taste, of situation. Terse writing may fit here and not there; flowery writing may work here and not there. Prescription always depend on the context and the goals.
- https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-dropped-acid-and-saw-into-th...
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
- https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
- https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview
- https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minis...
"I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup:
Tolerance is important, but it should not extend to the "outgroup". An outgroup is defined as those who are perceived as fundamentally different or opposed. Tolerance towards the outgroup can lead to harm to one's own group and undermine social cohesion. It's better to tolerate ideas and individuals within your own group and be intolerant towards the outgroup. This creates a sense of loyalty and strengthens bonds within the group."
The actual "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" article is a ponderous critique of our human tribal tendancy to find an outgroup and hate them. The article finally comes full circle when the author notices the whole essay itself could be seen (ironically) as an attack on another outgroup.
The article is intentionally not making a clear point. The experience I had reading was to come away ponderous, thoughtful and self reflective. I'm not convinced that a simple summary or simplification would be able to give a reader the same experience. (But at least summarizing the article correctly wouldn't hurt.)
Simple language has its place. But its just a style, like flat design or modernism. Its certainly no panacea.
Being confidently wrong is an important step towards passing the Turing test. The upsetting feeling is the "uncanny valley". The stupid machine is now expressing arrogance normally reserved to self-confident humans.
Many people try to emulate his style, usually they fail, and if they succeed it works against the purpose of their writing, which for most people, most of the time, is to communicate an idea.
A memorable critique, from an English professor, of my writing: "stop trying to sound smart". He meant that I should stop trying to use big words and stop trying to construct complex sentences.
>People state they want/like simple writing but revealed preferences show otherwise.
Simplicity isn't what you think it is. The simplicity people want is sentences that flow regardless of complexity. You say complicated, I say clunky. An author might use a complex sentence to coalesce several ideas, but if that complexity, because the construction interrupts the flow, requires the audience to reread the sentence, the author has failed.
That's how we arrive at simplicity. I find it easier to pepper diversity into my prose ex post facto than try during first draft. Connecting two simple sentences is less work than unwinding a complicated sentence.
The advice isn't really to leave your writing simple, it's to start simple. At some point, you will be required to use a complex sentence to connect ideas.
> I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.
They don't go hand in hand. Quite the contrary, I'm arguing they are in conflict.
Drawing from a larger vocabulary allows greater precision, results in shorter sentences and enables the writer to express complex ideas concisely.
Ironically, artificially restricting what words one can use puts a far greater cognitive burden on the reader. It's superfluous to quote the relevant xkcd.
There's no cure for unclear prose: it's the necessary consequence of unclear thoughts.
"Those two things are at odds with each other."
> Drawing from a larger vocabulary allows greater precision, results in shorter sentences and enables the writer to express complex ideas concisely.
"Using more precise words enables simpler sentences, even for complex ideas."
> Ironically, artificially restricting what words one can use puts a far greater cognitive burden on the reader. It's superfluous to quote the relevant xkcd.
"Limiting yourself to only simple words makes it harder to read."
> There's no cure for unclear prose: it's the necessary consequence of unclear thoughts.
"????"
I think what you're saying would be a lot more convincing if you had, in fact, been able to express it more clearly.
Laughed at the use of extra words to explain a big word rather than just saying something like “out of date”
It's nice to decorate, but not nice to encrypt.
pg has some decent takes on programming and one day decided that he might also have takes on things he knows far less about. These latter takes don't tend to be very good, which is unfortunate because he does actually manage to influence people.
It is hilariously dismissive to label someone's own ideas as pseudo intellectual because you don't agree with them, and they aren't coming with a bibliography.
People have had this kind of reaction to his writing for 20 years now and I've been puzzling about why for a long time, because even though I often don't agree with him (sometimes I disagree, more often I have no opinion), I wish I could write like him and know of few other writers who come close.
