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Good Writing
May 2025
There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can
sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice,
flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about
important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of good
would be unrelated, like the speed of a car and the color it's
painted. And yet I don't think they are. I think writing that
sounds good is more likely to be right.
So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems
both preposterous and true. Let's examine it. How can this
possibly be true?
I know it's true from writing. You can't simultaneously
optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far enough,
you always end up sacrificing the other. And yet no matter how
hard I push, I never find myself having to choose between the
sentence that sounds best and the one that expresses an idea
best. If I did, it would be frivolous to care how sentences
sound. But in practice it feels the opposite of frivolous.
Fixing sentences that sound bad seems to help get the ideas
right. [1]
By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right
means developing them well -- drawing the conclusions that
matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of
detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of
saying true things, but saying the right true things.
How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do
that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years
ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes
when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example,
you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I
don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but
what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter.
You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing
worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I
always ended up with something I liked better.
I don't think this was because my writing was especially
careless. I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in
anything written by anyone and told them to make it slightly
shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to come up with
something better.
The best analogy for this phenomenon is when you shake a bin
full of different objects. The shakes are arbitrary motions.
Or more precisely, they're not calculated to make any two
specific objects fit more closely together. And yet repeated
shaking inevitably makes the objects discover brilliantly
clever ways of packing themselves. Gravity won't let them
become less tightly packed, so any change has to be a change
for the better. [2]
So it is with writing. If you have to rewrite an awkward
passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it less true.
You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could bear things
floating upward. So any change in the ideas has to be a change
for the better.
It's obvious once you think about it. Writing that sounds good
is more likely to be right for the same reason that a
well-shaken bin is more likely to be tightly packed. But
there's something else going on as well. Sounding good isn't
just a random external force that leaves the ideas in an essay
better off. It actually helps you to get them right.
The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read. It's
less work to read writing that flows well. How does that help
the writer? Because the writer is the first reader. When I'm
working on an essay, I spend far more time reading than
writing. I'll reread some parts 50 or 100 times, replaying the
thoughts in them and asking myself, like someone sanding a
piece of wood, does anything catch? Does anything feel wrong?
And the easier the essay is to read, the easier it is to
notice if something catches.
So yes, the two senses of good writing are connected in at
least two ways. Trying to make writing sound good makes you
fix mistakes unconsciously, and also helps you fix them
consciously; it shakes the bin of ideas, and also makes
mistakes easier to see. But now that we've dissolved one layer
of preposterousness, I can't resist adding another. Does
sounding good do more than just help you get the ideas right?
Is writing that sounds good inherently more likely to be
right? Crazy as it may seem, I think that's true too.
Obviously there's a connection at the level of individual
words. There are lots of words in English that sound like what
they mean, often in wonderfully subtle ways. Glitter. Round.
Scrape. Prim. Cavalcade. But the sound of good writing depends
even more on the way you put words together, and there's a
connection at that level too.
When writing sounds good, it's mostly because it has good
rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of
music, or the meter of verse. It's not so regular. If it were,
it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to
match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different
shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But
other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more
complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.
An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way
dialogue is cleaned up conversation, and a train of thought
has a natural rhythm. So when an essay sounds good, it's not
merely because it has a pleasing rhythm, but because it has
its natural one. Which means you can use getting the rhythm
right as a heuristic for getting the ideas right. And not just
in principle: good writers do both simultaneously as a matter
of course. Often I don't even distinguish between the two
problems. I just think Ugh, this doesn't sound right; what do
I mean to say here? [3]
The sound of writing turns out to be more like the shape of a
plane than the color of a car. If it looks good, as Kelly
Johnson used to say, it will fly well.
This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas,
though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way
and then write about them afterward -- for example, if you
build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a
paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the
work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though
the ideas are good. The writing in textbooks and popular
surveys can be bad for the same reason: the author isn't
developing the ideas, merely describing other people's. It's
only when you're writing to develop ideas that there's such a
close connection between the two senses of doing it well.
Ok, many people will be thinking, this seems plausible so far,
but what about liars? Is it not notoriously possible for a
smooth-tongued liar to write something beautiful that's
completely false?
It is, of course. But not without method acting. The way to
write something beautiful and false is to begin by making
yourself almost believe it. So just like someone writing
something beautiful and true, you're presenting a
perfectly-formed train of thought. The difference is the point
where it attaches to the world. You're saying something that
would be true if certain false premises were. If for some
bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed,
then immigrants really would be taking our jobs.
So it's not quite right to say that better sounding writing is
more likely to be true. Better sounding writing is more likely
to be internally consistent. If the writer is honest, internal
consistency and truth converge.
But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is
true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something
that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas
wrong too.
Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two ends
of the same thing. The connection between them is not a rigid
one; the goodness of good writing is not a rod but a rope,
with multiple overlapping connections running through it. But
it's hard to move one end without moving the other. It's hard
to be right without sounding right.
Notes
[1] The closest thing to an exception is when you have to go
back and insert a new point into the middle of something
you've written. This often messes up the flow, sometimes in
ways you can never quite repair. But I think the ultimate
source of this problem is that ideas are tree-shaped and
essays are linear. You inevitably run into difficulties when
you try to cram the former into the latter. Frankly it's
suprising how much you can get away with. But even so you
sometimes have to resort to an endnote.
[2] Obviously if you shake the bin hard enough the objects in
it can become less tightly packed. And similarly, if you
imposed some huge external constraint on your writing, like
using alternating one and two syllable words, the ideas would
start to suffer.
[3] Bizarrely enough, this happened in the writing of this
very paragraph. An earlier version shared several phrases in
common with the preceding paragraph, and the repetition bugged
me each time I reread it. When I got annoyed enough to fix it,
I discovered that the repetition reflected a problem in the
underlying ideas, and I fixed both simultaneously.
Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Courtenay Pipkin for reading
drafts of this.
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