[HN Gopher] Good Writing
___________________________________________________________________
Good Writing
Author : oli5679
Score : 118 points
Date : 2025-05-24 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| cainxinth wrote:
| There was a line in the (not great) Ferrari biopic where Enzo is
| explaining his philosophy and says:
|
| > In all life, when a thing works better, usually it is more
| beautiful to the eye.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| What how does that concept work in poetry or lyrics, for example?
| Something could be completely fictional (and artificial) and
| still be exceptionally well written.
| keiferski wrote:
| It doesn't, really, which is okay, because the subtext here is
| that Pg is writing about essayistic writing, or more
| specifically, communicating ideas in the form of written words.
| I don't think he is commenting on "good writing" in the sense
| of a novel or line of poetry.
|
| _Moby Dick_ is my go-to example of a novel that is incredibly
| well-written, but I wouldn't say it's particularly clear or
| straightforward in its presentation of ideas.
|
| An example, if you haven't read it:
|
| _"The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails,
| whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges,
| through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds,
| unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to
| the iron way!"_
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Maybe the first paragraph could have been written less
| sweeping?
| bigyabai wrote:
| I don't think Paul knows that he's writing rhetoric and not
| prose.
| robertpateii wrote:
| Imo, that quote is clearly a train metaphor. But to your
| point, I do vaguely recall being unclear plenty when I read
| Moby Dick decades ago.
| keiferski wrote:
| True, this quote is just one of my favorite from the book
| and I wanted to share it. There are definitely other more
| difficult lines in it.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I find that Moby Dick passage to be quite clear and
| straightforward. It uses metaphor, but a simple and direct
| one.
| munificent wrote:
| My weird take on fiction is that much of the appeal is that the
| entire story is just an elaborate analogy to explain true facts
| about human nature that are otherwise hard to make clear.
|
| You could try to write a non-fiction essay about how being a
| parent sets you up for potentially the worst pain and most
| intense grief you can imagine but yet also the experience is so
| meaningful and rewarding that it's worth it. But that essay
| would be abstract and wouldn't really hit you in the gut.
|
| Or you could read Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" or watch
| Arrival which is nominally completely made up about aliens that
| don't experience time like us and it will convey the same
| concepts more effectively than an essay could.
| robertpateii wrote:
| Fiction still has ideas to get across and internal
| consistencies it needs to maintain to be enjoyable and get
| those ideas across.
|
| When characters do things that beggars belief built upon their
| previous actions, it can ruin the whole story.
|
| Even poetry has some truth and concept inside the poet to which
| it's bound.
| jdoliner wrote:
| Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.
| kazinator wrote:
| Wow, is this ever out of touch. People are currently confronting
| smoothly delivered, glib sentences that are wrong at an
| unprecedented scale due to widespread adoption of language model
| AI.
| ahmadtbk wrote:
| Good writing has the benefit of helping others for many decades
| and centuries. That's a realization I came to recently. My goal
| now is to write a variety of essays, articles, and books on
| topics that I excel in.
| fidotron wrote:
| There is a famous line about legal writing: "There are two things
| wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other
| is its content." [1]
|
| PG going for the "they're connected" angle, not too convincingly
| as shown mainly in the paragraph starting "This is only true of
| writing that's used to develop ideas".
|
| [1] https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3774-legal-prose-
| and...
| antirez wrote:
| I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more
| right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about
| writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not
| shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities)
| can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more
| signal.
|
| I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and
| that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no
| kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe
| Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main
| newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that
| with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year,
| to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an
| English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this
| comment):
|
| "Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns:
| one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not
| assigned to Borges".
|
| This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was
| not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of
| style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of
| the times, but having translated a few of his writings in
| Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home
| but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind
| of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via
| a very different process that only the best writers are able to
| perform and access.
| qsort wrote:
| I think the intended implication goes the other way:
|
| "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."
|
| In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and
| lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella
| Rossa.
|
| Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the
| international audience :)
| antirez wrote:
| Yep I guess that's true, I often times see that the best
| papers are written better and make broader cultural
| references. However, recently, with all the non mother tongue
| English speakers around, especially from China, I often see
| great ideas exposed in a bad way. So this link starts to be
| weaker and weaker.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really
| strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them
| eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of
| writing, that's in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong
| axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti
| quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the
| existence of language barriers rather disprove that
| hypothesis.
|
| Regarding the nobel prize quote above, while it provides some
| food for thought, I'm not sure what point exactly it is
| intended to make.
| antirez wrote:
| Sure, it's not a 1:1 map, but often who does an excellent
| job, does it along all the line: form, content, and the
| best papers are even shorter normally... They don't have to
| justify with many pages the lack of real content.