My current take: I think pg's unusual quality is that he thinks for himself. It used to be a truism that one should "think for oneself" (and even "question authority"!)—not so much anymore—but although we all tell ourselves we do that, mostly we don't. We mostly repeat things we've cobbled from other sources, usually sources tagged as authorities in our minds (and usually also in the culture at large). If you cobble from enough sources and have a bit of taste, that's the sweet spot for getting a good reception. You'll come across as clever and creative, but not weird, because you haven't left the tribe.
When encountering someone who actually does think for himself, the reaction is often a WTF. How dare he do that! Where are the citations?! Thinking-for-self stands out, not in a good way—and in pg's case the ruthless editing makes it stand out starkly. It's off-putting. The reaction isn't "hey, what would it be like if I thought for myself?" It's "hey, you can't do that."
The "rich and famous" aspect is a red herring because pg was this way long before he got rich and famous (except Lisp-famous), and it was by this quality that he got rich... that plus a lot of energy. But the rich-and-famous aspect intensifies the WTF reaction. It's no longer just "how dare you", it's "how dare that rich motherfucker" - which again, gets the causality the wrong way.
I know this sounds harsh about the cobbler type but I know these things by tracking them in myself—I'm no different. The funny thing is that one can notice such things and still feel perfectly sure about "thinking for yourself" or whatever else it is.
I think what you are getting at, though, is not so much "thinking for yourself" as pg is unafraid to say unpopular things that are on his mind. And I don't mean this in a derogatory way: it's good to have people who aren't just posting sycophantic opinions following the zeitgeist. But I don't think that's what causes my reaction to pg's writings. I think he gives advice that is overly universalizing from his position as a wealthy VC: for example, his "The Two Kinds of Moderate" post strikes me as very much the kind of thing that is really only taking his own experiences into account.
You're wrong about "position as a wealthy VC". As I said in the GP (but not before you replied! I was busy editing) - he was (1) exactly this way long before that, and (2) it was by being this way that he became a wealthy investor in the first place. YC was an exercise in exactly the same kind of thinking and writing that his essays are. And I do mean exactly.
Straw-manning is a telling sigh that you got defensive about PG, for some reason.
If people just dislike wealth, that's one thing, but nowadays they bring that up while criticizing his writing. I don't think those two things are connected, and it seems weird to conflate them.
They're also conflated because pg has written some very reductive stuff about smart people, sheep people, and ThInGs YOu JUSt CaNT SaY AnY MoRE. His stripped-back style makes for an easy read, but when he's not about his own experiences, it's ice-cold and humourless. That surely gets him pigeonholed quite fast outside of HN, even if you don't know what he does for a living.
Still this is the first of his blogs in years where I agree with him completely. No notes!
In a world of a million concepts, there are a trillion of possible directed associations between pairs of them, and each of them may be multi-valued. Say, what's a real-world relation between "ChatGPT" and "nighmare"? A good thinker will be able to find or come up with many that nobody has seen before, beyond the ones which, due to our 'social prior', are evident. What happens when instead of two, there are three or four concepts?
I would go further and say that parroting is often more complicated than being creative, you have to find those ideas to rehash first, and then rank them by popularity and efficacy at your goal, e.g. publicity or acceptance. In other words, you need to be able to "read the room", or "compute the social prior".
To think for oneself means to think based on one's experiences, not based on the thoughts of others.
It seems a key issue is that he often speaks in terms of what others should or should not do, rather than inviting others to see what has worked for him. Objectivity versus subjectivity. What makes it less palatable is that it appears carefully selected wording is used to (thinly) veil it to sound like something it isn't.
Ultimately it means the writing can come across as very self-indulgent. It does not often strike me as coming from a place of feeling genuine, authentic passion about sharing with other humans.
The "sharing with other humans" aspects is an interesting point though, because the way that pg strips things down to minimal expression involves stripping out the signals that make people feel they're being shared with. I wrote about this point 15 years ago (a horrible thing to say, but I'll link to it nonetheless): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143575.
It's very insightful to get to share different perspectives in these ways. Thanks for being so open
The reality is that many people are treading various intellectual ideas, and the idea that _you_ are the one with the new and innovative idea nobody else has thought of is... well.
