Paul Graham — How to Write Usefully (2020)

Source: paulgraham.com/useful.html · February 2020

为什么是 benchmark： PG 的 meta-essay，直接定义了什么是好文章。学的是：四个维度的 framework + "bold but true" 的拿捏 + 不 hedge 的勇气来自于只发布你确定的东西。

What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.

To start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enough merely to be correct. It's easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. That's a common flaw in academic writing, for example. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can't go wrong by saying that the issue is a complex one, that there are many factors to be considered, that it's a mistake to take too simplistic a view of it, and so on.

Though no doubt correct, such statements tell the reader nothing. Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.

For example, it's more useful to say that Pike's Peak is near the middle of Colorado than merely somewhere in Colorado. But if I say it's in the exact middle of Colorado, I've now gone too far, because it's a bit east of the middle.

Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. It's easy to satisfy one if you ignore the other. The converse of vaporous academic writing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of demagogues. Useful writing is bold, but true.

It's also two other things: it tells people something important, and that at least some of them didn't already know.

Telling people something they didn't know doesn't always mean surprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more fundamental.

Let's put them all together. Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.

Notice these are all a matter of degree. For example, you can't expect an idea to be novel to everyone. Any insight that you have will probably have already been had by at least one of the world's 7 billion people. But it's sufficient if an idea is novel to a lot of readers.

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

How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. I learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying anything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure it's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him, but when you do, they're usually right.

Translated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write a bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes a whole essay.

You can't ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the ones that aren't.

In the sciences, this is called publication bias, and is considered bad. When some hypothesis you're exploring gets inconclusive results, you're supposed to tell people about that too. But with essay writing, publication bias is the way to go.

My strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an essay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting it very carefully.

The trick for getting importance too. It's like the trick I suggest to young founders for getting startup ideas: to make something you yourself want. You can use yourself as a proxy for the reader. The reader is not completely unlike you, so if you write about topics that seem important to you, they'll probably seem important to a significant number of readers as well.

Importance has two factors. It's the number of people something matters to, times how much it matters to them.

The way to get novelty is to write about topics you've thought about a lot. Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in this department too. Anything you notice that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise a significant number of readers.

The fourth component of useful writing, strength, comes from two things: thinking well, and the skillful use of qualification. These two counterbalance each other, like the accelerator and clutch in a car with a manual transmission. As you try to refine the expression of an idea, you adjust the qualification accordingly. Something you're sure of, you can state baldly with no qualification at all. Whereas points that seem dubious have to be held at arm's length with perhapses.

There's one other quality I aim for in essays: to say things as simply as possible. Simple writing has the practical advantage that it becomes more honest. To write in a fancy way you have to build a certain distance from what you're saying.

I try to write the way I think, and mostly I fail. The gap between what I think and what I say is one of the most useful gauges I have.

It's not enough for a text to be correct, novel, important, and strong. If it's dull, people won't read it.

The trick I've found is to treat the reader as an intelligent adult who can follow any argument, but who has no obligation to continue reading. The moment he finds something unclear or dull, he can stop. So everything has to be clear and interesting or he will.

Another source of dullness is writing that's too long. Essays that take a while to get going, and essays that go on after they've delivered the main course.

To make writing engaging, I try to ask myself: if I'd never seen this before, what would I want to know? What are the questions that would be most interesting to answer? I try to answer those. And if there's an elephant in the room, I try to address it.

When you start writing an essay, the question "what is this essay about?" gets replaced by "what true thing do I want to say that's worth saying?" The latter is harder, but more honest.

If I look at my own writing, the essays I'm proudest of are almost all about problems I've been thinking about for years.

One final piece of advice: don't try to have good ideas. Write. If you write a lot and publish the things that turn out to be good, the ideas you've had will be better than average.