🌄 🛥️ 👝 Paul Graham: How to Write Useful Texts (Full) 😗 🎦 🐕

What should be the essay? Many would say - convincing. They taught us that way ... But I think that we can strive for something more ambitious: the essay should be useful.

First of all, the essay should be correct. But just being correct is not enough. It is easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. This is a common flaw in academic writing. Even if you don’t know anything about the subject, you won’t be mistaken in saying that the problem is complex, that there are many factors to consider, that looking at it too simply would be a mistake, and so on.

Such statements are undoubtedly correct, but they do not tell the reader anything. A good text contains strong sayings - so strong that making them even a little stronger would mean turning them into a lie.

For example, it would be more beneficial to say that Pikes Peak is located near downtown Colorado than just somewhere in Colorado. But if I say that this is exactly in the center of Colorado, it turns out that I exaggerate, because in fact it is a little east of the middle.

Accuracy and correctness are like opposing forces. It is easy to satisfy one, ignoring the other. Maintaining an academic style is bold but false, it is rhetoric and demagogy. Useful writing is bold and truthful.

There are also 2 other points here: telling people something important and something that at least some of them still don’t know.

To tell people what they don’t know does not always mean to surprise them. Sometimes this means telling them what they unconsciously knew, but never expressed through words. In fact, this can give more valuable insights, because it tends to be more fundamental.

Let's put it all together. A useful essay tells people something true and important, something that they did not know yet, and does it as unambiguously as possible.

Note that this is all a matter of level. For example, you cannot expect an idea to be new to everyone. Any insight that you had probably also had at least one of the 7 billion people living in the world. But actually enough if the idea is new to a large number of readers.

The same goes for correctness, importance, and directness. In essence, these four components are like numbers that you can multiply to get a utility score. I admit that this is a clumsy simplification, but nonetheless true.

How can you be sure that what you say is true, new and important? Believe it or not, there is a trick for this. I learned this from my friend Robert Morris, who is afraid to say stupid things. His trick is to say nothing until he is sure it is worth hearing. Therefore, it is difficult to get his opinion, but when it succeeds, it is usually true.

In the sense of creating an essay, this means that if you write a bad sentence, you do not publish it. You delete it and try again. Often you give up entire branches of the story of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes - from a whole essay.

It is impossible to guarantee that every idea that comes to mind is good, but you can make sure that every published one is good. Just don't post those that are unsuccessful.

In science, this is called bias and is considered a hindrance. When some hypothesis leads to inconclusive results, in any case it is supposed to convey them to people. But when writing an essay, selection is a natural way.

My strategy is to loosen and then tighten. I am writing my first draft essay quickly, trying all the ideas. And then I spend a long time rewriting it carefully.

I never tried to count how many times I proofread an essay, but I'm sure there are sentences that I read 100 times before publishing them. When I correct an essay, there are usually passages that look annoying, sometimes because they are awkwardly written, and sometimes because I'm not sure that they are true. I get annoyed unconsciously, but after the tenth reading or so I say "Ugh, this piece" every time I catch it. They become like bulls that bite your sleeve when you pass by. Usually I do not publish essays until they all disappear - until I can read everything without clues.

Sometimes I skip a sentence that seems awkward if I can't figure out how to rephrase it, but I will never consciously miss a sentence that seems wrong. And you should never miss this. If the suggestion seems wrong, all you have to do is ask why this is not the case, and usually a replacement occurs right in your head.

Here essays have an advantage over journalists. You have no deadline. You can work on writing as much time as you need to get everything right. You do not need to publish an essay at all if you cannot make it the way it should. Mistakes seem to lose courage in the face of an enemy with unlimited resources. Well, or so it is felt. What really happens is that you have different expectations from yourself. You are like a parent telling a child: "We can sit here all night until you eat your vegetables." There is only one caveat - you are this child.

I do not say to write without errors at all. For example, I added condition (c) to “A way to detect bias” after readers noted that I missed it. But in practice, you can catch almost all of them.

There is also a trick to convey importance. It is similar to the one I offer to the young founders when choosing ideas for a startup: do what you personally need. You can use yourself as an intermediary for the reader. The reader is completely different from you. Write about important topics for yourself, then they may seem important to a significant number of readers.

