I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities) can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more signal.
I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):
"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".
This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.
Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some particularly crude alien invaders:
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
Dave Barry writes like that, all the time (a lot less so, these days). He uses it for comedic twists, and usually integrated with other tricks.
His writing is known for a very smooth cadence. You reach these “lumps” in the narrative, and can almost miss them, which, for me, multiplies their impact.
I’ve always considered him one of the best writers that I’ve read. He probably gets less credit than he deserves (although I think he’s won a Pulitzer), because of his subject matter; sort of like Leslie Nielsen, or Victor Borge, who were both masters of their art.
> “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
That is probably my favourite phrase from the whole book. For some reason I find it hilarious. It has stuck in my brain in much the same way that names don't.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what he's trying to say.
Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.
I think the intended implication goes the other way:
"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
I can’t understand why it would be at all safe to conclude this. In any other field, you certainly wouldn’t conclude that good visual design, attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. indicates anything about the factual or moral correctness of the beliefs of the creators. Do the most beautiful and expensive churches indicate the most moral or theologically correct religious groups? Do the best designed uniforms tell you something about the wartime behavior of soldiers or the military policy of the country? Do the pharmaceutical companies with the best produced television advertisements have the best intentions and products backed by the best medical research?
I’m not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of writing, that’s in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the existence of language barriers rather disprove that hypothesis.
Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some food for thought, I’m not sure what point exactly it is intended to make.
Yep I guess that's true, I often times see that the best papers are written better and make broader cultural references. However, recently, with all the non mother tongue English speakers around, especially from China, I often see great ideas exposed in a bad way. So this link starts to be weaker and weaker.
>In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Nonsense. I've known many writers who are wonderfully eloquent at transmitting their essential message well with text, but fumble their way through live discourse as if they were high-schoolers in their first classroom presentation.
Some people just communicate better by certain means, and with writing, there's a breathing space that some can't manage with speech, in which you can better organize your otherwise interesting ideas.
> I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs
I describe it as inverse purple prose. The over-engineered simplicity stands out and distracts from the content.
Simplicity in the naive sense of minimal word count increases cognitive load because we have neural circuits that got used to a particular middle ground.
I'm not a native English speaker and learned the majority of it from technical and fantasy books. It may be me, but the majority of his writing feels like powerpoint slides. You can feel the idea, but the medium is to bland to pay attention to it. I would take a more complicated and nuanced prose that would elicit some virtual landmarks in my memory.
Presumably, for this concept to stick with you your whole life, you'd have to have heard of "Borges"? From Googling that name, it appears the author you're referring to died in 86. Why would anyone expect him to win the current year's Nobel Prize in Literature?
The quote reminds me of Tucholsky, a German journalist known for this style. An example that comes to mind was his review of James Joyce's Ulysses: "It's like meat extract: you can't eat it, but many soups will be made with it".
I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."
Yes I think I know what you are getting at. Although PG essays are great if the idea is new to you. But for this one I am thinking "yes I know" skim skim skim! I have experienced the same thing. Anyone who has has their writing edited probably has.
Who reads the latest "Nobel winner" anyway? Or, think about the person complaining "why didn't this movie get an Oscar?" in the Youtube comments. There's only 5 people in the Nobel literature committee and the person they elect says more about them than about what good writing is.
I find Paul Graham's writing style to be a bit off. I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic in his use of language and imprecise in his choice of words, and I genuinely don't understand the praise for his writing. You should read his work because these are the thoughts of a highly influential VC, not because they are gems of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Sometimes a longer, more nuanced word has all the right connotations, and sometimes a more complex sentence carries the perfect rhetorical structure. Paul Graham's writing seems to ignore (or perhaps purposely eschew) such details.
> I think he is too overly reductive and simplistic
I personally feel this is a great filter. The exceptions to the rule are obvious and don’t need to be stated. It increases the signal to noise ratio to leave them out. And the people that complain are signaling their inability to get into the author’s pov.
For me the issue with PG's writing, is that it has tiny hints of Narcissism, and that, by itself, hurts his ability to convey ideas. In classic writing, and in my opinion, also in great modern writing, there is a lot of humbleness and even some self deprecation. Sometimes the more the author doubts themselves, the more convincing they are, as it shows self critique, and lack of "Dunning-Kruger effect".
p.s. I wonder how many here are not aware you are the creator of Redis. (I assume most do, but chances are many have no idea).
