Write Simply

What our opinions have in common is that they are not falsifiable. Unless we validate our conjectures with empirical evidence, we're really just sharing our taste.

"Oh no," you may say, "I have tested it, and when I write a longer essay, my retweets and upvotes decline." Very well, but the plural of anecdote is not 'data.'

Somewhere else on the Internet, there is someone with poetic, dense writing. When they simplify it, their audience dries up.

Writers and audiences find each other. If you try to measure the effect of your writing using only an audience that has selected your writing voluntarily, you are not measuring your effectiveness, you are measuring the degree to which your writing pleases people who already like your writing.

Absent a properly constructed empirical approach, we might as well be discussing hemlines and necktie widths.

'Write Simply' received an overall grade of 'A', and a very-approachable Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 5.9. It's said to be readable by 100% of the literate general public, which is only 85% of the full general public.

But, out of the 507 words and 38 sentences, 4 sentences were flagged as "very long" (over 30 syllables) and 15 as "long" (over 20 syllables).

Two 'hard words' – over 12 letters or over 4 syllables – were flagged, somewhat ironically: "unnecessarily intellectual".

Another trick I've found is making sure each word has unambiguous function. Here's some examples from other comments:

I had this impression recently while reading the Akbarnama, which is a sort of court-approved biography of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, written by his Grand Vizier -- Was the Emperor written, or was it the biography?

There are some cases in which your work demands a certain level of precision -- It could've continued like "in which your work demands are excessive", so you don't know if "demands" is a noun or a verb until you read on.

That "simple" writing lasts longer is disproved by many works of literature that have made their way to us through history -- It could've continued like "that simple writing is not so simple", so you don't know if "that" is a conjunction or determiner until you read on.

These are small things, but somehow the more I notice them, the clearer my writing becomes.

In good essays, the first and last sentence in a paragraph are often enough to summarize the points. It helps set the context, and makes it much easier for the reader to make a mental map of the overall idea. In this article, its "hiccup" style of writing makes it much harder to build a mental map. You can't predict where it will go until you fully read the sentence.

I usually enjoy reading most of PG essays. For this one, I don't enjoy reading it, and I stopped reading after paragraph 4.

1. People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing. Simple. Precise. Direct. It suits a technical literal mind to have less ambiguity and fewer flourishes.

2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.

Both of these points considered, I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace).

Both the technical field and the academic field (especially the humanities) are plagued with the notion that a complex and therefore "valuable" idea also needs to be expressed in complex terms to be considered valuable. Personally I believe that there's insecurity at the core of this, writers are afraid to mention things that are obvious to some readers, or afraid to use language that is considered too "simple" for the context (the efficiency of the message is not considered at all).

When it comes to technical writing at least, nothing could be further from the truth. I think anyone who writes for a living has a responsibility to not waste the reader's time, and "get on with it" so to speak. Focus on what's important and drop the rest. Almost any sentence can be made 10% shorter, which seems insignificant until you've made the entire text 10% shorter without losing any important messaging.

The man is undeniably intelligent, undeniably successful, and undeniably talented in business (and deserves huge credit for his contributions to the startup community).

But I just thing he's deeply wrong here. His simple writing style (and those that have inherited/copied it) is a detriment to the community.

It's the take of a (talented!) engineering mind. It's the same attitude that engineers often take with building digital products ("we don't need a designer - just present the UI elements simply and people will get it.")

Design is an art. Communication is an art. Writing is an art. Essays are an art. They have function, of course, and a simple straightforward style is, indeed, a style that is more functional for some.

But it also diminishes the joy of reading and purees it into the blandness of an economics textbook. I've tried to read his essays and yes, they have some great ideas, but they're just....bland.

They're like Soylent for the mind. Does it deliver nutrition to your body in an maximally-efficient vehicle? Sure. Do you enjoy drinking that Soylent shake?

shiver

EDIT: I should explicitly clarify something: I'm not arguing that one should use jargon or unnecessarily complex words in their writing. That's obviously bad. But there's a gap between the "simple writing style" and "enjoyable rich prose".