I think what happens a lot of times though is that people will get to an idea that others dismiss, and then keep on going for whatever reason. Most of the time this leads to nowhere. Sometimes it leads somewhere interesting/valuable. But this is probably the most straightforward example of survivor bias out there. People with success will probably have done something counterintuitive or explored thoughts other people didn't have, but so many others waddle around endlessly in their search for having the unique idea.
If you want to get scientific with it, the way to prove if his ideas were valuable still would be to publish them anonymously. I'm a nobody and I have had things I post here get traffic. Some of pg's essays would also inspire some good conversations. But... this? I don't know.
Also, I am sure PG is really smart, but do not underestimate the effect on your brain of spending hours a day on HN, for many years. That's what makes me curious to read your stuff, in addition to Paul's.
Ah, I believe the simple main reason why people criticize Paul is... envy.
He doesn't need to be right all the time. He writes things that are provocative, and often make me/us think a lot about the topic. That's a success, in my view. Some people take it like that, others can't wait to criticize it to sound smart. And even if they're right, there are many ways to contribute to the conversation, instead of just bashing his writing as many often do.
I'm pretty content to stick to internet comments. They're below the radar, and I prefer to hide.
You might want to try writing anonymously and/or use a pseudonym.
It would allow you to share some of your thoughts with the world, and protect your privacy at the same time.
Oh and it's astonishing that anybody remembers that.
I’m not dismissing their cultural relevance, I’m just constantly baffled at the fideism, and it honestly scares me a bit, as if people were prey to a global hallucination making them believe that by appreciating and praising such figures then one day, maybe, they could be like them?
What I'm defending are qualities that I love and admire because they're admirable and which people are wrong to dismiss. Net worth, btw, is a terrible criterion to judge an individual by, even if wealthy people do bad and class dynamics are a thing. If a good and smart person becomes rich, do they instantly cease to be good or smart? Of course not.
Edit: I just noticed this part:
> wouldn’t take a minute to expend y’all as necessary casualties
On what basis can you possibly say that? Do you think this is true of everybody?
Re the latter comment: a commendable trait of a good capitalist is to take hard decisions aimed at growing wealth or a business. If that comes at the expense of expandable humans, well tough luck. Not having this trait inevitably makes you a bad capitalist, or one that won’t succeed as fast or so greatly. Pg is an excellent capitalist.
Edit: I take your point about capitalism, but sometimes optimization is suboptimal. That is, sometimes narrow self-interest ends up limiting you, and sometimes going against self-interest (as currently perceived) leads to greater outcomes—like navigating through a narrow waterway and ending up in an ocean.
This is what happened with YC. The YC founders (not just PG) did things that the rest of the industry thought were dumb. For example, if the founders of a startup wanted to get acquihired, YC would say "great, do what you think best", where other investors would say "over my dead body" because they weren't making money on the deal. YC's attorneys in those days would send the paperwork back because they thought there must be some mistake.
It turned out that optimizing for founders optimized for YC as well, but this was not obvious at the time. Why did pg and YC do that? it wasn't because they were "good capitalists". It was because of the kind of people they were and the ideas they thought were cool. That turned out to be massively more profitable than being a ruthless capitalist would have. So in the end it gets a bit hard to draw these distinctions. Sometimes being a good capitalist makes you a worse capitalist!
> It used to be a truism that one should "think for oneself" (and even "question authority"!)—not so much anymore—but although we all tell ourselves we do that, most of us don't.
We get beaten up when we do. The part that people envy isn’t his money, it’s his freedom.
Incidentally, if you really want an answer to your question, you can see this phenomenon in yourself. Run a thought experiment. If pg said X was a good idea, are you more or less likely to believe it than if I’d said it?
You could say this isn’t a fair comparison, since you have a lot of data about pg, so you’re using different priors. Still, even when he was Lisp-famous —- an era I miss —- he had the freedom to say whatever he wanted. He didn’t need to care whether you care what he thinks.