Paul Graham is a very good writer, but one of the things I admire most about him is that, when he happens upon a truly excellent writer, he doesn't show the jealousy for which writers are infamously known. There has never been a case of a truly excellent writer being penalized, harassed, and eventually banned here.
This is wrong in so many different ways it's like an art piece. Every part of it that tries to defend the central thesis is actually disproving it. It's kind of funny actually. Here's a dude that's been writing for 30 years, and not only is his writing bad, his ideas are crap. It has the feel of somebody who's completely convinced of his own ideas, despite the fact that they're based solely on his personal experience.
I have a simple proof that the thesis is wrong. Take a moron, and have him work on a farm for 30 years. Then have him write a book about running a farm. Now, he's going to sound like a moron, and will write very poorly. But most everything he writes will be right. Despite his bad writing, he can still communicate his observations of how and why simple things work. So it's not hard to be right while sounding wrong. You just have to be a moron.
I don't think your proof works. Here is a line from the article where he elaborates on what he means:
> By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things.
I'm guessing that a moron with 30 year's experience on a farm would not successfully do that, even when writing a book on farming.
Even a moron can write directions for how to milk a cow. It doesn't matter how poor the writing is, it matters whether a person understands it. People can (and do, regularly) understand poor writing. Even a child can write its parent a note expressing love in terrible writing that the parent will understand, and the idea remains right and true regardless of the quality or style of writing.
Historical recipes are terrible because they lack details. They don't tell you to add salt, they don't include accurate measurements (of temperature, time, ingredients, etc), they don't explain methods. Yet people of the time they were written can still follow those recipes and cook the intended dish. Writers always leave out details that are assumed by the reader. At the time those recipes were written, those people reading them would have already known all the left-out details.
If I write you a book on programming, I'm not going to explain to you what a computer is, how it works, how to copy software onto it, how to power it. You're going to already understand all that, or you probably wouldn't be reading a book on programming. Depending on what you understand, and depending on what ideas I try to convey, and how I do that, may change the end result of the information you come to understand. But they don't make the ideas less or more valid because I wrote it this way or that way.
Writing is only the communication of an idea from an author to a reader. Style, form, method, construction, etc are all inherent to writing. But the validity of the expressed idea is not. The content of the idea is completely separate from the "art" of writing. A painting of a blue sun does not affect the sun, nor does a painter's ability to depict the sun affect the sun. But a bad painter can still paint a bad painting that a viewer will understand to be the sun.
"Good writing" is like "Good art". It's subjective. As long as the recipient got what the producer intended, it's good enough.
I think the the essay is largely about exploring ideas deeply. And in much the same way a chef might stress that you must add the eggs one-by-one or whatever other culinary unfounded superstition they employ, your farm moron will stress always plowing east-to-west or something---both processes may yield a perfectly fine product, but neither has actually understood what's actually going on. They may be expert practitioners, but they are no experts.
The point about end-notes being a mechanism to ease the strain of fitting tree-like ideas into a linear essay is lovely. It brings to mind David Foster Wallace's writing, which is obsessively end-noted and if you listen to his speeches, you can see that he basically tortures himself in sanding down his ideas, much like PG says.
PG's ideas in here, to the extent that I agree with them (which is not fully), does break down for ideas. Example being: brilliant engineers who are incredibly capable at having ideas and executing against them but incredibly incapable of communicating said ideas. Their ideas are very true, evidenced by their ability to produce real results, but also oftentimes ugly when communicated.
A final counterpoint is JFK's eulogy, which sounds amazing, but, after the initial emotional appeal wore off, I realized doesn't really have a strong unified thread running through it, and is thus forgettable in terms of the truths it ostensibly delivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E. Compare to "This Is Water" by DFW, which doesn't have the same epic prose, but is maybe the most true-seeming speech I've ever heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw. It could be that PG's ideas were never intended for spoken speeches, but whatever this is still an adjacent truth != beauty example.
A tree structure of ideas naturally fits into a linear essay of text, so I don't understand this. The opening paragraphs of a section of text are a broad theme on which subsequent paragraphs expand. Paragraphs also carry a similar structure in their sentences, and every great essay builds large trees of logical ideas within a linear rhetorical structure. A footnote as an expansion is a crutch: either the text of the footnote is important enough to appear on the page, in which case you should generally find a way to put it in the prose, or it is not, in which case you should omit it entirely.