But that doesn't imply you always have to write simply. To often I've had friends who declare that writing in school is dumb and that we should always write simple and short. What's implicit in their view is that the text is not important, simply the message. The text should be merely a vehicle to convey the message.

I'd counter that the text is not extricable from the message. The form and style of the text colors the message and provides a signal of whom the author is speaking to and with what tone. I read a James Baldwin novel and I have the feeling of someone preaching to me with fervor and ferocity. I read a Paul Graham essay and I have the feeling of a drily funny, at times arrogant lecture. Like it or not, PG has a style that is his brand. It's a good brand, but to claim that it's purely simplicity is presumptuous.

I had this impression recently while reading the Akbarnama, which is a sort of court-approved biography of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. It was written by his Grand Vizier, the top political advisor, who was also a poet and translator. Indeed it would almost be unheard of for a high governmental official to not be deeply educated in aesthetic matters.

In any case, what immediately struck me was how beautiful the writing itself was. A bit wordy, at times, but in no way simple. Just one line I wrote down from the introduction:

Without the help of Speech, the inner world's capital could not be built, nor this evil outer world's civilization be conceived.

When political leaders put together similar books today, they are inevitably written in the most simple, banal language possible in order to maximize "idea propagation" and book sales. History is all the worse for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akbarnama

0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well

[^1] Here's the current link if you're interested so watch: http://byronm.com/13sentences.html (Thankfully re-discovered from one of PGs recent tweets: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1365425470318272514)

I can edit the above to;

> I do think specific words and long sentences have their place. They can be used to alter the flow of a sentence and make it feel more conversational instead of less.

But it's not the way I talk. I enjoy the way you can alter the cadence of sentence to impact the reader. For example: the phrase, "perhaps counterintuitively," is like a rolling hill the reader spends extra energy to climb but then engages them with the writer, "I'm interested, I like hearing about counterintuitive things" -- it's almost an invitation. You've set an expectation that something counterintuitive is ahead, so what's next?

Generally, I could use more of Paul's advice in my own writing. And that's the fun of writing, learning to write is a very organic process. But I'm sure everyone can find their own style somewhere in between simple, poetic, natural, or whatever makes you feel the happiest about your work.

[1] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/

Examples:

> Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry.

Notice how he's arguing against "write in a fancy way to impress people" and not "write in a fancy way". Most authors write in a "fancy" way to invoke a feeling in the reader. They don't add random words to "seem cool". Is spending a few more words to get the reader into a happy/sad mood "inconsiderate"? That's an interesting discussion, but in his quest to "write simply" he's just skipped right by it.

> It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.

What is evening happening in this paragraph? First he's questioning whether it's possible for "writing to ever be pure ideas" without explaining what that's even supposed to mean. Then he says that most people aim for that. And somehow the solution is "not filled with poetry". I don't understand a thing of this. He's implying so much without explaining anything.

There’s definite value to simplicity in writing. At the same time, like all principles, people tend to run with the idea and misapply it. There are some cases in which your work demands a certain level of precision that’s only possible using complex words or jargon. Not to mention, writing that’s a little complicated can be a lot more fun! There are several novelists, essayists, and poets who are a joy to read not because they express their ideas as clearly and simply as possible, but because they manage linguistic acrobatics that make us realize there are ways to use language we never thought possible—often it takes some extra work to understand such output.

*: Have never taken the time to verify this myself.

The assumptions aren't wrong, they're just not explicit. Because he is not stating them overtly, he's getting criticized for not writing like Nabokov or the grand vizier of an emperor.

Most of us will never be Nabokov, or the emperor's vizier. But we will write things for other people that they will need to understand and act on, and those are the people PG is writing for.

