What our opinions have in common is that they are not falsifiable. Unless we validate our conjectures with empirical evidence, we're really just sharing our taste.

"Oh no," you may say, "I have tested it, and when I write a longer essay, my retweets and upvotes decline." Very well, but the plural of anecdote is not 'data.'

Somewhere else on the Internet, there is someone with poetic, dense writing. When they simplify it, their audience dries up.

Writers and audiences find each other. If you try to measure the effect of your writing using only an audience that has selected your writing voluntarily, you are not measuring your effectiveness, you are measuring the degree to which your writing pleases people who already like your writing.

Absent a properly constructed empirical approach, we might as well be discussing hemlines and necktie widths.

The response "this normative opinion is not falsifiable" is just confused—it's like saying "this empirical observation is not good."

I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. ... That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.

This is a claim suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship between a certain type of writing and a certain behaviour on the part of people who read the article.

My feeling is that this claim could be falsifiable, provided the OP got specific about what "ordinary words" are, what "simple sentences" are, and what kind of "engagement" we wish to measure.

If he did so, the claim would be falsifiable. And in truth, I'm not going to say that if he did get precise, it would still not be falsifiable. Experience tells me that yes, we can identify cause-and-effect relationships between empirically measurable characteristics of prose and precise engagement metrics.

That is exactly the kind of thing that people do when they try to manufacture "clickbait" headlines.

But he chose to make these claims without being specific, and to me this is what makes it non-falsifiable, but not normative.

JM2C.

You are suggesting to write a proper paper, backed by proper research.

A paper would of course be useful. But it won't replace the short blurb, which communicates an idea in 2-3 minutes of reading.

"If It's Hard to Read, It's Hard to Do: Processing Fluency Affects Effort Prediction and Motivation"

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.200...

Words have a magic about them, and I don’t think Paul Graham would dispute that.

Data is not the basis of existence. Math itself is nothing but a derived value construct our minds play tricks with. 3 apples is a value system in the mind as we see it, not innately as it sits there.

Thus, when people say "I want data", they are saying to me, "I want a majority thought based on an abstraction of information (math)." You certainly didn't when you (and me and everyone else) were foraging for a nipple/bottle!

Sure, producers and consumers “find each other” but that’s no where near the end of the story.

You have a flaw in your reasoning here. Not all that is true is falsifiable.

I wish there was an A/B testing platform for writers

Like/dislike of writing style is so subjective, just like musical taste, so I can understand if it's not even possible to verbalize why. Perhaps it's just the "tone".

'Write Simply' received an overall grade of 'A', and a very-approachable Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 5.9. It's said to be readable by 100% of the literate general public, which is only 85% of the full general public.

But, out of the 507 words and 38 sentences, 4 sentences were flagged as "very long" (over 30 syllables) and 15 as "long" (over 20 syllables).

Two 'hard words' – over 12 letters or over 4 syllables – were flagged, somewhat ironically: "unnecessarily intellectual".

Another trick I've found is making sure each word has unambiguous function. Here's some examples from other comments:

I had this impression recently while reading the Akbarnama, which is a sort of court-approved biography of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, written by his Grand Vizier -- Was the Emperor written, or was it the biography?

There are some cases in which your work demands a certain level of precision -- It could've continued like "in which your work demands are excessive", so you don't know if "demands" is a noun or a verb until you read on.

That "simple" writing lasts longer is disproved by many works of literature that have made their way to us through history -- It could've continued like "that simple writing is not so simple", so you don't know if "that" is a conjunction or determiner until you read on.

These are small things, but somehow the more I notice them, the clearer my writing becomes.

I remember when I was a teenager I used to get frustrated that English words had so many homophones and overlaps and synonyms. I thought why can't every concept and idea have its own distinct word? Why would we clutter up the language with fuzzy overlaps, overloaded terms, and the need to disambiguate so frequently? The disambiguation melts away with experience as you begin to sharpen your contextual locating skills. But I recall at one point I realized that one of the great things that is afforded by the language is that you have slack for adding phonetic variation to your sentences and they, for lack of a better word, sound less dumb. When something is repeated too much in a sentence or paragraph somehow it affords less clarity, and comes off childlike in some way. There's something about it that you can't quite twist out another facet on a subject through plain repetition. I never matured that idea any further, but it seemed like a fascinating insight into the operational workings of English.

This is something that I've run into commonly enough that I try to write 'read' only for the present tense 'read a book', and 'redd' for the past tense 'redd the email.'

You skipped the first half of my sentence, which makes it pretty clear who wrote the book. At least, I think it does. In any case, you did make me realize the last clause is awkwardly written, so thanks! I amended my original comment.

Based on the other examples, I think they meant, at the point where you have up to "written", do you expect the sentence to continue as above, or as something like:

> I had this impression recently while reading the Akbarnama, which is a sort of court-approved biography of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, [who was] written as the greatest leader the Mughal empire ever had.

Although if so, I don't think that one's a very good example, as suggested by the need to editorialize in the "[who was]" above.

In good essays, the first and last sentence in a paragraph are often enough to summarize the points. It helps set the context, and makes it much easier for the reader to make a mental map of the overall idea. In this article, its "hiccup" style of writing makes it much harder to build a mental map. You can't predict where it will go until you fully read the sentence.

I usually enjoy reading most of PG essays. For this one, I don't enjoy reading it, and I stopped reading after paragraph 4.

Gary Provost.

It's full of decent advice. Some bad. Some good. Some that is insightful in ways you might never have thought of by yourself.

Good luck.

On the general point of shorter sentences, I've found it to be an excellent first approximation rule. Follow it religiously if you're new to making your writing reader-friendly. Later on ... keep following it. But allow your discretion to override it sometimes.

FWIW, it's unclear what you mean. "Normally" as in "usually, but not this one" or "usually, and this one too"? Two exact opposites, and in just one sentence you managed to be maximally ambiguous. If done on purpose, that's a skill. But, without intending to offend, I think you just don't realize how hard simple writing actually is. I think he succeeded in it very well.

as if

a robot

wrote

it

because it's very

jarring to

read

kind of

like this

1. People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing. Simple. Precise. Direct. It suits a technical literal mind to have less ambiguity and fewer flourishes.

2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.