The only truly good use of expository footnotes is to expand on things that the reader might be interested in (and point to further reading), but are orthogonal to the main argument of the essay. They are not for expansion of the tree of logical arguments present in the body of the essay.
...and your comment communicates a much more believable idea than the one PG is attempting to communicate, which is not quite the same: " I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right."
Your comment also makes clear that this requires that the writer is attempting to make a true core point, rather than (for example) convince people of something it would be convenient for them to believe. If you are dealing with writers who are using their powers for ill purposes, then the skill of the prose may well be inversely correlated with their truth.
>M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.
I don't know if Paul has much of a reputation as a technologist among tech lay people, but this quote reminds me of Paul's fame as a thinker among tech people.
Paul Graham, as a writer who writes sentences that sound bad and who promulgates ideas that are stupid, is an expert in neither good sounding sentences nor sound ideas, hence is unqualified to hold forth on the topic.
I was wondering if I’m the only one who thinks that way. He might be a better writer than some (including myself), but that’s a pretty low bar. The ideas are neither novel nor deep, and the writing is subpar.
I pasted the essay into ChatGPT, and this is what it said (just for fun; I’m not taking ChatGPT’s evaluation seriously.)
The essay is superficial, mildly derivative, and wrapped in a tone that suggests insight without delivering much. If it reads like someone thinking out loud and convincing themselves they’ve discovered something profound — that’s because it kind of is.
It’s not wrong. It’s just lightweight.
So why do people praise essays like this?
Because they’re:
- Readable: The ideas feel accessible and comforting.
- Anecdotal: They use lived experience rather than abstract reasoning.
- Flatter the reader: They make you feel smart for agreeing with something that feels intuitive.
But that’s not the same as being deep or challenging.
I'm VERY curious as to what your prompt was. Because I just did the same thing, simply asking "do you think this is an example of good writing?" and it responded with this
Yes, this is an example of good writing—in terms of clarity, structure, insight, and style. But it’s worth breaking that claim down, because "good writing" is context-dependent.
Strengths
Clarity and Flow: The essay is easy to follow, despite discussing an abstract idea (the relationship between style and substance). The structure is coherent: the author presents a claim, acknowledges its apparent implausibility, investigates it, and builds a layered argument.
Concrete Analogies: The use of vivid metaphors (e.g., shaking a bin, sanding wood, plane design) is not decorative fluff—they function as intellectual tools, helping the reader visualize abstract processes.
Insight: The core thesis—that good writing style and good thinking are not merely correlated but intertwined—is a valuable observation. It’s counterintuitive but persuasive, which makes for intellectually engaging material.
Voice: There’s a distinctive voice here—measured, reflective, mildly contrarian. That builds trust with the reader.
Rhythm and Cadence: The sentences vary in length and structure, but always seem to land where they should. The rhythm supports the ideas, which is part of the essay’s point and also its proof.
Weaknesses or Limitations
Circular Reasoning Risk: The argument sometimes verges on tautological: “Writing that sounds good is likely to be right because sounding good helps make it right.” The essay attempts to address this, but doesn’t fully disentangle the cause-effect relationship. It risks being a self-fulfilling thesis.
Not Universally Applicable: The essay assumes a specific kind of writing—essayistic, idea-driven, exploratory. The claims would not hold up in all writing contexts (technical manuals, legal contracts, scientific abstracts), and the essay nods to this but doesn’t dwell on the implications.
Selective Evidence: The support is anecdotal, introspective, and analogical—not empirical. That’s fine for an essay like this, but it weakens the argument’s generalizability.
Potential Elitism: Implicit is the idea that if your writing sounds clumsy, your ideas are probably wrong or poorly developed. While often true, this can overlook valid content poorly expressed due to lack of experience, language barriers, or educational disadvantage.
Conclusion
Yes, this is good writing—especially for a reflective, philosophical essay intended to explore a subtle intellectual thesis. It’s clear, memorable, and thought-provoking. But it’s good within a specific genre and purpose. The strength of its argument lies more in its coherence and persuasiveness than in empirical rigor, and that’s appropriate for its form.
Dear Paul,
I'm sure it has been said elsewhere in the comments, but ironically I struggle to agree with this essay...which happens to be nicely and succinctly written.