An equally good way to state his point would be to echo Feynman: if you can't write it simply, you probably don't understand it. So it's good advice for anyone beginning to write something new, and it's good advice for anyone new to writing.

Write simply first, if you can. And above all, write in a style that your audience can absorb.

"That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas."

(Why not: "Simple writing makes it easier to engage your ideas.")

"And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English."

(Why not: "Don't make your ideas difficult to understand.")

I think of "useful" language as a balance of precision, concision, and understandability. If I use terms that I don't expect my audience to understand, then my language not very "useful" even if it's the most precise and concise. Conversely, there's no reason for me to refrain from terms which I expect my audience to understand if using them makes my language more precise or concise.

Thinking about the entertainment perspective and e.g. the journalists and bloggers I like, I think it's pretty similar to how we perceive music. I remember a paper from quite a few years ago that found (through fMRI) that we most enjoy music that our brain can mostly predict, but sometimes it would mispredict/would be wrong about the next few notes that follow. It's a balance.

Non trivial writing must be similar. I.e. it may not be about music, but entertainment: it should be somewhat in line with what you expect but at the same time throw challenges at you. It should make you work at an enjoyable level.

What he says about ageing, OTOH, is probably pretty universal. There is some debate in my country (Hungary) about the literature curriculum in elementary and high schools. Traditionally children are supposed to read XIX and early XX century novels from some of our great writers. This hasn't changed since I went to school decades ago. I remember hating these. Most of them were very hard to follow, very hard to decipher the story from the complex text. I guess what happened is that what they were writing was challenging to the level of being entertaining to their contemporaries (just like it is with today's writers, of course) but then the change in the language made it too challenging for most of us (at least the young, untrained minds).

That blog post is too long for the ideas it conveys (kinda ironic?). Here are some things I found tiring to read:

"There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means "leap into the mouth." My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there."

^ This analogy is distracting and not required to communicate a simple concept.

"It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry."

^Just delete this. What are you trying to say here?

"It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry."

^I don't understand this analogy. Long train I am trying to carry behind me? That is a ridiculous and distracting image you have put into the readers mind.

"If the friction of reading is low enough, more keep going till the end."

^This is an obtuse and awkward way of saying: "People are more likely to read things they easily understand"

"Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job."

^ Where did chairs come from?

But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to."

^ Delete, doesn't add any value tbh

That's a great point.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/arts/writers-writing-easy...

You're already hypocritical - readers don't want to 'engage' with writing. People don't want to 'engage' at all. This is not an ordinary way of talking about things outside a pretty niche circle of VCs and marketing managers.

Choose what to read and who to associate with as well as it will strongly influence your own language :)

He opposes simple to "fancy", but the opposite of simple isn't just "fancy", that's, well, a simplification. The opposite of "simple" writing may be: "rich" writing, "complex" writing, none of which are particularly problematic for Graham's goal provided that they're paired with enough clarity.

That "simple" writing lasts longer is disproved by many works of literature that have made their way to us through history, most of which, by the standard of this essay, could be considered complex.

As someone with a modicum of experience in the philosophy of language, I must also say that I do not look kindly on people who take for granted that there even could be such a thing as a thought without language, a "pure idea", since for all we know such a thing has never been observed.

Writing simply and learning how to present things in such a way that anyone can understand has probably been the most valuable skill for my career progression.

I have seen too many cases where technical/domain experts miss this and instead use words that only people who work in the same domain as them would understand. The result is that when they do a presentation at least half the people in the room have no idea what they are speaking about but are too polite to say anything.

I also live in a country where most of the population are not native english speakers and this has allowed me to understand that a lot of people think by using complicated language they sound smarter, which is the furthest possible thing from the truth. In one incident I actually had someone who liked to show everyone how smart he was ask me, if I can help him find a more complicated way/wording to say something in a presentation he was working on so he can sound smarter. My only assumption was that for him people not understanding acted as a giant ego boost. He was PhD, that was also lecturing at one of the local universities. I can only imagine that his students had absolutely no idea what he was talking about most of the time and I am sure he took great pride in it.