Both of these points considered, I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace).

My perception is the reverse. Probably 60% of the articles linked on this site, day in and day out, are a thicket of impenetrable jargon. Endless blog posts that make no attempt to explain to the non-initiated what the various acronyms mean or why the concepts might matter for a person who is not deeply, deeply immersed in whatever technical field the author is writing about. I wish more people who write about coding/tech would realize that a larger audience is interested in what is going on, but that the communication of the concepts needs to be approachable. This is not just a shortcoming of this field, obviously, as people in all sorts of technical/specialized fields tend to write the same way, speaking only to the in-crowd.

Insightful ideas are rare. Hiding mundane thoughts in abstruse verbiage leaves questions in the mind of the readership: "I don't see the author's point. But he seems pretty smart. I must have missed something." Vote up.

Many well established schools of untestable academic thought are often built on foundations as sandy as these, IMHO.

Do you really think Paul Graham is arguing against James Joyce style writing? Why would you think that?

Are you sure? From the blog (first sentence):

> I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.

Since the "I" in this case refers to someone who does not write poetry, speculative fiction, drama, tragedies, comedies ... and only ever writes for a technical audience, the context is clear: technical[1] audience not seeking poetry, fiction, drama, etc...

Further one he says:

> So you can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can safely use difficult words.

Once again, that indicates to me he is talking about writing something technical[2], not prose or poetry.

[1][2] "Technical" is not limited to IT and engineering; it's about anything that involves technique. Describing dance moves is "technical", as is writing a recipe (which is very similar in technique to writing a tiny program) or anything involving writing down music (Should you use 7/4 for the first verse, or alternate between 3/4 and 4/4? Which will be clearer to the flautist?)

> That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.

That is a general claim. I agree that it is often good advice, but there are caveats which Graham does not provide.

I'm also fairly certain that the type of writing he's talking about is mostly non-fiction prose, such as the essays he writes himself (even though he doesn't state that explicitly). Would you consider those "technical" writing?

A very odd term to use.

I'd open simply with "Think of your audience, think of your goal" and on thinking of audience expand to "Think of your audience, of which there may be some you've not thought of, or it might just be yourself, and think of your goal, if any."

It’s possible he simply said nothing.

Kind of incredible.

I would argue that academic writing tends to be pretty poor.

The above-namedropped David Foster Wallace certainly thought so.

Among people who spend their days thinking about language I'm pretty sure academese is considered more of an elaborate, extended shibboleth than an effective communication tool, going beyond merely being sprinkled with jargon and fake-fancy clichés (like, say, business language) so that it serves as an effective gatekeeping tool. Hard(er than it needs to be) to read, hard to correctly write.

[...]

2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.

Did you see what he wrote in the essay, regarding this:

> Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the future will be in much the same position as people from other countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain for a woodworker to build a chair to last.

Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job.

> I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace).

It seems pretty clear to me that the essay is about non-fiction writing, not fiction. All the arguments in it apply to non-fiction writing.

Most of us are not creating greatest works of English literature and me or many others are not James Joyce neither David Foster Wallace.

If you are writing some greatest work of literature please use all the tools that language gives you.

But for clear communication use simple language, please.

That's the main shortcoming of this essay. It doesn't define what it means by "simple". "If you want to be clear, write clearly" is a bromide, not an essay.

Fiction and poetry vs whatever type of writing blogging is.

Essayists, pamphleteers, and diarists (blogs), and aphorists (Twitter). Genres with centuries-long histories.

Both the technical field and the academic field (especially the humanities) are plagued with the notion that a complex and therefore "valuable" idea also needs to be expressed in complex terms to be considered valuable. Personally I believe that there's insecurity at the core of this, writers are afraid to mention things that are obvious to some readers, or afraid to use language that is considered too "simple" for the context (the efficiency of the message is not considered at all).

When it comes to technical writing at least, nothing could be further from the truth. I think anyone who writes for a living has a responsibility to not waste the reader's time, and "get on with it" so to speak. Focus on what's important and drop the rest. Almost any sentence can be made 10% shorter, which seems insignificant until you've made the entire text 10% shorter without losing any important messaging.

- Moby Dick

The man is undeniably intelligent, undeniably successful, and undeniably talented in business (and deserves huge credit for his contributions to the startup community).

But I just thing he's deeply wrong here. His simple writing style (and those that have inherited/copied it) is a detriment to the community.

It's the take of a (talented!) engineering mind. It's the same attitude that engineers often take with building digital products ("we don't need a designer - just present the UI elements simply and people will get it.")

Design is an art. Communication is an art. Writing is an art. Essays are an art. They have function, of course, and a simple straightforward style is, indeed, a style that is more functional for some.

But it also diminishes the joy of reading and purees it into the blandness of an economics textbook. I've tried to read his essays and yes, they have some great ideas, but they're just....bland.

They're like Soylent for the mind. Does it deliver nutrition to your body in an maximally-efficient vehicle? Sure. Do you enjoy drinking that Soylent shake?

shiver

EDIT: I should explicitly clarify something: I'm not arguing that one should use jargon or unnecessarily complex words in their writing. That's obviously bad. But there's a gap between the "simple writing style" and "enjoyable rich prose".

In college (and then consulting), I was basically trained to write like I'm trying to convince someone I'm smart. It only got in the way once I left and started trying to communicate real ideas. Graham's advice is very good for mundane, day-to-day writing.

There is no benefit to insiders or outsiders in a field to unnecessary use of jargon when simpler forms of expression are available. I greatly the prefer the no-nonsense, practical, straight talking, ignore the eggshells on the floor, git-r-done communication of a classical sci-fi engineer.

But that doesn't imply you always have to write simply. To often I've had friends who declare that writing in school is dumb and that we should always write simple and short. What's implicit in their view is that the text is not important, simply the message. The text should be merely a vehicle to convey the message.

I'd counter that the text is not extricable from the message. The form and style of the text colors the message and provides a signal of whom the author is speaking to and with what tone. I read a James Baldwin novel and I have the feeling of someone preaching to me with fervor and ferocity. I read a Paul Graham essay and I have the feeling of a drily funny, at times arrogant lecture. Like it or not, PG has a style that is his brand. It's a good brand, but to claim that it's purely simplicity is presumptuous.