His recent rebellion against Twitter was especially notable. That’s what happens when you think for yourself. He can do that. The rest of us have to pick our battles.
So, the answer to your question of “Why are people dismissive of pg?” is undoubtedly related to the think-for-yourself aspect. It’s an aspect forced out of most of us, either by our parents or by authority. And that lack of freedom seems to be the underlying emotion.
Interestingly, you seem to imply that any of us can be like pg. Just think for ourselves, have good ideas, and don’t say dumb things. But when people actually try to do that, they risk far more than someone in pg’s position. So the “rich motherfucker” aspect is merely an extension of the same reaction that always tended to pop up. It’s a bit like a prisoner watching someone talk openly about how wonderful it is to walk outside whenever you want; of course they’d be jealous.
The important question is to figure out what one needs to do to become free (i.e. to feel free) oneself. How do you get from your initial conditions to that state? I've basically devoted my life, so far, to that question and I'm still at it.
p.s. I comment like this on HN pretty regularly; those comments are just drowned out by "if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future, we'd sure appreciate it lol xoxo"
If you met yourself at 10 and wanted to transmit some advice about what you need to do to feel free, what would you say? (I’m curious if you’ve made progress towards answering the question, or if it’s as elusive as it sounds.)
10 is too early for the "what would you tell yourself" question. At 10 you don't yet have a self that can be retroactively told things to. I suppose I would say "it's all ok and you're ok and it's all happening for a reason".
To my 15 year-old self and later, I would say: it's not going to be anything like you expect, so trust what happens and try not to resist.
Basically, all of pg's writings are also just cobbled together from other sources and only become notable because he's a rich, successful person.
If you "think for yourself" when confronted with a problem like this (a problem at least three millennia old! People have been arguing about effective writing for a long time), you'll inevitably retrace some steps—good steps—of smart thinkers that have gone before you. But you won't be able to think deeply! PG, like some many smart people who embark on criticism, don't imagine the responses-to-their-response (which are, historically, also by clever and independent thinkers), and the third order responses, and so on.
This essay is shallow because it has no reference to, and no argument against, the generations of writers who thought "perhaps complexity or even obscurity has an essential and unavoidable place in our writing" and wrote persuasively to advocate for the need complexity in writing.
This (like so many of PG's essays about things that aren't programming), is armchair philosophy about a contentious and deep topic that doesn't consider the very real problems of writing. PG (by virtue of his position) doesn't have to, and therefore cannot, steelman his arguments. While you're right that this essay isn't in any way "dumb", unfortunately the comment you're responding to was right! This is pseudo-intellectualism.
He's a keen observer and a good writer.
>Can we scrutinize all your comments for subject matter expertise?
Absolutely.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
He makes a point and talks about it. There doesn't appear to be an attempt to come off smarter than he is.
Looking at other comments in this thread, I get the impression that people have this ideal of an essay that looks like an academic paper, that starts with a literature review.
But that is not how writing and thought naturally flows.
People write like this to suck up to the right people who might help them get a job as an assistant professor somewhere, or tenure or maybe just cite their own papers in return.
I find it repulsive.
I haven't recognised this in his writing. Can you quote some of the pseudo intellectual philosophy-veneered sections?
> dedicates an entire paragraph
You're technically right, but this entire paragraph consists of two sentences.
"When I write a sentence that seems too complicated, or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy to me. It seems clumsy."
So apparently the dimensions are writing simply ⮂ writing fancy, which actually gets reduced to writing simply ⮂ writing clumsy. This implies that any writing which is not clumsy is written simply, therefore the best samples of simply writing is something akin to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Heidegger's Being and Time, or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, for they are the pinnacle of non-clumsy word strings, no sign in those texts is extraneous, however they also are the pinnacle of extremely dense ideas, requiring multiple library shelves to be understood. Something does not follow.
Although, granted, if Kant indeed gave us a specification for artificial intelligence [1] in the form of a post-medieval, transitory Latin to German compendium, a vade mecum if you will, 150+ years prior to the invention of the Turing machine, well, I suppose he couldn't write simply-er than he did.