In university, back in Canada where I was born I had a similar experience when one of my math teachers started the year off by telling the entire class how he is very proud of his vocabulary. Needless to say on one of the tests he used a word that no one understood. After numerous students asked him the same question he finally got angry and announced to the entire class what the word meant.

Personally I encourage my team to do the following in every work presentation: 1. Pretend you are presenting to a friend or family member who has no idea about the subject matter 2. Any words that would be known by people who are either inexperienced or outside of your expertise should include a definition the first time you use it. It can be written or it can be verbal, but it needs to be there

The assumption is that the purpose of your writing is to argue for a particular viewpoint/stance/take on an issue in a sober way.

I don't believe the author is saying "write simply" if you are writing poetry or you are trying to inspire and motivate with emotion.

Most of the author's writings are dry, devoid of fluff, and to the point, which I think flows from embracing the thinking behind this piece.

Purpose dictates style.

Ah, the good old wrong idea that somehow language is a tool that can clone ideas from one brain to another. It doesn't work like that.

On the other hand, arguable the greatest sentence in the English language, the opening paragraph from Moby Dick is not written simply, yet Melville makes it flow.

"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodologically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball... I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

Vonnegut and Melville were great writers. Paul Graham is a great programmer turned businessman who likes to dabble at writing.

I would just like to reveal that the word "essay" comes from French verb "essayer" which means "to try".

This makes the phrase "trying to write an essay" somewhat tautological doesn't it?

I'm curious whether PG knows this little fact.

If language is like a 6th sense into a shared platonic realm of ideas, it wouldn't be unsurprising that PG is able to survey the concept of "essays" accurately without knowing its etymology.

YC was probably the first proponent of the X for Y type of startup descriptions, because the analogies are simple and give you a starting point to begin understanding.

The genre also matters a lot. For sure I think simple writing is the better choice for Graham's topics, but I think it's much more open for fictional writing, and that some kinds of non fiction essays also benefit from less simplicity (again, keeping in mind the distribution effect discussed above).

For instance, one of my favorite essays is David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water". It is not simple, but it is much more effective than an essay using simple language to make the point that we often don't realize the things that we are immersed in. But I come across examples of this by good writers who do not usually use simple language who I believe are usually more compelling than writers like Graham.

To write simply, in the way that Paul suggests here, and in the way most editorial softwares these days try to suggest/auto-correct our writings (gmail, grammarly, hemingway app etc).

That is until I found a guy called Alexander Cortes, a personal trainer selling fitness programs online.

His writing style and the philosophy behind is the exact opposite of the ideas above.

When I subscribed to his newsletter (read by many thousands) I was impressed with his style. It has typos, no punctuation and no writing order/rules of any kind that you might've got used to. But you can still read and fully comprehend it. Otherwise that many people wouldn't be following him (100K twitter followers: @AJA_Cortes). It's unique and makes his writing stand out from all the writers following same writing advice from the mainstream writing advice (which is similar to what Paul says in the article).

In this tweet thread Alexnder talks about his writing style [1]. Here's two posts from his blog [2] and [3] that I like and shows the style.

[1] https://twitter.com/AJA_Cortes/status/1250356145316712449 [2] https://cortes.site/the-protocol-for-rehabbing-a-bad-shoulde... [3] https://cortes.site/the-tao-of-bro/

On my website [1], I write for immigrants. I pick simple words, and I write simple sentences. I avoid idioms, rare words, and expressions. It's not very interesting to read, but it's easy to understand.

When I'm among fluent speakers, I'll pepper my sentences with idioms, and generally be more expressive. It's more fun to write that way, because I can pour some of myself into my writing. That's how I write most comments and blog posts.