|
| About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most
| powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of
| things, something that ancient greeks knew very well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
| layer8 wrote:
| I was responding to "the converse: something that seems
| clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong
| too."
|
| About the nobel prize quote, it isn't that powerful to me
| because I don't really know what it wants to say, and it
| didn't lead me to any notable insight either. But maybe
| that's just me.
| saltwatercowboy wrote:
| Perhaps one sniff test for bad writing is presence of a
| link to the Wikipedia page for rhetoric.
| antirez wrote:
| Pontiggia sometimes explained parts of other writers just
| using rethoric figures, and showing how their application
| provided new insights into things and concepts.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| > Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate
| with having a talent for expressing them eloquently?
|
| It's about the process, not the talent. When you've
| carefully thought through and refined an idea to understand
| whether it makes sense yourself, that usually provides a
| lot of guidance on how you can express the idea eloquently
| to others. You know the questions they'll have and the
| answers they'll find satisfying, because you already went
| through the same process. When you're just tossing out your
| first half-baked impression, it's a lot harder to
| communicate it well, although some people do have the
| orthogonal talent of making it up on the fly.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I can't understand why it would be at all safe to conclude
| this. In any other field, you certainly wouldn't conclude
| that good visual design, attention to detail, craftsmanship,
| etc. indicates anything about the factual or moral
| correctness of the beliefs of the creators. Do the most
| beautiful and expensive churches indicate the most moral or
| theologically correct religious groups? Do the best designed
| uniforms tell you something about the wartime behavior of
| soldiers or the military policy of the country? Do the
| pharmaceutical companies with the best produced television
| advertisements have the best intentions and products backed
| by the best medical research?
| pdonis wrote:
| You have it backwards. PG agrees that you can't conclude
| from the fact that something is beautiful that it's also
| right--he says "we can't safely conclude that beautiful
| writing is true".
|
| What PG is saying is that if something is ugly, you _can_
| conclude that it 's most likely wrong as well.
| skybrian wrote:
| You can't safely conclude that either. It could be a
| hastily-written rough draft. It could be the result of
| effort, but written by someone who isn't fluent in
| English.
|
| Attention to detail is a signal of quality, but these
| things are just heuristics, not reliable truths.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> It could be a hastily-written rough draft. It could be
| the result of effort, but written by someone who isn't
| fluent in English._
|
| The article says it is ruling out both of these
| possibilities, as other posts elsewhere in this
| discussion have already pointed out.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Yes, I understand what he is saying and it's precisely
| what I am disputing.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I understand what he is saying and it's precisely what
| I am disputing._
|
| I don't see how. Your post was disputing the claim that
| good design, craftsmanship, beauty, etc. are signs of
| correctness. And that's _not_ the claim PG makes in the
| article. Your post never disputed the claim PG _did_
| make, which is that _bad_ design and craftsmanship,
| ugliness, etc., are signs of _lack_ of correctness.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _In this sense it 's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad
| and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in
| Palombella Rossa._
|
| Yes, if you use some disfavored group's vernacular, there's a
| decent chance you also use their cultural values.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad
| and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in
| Palombella Rossa.
|
| Nonsense. I've known many writers who are wonderfully
| eloquent at transmitting their essential message well with
| text, but fumble their way through live discourse as if they
| were high-schoolers in their first classroom presentation.
|
| Some people just communicate better by certain means, and
| with writing, there's a breathing space that some can't
| manage with speech, in which you can better organize your
| otherwise interesting ideas.
| yojo wrote:
| Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some
| particularly crude alien invaders:
|
| "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks
| don't."
|
| He could have written something like: "The blocky ships hovered
| seemingly in defiance of gravity."
|
| Instead he picked a phrasing that's intentionally a little hard
| to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to
| get the joke, and remembers it.
|
| Paul's style of removing all friction might help the concepts
| slide smoothly into one's brain, but as antirez points out,
| they're less likely to stick.
| antirez wrote:
| Great example, love this.
| sctb wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas,
| though.
|
| Descriptive writing, especially for fiction, seems out of
| scope.
| kaiwenwang wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Check out Keynes or 1950s American writing such as https://hi
| story.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950v01/d8....
| not_maz wrote:
| _Paul's style of removing all friction might help the
| concepts slide smoothly into one's brain, but as antirez
| points out, they're less likely to stick._
|
| That's fine. The ideas transmit, the words are forgotten. He
| doesn't need to use memorable sentences if he's saying what
| he's trying to say.
|
| Paul Graham is a very skilled communicator. He's not a
| writer's writer like YKW, but he doesn't need to be.
| dang wrote:
| To me the first sentence sounds much better than the second,
| so by pg's standard it's better.