I had this impression recently while reading the Akbarnama, which is a sort of court-approved biography of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. It was written by his Grand Vizier, the top political advisor, who was also a poet and translator. Indeed it would almost be unheard of for a high governmental official to not be deeply educated in aesthetic matters.

In any case, what immediately struck me was how beautiful the writing itself was. A bit wordy, at times, but in no way simple. Just one line I wrote down from the introduction:

Without the help of Speech, the inner world's capital could not be built, nor this evil outer world's civilization be conceived.

When political leaders put together similar books today, they are inevitably written in the most simple, banal language possible in order to maximize "idea propagation" and book sales. History is all the worse for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbarnama

"On the evening of March 8, we invalidated all authenticated sessions on GitHub.com created prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8 out of an abundance of caution to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions."

"out of an abundance of caution" adds nothing other than the faint smell of a desperate attempt to reassure the reader. The sentence would read much better without it.

I'm all for rich language where it's useful or appropriate (a novel, etc) but in most cases I just want to know what's up.

[0] https://github.blog/2021-03-08-github-security-update-a-bug-...

"On the evening of March 8, we logged out all users from GitHub.com who had logged in prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8. This was done to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions. No user accounts were affected"

I really couldn't simplify much without losing information. Logging out users isn't the same as invalidation of authenticated sessions because this probably revoked access to bots / API calls etc.

Last night, we logged out your Github account to fix a security flaw. Your account was not breached. You can read more details here [1].

[1] https://github.blog/2021-03-08-github-security-update-a-bug-...

"On the evening of March 8, we invalidated all authenticated sessions on GitHub.com created prior to 12:03 UTC on March 8 out of an abundance of caution to protect users from an extremely rare, but potentially serious, security vulnerability affecting a very small number of GitHub.com sessions."

"Out of an abundance of caution" adds only the smell of a desperate attempt to reassure the reader. The sentence would be much better without it.

I like rich language where it is useful or fitting but, usually, I only want to know what the writer is communicating.

Hmm. You may be right.

like this:

> Hmm. You may be right.

thats all i ask

Mandarin was the official language of the government, and so all regional and local bureaucracies, during the days of dynasties in China. Although it may sound foreign to locals in various provinces, it guaranteed that every part of the government had a common understanding.

Quite the opposite of fluff for fluff's sake.

Most writing on the web (including most of my work) is designed for reach, for all of the narcissistic reasons like retweets and shares, but also the reason that we live in a more democratic world today, and ideas that have more reach often have more impact.

When you write, you want yourself to succeed through your writing, but to me it's far more important that my ideas succeed - that they find life in another mind.

Early writing (especially from the era you mentioned, alongside the vedas and the upanishads before it) was poetic not only for the purpose of aesthetics, but also so that the work can self-select who can understand it. Interpreters and translators were common (and still are when concerning these and religious works), which concentrates power. If I need you to tell me what the mahabharata says, you have more power than if I could understand it myself.

Overall, pulling to either extreme - simplicity or purple prose - is not recommended, but I think everyday writing (especially policy) should be clearer and not cleverer.

Otherwise, sure, I agree. I'd just say that the beauty of democratization and widespread literacy is that we all have access to the high culture of the past.

PG does not really explore that (natch), but that's a point to consider, nonetheless.

There is certainly no reason why one can't write well and communicate their ideas at the same time. In fact, I'd argue that well-written ideas spread more quickly. Things like The Bible or The Qur'an would likely be far less influential if they were poorly written.

> It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.

I think that's virtually meaningless unless you define what is meant by "an idea". The Bible, Qu'ran, the story of Gilgamesh, Homer's Illias,... are all ideas, just the same as famous essays by Hemingway or Benjamin Franklin. Even Proust's In Search of Lost Time with it's epic long sentences is a multitude of ideas regarding involuntary memory, separation anxiety and much more.

Everything PG writes after that hinges on a single imperative: That if you intend for your writing to be read, you must write simple.

The trouble is that his argument doesn't challenge that. There's no reflection on the fact that this is by far an universal principle, or that it, paradoxically, defines the relationship with the reader as if the latter always wants simple, digestible reading at every turn.

Hemingway is famous for his terse and simple writing, attributed to his schooling as a journalist. But he also had a critics who simply despised his literary writing for its terse and uncompromising style. And then there's William Faulkner who had this baroque style with long, endless sentences which dug their heels into Big Emotions, trying to convey them in the most sinuous way possible. Faulkner, just like Hemingway having won the Nobel Prize, found himself the butt of criticism on his writing as well.

Sure, these musings pertain to great literators. PG's point could be relegated to articles and essays instead. Or, unspoken yet more to the point, writing as this ephemeral, intangible idea that disolves and dissappear like vapor clouds the second it is published in the digital realm. Unlike words which are printed in respectable paper journals and glossy magazines.

No, the writing style of PG's essay was also part of this expose. Leveraged by the author to drive a point home. I'm still not sure what that point was exactly. PG being PG, chances are he just wanted nothing more then to make a so-called thought-provoking statement. In that regard, simple writing doesn't automatically make for good writing. The idea, the essence, you're trying to sell still needs to be solid and worth telling. That's where PG's essay, ironically, falls flat.

PG's essay doesn't spark a debate because he writes about an idea, it sparks discussion because of quite the opposite: writing about anything except about writing or why one writes. Now, one can fault PG for not providing context, but as with anything in this digital world, PG publishes on his own websites and assumes that the reader had written his other writings as well to understand what he's trying to get at. That's fine. It just doesn't make for compelling reading if one has to pieces together.

"Beauty" and "inspiration" are subjective and vary with personal preferences. I find simple and concise language much more elegant than the verbose "literary" styles of the past.

That actually isn't universally true. For example, most people today probably consider Shakespeare's writing style to be "flamboyant" yet his audience was a wide swath of the public. The difference today is that we are post-Moderns and so we have inherited the Modernist rejection of the Victorian era and its excessive tendencies.

Akbar was also a contemporary of Shakespeare, interestingly enough.

Is this true? Since the 20th century, there's been a marked subset of literature dedicated toward ambiguity, absurdism, and surrealism brought on by the idea of the subconscious, the theory of relativity, WWII.