[1] https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~re14/Evans-R-2020-PhD-Thesis.pdf
I find long paragraphs a lot harder to read in most written forms, and often 'go to the next line' only to have started that line over again.
For the most part, this article was written that way, whether intentional or not.
― Ernest Hemingway
For example, in this essay I agreed with the main thrust and laughed at the irony of his Italian food example (which is certainly not a universal experience). Simple writing is good. Often. That's it right? There are contexts where we should strive to write more simply, and there are contexts in which we should encourage others to write simply. Does it make sense to qualify these contexts in his essay, or would the essay be any better for it? It would certainly be longer. More accurate perhaps, but better? Surely it would not be any more thought provoking to try and list all of the contexts under which a "write simply" rule ought to apply.
If a reader interprets any argument to follow a general rule such as this as literal an absolutist they're doing both the author and themselves a disservice.
Personally, I like to use a long word where a short word will do because it's fun. But when I write for the broadest audience it's better to follow this advice.
Mr. Graham doesn't use the term, but purple prose odious to read and I would agree that complicated writing is often used (e.g. in academia) to obfuscate the key message and bolster weak arguments. On the other end of the spectrum too much simplicity is exhausting to read; short, unvaried sentences are boring. For informative writing, I agree that ideas should be clearly and concisely expressed for the intended audience. For this purpose I'd highly recommend "Make it Clear" by Patrick Winston, who was known for his work in AI, but also a lecture series at MIT called "How to Speak".
Which words are deemed "fancy" in the English language requires knowledge of fluent English and jargon of the intended reader. For a native German speaker the word "ersatz" is commonplace, but it probably isn't familiar to many Americans. Likewise, Germans prefer "fancy" passive constructions--sentences that feel inelegant to English speakers, sound fine to Germans.
I've read a lot of business writing where the writer's mindset is clearly:I am writing for business, therefore I must sound business-like. Lots of "in terms of", "for the purpose of", "ideation", "develop needs", "affect change", "going forward". From what I hear and from what little I've read, a similar overwrought voice has developed in academia too.
I've fallen into this trap before, partially to "fit in" and partially because it's hard to simplify. But many famous business communicators -- Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett come to mind -- show that clarity is more effective than sounding like the context.
What I meant by context was: (1) For whom is the writing intended? (2) What is the purpose of the writing? (3) What is the intended tone?
(1) Is the reader an academic? New to a subject? An expert? A layperson? How old are they?
(2) Is the purpose of this text to inform? To persuade? To entertain? To instruct?
(3) Optimistic, pessimistic, uplifting, formal, casual?
The most effective communicators will have a consistent (and unique) voice whether writing a newspaper article, a college text book, or a toast. I believe strong communicators consider the context of their writing or speaking.
> Out with the long
> “Short words are best”, said Winston Churchill, “and old words when short are the best of all”
> Oct 7th 2004
full article here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230201081635/https://www.econo...
It can cause issues, where precision is required, but can make it much easier to read long articles.
Asimov was famous for his “science for the layman” writing, and I learned a lot from him (I liked these books, more than his fiction).
Tangentially it makes me wonder how far we are away from being able to converse with a ChatGPT avatar of Paul Graham (PgGPT) with slightly worse (better?) jokes.
Finally if we’re going to discuss language I really love this Orwell Essay [1]. We are so lucky to live in a time when we can just look great pieces of work like this up.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
A video dictates its consumption pace (to a degree), it can't be easily quoted, it requires both your eyes and ears.
I understand podcasts: they are for people who want to listen to something while driving. But you can't watch a video while driving.
Possibly a video of a talking head is more convincing and engaging if you are a great stage performer, and radiate emotion like a text cannot.