There are two factors that determine importance. The number of people for whom it matters multiplied by the magnitude of this significance. Of course, this does not mean that we get a rectangle. Rather, it’s something like a ragged ridge, like a graph of the function of the Riemann sum.

To achieve novelty, you should write on those topics on which you have thought a lot. In this case, you can become a guide to this area also for the reader. Everything that surprised you — the one who thought a lot about this topic — will certainly surprise a significant number of readers. And here, to make sure of this, just as with correctness and importance, you can use the Morris technique. Do not publish an essay if you haven’t learned anything new from it.

To appreciate the novelty, you must be modest - because realizing the innovation of an idea, you realize that you did not notice it in the past. Confidence and modesty are often opposed to each other, but in this case, as in many others, confidence helps you put up with it. When you know that you are an expert in any field, you can safely admit that you understood something that you did not know before, because you will be sure that most people probably did not know about it either.

The fourth component of practical writing, persuasiveness, consists of 2 aspects: a clear train of thought and skillful use of reservations. These aspects balance each other, like the gas pedal and the clutch in cars with a manual gearbox. As you grind the wording of the idea, you also adjust reservations accordingly. Know that you can not make reservations at all if you speak directly, as in my case with the four components of practical writing. Ambiguous abstracts should also not cause any guesses.

In the process of finalizing the idea, you strive to minimize the number of reservations. However, it is extremely rare to completely abandon them. Sometimes it’s not worth it, for example, if these are additional arguments and the fully developed version is too long.

Some believe that reservations make the letter unconvincing. For example, that you should never start a sentence in an essay with the words “I believe”, because if you write about it, it is obvious that you think so. Indeed, the statement “I believe x” sounds weaker than just “x”. That’s why you need this “I believe”. This is necessary to express the degree of your confidence.

But reservations are not scalars. This is not just an experimental error. There are 50 things that they can express: how widely something is applicable, how you know it, how happy you are, even how it can be falsified. I am not going to try to explore the structure of the reservation here. This is probably more complicated than the whole topic of writing to good use. Instead, I will simply give you practical advice: do not underestimate the disclaimer. This is an important skill in itself, and not just some kind of tax that you have to pay in order to avoid false statements. So study and use it in full. This may not be half of having good ideas, but it is part of their presence.

In the essay, I strive for another quality: explaining something as simple as possible. But I do not think that this is a component of utility. It is rather a question for readers to think about. And this is practical help in understanding things; the error is more obvious when expressed in plain language. But I admit that the main reason I write is not for the reader’s sake or because it helps me get it right, but because it prevents me from using more words or more fancy words than I need. It doesn't seem as elegant as a program that is too long.

I understand that some people write intricately. But if you are sure that you are one of them, then the best advice is to write as simple as possible. I believe that the formula I gave you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength is a recipe for a good essay. But I must warn you that this is also a recipe in order to drive people crazy.

The root of the problem is novelty. When you tell people something that they did not know, they do not always thank you for that. Sometimes the reason people don’t know something is because they don’t want to know it. Usually because it is contrary to some kind of cherished faith. Indeed, if you are looking for new ideas, popular but erroneous beliefs are a good place to find them. Each common erroneous belief creates around itself a dead zone of ideas that are relatively unexplored because they contradict it.
The force component only worsens the situation. If there is something that annoys people more than contradicting their cherished prejudices, then this categorically contradicts them.

Plus, if you used the Morris technique, what you wrote will seem pretty confident. Perhaps insultingly confident for people who disagree with you. The reason you will seem like this is because you are sure: you cheated by publishing only what you have no doubt about. People who are trying to argue with you will think that you will never admit that you are wrong. In fact, you constantly admit that you are mistaken. You just do it before publishing, not after.

And if your text is as simple as possible, it only makes matters worse. Brevity is the ability to command. If you watch someone transmit unwanted news from a low quality position, you will notice that they tend to use a lot of words to soften the blow. While in order to be brief with someone it means to be rude to him.