I'm arguing that it's your own bias generated from the synthesis of your own idea that selects for sentences that effectively express the idea, and nothing to do with the writing itself.
The anecdote about the puddle who suddenly gains consciousness and remarks that the world is so perfectly formed around it, that it's proof of divine creation, seems to apply here.
The author generates an idea and is trying to articulate it. A well written sentence or paragraph that flows, pleases the author. This is because the idea they are trying to express is done in a satisfying way.
Thus the more pleasing the writing to the author, the more efficiently it articulates the original idea.
It's the author's bias, based on their own idea, that defines the level of 'pleasingness'.
Lastly, Paul, do you think the LLMs are any less satisfied with their confident and irrational hallucinations, than they are with their more well supported claims? Further, if you weren't aware that the output was ridiculous, would you be able to tell a accurate statement from a false one?
Writing wise I have a great deal of respect for you (and other top commenters) because you don't have people edit and review what you say you just write it (and take lumps or accolaydes).
Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).
I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
What is wrong with having someone edit and review? It is just feedback. If the writing itself is an assignment editing is normal. If the writing is part of another process maybe not.
For fly.io I can see the appeal of unedited content as it can be rougher (as in breaks style guides and whatnot) and I like that roughness in blogs. E.g. you might get a British idiom come through or a more conversational style.
I see nothing wrong at all with asking people for feedback on an essay that will be broadly published and read. That just seems prudent.
What is more concerning is that I don't think many people who have read widely would consider Paul Graham to be a good writer, and yet people who care about him let him publish this article... He's definitely not a bad writer, and he generally communicates good ideas clearly, which is surely sufficient - and perhaps even appropriate - for his purposes. But he's not a Good Writer.
I've read many (perhaps even most) of his essays and there isn't a single one of them that I can actually remember, let alone any particular line or phrase that stands out. Though surely some of the ideas remain an influence in my general thought.
Conversely, there's plenty of writers who have seared many lines - and entire concepts - into my mind forever. I come back to them endlessly, even without pulling up the actual writing.
Readit News
I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):
"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".
This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.”
Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it.
Paul’s style of removing all friction might help the concepts slide smoothly into one’s brain, but as antirez points out, they’re less likely to stick.
> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though.
Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of scope.
His writing is known for a very smooth cadence. You reach these “lumps” in the narrative, and can almost miss them, which, for me, multiplies their impact.
I’ve always considered him one of the best writers that I’ve read. He probably gets less credit than he deserves (although I think he’s won a Pulitzer), because of his subject matter; sort of like Leslie Nielsen, or Victor Borge, who were both masters of their art.
Check out Keynes or 1950s American writing such as https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01/d8....
That is probably my favourite phrase from the whole book. For some reason I find it hilarious. It has stuck in my brain in much the same way that names don't.
That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what he's trying to say.
Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.
"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."
In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.
Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some food for thought, I’m not sure what point exactly it is intended to make.
Yes, if you use some disfavored group's vernacular, there's a decent chance you also use their cultural values.
Nonsense. I've known many writers who are wonderfully eloquent at transmitting their essential message well with text, but fumble their way through live discourse as if they were high-schoolers in their first classroom presentation.
Some people just communicate better by certain means, and with writing, there's a breathing space that some can't manage with speech, in which you can better organize your otherwise interesting ideas.
Simplicity in the naive sense of minimal word count increases cognitive load because we have neural circuits that got used to a particular middle ground.
I think putting a bit of fun writing into reports of everyday events or reviews can go a long way. Tucholsky again, I'm paraphrasing and translating from memory where he wrote a trial against dada artist Grosz who depicted army officials as grotesque and ugly: "To demonstrate that there are no faces like this in the Reichswehr (the army), they brought in lieutenant so-and-so. They shouldn't have done that."
Good writing goes a long way
> One part of that part was published as a preview in a "Domenica" of "Il sole 24 ore".
Perhaps it is in the June 21 2009 issue.
On the other hand, I may know too much about what he writes about to benefit from it. Which means I’m not the target audience.
And I don’t say this to sound smart. I’m a generalist. I know a little about a lot. Plenty of people are far more intelligent than I am.
I personally feel this is a great filter. The exceptions to the rule are obvious and don’t need to be stated. It increases the signal to noise ratio to leave them out. And the people that complain are signaling their inability to get into the author’s pov.