In fact, most of these titles arguably don't even have an "intended idea" to impart. E.g. T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", Joyce's "Ulysses", Camus's "The Stranger" to name a couple off the top of my head.

"'Beauty and 'inspiration' are subjective...I find simple...language much more elegant than...'literary' styles of the past" Sure, in your subjective opinion you think older literature is not as pleasing to read, but these works objectively changed the use of the English language: that's why they are regarded as literature.

Canonical literature changed not only the way future authors wrote, but also how future generations behold and conceive existence. Both the ideas, and the way they are expressed are the source of many derivative bodies of text including your and my own comments.

Modern works that repackage these ideas, styles, and archetypes in a more diluted way to satisfy one's personal taste and level of reading comprehension does not qualify them to be more "literary" than the original works which created those artifacts. In this sense, the idea of literature and the value of those works is well defined. To reduce literature as merely "verbose" and to quote the word as if it is illegitimate and lacking consensus is highly ignorant and, given the lack of substantive evidence or original arguments supporting it, completely asinine.

Don’t speak clearly or concisely or with prose or with poetry, if you lack conviction. Who the fuck are you talking to, take your stand. The world is not your school.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Lan...

But hey, if he meant ‘this ones for the kids’, make it clear by writing simply.

All forms of expression tread on fraud if you lack conviction, and you will have to hide in airy fortifications of [‘that’s not what I meant’, ‘I was misinterpreted’, ‘You only think I meant this’, ‘Your are the problem’].

Well I’m sorry, I was just trying to figure out what you simply meant to say.

I would argue that "writing" can mean "writing the tool" as well as "writing the art form." PG is talking about "writing the tool."

Confusingly, both the tool and the art form can convey ideas.

Certain ideas can be conveyed better by art ("a picture is worth a thousand words"). Visual art is typically more accessible than complex prose, but all forms of art can reach levels of inaccessibility that are frustrating to those not "in the know."

That's not the argument here. This talks about language and writing as a means of communicating ideas to as broad an audience as possible. There is still a place for dense, poetic, or ambiguous language full of jargon and metaphor and all that good stuff. For example, physicists will communicate amongst themselves in a very inaccessible language of physics because they need precise language in that setting. But a physicists who wants to communicate his ideas to the public, he will simplify it to to make it accessible.

Secondly implicit in that argument is the notion that ordinary people can only comprehend 'simple speech' and have no appreciation for form or aesthetics, which is pretty arrogant but par for the course for your average PG essay and captures perfectly the stereotypical software developer developer mindset of completely lacking appreciation for style and thinking one's own ideas are so brilliant they have to be dumbed down for everyone else.

Here's the context for my argument: believe it or not, there are people that will use language to impress or intimidate or to even mask their ignorance, even people who also purport to communicate ideas. Sometimes those people will also purposely use jargon with the aim to do both: direct their message to their in-group and purposely exclude individuals not from their in-group (I can list some examples of groups that do that, but I prefer not to go down that rabbit hole. I'm sure you can come up with some examples as well).

On the other hand, people who genuinely care about communicating ideas as broadly as possible will tailor their speech in such a way as to make it most accessible to as much of the audience as possible, because to them the idea is the important part not the medium. I leave it up to you to define 'accessible speech', but to pg it means communicating with simpler language - I think he makes a reasonable argument. Especially in context of a multicultural society with a sizable (recent) immigrant base and a global audience with various levels of English vocabulary knowledge.

It is also the hallmark of a good teacher when they can tailor the idea to a student who is smart enough to understand it but struggles with overcoming some kind of barrier (from vocabulary, to culture)

0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well

If that really is your only goal, then I agree, the simpler the better.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/755379555?book_show_ac...

If it’s a work of art, fair enough. If you’re trying to explain or argue something... then you’re probably hiding the holes in your argument or trying to sound smarter than you are.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18345

Also a tiny study on whether adj/adv usage correlates with good/bad writing: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18398

Prescriptivists never seem to add that clarifying nuance to their advice though.

> That way if you never learn how to break them correctly, your writing is still a lot better than it was.

That assumes their advice is good in the first place - when professional linguists call it trash, I'd have to wonder if it is.

They often do, in my experience. AFAIK it hasn't been common to attempt any kind of real, strict prescriptivism in English since the middle of last century (yes, I'm sure a few examples exist). These days it's mostly "write like this—until you know better" or "avoid X if your audience is Y, for such-and-such reason".

Aside from knowing this though the most effective thing I've learned to do is to keep re-reading what I wrote. Reorganize phrases to keep connected thoughts nearby in text. In English you have a lot of freedom to put phrases all over the place in a sentence. When I write I very rarely put all the connected phrases next to each other in the first pass.

But I guess I'd generalize that to say: taking the time to re-read what you wrote and edit it actually makes a big difference. It took a lot of shitty writing and overcoming laziness in school before I learned this lesson.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51750.Writing_Tools

[^1] Here's the current link if you're interested so watch: http://byronm.com/13sentences.html (Thankfully re-discovered from one of PGs recent tweets: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1365425470318272514)

I can edit the above to;

> I do think specific words and long sentences have their place. They can be used to alter the flow of a sentence and make it feel more conversational instead of less.

But it's not the way I talk. I enjoy the way you can alter the cadence of sentence to impact the reader. For example: the phrase, "perhaps counterintuitively," is like a rolling hill the reader spends extra energy to climb but then engages them with the writer, "I'm interested, I like hearing about counterintuitive things" -- it's almost an invitation. You've set an expectation that something counterintuitive is ahead, so what's next?

Generally, I could use more of Paul's advice in my own writing. And that's the fun of writing, learning to write is a very organic process. But I'm sure everyone can find their own style somewhere in between simple, poetic, natural, or whatever makes you feel the happiest about your work.

[1] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-u...

Examples:

> Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry.

Notice how he's arguing against "write in a fancy way to impress people" and not "write in a fancy way". Most authors write in a "fancy" way to invoke a feeling in the reader. They don't add random words to "seem cool". Is spending a few more words to get the reader into a happy/sad mood "inconsiderate"? That's an interesting discussion, but in his quest to "write simply" he's just skipped right by it.

> It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.

