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paulgraham.com

48 pointsmarvin30 comments

Probably the revised version is "better", but I enjoyed reading the deleted parts. By condensing an essay you can make it more syropy and thus increase the number of people who will consider it worth reading. But I think it's doubtful whether you're doing a service for the readers who would have liked the original version.

The same phenomenon is being played out with music and bootlegs, and movies and director's cuts. Most people want the short version, the fans want as much as they can get.

Nah, it's the lack of all that unsupported unnecessary fluff that makes Paul's writing enjoyable. This is a critical step in good writing, stop trying boring your reader to death and get to the damn point already, and Paul does it well, Steve Yeggi on the other hand must have missed this lesson. If you had to read all that stuff everytime, you may not come to enjoy Paul's writing as much as you do now in the first place. Fans only want more after they've become fans.

Speak for yourself. Yegge was never terse, yet he may count me a fan.

I didn't say he didn't have fans, some people like all that verbal diarrhea!

Steve Yegge generally makes unfiltered work for him.

PG treats his essays like oil paintings, and keeps working on them over time until he's satisfied with the results. Yegge's "drunken blog rants" are more like sketches -- when they work, the spontaneity is part of the appeal, but they tend to be much more uneven. Neither style is necessarily better than the other, just very different.

I agree with your first premise - Paul Graham's writing is enjoyable because it is terse.

I can't support your second premise. Just because Steve Yeggi's writing is long, doesn't mean it's full of fluff. It may not be as compact as a PG essay, but Steve Yeggi is also expressing very complex ideas and I think he uses just as many words as he needs to, to get the whole point across.

But it is full of fluff, metaphor after metaphor or personal example after personal example repeatedly hammering at a point he could have gotten across much simpler if he tried. I'm usually so bored a quarter the way through I start skimming looking for some point worth reading. Paul's writing on the other hand is of a much higher quality, doesn't assume the reader is so dense that he needs to keep hammering on the point, and recognizes that I don't care about fluff, but look for the meat. Yeggi thinks every though he has is worth reading, Paul knows better.

i also enjoyed reading the deleted parts.

obviously pg is aiming for "terse" in most of his essays. but if he left in a few of the diversions, personal feelings, reactions to others, etc, he would seem more human. fewer people would have the occasional violent negative reactions to him that we've been seeing lately.

I'm now wondering whether it's worth spending a day a week writing, instead of coding. It's true that you can generate much more ideas by writing, and it allows you to cast your gaze a lot further than whatever particular method you're working on. Any thoughts?

I think writing is more about teaching others than helping yourself. pg can afford to write because he's made his fortune.

Simple notes to yourself should be sufficient for generating and refining ideas.

"writing is more about teaching others than helping yourself."

I disagree. I write a lot of stuff that nobody else sees, just to clarify my thinking. My head's full of vague ideas, and it's only when I write them down that I can pick apart the contradictions. It's no different from coding: once you actually start writing code (rather than just planning it) you suddenly notice a host of edge cases and potential bugs.

It's true, writing is a great way to capture thought. The brain just can't hold enough things at one time to fully understand many problem spaces, but a Word doc can be infinitely long.

That's not it. The brain can hold far more than any hard drive. And you don't really understand something that's not in your brain: all the neural links just don't exist on paper.

It's the writing that helps. I'm not entirely sure how, but something about putting thoughts into sentences makes the thoughts themselves more coherent. Maybe because it forces you to think them in new ways => more connections => better understanding.

Not quite. Long term memory does hold much more than a hard drive. But what the GP is talking about is the limited capacity of short-term memory. When you are thinking about something and fill up your short-term memory, things start dropping out and by definition you can't notice that fact, because all your short-term memory is full! The benefit of an essay is that you can fix the ideas down on paper and move on in your thinking, without having to worry about forgetting where you started from.

Granted: if you want to capture a specific train of thought, you'll probably have to write it down.

But I was more referring to "to fully understand many problem spaces", for which STM isn't really relevant. Understanding is a matter of how a topic is stored in LTM. Writing it down will improve your understanding of it, but it won't directly increase the amount you can understand.

Writing about your problem domain may also help you to make better pitches and sell your product better.

I'm passionate about what I'm building, yet find myself fumbling for words when explaining it to sceptical acquaintances. It takes practice to master any skill.

Sometimes when I get stuck on a code problem, I start writing an essay describing how the system works. Even if I don't have a clear idea what that should be, by the time I finish the essay, I've worked out what I should write in the code.

"... I'm now wondering whether it's worth spending a day a week writing, instead of coding ..."

Do you have a blog? ~ http://inglua.wordpress.com/ then write some interesting things up and submit them

There seem to be some clear patterns in what was cut: anything angsty, opinions lacking empirical support, personal feelings, etc. Which isn't to say that all of these weren't needed to get the thoughts down on paper.

I think language is also a factor. English grammar is dependent on word order. a thought is more free. so transforming that into sentences that reflect the thought order is a challenge. maybe this is only true for people like me who speak a different language (Farsi) which has free word order. I can write a long sentence putting all my thoughts in it without much problem. but when I write it in English it turns into run-on sentence. The only solution I've found is short senses that follow my thoughts. While English is a simple language it's an art to be able to write well so maybe that's why Paul's well written work include revisions in the process. I'm sure there are more to this but I'm not a language expert :)

I'm not sure that's really true. You tend to think more or less in the terms of the language you speak most of the time. For example, I lived in the US for one year and, when I got back to Brazil I'd often think like "I like this better", wheras in portuguese you'd say something like "I like more of this". My point being that we adapt to think how we speak and write, so that's not really the issue when writing down your thoughts.

I think the hardest thing is to be coherent, when you think you often skip steps that you look with greater care when you write. It's not uncommon that some of the steps you're skiping are crucial ones.

"I probably write three to four words for every one that appears in the final version of an essay."

Writing is cutting. Most things are: a lot of crap is produced for everything worth keeping.

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings." (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.)

Ira Glass on a similar theme

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM

Good quotation: "Not enough is said, about the importance of dropping crap."

A person named canoebuilder on hacker news? I thought I was the only one.

It's mostly a metaphor for early peoples who used the empty space they created in cut down trees for more efficient means of progress.

The literal sense does interest me as well, though. Where do you pilot your canoes?

Haha, yeah... I literally am building canoes. see our website http://kamanucomposites.com

I liked the comparison of studying the classics in the middle ages to "Alien Studies". Very revealing metaphor!

pg makes a point of devaluing the classics in his essays. I don't know why.

Let's assume there are consistent patterns to how people work, and these patterns are consistent because people forget about them. So, the best way to learn about the patterns are by reading the classics and history.

Now let's come back to the present day. People give this idea lip service, but no one really takes the classics seriously anymore. Because of metanarratives like evolution, we think progress happens automatically and that there is no intrinsic human nature. We don't realize this worldview is very recent and people thought it was a bad idea in the past.

Consequently, our worldview becomes a local optimum that limits us from looking for anything else. This is called hubris in classical literature. Think Oedipus.

"the best way to learn about the patterns are by reading the classics and history"

"ways"

I hate it when I put time into creating a good response and a grammar mistake makes my writing look retarded.

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