Deleted Comment
For me the issue with PG's writing, is that it has tiny hints of Narcissism, and that, by itself, hurts his ability to convey ideas. In classic writing, and in my opinion, also in great modern writing, there is a lot of humbleness and even some self deprecation. Sometimes the more the author doubts themselves, the more convincing they are, as it shows self critique, and lack of "Dunning-Kruger effect".
p.s. I wonder how many here are not aware you are the creator of Redis. (I assume most do, but chances are many have no idea).
I have a simple proof that the thesis is wrong. Take a moron, and have him work on a farm for 30 years. Then have him write a book about running a farm. Now, he's going to sound like a moron, and will write very poorly. But most everything he writes will be right. Despite his bad writing, he can still communicate his observations of how and why simple things work. So it's not hard to be right while sounding wrong. You just have to be a moron.
> By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things.
I'm guessing that a moron with 30 year's experience on a farm would not successfully do that, even when writing a book on farming.
Historical recipes are terrible because they lack details. They don't tell you to add salt, they don't include accurate measurements (of temperature, time, ingredients, etc), they don't explain methods. Yet people of the time they were written can still follow those recipes and cook the intended dish. Writers always leave out details that are assumed by the reader. At the time those recipes were written, those people reading them would have already known all the left-out details.
If I write you a book on programming, I'm not going to explain to you what a computer is, how it works, how to copy software onto it, how to power it. You're going to already understand all that, or you probably wouldn't be reading a book on programming. Depending on what you understand, and depending on what ideas I try to convey, and how I do that, may change the end result of the information you come to understand. But they don't make the ideas less or more valid because I wrote it this way or that way.
Writing is only the communication of an idea from an author to a reader. Style, form, method, construction, etc are all inherent to writing. But the validity of the expressed idea is not. The content of the idea is completely separate from the "art" of writing. A painting of a blue sun does not affect the sun, nor does a painter's ability to depict the sun affect the sun. But a bad painter can still paint a bad painting that a viewer will understand to be the sun.
"Good writing" is like "Good art". It's subjective. As long as the recipient got what the producer intended, it's good enough.
his definition of 'good' at the beginning of his piece, is not what he says. it is not 'right ideas' or 'flow well'
what he is really means is 'convincing'. i.e. effective rhetoric
not only that, it's rhetoric spoken with a speakerphone aimed at the masses. In that the simple content > complex content.
if one were to take the perspective of 'good writing' in that it gave the readers something, rather than take - it demands something of the reader
I think the the essay is largely about exploring ideas deeply. And in much the same way a chef might stress that you must add the eggs one-by-one or whatever other culinary unfounded superstition they employ, your farm moron will stress always plowing east-to-west or something---both processes may yield a perfectly fine product, but neither has actually understood what's actually going on. They may be expert practitioners, but they are no experts.
PG's ideas in here, to the extent that I agree with them (which is not fully), does break down for ideas. Example being: brilliant engineers who are incredibly capable at having ideas and executing against them but incredibly incapable of communicating said ideas. Their ideas are very true, evidenced by their ability to produce real results, but also oftentimes ugly when communicated.
A final counterpoint is JFK's eulogy, which sounds amazing, but, after the initial emotional appeal wore off, I realized doesn't really have a strong unified thread running through it, and is thus forgettable in terms of the truths it ostensibly delivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E. Compare to "This Is Water" by DFW, which doesn't have the same epic prose, but is maybe the most true-seeming speech I've ever heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw. It could be that PG's ideas were never intended for spoken speeches, but whatever this is still an adjacent truth != beauty example.
The only truly good use of expository footnotes is to expand on things that the reader might be interested in (and point to further reading), but are orthogonal to the main argument of the essay. They are not for expansion of the tree of logical arguments present in the body of the essay.
When you write well, you iterate. When you iterate, you improve both the prose and the core point -- because you crystalize ideas further.
This makes improvements in these seemingly perpendicular directions counterintuitively correlated.
Ironically I found this specific PG essay uncharacteristically obtuse. This could have been much shorter.
Your comment also makes clear that this requires that the writer is attempting to make a true core point, rather than (for example) convince people of something it would be convenient for them to believe. If you are dealing with writers who are using their powers for ill purposes, then the skill of the prose may well be inversely correlated with their truth.