However, one must be cautious as not to overdo it, and in the process alienate the reader with needlessly elongated prose. Though this writing style is entirely too common in academia - particularly in the philosophy department - it serves little more than to prove how full of himself writer is. Perhaps it is believed that this is how intelligent people express themselves, but the reader's energy is better spent on the underlying ideas than on the deciphering of each sentence.

[1] Typical example: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance

Another good one is George Gopen's "The Sense of Structure". It's less inspirational than Clarity and Grace, but it shows more hands-on how to construct sentences and paragraphs.

[1] or "Lessons in Clarity and Grace" or "Toward Clarity and Grace" – they are all substantially the same book

Communicating simply can leave vague generalities to a technical conversation or decision making process that allows for those involved to make the wrong assumptions; but if you take the time to give precision to the process you can remove those assumptions without harming the overall communication. One doesn't need to go in depth about how a decision tree works or a random forest works to explain the pros and cons of the process, and the assumptions made to get the results.

Writing simply in all cases is the equivalent of "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail," writing precisely is using a screwdriver when you're working with screws and a hammer with nails. Use the right tool for the job, sometimes simple isn't correct, and sometimes precision isn't either (elementary school algebra vs algebraic theory).

You can compare this with the writing of Patio11, which often seems to be the opposite extreme - chains of double negatives, obscure words etc etc.

https://digital.gov/resources/plain-writing-act-of-2010/

ruthless editing seems a pretty big factor in the writing well result.

'write like you are speaking'

depending on my purpose and audience, i will write the first draft and then deliver it verbally. at least for me, and i do tend to use far too many words in the first draft, that exercise leads to a much clearer second draft.

Especially the latter's "have a point" and "get to the point".

This is a big problem in churches. As a child and young adult I spent countless hours listening to sermons on Sunday mornings. At some point, I realized that many sermons were delivered without editing. Every week the pastor has to deliver a certain amount of content, regardless of whether they have anything valuable to say. As a result, at many churches what you get is a combination of plagiarism and stream of consciousness. At only a few did I find any evidence of editing, and at even fewer editing by another person. The difference in quality was immense, and I believe that to a substantial extent the growth of the church would be correlated with that factor.

I've only read first few chapters, but one of the core ideas is, apart from writing simply, to write concisely:

- If you can use one word instead of three to convey same idea, use one.

- Iterate on what you wrote, and ruthlessly eliminate words that don't add value.

It's illustrated with a real example where he crosses out a dozen of phrases from a short text: https://ibb.co/k62CkLR

It sounds extreme but I found this framework very useful e.g. when writing code comments, wiki docs, pull request info etc.

"How would it sound if somebody spoke it out loud?"

I've found that to be a very accurate way to check sentences for too much fluff.

Complex sentences just sound "off" when spoken.

Gregory Williams, author of the classic "Towards Clarity and Style", has a thoughtful rebuttal to these punchlines in his book's description (quoting an older edition):

This is a book about writing clearly. I wish it could be short and simple like some others more widely known, but I want to do more than just urge writers to "Omit Needless Words" or "Be clear." Telling me to "Be clear" is like telling me to "Hit the ball squarely." I know that. What I don't know is how to do it. To explain how to write clearly, I have to go beyond platitudes.

But I want to do more than just help you write clearly. I also want you to understand this matter to understand why some prose seems clear, other prose not, and why two readers might disagree about it; why a passive verb can be a better choice than an active verb; why so many truisms about style are either incomplete or wrong. More important, I want that understanding to consist not of anecdotal bits and pieces, but of a coherent system of principles more useful than "Write short sentences."

            • • •

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9445.html

Related: There was a post here a few days ago, where the author described 2 styles of writing: Writing start to end, naturally evolving, and working out of sequence, with many edits. She focus of that article was the author preferring the former. This article's author prefers the latter.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/acp.1178

I do however understand some of the comments saying that complex writing can be more artful. A good analogy, symbolism, or metaphor can go a long way to driving home a point in a more elegant way.