What is evening happening in this paragraph? First he's questioning whether it's possible for "writing to ever be pure ideas" without explaining what that's even supposed to mean. Then he says that most people aim for that. And somehow the solution is "not filled with poetry". I don't understand a thing of this. He's implying so much without explaining anything.

For me, I try to remember that a lot of what he’s saying may pattern match to an arrogant heuristic, but that’s just because 99 out of 100 people who strike that tone are blowhards. He is the 100th person, and there’s a lot to be gained if I set aside my own ego and just try to understand what he’s describing.

PG doesn't pattern match as such because other people are blowhards. He's actually arrogant. Which is fine! He's been very successful enough times that it seems unlikely to be coïncidence.

But he also writes essays that are complete whiffs. It's not an ego thing by the reader. There are many examples of no nuance where there is actually a hell of a lot of nuance in the subject at hand. So people quote the essays or act on them blindly because they rely on them as exhaustive when I don't think that that is the case or his actual intention.

edit: the point of my comment is not that I won't write that way. It's that the author is talking about his own preferences, but the title makes it sound prescriptive. In a way it illustrates the opposite point. Opinions are nuanced, and a two-word title written in the imperative doesn't convey the nuance of what the author is trying to say.

The internet is absolutely loaded with programmers offering opinions or repeating the opinions of others but framing them as directives. Do this or don't do that. Or the more subtle: I like X and and you should, too. These authors can be argumentative if the opinions are challenged, as if one was disobeying a directive, or contradicting a fact, instead of disagreeing with an individual or group opinion.

Hence, I also don't think there's anything at all wrong with the imperative style of writing (or I might as well say "there is nothing wrong with it"). Since it is incumbent upon the reader to consider whether or how far to trust the author anyway, it should make no difference whether the statements are presented as fact or opinion. To treat them differently is to give the author far too much power over your thinking.

And so, as the author, given that any sensible reader will put your statements in context anyway, you might as well simply state them directly.

https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-stude...

https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/stude...

https://www.chronicle.com/article/students-fall-for-misinfor...

PG's "responses" are a good contrast, if you're curious what "pg trying to persuade the reader" sounds like. http://paulgraham.com/kedrosky.html

Perhaps the first difference between us is I immediately assumed PG is talking about transmitting ideas (argumentation or proposition), ie writing essays and not writing fiction.

What I assume he means about “writing not being pure ideas”, he means there’s an overhead in transmitting ideas via writing. This is analogous to using programming languages to capture ideas, hence anything but simplicity offends because it is analogous to (in)elegance in code.

I think this essay is excellent but it seems I was more attuned to his message, or at least it met my expectations.

I think, as usual, there's a lot of nuance here. I think emotion is inextricably linked to almost all forms of communication, and that there's not such a bright line between fiction and non fiction in that regard.

The books that have taught me the most are not necessarily the ones with the most information density or even the most clarity of thought (although both help). The ones that have really conveyed their points effectively to me have all had an element of weaving them into a narrative that I could engage with, examine from different angles, absorb and remember.

But I'm also pretty sympathetic to the idea of cutting fluff at all opportunities and getting to the root of what you want to say - that's the one thing that's improved my writing the most.

Depends on the time period. I wouldn't exactly say that T. S. Eliot's poetry was about pure idea (or pure emotion). He did revel a lot in the fact that he was very educated and the readers are probably less so. Still a canonical author though.

I'd bet money this is mostly wrong, and most authors are writing in a fancy way to seem fancy. That's part of the reason their writing is often bad.

There are exceptions, but I'd argue that failure is the general case.

> "I don't understand a thing of this."

Clarity of thought without purple prose fluff? That's my take away from it anyway. Basically, most of the time extra purple prose fluff is not poetry and just gets in the way. Poetry would be an exception to this rule.

This essay is also similar to another one of his from 2015 (which has more explicit examples): http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html

But you can’t call adjectives and similes and metaphors all purple prose.

The idea is good though, bias towards clarity and be aware of how complex your writing is. Don't use big words to try and seem smart or fancy because they obscure meaning - there are rare exceptions to this, but they should be intentional and rare.

“That dude is sneaky” “That dude is sneakier than a fox”

Why cut out fox?

If you read stuff that's doing that kind of thing all of the time it makes it harder to read and the writing is often worse. It's something newer writers tend to do for some reason, I'm not sure why.

Removing the simile reduces the meaning of “sentimental archaism”. Similes clarify meaning. That’s what all imagery is for.

That quote is from Orwell's Politics and the English Language: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

While the one sentence out of context seems unnecessarily complex, most of Orwell's writing is pretty simple to read.

Another bit from that essay:

"The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

Arguably, Orwell would probably agree with PG.

Using imagery to clarify meaning can be done well, but part of doing it well is using the tools sparingly and intentionally with an eye towards clarity.

Another relevant bit from that Orwell essay:

"As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say 'In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption' that than to say 'I think'."

I'd argue 'sneakier than a fox' is an example of what he's talking about. A lame pre-existing set of words that does little to explain or clarify anything.

Sure, my off the top example is lame but that’s not my point. You’re saying that they’re rarely used, almost never, yet those paragraph you quoted have plenty of similes and other literary devices.

I’d argue that you can’t recognize literary devices so that’s why you’re confusing what these people are trying to say. Yes, you do need to make an effort to come up with original and interesting similes and metaphors, but they are not to be avoided

You could say

Struggling against the abuse of language is like being emotionally trapped in the past.

There is no reason to use two rarely used words (sentimental, archaism) in that sentence.

But you’re still using a literary device to increase the clarity of “struggling against the abuse of language”. What these guys are arguing is that there is no use for similes. You should say: “People struggle against the abuse of language” and leave it at that.

If you read through Paul's previous essays, you may notice that he falls into this habit frequently.

After reading this I would expect a solid argument from you that "it's not very good writing" because "There is basically no argumentation happening" and "most statements are just thrown out as truths".

(you) > Notice how he's arguing against

So... is argumentation happening or not?

(pg) > When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool.

(you) > Notice how he's arguing against "write in a fancy way to impress people" and not "write in a fancy way".

He is definitely taking for granted here that everyone who is writing in a "fancy way" is doing so to impress people. At the very least, he seems to be suggesting that this is often the case. There is no question whatsoever though, that this is happening at least some of the time.

