# Paul Graham's Advice for Writers [[Paul Graham]] has given advice to writers. Main point: Essays should be useful It should first be correct, and precise (i.e., not vague). Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false. [[Precision and correctness are like opposing forces]]. It's easy to satisfy one if you ignore the other. Useful writing is bold, but true. Useful writing must also tell people something important, that at least some of them didn't already know. It doesn't necessarily mean surprising them. Sometimes it's about turning what people know unconsciously into words. Such insights may be more valuable because they tend to be more fundamental. [[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. To write things that are true, novel and important, there's a trick used by Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying anything dumb: [[Don't say anything unless you're sure it's worth hearing]]. If you write a bad sentence, don't publish it. Delete it and try again. 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. Paul's strategy is loose then tight. Write the first draft quickly, trying out different ideas. Then spend days rewriting very carefully. Proofread again and again and again. Don't let through sentences that don't seem correct. You never have to. Essayists don't have a deadline. Use that to your advantage to try and catch all mistakes. To get importance, make something you really want. Use yourself as a proxy for the reader. 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. Use anything you notice that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot. It will probably surprise many readers too. [[If you don't learn anything from writing an essay, don't publish it]] You need humility to measure novelty, because acknowledging the novelty of an idea means acknowledging your previous ignorance of it. Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but in this case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble. If you know you're an expert on some topic, you can freely admit when you learn something you didn't know, because you can be confident that most other people wouldn't know it either. The fourth component of useful writing, strength, comes from two things: thinking well, and the skillful use of qualification. These two counterbalance each other. 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, as I did the four components of useful writing. Whereas points that seem dubious have to be held at arm's length with perhapses. As you refine an idea, you're pushing in the direction of less qualification. But you can rarely get it down to zero. Sometimes you don't even want to, if it's a side point and a fully refined version would be too long. Some say that qualifications weaken writing. For example, that you should never begin a sentence in an essay with "I think," because if you're saying it, then of course you think it. And it's true that "I think x" is a weaker statement than simply "x." Which is exactly why you need "I think." You need it to express your degree of certainty. Qualifications are not scalars. They're not just experimental error. There must be 50 things they can express: how broadly something applies, how you know it, how happy you are it's so, even how it could be falsified. Don't underestimate qualification. It's an important skill in its own right, not just a sort of tax you have to pay in order to avoid saying things that are false. Learn and use its full range. It may not be fully half of having good ideas, but it's part of having them. Another quality is to say things as simply as possible. It's not a component of usefulness, but a matter of consideration for the reader. It helps with getting things right; a mistake is more obvious when expressed in simple language. The formula for a good essay is: importance + novelty + correctness + strength It's also a recipe for making people mad. The root of the problem is novelty. When you tell people something they didn't know, they don't always thank you for it. Sometimes the reason people don't know something is because they don't want to know it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief. And indeed, if you're looking for novel ideas, popular but mistaken beliefs are a good place to find them. Every popular mistaken belief creates a dead zone of ideas around it that are relatively unexplored because they contradict it. The strength component just makes things worse. If there's anything that annoys people more than having their cherished assumptions contradicted, it's having them flatly contradicted. If you use the Morris technique, your writing will seem quite confident. Perhaps offensively confident, to people who disagree with you. The reason you'll seem confident is that you are confident: you've cheated, by only publishing the things you're sure of. It will seem to people who try to disagree with you that you never admit you're wrong. In fact you constantly admit you're wrong. You just do it before publishing instead of after. And if your writing is as simple as possible, that just makes things worse. [[Brevity is the diction of command]]. If you watch someone delivering unwelcome news from a position of inferiority, you'll notice they tend to use lots of words, to soften the blow. Whereas to be short with someone is more or less to be rude to them. If you want to soften things, try to deliberately phrase statements more weakly than you really mean. Put "perhaps" in front of things you're actually quite sure of. But best is remain confident. The strength component of useful writing will make you particularly vulnerable to misrepresentation. If you've stated an idea as strongly as you could without making it false, all anyone has to do is to exaggerate slightly what you said, and now it is false. People who disagree with you rarely disagree with what you've actually written. Instead they make up something you said and disagree with that. The countermove is to ask someone who does this to quote a specific sentence or passage you wrote that they believe is false, and explain why (hint: they won't). It's sometimes better to say something slightly misleading and then add the correction than to try to get an idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can also model the way such an idea would be discovered. But don't do that in the body of the essay. Use end notes for that. But don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingenious at misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to hear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they want to do but know they shouldn't. As with most other things, the way to get better at writing essays is to practice. To get started, you can relax some constraints. One idea is to narrow the topic sufficiently to reduce the number of people who will care. Later you can expand the breadth of topics you write about, and reach more readers. The other constraint you can relax is a little surprising: publication. Writing essays doesn't have to mean publishing them. Thanks to the internet, anyone can publish essays online. You start in obscurity, perhaps, but at least you can start. You don't need anyone's permission. The exciting thing is not that there's a lot left to write, but that there's a lot left to discover. There's a certain kind of idea that's best discovered by writing essays. If most essays are still unwritten, most such ideas are still undiscovered. ## References - http://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html