'Get to the point.'

As in, be concise, be clear, don't use more words than necessary and make your writing as simple to understand as possible.

Most writing exists to try and communicate an idea. The words used should be chosen to make that idea as clear as possible with the least amount of effort. (Apart from abstract poetry and such I suppose.)

Especially, if you're a tech writer.

Explaining complex things in a simple way is what you should aim for.

My #1 rule in writing: "if you can remove this word, and the reader can still understand what you mean then do so"

It changed the way I think about writing and goes into a bit more detail.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

EDIT: but in all honesty, my most read texts online are where I managed to remove as much words as possible.

The benefit of that is less noise. A problem in that is some people will get angry and blame you with hostility if they feel stupid and cannot follow the writing.

For other readers’ goals, other styles are more appropriate.

I guess everyone does that, to some extent, but this is literally the entire content of his piece. Hasn't he written something like that before? Why does he repeat himself every few years almost verbatim?

It was actually Blaise Pascal who said it. But the point is, that clear writing means removing lots of fluff.

Of course that doesn't imply the images and ideas are simple.

Similarly, I always thought Tom Robbins tried too hard to be simple and sci-fi.

A poor man's Vonnegut, and a Lazy man's Pynchon..heh..

Here’s a challenge: Communicate without the word “just” (as in “only”). Every time I write the word “just”, I find that there is a level of snarkiness behind it, as in this example.

~Just~ Avoid it.

Here's a place to start: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/punctuating-sentences.html

There are people who want to communicate ideas to as wide an audience as possible. Those people will instinctively use speech and writing in a way that is most accessible.

There are people who want to intimidate, or impress. Those people will hide behind jargon and lingo.

https://www.city-journal.org/thomas-sowell-race-poverty-cult...

https://medium.com/@solidi/the-one-about-blogging-cd9e65a205...

Write truly, not simply.

“The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.”

- Ernest Hemingway, Death In The Afternoon

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

E.g., analogy can be more efficient at this than plain description.

Sometimes, it's not just about the words, but the layout also.

"I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise –"

Emily Dickenson

When I was a teenager I was waiting in the kitchen for my mom to do something. I was in a bad mood and frustrated at having to wait, and and I resigned myself to staring at a bit of artwork my mother had recently put up - one of Andy Warhol's soup cans, and I determined that I would stare at nothing but this stupid picture until I found something interesting about it. After a moment or two I thought that it was interesting how tragic it was that in our society a master artist spent his time illustrating... soup cans.

Even as I was completing the thought, it struck me, like a truck, that this may have been exactly the intended message. That some graphic designer, who might have the soul of an artist, would have to earn a living doing the iconography on a soup can - for no higher purpose than crass commercialism, and even that wouldn't be original, but mass produced by machines and assembly lines - that in our society art itself was subsumed by capitalism.

That was the first moment that I realized art might be more than pretty pictures. In my own home office I have that same picture now. It reminds me of a lot of thoughts - the memory of that realization, striving against creativity enslaved by capitalism, and my own mother.

I bring this up because I think there is some sense in which "poetry" can separate writing from meaning, but there is another way in which poetry, or abstract expression like art, can encode meaning that simple and direct communication cannot hope to.

In college I heard a poem that went "The apparition of these faces in a crowd; petals on a wet, black, bough". I still don't know exactly what that feeling is, but I feel that way from time to time and recite that poem to myself when I do.

Poetry, or art, is inexact, but I think it is a lot closer to the pure idea form of communication. At least when it works.

"I apologize, I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have the time to write you a shorter one."

Is that the only reason to write in sentences of 10 words or more?

Instead of large words and greek symbols, possibly simplicity and compilable code.

Read your writing aloud.

Great writing is rewriting.

Keep it simple.

Why? Because it offers nothing concrete that can help a given piece of writing or your writing in general.

