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Comment by kashyapc | Hacker News Reader

Excellent point on "Death of a pig" by E.B White. It's the perfect example of a timeless essay, without a "big scientific idea".

For others unaware of it, that essay was written in 1948[1], go read it in full. It starts like this:

"I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting."

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240227003736/https://www.theat...

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Would also like to mention that the Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B White is an all-time great book on non-fiction writing. It was required for my Newspaper Fundamentals class in college and I've used it so much since that the creases are wearing thin.

There's another fantastic book—On Writing Well—that is a recurring read for me. An aside—I was in one of the early programing bootcamps, The Starter League. My class was held in 37signals office. Jason Fried and some of the other 37signals designers were in this class with me. One day Jason stood up and answered a few questions. One of the other students asked him about books. He walked over to a closet and opened the door. There were hundreds of copies of On Writing Well. That's the book he'd gift to people.

That always struck me as interesting. Especially since he'd written (or co-authored) several books at that point.

Though, with respect to Strunk & White, Pullum's timeless takedown:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/50-years-of-stupid-grammar...

Ah yes, as Pullum timelessly put it, "To continue reading for FREE, please sign up". An un-walled version is (legitimately, so far as I know) at https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-file-manager/fil... .

[EDITED to add:] I don't know how close to identical this is to the Chronicle article; at the end it says "Adapted from an article written for The Chronicle of Higher Education"; my guess is that essentially nothing was changed, but I haven't tried to check.

Your link was the one I was looking for anyways.

It's a good read, but by its very nature invites the following sort of riposte. I'll indulge in just one.

> “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

The motivation is so that ponderous language like

> Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them

Might be edited to something like "Though many are mere platitudes, following the style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them".

The sentence, as written, suggests that the platitudes, specifically, as opposed to any which might be less uhhhh, platitudinous, would make your writing better. I don't believe this was the author's intent.

Yeah, while I appreciate the little classic, "Elements of Style", it falls short[1]. As you say, "On Writing" is indeed a better practical guide -- just by reading the first 80 pages, you get a lot of value out of it.

Another book I love is, "Towards Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb (there are several expensive editions of it with modified names, but any older version would do). I elaborated more on it here[1] in the past.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272968

That’s a really great endorsement. I had Zinsser as a textbook for a non-fiction creative writing class in university. It was one of the only textbooks I never had a compunction to sell. Haven’t read it since then, but your comment will make me give it a re-read.

I also love “clear and simple as truth” by thomas and turner.

Yeah, that's an excellent book, too. Thanks for reminding, I need to re-reread parts of it.

I want to be careful not to pummel a straw man, because it's sort of clear that Graham doesn't believe the Best essay must come from an exploration of science or of exciting new ideas (though most of the advice he gives is for that kind of essay). If I have a concern, I think it's about the chemistry his writing has with this community, how threads here will bleach it down to a game of prog-rock writing, trying to somehow outdo Darwin.

I cannot decipher your second sentence here.

I think that Graham's essays have a special significance to HN, and that the community here has a tendency to project things Graham says further along a direction of HN-think than Graham intends in his writing, so that you can imagine threads about how the only contenders for "Best" essays, like, prove P!=NP or something.

I'm mostly motivated to comment by that phenomenon, not by the plain text of Graham's essay.

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