Possibly a video that turns an essay into a clip / movie with visuals conveying the point additionally to the text would be even.more convincing, but producing such a video is incomparably more work than writing a text, even if some magical AI produces any visuals you ask it for. It's just a much harder composition task, a symphony versus a single-voice melody.
omit needless words
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happyOr on the other hand, people might think that your essay was pure waste of their time as far as "bringing great new ideas/perspectives" goes. And it’s OK, most things that we utter is in that case, certainly. But if you don’t pay extra effort in removing every single asperities in your prose, at least they might have a few new fancy words to play with.
Don't think this a thing to aim for. When you write you don't just want to convey meaning by what you write, but by how you write. People express meaning through style and form, not just through content.
It's very techbro-ish and it reminds me of a guy I met who replaced all his meals with Soylent because "taste and cooking is just a waste of time, this has the same nutrients".
This performative simplicity that makes a virtue out of not having fun, in this case with prose is really annoying.
https://twitter.com/chiefchimpanzee/status/16157090455785062...
My dad used to do some technical translations and he disliked English namely because you cannot invent words like in Danish or German, where you can just put words together to make a new one.
"Achtung! Blinkenlights! Nicht für der gefingerpoken!"
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3a/9a/e8/3a9ae804abc43be473e6...
I know so many people who are very emotionally invested in "correct" grammar/english (semicolons, their/there, oxford comma) but only up to the point that they know and then are annoyed by those who take it 10% further than they.
I have a big vocabulary. Huge. Some might say the biggest ever.
Point being, I don't use large words out of any sense of superiority, despite apparently everybody knowing that I do this to feel superior.
In fact, I feel like an ass when someone pulls out the "Well, that's a huge word".
It's embarrassing on multiple levels, and certainly not something I would strive to do on purpose. So once this has happened once or twice, I might stick to simple sentences.
Am I really being classist here? Come on
https://ethan.id/writing/enguhlishishness/
Another idea I think goes along with this theme: separating the quality of the idea from the quality of the writing. It’s surprisingly difficult to do consistently, and I always try to remind myself to treat the two separately.
She had the highest impact on my writing today.
Tightened-up prose really does make the world a better place :)
Write Simply - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26423090 - March 2021 (330 comments)
True it is confusing and time consuming, doing laps of reading for nothing.
E.g., the art of readable writing, but there is also a book for people writing legal texts.
Just because some readers might not be proficient in English, we have to write plainly to accommodate them? What if they are seeking prose that makes them better at the language? This is a classic symptom of not having read enough literature. There is a visceral beauty in writing, and trying to place conditions on how it ought to be done is like asking of the painter how he ought to paint.
And frankly, skimming the rest, I found most of the "conclusions" rather insulting. Imagine a world where fancy words can both give a simple idea, as well as provide a deeper meaning to those that look.
Indeed some of the most profound and lasting prose is that which paints a scene in your mind.
So what brings around a better image?
"The room was green".
Great? Do I care? Will that last?
Or
"The hue of the walls enveloped the space in a lush, verdant color. It was a shade that reminiscent of spring meadows and flourishing gardens, invigorating and rejuvenating to the senses. The green was not just a simple tint, but a depth of tone that conveyed life and growth. The room felt fresh and lively, as if it were breathing with the vibrancy of nature itself. The walls seemed to glow in the light, casting a serene aura that made you feel at peace. The color was bold yet calming, creating a space that was both exhilarating and relaxing at the same time."
I want to BE in this room. I can almost smell it.
Having read a lot of Paul Graham's shit over the years-links in HackerNews, I get the impression that this guy just likes to write for the sake of writing. But it makes me ask: why does his stuff consistently make it to the top of HN?
Were it anyone else, the comment section would be rife with the ilk (pardon my unsimple Scottish!) of, "Why does this site not have a valid SSL certificate?"
For example, I can tell from your first paragraph that the character is a little boring, a bit plan. They get to the point and don’t have time to mess around. The character in your second paragraph is a pompous ass, they think highly of themselves, perhaps love to hear themselves think. Like a teenager who discovered depth and can’t wait to tell everyone.
Both can be fine. It depends.
Personally I like it when authors have something to say and don’t hide behind grand flourishes. Use the big words where they shine, stand out, and make a point. Let your story do the work, not your words.