To illustrate, consider comparing pieces of writing:

A caveat: its hard to set up a worthwhile comparison in the absence of context, meaning external information that pinpoints the points of comparisons. To keep this short, I'll propose and discuss two common comparisons that writers and readers make. Feel free to challenge these instances:

1. Grading tests.

The purpose of grades is exactly to offer a reductionist evaluation that explicitly identifies the "better" answer. Please agree that grading becomes more difficult as one moves from true false, to multiple choice through short answer and finally to essay exams. Taken to the extreme, awarding a Pulitzer prize is a form of grading.

Under conventional definitions of simple, as one moves toward that extreme, isn't it difficult to justify ever calling the simpler answer better?

To me, the limiting case of this claim cribs from Occam's razor. The exact same answer, is better, if its shorter. Again to me, this is a difficult case to make, and ultimately is question begging, because it assumes the grader knows two answers are the same. (Notably to this hacker news community, there is a special case covering whether shorter code performing the same task is better.)

Being more sympathetic to the advice giver (and in line with other comments), the advice really concerns clarity, conciseness, coherence or something similar. It is not controversial to say that, all else equal, the answer possessing this quality is better. (Does this claim require the sameness stipulation? It would makes discussions of that quality more interesting.)

Thus, the advice is either wrong or mislabeled.

2. Revising writing.

Whether stated or not, revision is the signal target of all writing advice. To use the same framework, the author has two pieces, the current piece and a future piece. Of course, the author wants to make the future piece "better"

Leaving the point about clarity and its cousins aside, there are obvious cases where simpler is better. For example, the exact same piece is better absent extraneous material. Put another way, cutting the material only improves the piece if it is extraneous. You can see where this leads: more empty advice.

The bottom line here is that simple is underspecified. It has no value without a much, and probably impossible to formulate, stronger definition of simple.

So, trying to be constructive, what would, concretely, improve a given piece or your writing in general? Try this:

Instead of editing down a given piece - trying to make it simpler - write two pieces for the same context, maximizing the differences between each. This takes time, but it is a much better exercise, especially for the beginner, than going back and forth with the same piece.

I guarantee that having two pieces (not paragraphs, sentences, words or other subsets of the piece) will lead to a much better final piece, even novel, than having one piece and real or potential variants.

Next, and this is the best "piece" of advice, I have: have others read your work - as many as you can, and discuss it with them as much as possible.

TLDR Good writing takes work and conscious practice

> "When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool."

> "So you can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can safely use difficult words."

I can't understand why someone writing about writing simply is using a word like "flag" that is completely jarring and never used colloquially. While you can sort of surmise what it means from the context, I still had to look up the definition to confirm. And if it might be meant as a way to naturally teach someone the word, why is that lesson buried in an essay about writing simply? I guess I'll chalk it up to him not realizing how obtuse that word is, couldn't think of anything simpler like "wane", "fall", or "recede", and didn't want to change up the structure of that sentence.

I just can't imagine how that irony got past any editor.

Ah, condescension. The secret ingredient for a fantastic essay.

Simple and "saltintesta" writing is effective in many contexts. However, as any critic of Twitter culture can tell you, the style has an important pitfall.

Why do so many people react strongly to seemingly innocuous Graham essays? How does a prescription to "Write Simply" cause such strong emotional reactions?

I think it's in part because Graham writes in a simple and memetic ("saltintesta") style about not-so-simple topics. He writes to a very large audience is filled with readers who have a different latent perspective on that missing detail and nuance. Some of those readers fill in the nuance and context differently from how Graham intended. Unfortunately, they do so while barely noticing the words that got them there! Hence, conflict.

But can we really blame the reader for falling into this pit, when the author's goal was for the words to be barely noticed?

The comments on this article are a case study in the benefits and pitfalls of the Simple and "saltintesta" writing style. The style demands a lot of the reader's latent context. It therefore works well when writing to a group of people who are very much like the author but breaks down when writing across even small differences in culture, life experiences, or values.