(you) > Most authors write in a "fancy" way to invoke a feeling in the reader. They don't add random words to "seem cool"

"Most"? According to what? Do you have anything more to support this assertion than he had to support his? Are you really in a position to be critiquing him about this?

(pg) > It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.

(you) > What is evening happening in this paragraph? First he's questioning whether it's possible for "writing to ever be pure ideas" without explaining what that's even supposed to mean.

There's a fair amount of implicit logic here, but i'd say the general idea is something along the lines of:

  - The purpose of writing (for "most writers, most of the time") is to communicate ideas.
  - Care ought to be taken in preventing the medium (text) from inhibiting this communication.
  - Simple writing can be understood by a more broad audience
  - Therefore, simple writing will help these writers towards their end of communicating these ideas to a broader audience

No, he said "for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for". He is saying that they ought to be aiming for that. If they already were doing so, then it would go without saying.

(you) > And somehow the solution is "not filled with poetry"

Again, I think you are misunderstanding what he is trying to say. Building on my previous explanation, I'd say he is contrasting his ideal of simple writing with poetry, which is often cryptic.

Circling back to my initial statement, I'd suggest you worry about your own arguments before criticizing those of others.

There’s definite value to simplicity in writing. At the same time, like all principles, people tend to run with the idea and misapply it. There are some cases in which your work demands a certain level of precision that’s only possible using complex words or jargon. Not to mention, writing that’s a little complicated can be a lot more fun! There are several novelists, essayists, and poets who are a joy to read not because they express their ideas as clearly and simply as possible, but because they manage linguistic acrobatics that make us realize there are ways to use language we never thought possible—often it takes some extra work to understand such output.

*: Have never taken the time to verify this myself.

[1]https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/05/hard-writing/

These are the Three Questions.

My advice: answer them before you create a powerpoint, an email, an essay, a policy. They create a sharp tool for thought.

Reminds me of Mark Twain: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one."

Reading for pleasure should be entertaining. Reading for knowledge should be simple/concise.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

And replace it with:

The Earth contains all humans and is far from Voyager I.

For instance, your condensation of the graph completely misses the mention that people misapply general principles, and it also reduced linguistic creativity to “entertainment” which can mean a far different thing (e.g. one can write a book that’s wildly entertaining because of its characters but that sports none of the linguistic ingenuity I mention in the OP). Not to mention, you couldn’t even decide whether to use the word simple or concise! Sometimes you just can’t get around using a couple of “extra” words. Thus the abominable “/“. (Ick)

It can be a difficult balance. You can provide a lot of information in a few bullet points, but there may also be a lot of contextual information left out that leaves more curious readers wondering "why is like this and not another way".

There is plenty of writing not meant to entertain or convey knowledge.

The assumptions aren't wrong, they're just not explicit. Because he is not stating them overtly, he's getting criticized for not writing like Nabokov or the grand vizier of an emperor.

Most of us will never be Nabokov, or the emperor's vizier. But we will write things for other people that they will need to understand and act on, and those are the people PG is writing for.

An equally good way to state his point would be to echo Feynman: if you can't write it simply, you probably don't understand it. So it's good advice for anyone beginning to write something new, and it's good advice for anyone new to writing.

Write simply first, if you can. And above all, write in a style that your audience can absorb.

I'm sure Paul Graham thinks himself a clear writer, which he tends to be. Now try running "On Lisp" through an app like Hemingway, that will "simplify" the language. I'm almost certain the result will be less clear than the original, even though it'll be arguably simpler. Is that really what writers should aim for?

Probably applies to writing programs too.

Graham states in this essay that his goal is: "ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there".

Given that this is the goal of his writing style, it's not at all surprising that his readers often jump to ("incorrect") conclusions barely noticing what got them there.

Most of the comments critiquing this essay can be boiled down to an obvious but important observation: simplicity requires either eliding necessary nuance or hiding complexity. The goal is usually the latter, but hiding complexity in this way requires a shared context.

Take a running program and strip it from its context (state). Then, drop the program into a new context. The meaning of the program can change drastically. Hell, it might not even type check anymore. The program text is the same but the meaning is different, and all that changed was the context. The only way to avoid this is to muddle up the program text with assertions on the context that ensure this "drop into new context" operation can't change the meaning of the program too much.

So too with writing. Specifying context decreases the amount of shared context required to avoid miscommunication, but also results in less simple writing.

People here LOVE to take statements and search for contexts where the statement doesn't work, then act like that was what the author was arguing.

"That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas."

(Why not: "Simple writing makes it easier to engage your ideas.")

"And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English."

(Why not: "Don't make your ideas difficult to understand.")

Paul's are more convincing, even though he doesn't assert anything. He just provides the rationale.

I think of "useful" language as a balance of precision, concision, and understandability. If I use terms that I don't expect my audience to understand, then my language not very "useful" even if it's the most precise and concise. Conversely, there's no reason for me to refrain from terms which I expect my audience to understand if using them makes my language more precise or concise.

Thinking about the entertainment perspective and e.g. the journalists and bloggers I like, I think it's pretty similar to how we perceive music. I remember a paper from quite a few years ago that found (through fMRI) that we most enjoy music that our brain can mostly predict, but sometimes it would mispredict/would be wrong about the next few notes that follow. It's a balance.

Non trivial writing must be similar. I.e. it may not be about music, but entertainment: it should be somewhat in line with what you expect but at the same time throw challenges at you. It should make you work at an enjoyable level.

What he says about ageing, OTOH, is probably pretty universal. There is some debate in my country (Hungary) about the literature curriculum in elementary and high schools. Traditionally children are supposed to read XIX and early XX century novels from some of our great writers. This hasn't changed since I went to school decades ago. I remember hating these. Most of them were very hard to follow, very hard to decipher the story from the complex text. I guess what happened is that what they were writing was challenging to the level of being entertaining to their contemporaries (just like it is with today's writers, of course) but then the change in the language made it too challenging for most of us (at least the young, untrained minds).

That blog post is too long for the ideas it conveys (kinda ironic?). Here are some things I found tiring to read:

"There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means "leap into the mouth." My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there."

^ This analogy is distracting and not required to communicate a simple concept.