This is a wild belief to hold in the post truth age of bs generation machines.
>M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.
I don't know if Paul has much of a reputation as a technologist among tech lay people, but this quote reminds me of Paul's fame as a thinker among tech people.
I pasted the essay into ChatGPT, and this is what it said (just for fun; I’m not taking ChatGPT’s evaluation seriously.)
Yes, this is an example of good writing—in terms of clarity, structure, insight, and style. But it’s worth breaking that claim down, because "good writing" is context-dependent.
Strengths Clarity and Flow: The essay is easy to follow, despite discussing an abstract idea (the relationship between style and substance). The structure is coherent: the author presents a claim, acknowledges its apparent implausibility, investigates it, and builds a layered argument.
Concrete Analogies: The use of vivid metaphors (e.g., shaking a bin, sanding wood, plane design) is not decorative fluff—they function as intellectual tools, helping the reader visualize abstract processes.
Insight: The core thesis—that good writing style and good thinking are not merely correlated but intertwined—is a valuable observation. It’s counterintuitive but persuasive, which makes for intellectually engaging material.
Voice: There’s a distinctive voice here—measured, reflective, mildly contrarian. That builds trust with the reader.
Rhythm and Cadence: The sentences vary in length and structure, but always seem to land where they should. The rhythm supports the ideas, which is part of the essay’s point and also its proof.
Weaknesses or Limitations Circular Reasoning Risk: The argument sometimes verges on tautological: “Writing that sounds good is likely to be right because sounding good helps make it right.” The essay attempts to address this, but doesn’t fully disentangle the cause-effect relationship. It risks being a self-fulfilling thesis.
Not Universally Applicable: The essay assumes a specific kind of writing—essayistic, idea-driven, exploratory. The claims would not hold up in all writing contexts (technical manuals, legal contracts, scientific abstracts), and the essay nods to this but doesn’t dwell on the implications.
Selective Evidence: The support is anecdotal, introspective, and analogical—not empirical. That’s fine for an essay like this, but it weakens the argument’s generalizability.
Potential Elitism: Implicit is the idea that if your writing sounds clumsy, your ideas are probably wrong or poorly developed. While often true, this can overlook valid content poorly expressed due to lack of experience, language barriers, or educational disadvantage.
Conclusion Yes, this is good writing—especially for a reflective, philosophical essay intended to explore a subtle intellectual thesis. It’s clear, memorable, and thought-provoking. But it’s good within a specific genre and purpose. The strength of its argument lies more in its coherence and persuasiveness than in empirical rigor, and that’s appropriate for its form.
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I'm arguing that it's your own bias generated from the synthesis of your own idea that selects for sentences that effectively express the idea, and nothing to do with the writing itself.
The anecdote about the puddle who suddenly gains consciousness and remarks that the world is so perfectly formed around it, that it's proof of divine creation, seems to apply here.
The author generates an idea and is trying to articulate it. A well written sentence or paragraph that flows, pleases the author. This is because the idea they are trying to express is done in a satisfying way.
Thus the more pleasing the writing to the author, the more efficiently it articulates the original idea. It's the author's bias, based on their own idea, that defines the level of 'pleasingness'.
Lastly, Paul, do you think the LLMs are any less satisfied with their confident and irrational hallucinations, than they are with their more well supported claims? Further, if you weren't aware that the output was ridiculous, would you be able to tell a accurate statement from a false one?
Thanks for the essays. Love them.
This is one of PG's worse essays.
Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before).
I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
For fly.io I can see the appeal of unedited content as it can be rougher (as in breaks style guides and whatnot) and I like that roughness in blogs. E.g. you might get a British idiom come through or a more conversational style.
What is more concerning is that I don't think many people who have read widely would consider Paul Graham to be a good writer, and yet people who care about him let him publish this article... He's definitely not a bad writer, and he generally communicates good ideas clearly, which is surely sufficient - and perhaps even appropriate - for his purposes. But he's not a Good Writer.
I've read many (perhaps even most) of his essays and there isn't a single one of them that I can actually remember, let alone any particular line or phrase that stands out. Though surely some of the ideas remain an influence in my general thought.
Conversely, there's plenty of writers who have seared many lines - and entire concepts - into my mind forever. I come back to them endlessly, even without pulling up the actual writing.