Sometimes it is used to ease the categorization of a statement. Put “maybe” in front of something that you are really sure of. But you will notice that when authors do this, they usually do it with a wink at the reader.

I do not really like to do this. It is foolish to use an ironic tone for the whole essay. I think that we just have to recognize the fact that elegance and conciseness are two names for the same thing.

You might think that if you work hard enough to make sure that the essay is written correctly, it will be invulnerable. This is somewhat true. It will be invulnerable to legitimate attacks. But in practice, this is little comfort.

In fact, the power component of useful writing will make you especially vulnerable to information distortion. If you set out your idea with all the confidence, without making it false, all you have to do is slightly exaggerate what you said, and now it's a lie.

For the most part, they don’t even do it consciously. One of the most amazing things you will find if you start writing an essay is that people who disagree with you rarely disagree with what you actually wrote. Instead, they interpret what you said and disagree with it.

To do this, you should ask someone who does this to quote a specific sentence or passage that you wrote that they consider false, and explain why. I say “worth it” because they never do that. Therefore, although it may seem that this can lead to a failure in the discussion, the truth is that it has never been on the right track.

Should you explicitly warn of possible misinterpretations? Yes, if they are misinterpreted, then a smart enough and well-intentioned person can do it. In fact, sometimes it’s better to say something a little misleading, and then add a correction, than to try to formulate the idea rightly right away. This may be more efficient, and may also simulate a way to discover such an idea.

But I do not think that you should explicitly prevent intentional misinterpretations in the structure of the essay. An essay is a meeting place with honest readers. You don’t want to spoil your house by putting bars on the windows to protect them from dishonest people. A place to protect against intentional misinterpretation is found in the final notes. But do not think that you can predict them all. People are just as creative in distorting you when you say what they don’t want to hear, as well as in coming up with rational explanations for what they want to do, but know that they shouldn’t do it.

As in any other business, you need to practice to become better at writing an essay. But where to start? Now that we have examined the structure of a useful writing, we can rephrase this question more precisely. What restriction do you relax initially? The answer is: the first component of importance: the number of people who care about what you write.

If you narrow the topic down enough, you can probably find something that you are an expert in. Write about it to start. If you only have ten readers who care, that's fine. You help them and you write. Later, you can expand the circle of topics you are writing about.

Another limitation that you can loosen is a little surprising: posting. Writing an essay does not necessarily mean publishing it. It may seem strange now that there is a tendency to publish every random thought, but it worked for me. I wrote what constituted an essay in notebooks for about 15 years. I never published any of them and never expected this. I wrote them as a way to understand what is happening. But when the network appeared, I had a lot of practice.

By the way, Steve Wozniak did the same. In high school, he created computers on paper for fun. He could not build them, because he could not afford to buy components. But when Intel launched 4K DRAMs in 1975, it was ready.

And how much more essay remains to write? The answer to this question is probably the most incredible thought I understood about writing an essay. Almost all of them are left to write.

Although the essay is an old form, it was not diligently cultivated. In the print era, publishing was expensive, and there was not enough demand for essays to publish so many. You could publish an essay if you were already well known for writing something else, such as novels. Or you can write reviews of books that you have taken on to express your own ideas. But in fact, there was no direct path to becoming an essayist. And this meant that very few essays were written, and those that were written, as a rule, were devoted to a narrow circle of topics.
Now, thanks to the internet, there is a way. Anyone can post an essay on the Internet. You start in the unknown, perhaps, but at least you can start. You don’t need anyone’s permission.

Sometimes it happens that this or that field of knowledge sits quietly for years until some change makes it explode. Cryptography did the same with number theory. The Internet does the same with essays.

The most exciting thing is not that we still have much to write, but that we still have much to discover. There are certain ideas that are best disclosed through essay writing. If most essays are still not written, then most of these ideas are still not open.

Notes

[1] Put the railing on the balconies, but do not put the bars on the windows.

[2] Even now, I sometimes write essays that are not intended for publication. I wrote a few to figure out what Y Combinator should do, and they were really helpful.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Hackle, Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading the drafts of this essay.

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Paul Graham: How to Write Useful Texts (Full)

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