But that’s me. Some people like to slug it out with the author in page after page of inscrutable prose. Hell, just look at Ulysses.
edit:
You can use variations in style also. A character that talks like your second paragraph, but when their grandma asks about the room they go "It was green." Oooof sizzle. Drama! What happened here!? Tell me more.
Ultimately you have a good point. My second example was over-the-top, and the first was over-simplified. I think it's safe to say there can be some middle-ground.
Or at least not "yo dawg, write simple bro, because words be hard" as a teenager close to me might say.
Took me a second to recognize this is exactly pg's point. I am sure it's my loss, but I bailed.
The other camp values writing in and of itself. They can sense the richness of words, the flexibility of meanings, the pliability of structure. They know that words are not containers of thought but are in fact co-constitutive of thought. They appreciate style and innovation at the level of the text itself. A plain idea put beautifully is more interesting to them than a beautiful idea put plainly. They can appreciate poetry, which is more economical than the bloodless prose those in the first camp worship, and yet far more interesting. When it comes to prose, they desire work that proves its linguistic creativity more than its intention or "meaning". Those in this camp are writers first and thinkers second.
Personally, I find the writing of everyone in the first camp completely agonizing and I lament every article that expounds the benefits of well-oiled plain-jane clarity above all. To me, trying to strive for some ultimate clarity in writing always stunk of massive denial of the fact that meaning is extremely fuzzy in general and that's part of what makes it all fun.
We write to communicate, but the way we write can communicate something as well. Style, word choice, punctuation also say something to the reader.
Reducing language to the lowest common denominator risks losing complex thoughts that are best communicated in complex language.
At the end of the day, know your audience. Are you communicating something to the largest possible group of people or people interested in a niche topic that you're passionate about?
Intended for a more special and a baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door Ï was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire.
Enhancing reach only makes sense if you have a message. The envelope for that message might also be passionate, sincere, vivid, playful, challenging, informative, and perhaps most of all - enjoyable for the writer. But it must be addressed to something.
Let's return to that first sentence. Writing is a technology.
Most of the images Paul Graham's piece invokes, of dragging a heavy, tedious train behind me, apply more to any computer technology than writing. Show me today one piece of digital writing (code) that is simple, universal, transparent, and durable.
There is a line between Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and Postman's "Seven Questions About Technology", and somewhere on it is point where we ask "What is it's sincere and honest purpose?" As mobile technology and social media show, I think we've lost track of purpose and gotten obsessed with the form itself.
"I do not know exactly why, in the twentieth century, the dominant fashions in English prose moved relentlessly in the direction of ever greater simplification and aesthetic minimalism. I do not even entirely regret it. Tastes change, and some of the change has been a corrective of certain excesses of the past. But, on the whole, the result has been a kind of official dogma in favor of a prose so denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality as to be often little better than infantile, not only in vocabulary but also in artistry and expressive power—a formula, that is, for producing writers whose voices are utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness. "
— David Bentley Hart, The Lamp, "How To Write English Prose" https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-to-write-english-prose
I see multiple trends going on in writing. Academic "STEM" writing is getting impenetrable, not because the authors are obscuritan, but to satisfy non-functional powers; to conform to keywords, generate REF impact factors and whatnot. At the same time science journalism is pulling the other way. In an effort to dumb things down to a folksy and breathless "hey, isn't that amazing!", it ends up just wrong. In both cases the stylish tail is wagging the dog.
What I read here from Bentley is something else, anticipating the corporate grey goo of soulless, value-free - "voices utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness." It's a kind of linguistic self-harm.
To me, that writing is not merely passive, it's actively cowardly.
I've read a lot of 'perfect' resignation letters sent around email by colleagues;
"I have worked for Company X for the past Y years during which time
I've had the pleasure of working alongside all of you. Thank you
for your wonderful support I have received over the years...." yada
yada
What energy it must take to be that insincere to oneself. And at what cost to your soul? And after all that, it's kinda insulting to everyone too. Such corruption of words.