"It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry."

^Just delete this. What are you trying to say here?

"It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry."

^I don't understand this analogy. Long train I am trying to carry behind me? That is a ridiculous and distracting image you have put into the readers mind.

"If the friction of reading is low enough, more keep going till the end."

^This is an obtuse and awkward way of saying: "People are more likely to read things they easily understand"

"Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job."

^ Where did chairs come from?

But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to."

^ Delete, doesn't add any value tbh

That's a great point.

That article is going to end up being mostly fluff, and there’s not much I can do about it. Sure, I can work in some background and play up the implications of the news, but really, it’s just content for content’s sake, so that they can stay in their customers’ feeds.

And, just for the record, those type of articles are not my forte or preference, but are an unavoidable reality in my line of work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/arts/writers-writing-easy...

You're already hypocritical - readers don't want to 'engage' with writing. People don't want to 'engage' at all. This is not an ordinary way of talking about things outside a pretty niche circle of VCs and marketing managers.

Choose what to read and who to associate with as well as it will strongly influence your own language :)

He opposes simple to "fancy", but the opposite of simple isn't just "fancy", that's, well, a simplification. The opposite of "simple" writing may be: "rich" writing, "complex" writing, none of which are particularly problematic for Graham's goal provided that they're paired with enough clarity.

That "simple" writing lasts longer is disproved by many works of literature that have made their way to us through history, most of which, by the standard of this essay, could be considered complex.

As someone with a modicum of experience in the philosophy of language, I must also say that I do not look kindly on people who take for granted that there even could be such a thing as a thought without language, a "pure idea", since for all we know such a thing has never been observed.

- Would that literature have been considered complex at the time it was written? How much of that perceived complexity is due to changing writing styles, education standards, etc?

- Writing a book and writing a proposal for the next project/product have entirely different definitions of "lasting". Context matters greatly.

> As someone with a modicum of experience in the philosophy of language, I must also say that I do not look kindly on people who take for granted that there even could be such a thing as a thought without language, a "pure idea", since for all we know such a thing has never been observed.

This sentence is a good example of the kind of unnecessary complexity described by the essay. You seem to be saying that "pure ideas are not possible without language", but that's not clear in your writing. If your intent it to exclude people who do not have a "modicum of experience in the philosophy of language", I have to ask: why?

Great question, can't say I'm able to answer it authoritatively. I would guess most works of literature, essays and speeches, even at the time they were produced, tend to be a fair bit more complex than what the average person is used to. Especially if they come from eras with lower literacy.

> - Writing a book and writing a proposal for the next project/product have entirely different definitions of "lasting". Context matters greatly.

It certainly does.

> This sentence is a good example of the kind of unnecessary complexity described by the essay.

It's a pretty simple sentence. What's tripping you up?

> You seem to be saying that "pure ideas are not possible without language", but that's not clear in your writing.

No. I'm saying that thinking "pure ideas devoid of any language" is a naive concept to anyone who's researched that topic a minimal amount. I wasn't flexing.

> If your intent it to exclude people who do not have a "modicum of experience in the philosophy of language", I have to ask: why?

That's not my intent at all. I'm providing context to my judgment. If that was my intent, I would have said: "If you don't have experience in the philosophy of language, don't write about this topic." Good thing is — I'm not a Nazi, so I tend not to do that kind of stuff.

Writing simply and learning how to present things in such a way that anyone can understand has probably been the most valuable skill for my career progression.

I have seen too many cases where technical/domain experts miss this and instead use words that only people who work in the same domain as them would understand. The result is that when they do a presentation at least half the people in the room have no idea what they are speaking about but are too polite to say anything.

I also live in a country where most of the population are not native english speakers and this has allowed me to understand that a lot of people think by using complicated language they sound smarter, which is the furthest possible thing from the truth. In one incident I actually had someone who liked to show everyone how smart he was ask me, if I can help him find a more complicated way/wording to say something in a presentation he was working on so he can sound smarter. My only assumption was that for him people not understanding acted as a giant ego boost. He was PhD, that was also lecturing at one of the local universities. I can only imagine that his students had absolutely no idea what he was talking about most of the time and I am sure he took great pride in it.

In university, back in Canada where I was born I had a similar experience when one of my math teachers started the year off by telling the entire class how he is very proud of his vocabulary. Needless to say on one of the tests he used a word that no one understood. After numerous students asked him the same question he finally got angry and announced to the entire class what the word meant.

Personally I encourage my team to do the following in every work presentation: 1. Pretend you are presenting to a friend or family member who has no idea about the subject matter 2. Any words that would be known by people who are either inexperienced or outside of your expertise should include a definition the first time you use it. It can be written or it can be verbal, but it needs to be there

Three people who know a fair amount about the author -- at least relatively speaking -- can't agree on the meaning of this essay.

Now, consider that some other people reading this essay might be genuinely confused about why we're discussing Parental Guidance.

He could have written a slightly clunkier essay that allowed me to understand with greater detail the entire collection of types of writing that he is discussing. He didn't want to write that essay, which is of course fine.

To be clear, I'm not "for" or "against" any writing style for the same reason that I don't get into religious wars about programming languages. I think this is a good essay with some solid advice for many different types of writers. But it's also, ironically, an essay that can be used to demonstrate why one might sometimes choose to write a bit less simply. Or, to write simply (plain words and simple sentences) but without trying to "jump into the reader's brain without them noticing".

It's really the combination of "Write Simply" and "saltintesta" that I think deserved at least a bit of a "well, sure, but realize this approach can be a footgun".

The assumption is that the purpose of your writing is to argue for a particular viewpoint/stance/take on an issue in a sober way.

I don't believe the author is saying "write simply" if you are writing poetry or you are trying to inspire and motivate with emotion.

Most of the author's writings are dry, devoid of fluff, and to the point, which I think flows from embracing the thinking behind this piece.

Purpose dictates style.

Ah, the good old wrong idea that somehow language is a tool that can clone ideas from one brain to another. It doesn't work like that.

You can hear echoes of that when Musk talks about all the Neuralink stuff and just communicating with "pure thoughts" or whatever. What these pure thoughts and ideas, disconnected from language, are supposed to be, is left as an exercise to the listener.

