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Writing, Briefly

paulgraham.com

46 pointswumi25 comments

Wow, you managed to find the one remaining page on paulgraham.com that hadn't been submitted before.

By accident. Stumbled across this essay via another site (Venture Hacks I believe), so I submitted it. Lo and behold, it hasn´t been done before.

I thought I submitted "the one remaining page" when I posted http://www.paulgraham.com/asterisk.html

wumi, you win.

You guys make me want to write a bot to crawl his site and just submit every URL.

Would probably be funny until my account got deleted.

There is an art to what I did. Instead of enjoying Piccasso, you are trying to write a GIMP plugin for cubism effect. It is not the same, dude. ;)

Never been linked to anywhere but the index: http://paulgraham.com/scient.html

OK, I'll be the first to admit... I had to look up the meaning of "anaphora".

So you're not using aif or awhen I bet.

    a·naph·o·ra [...]
        –noun
        1.  Also called epanaphora. Rhetoric. repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more successive verses, clauses, or sentences. [...]
        2.  Grammar. the use of a word as a regular grammatical substitute for a preceding word or group of words [...]
        3. (sometimes initial capital letter) Eastern Church. [...]

Aif and awhen use meaning 2, while this essay probably means 1.

Interesting and quite useful. I have made so many false starts on starting a blog of my own, that I have lost count. Being a founder of a software startup, I know I have to start blogging sooner than later, but (this may sound really weird) so far I have not had the courage. This essay will help me organize my thoughts and take me closer to "putting pen on paper"

Another added tip for writing and, this can be used for almost anything, is following the Statement Example and Explain format. (SEE) It is very English 101 but always helps, e.g., “I need you to change the font to bold” (Statement) “See this is how you do it <strong> my bold text</strong>” (Example) “ Once we make the change visitors will be able to read the text better” (Explain) Or “I love you” (s) “I think about you all the time” (e) “This is why we should get married” (e)

Here's one: If your essay turns into a list, use bullet points or numbers rather than a block of semicolons.

Otherwise, great stuff. I like that pg's advice for writing--create a first draft and iterate rapidly--is exactly the same as his advice for creating startups.

Create a first draft and iterate rapidly really ends up being a philosophy for almost anything that can be lumped into "design". It's a great message to espouse.

True -- but that way it's just another of ten billion How To blog posts. This way, it's a tight, rapid fire (anaphora ftw) Essay.

Amen to that. I had to fight hard to finish the article.

After the first 2 items of the list I realized it was indeed a list until the end: from that point, knowing the structure of the article made the reading even easier.

Interesting that most of the advice can be well applied to programming also.

Nice ending! Poetic even :)

Don't be afraid to use long sentences.

There are no rules, only guidelines.

If, and only if, you can craft one that makes sense and is coherent.

He uses too many semi-colons for my liking.

Most modern English speakers seem to use way, way fewer semicolons than they should; I'm not sure whether to blame this on education or if it's just the bar for publishing being lowered; nevertheless, the vast majority of people I've talked to don't know to use semicolons with coordinating adverbs (or whatever they're called) such as "however" and "nevertheless;" oftentimes they also don't know that comma-splices are bad; as an amateur Grammar-nazi, this general practice really irks me.

kurt Vonnegut was rather famously against the use of semicolons. it made me rethink their usage. these days i'm more likely to use two sentences to convey the same idea.

there are three ways to break up the flow of writing. . is to start an entirely new subject , is to stay on the same subject ; is somewhere in between, you're still on the same topic but have switched focus.

another way to think of it is conversationally. a period is a breath, a coma is a pause, a semi is a slightly longer pause.

It's something I've come across in older writing (ie >50 years ago). As mentioned above, the modern thing to do is to use bullet points.

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