On the other hand, arguable the greatest sentence in the English language, the opening paragraph from Moby Dick is not written simply, yet Melville makes it flow.

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodologically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball... I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

Vonnegut and Melville were great writers. Paul Graham is a great programmer turned businessman who likes to dabble at writing.

I would just like to reveal that the word "essay" comes from French verb "essayer" which means "to try".

This makes the phrase "trying to write an essay" somewhat tautological doesn't it?

I'm curious whether PG knows this little fact.

If language is like a 6th sense into a shared platonic realm of ideas, it wouldn't be unsurprising that PG is able to survey the concept of "essays" accurately without knowing its etymology.

YC was probably the first proponent of the X for Y type of startup descriptions, because the analogies are simple and give you a starting point to begin understanding.

The genre also matters a lot. For sure I think simple writing is the better choice for Graham's topics, but I think it's much more open for fictional writing, and that some kinds of non fiction essays also benefit from less simplicity (again, keeping in mind the distribution effect discussed above).

For instance, one of my favorite essays is David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water". It is not simple, but it is much more effective than an essay using simple language to make the point that we often don't realize the things that we are immersed in. But I come across examples of this by good writers who do not usually use simple language who I believe are usually more compelling than writers like Graham.

To write simply, in the way that Paul suggests here, and in the way most editorial softwares these days try to suggest/auto-correct our writings (gmail, grammarly, hemingway app etc).

That is until I found a guy called Alexander Cortes, a personal trainer selling fitness programs online.

His writing style and the philosophy behind is the exact opposite of the ideas above.

When I subscribed to his newsletter (read by many thousands) I was impressed with his style. It has typos, no punctuation and no writing order/rules of any kind that you might've got used to. But you can still read and fully comprehend it. Otherwise that many people wouldn't be following him (100K twitter followers: @AJA_Cortes). It's unique and makes his writing stand out from all the writers following same writing advice from the mainstream writing advice (which is similar to what Paul says in the article).

In this tweet thread Alexnder talks about his writing style [1]. Here's two posts from his blog [2] and [3] that I like and shows the style.

[1] https://twitter.com/AJA_Cortes/status/1250356145316712449 [2] https://cortes.site/the-protocol-for-rehabbing-a-bad-shoulde... [3] https://cortes.site/the-tao-of-bro/

On my website [1], I write for immigrants. I pick simple words, and I write simple sentences. I avoid idioms, rare words, and expressions. It's not very interesting to read, but it's easy to understand.

When I'm among fluent speakers, I'll pepper my sentences with idioms, and generally be more expressive. It's more fun to write that way, because I can pour some of myself into my writing. That's how I write most comments and blog posts.

However, one must be cautious as not to overdo it, and in the process alienate the reader with needlessly elongated prose. Though this writing style is entirely too common in academia - particularly in the philosophy department - it serves little more than to prove how full of himself writer is. Perhaps it is believed that this is how intelligent people express themselves, but the reader's energy is better spent on the underlying ideas than on the deciphering of each sentence.

[1] Typical example: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance

Another good one is George Gopen's "The Sense of Structure". It's less inspirational than Clarity and Grace, but it shows more hands-on how to construct sentences and paragraphs.

[1] or "Lessons in Clarity and Grace" or "Toward Clarity and Grace" – they are all substantially the same book

Communicating simply can leave vague generalities to a technical conversation or decision making process that allows for those involved to make the wrong assumptions; but if you take the time to give precision to the process you can remove those assumptions without harming the overall communication. One doesn't need to go in depth about how a decision tree works or a random forest works to explain the pros and cons of the process, and the assumptions made to get the results.

Writing simply in all cases is the equivalent of "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail," writing precisely is using a screwdriver when you're working with screws and a hammer with nails. Use the right tool for the job, sometimes simple isn't correct, and sometimes precision isn't either (elementary school algebra vs algebraic theory).

You can compare this with the writing of Patio11, which often seems to be the opposite extreme - chains of double negatives, obscure words etc etc.

https://digital.gov/resources/plain-writing-act-of-2010/

ruthless editing seems a pretty big factor in the writing well result.

'write like you are speaking'

depending on my purpose and audience, i will write the first draft and then deliver it verbally. at least for me, and i do tend to use far too many words in the first draft, that exercise leads to a much clearer second draft.

Especially the latter's "have a point" and "get to the point".

This is a big problem in churches. As a child and young adult I spent countless hours listening to sermons on Sunday mornings. At some point, I realized that many sermons were delivered without editing. Every week the pastor has to deliver a certain amount of content, regardless of whether they have anything valuable to say. As a result, at many churches what you get is a combination of plagiarism and stream of consciousness. At only a few did I find any evidence of editing, and at even fewer editing by another person. The difference in quality was immense, and I believe that to a substantial extent the growth of the church would be correlated with that factor.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

I've only read first few chapters, but one of the core ideas is, apart from writing simply, to write concisely:

- If you can use one word instead of three to convey same idea, use one.

- Iterate on what you wrote, and ruthlessly eliminate words that don't add value.

It's illustrated with a real example where he crosses out a dozen of phrases from a short text: https://ibb.co/k62CkLR

It sounds extreme but I found this framework very useful e.g. when writing code comments, wiki docs, pull request info etc.

"How would it sound if somebody spoke it out loud?"

I've found that to be a very accurate way to check sentences for too much fluff.

Complex sentences just sound "off" when spoken.

Gregory Williams, author of the classic "Towards Clarity and Style", has a thoughtful rebuttal to these punchlines in his book's description (quoting an older edition):

This is a book about writing clearly. I wish it could be short and simple like some others more widely known, but I want to do more than just urge writers to "Omit Needless Words" or "Be clear." Telling me to "Be clear" is like telling me to "Hit the ball squarely." I know that. What I don't know is how to do it. To explain how to write clearly, I have to go beyond platitudes.

But I want to do more than just help you write clearly. I also want you to understand this matter to understand why some prose seems clear, other prose not, and why two readers might disagree about it; why a passive verb can be a better choice than an active verb; why so many truisms about style are either incomplete or wrong. More important, I want that understanding to consist not of anecdotal bits and pieces, but of a coherent system of principles more useful than "Write short sentences."

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[1] https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9445.html