| not_maz wrote:
| Paul Graham is a very good writer, but one of the things I
| admire most about him is that, when he happens upon a truly
| excellent writer, he doesn't show the jealousy for which
| writers are infamously known. There has never been a case of a
| truly excellent writer being penalized, harassed, and
| eventually banned here.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I find Paul Graham's writing style to be a bit off. I think he
| is too overly reductive and simplistic in his use of language
| and imprecise in his choice of words, and I genuinely don't
| understand the praise for his writing. You should read his work
| because these are the thoughts of a highly influential VC, not
| because they are gems of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
| Sometimes a longer, more nuanced word has all the right
| connotations, and sometimes a more complex sentence carries the
| perfect rhetorical structure. Paul Graham's writing seems to
| ignore (or perhaps purposely eschew) such details.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Same. I always get the feeling his ideas aren't sufficiently
| thought through or communicated well enough to be actually be
| useful.
|
| On the other hand, I may know too much about what he writes
| about to benefit from it. Which means I'm not the target
| audience.
|
| And I don't say this to sound smart. I'm a generalist. I know
| a little about a lot. Plenty of people are far more
| intelligent than I am.
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| Yes I think I know what you are getting at. Although PG essays
| are great if the idea is new to you. But for this one I am
| thinking "yes I know" skim skim skim! I have experienced the
| same thing. Anyone who has has their writing edited probably
| has.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I wouldn't phrase it exactly this way, but this is an important
| point that I really struggle to get across. I regularly see
| proposals and such that are very challenging to reason about
| because of their writing. But when I ask for terms to be more
| rigorously defined, or for the document to be reordered into a
| more principled structure, some people seem to have a strong
| instinct that I'm just being difficult for the sake of it. I
| still remember one guy who insisted that I need to make a
| specific technical criticism or sign off, and absolutely refused
| to accept the answer that my structural feedback was intended to
| help us reason about the technical details.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...I find it a bit surprising that Paul Graham of all people,
| writing in May of 2025, managed to get through this entire essay
| without mentioning LLMs.
|
| Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his
| thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect,
| but probably much better than the median human--and they are just
| as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality
| ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is
| trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.
|
| So while I agree that for _humans_ , writing that sounds good
| tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent
| in all writing.
| pvg wrote:
| Most people don't want to spend much time reading 'median
| human' writing so the claim that LLMs are 'better', even if
| true, doesn't really say that much. We don't listen to median
| human music either.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > We don't listen to median human music either.
|
| Don't we? What about the music that plays in the elevator, or
| while you're on hold on the phone?
|
| Similarly for writing, I would imagine you read plenty of
| emails that are of more-or-less median writing quality. And
| yet, these emails may discuss pivotal decisions, where it is
| very important whether their arguments are logically correct.
| pvg wrote:
| Get a median human to write some elevator or hold music and
| see how that goes. There's an entire business of making and
| licensing such music which would not be the case if any
| rando could just crank it out.
|
| Emails, etc, are just 'communication but over text' - it's
| 'writing' in the very basic sense but it's not the sort of
| writing people concerned with style and quality care about,
| either as consumers or producers. Me talking to the cashier
| at the store is not 'public speaking', neither I nor the
| cashier care it's not the Gettysburgh Address.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis._
|
| No, they don't. His thesis is _not_ that writing that looks
| good--that seems plausible and convincing, like the output that
| LLMs often produce--actually is. He says explicitly in the
| article: "we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is
| true".
|
| His actual thesis is in the very next clause of that sentence:
| "it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that
| seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong
| too."
| envirogis wrote:
| I had the same reaction. I spend an increasingly large part of
| my day reading and being required to edit AI slop. Part of what
| makes that hard as well as annoying is that it is all
| reasonably well written and plausible. Just not factual. That's
| the real problem I think all of society is likely to face soon
| if not already. Not to mention the upcoming problem of new AI
| models trained on the internet of slop.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > LLMs are so good at bullshitting
|
| They are trained on it.
| kaushalvivek wrote:
| I feel the essence here is -- iterative writing improves both the
| prose and the core point.
|
| When you write well, you iterate. When you iterate, you improve
| both the prose and the core point -- because you crystalize ideas
| further.
|
| This makes improvements in these seemingly perpendicular
| directions counterintuitively correlated.
|
| Ironically I found this specific PG essay uncharacteristically
| obtuse. This could have been much shorter.
| luispauloml wrote:
| There are two sentences in this essay that I couldn't understand.
| Can someone help me?
|
| 1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way
| dialogue is cleaned up conversation"
|
| I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is
| the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up
| version of the other?
|
| 2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country
| were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."
|
| What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It
| sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy,
| but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?
|
| Also, did anybody else got confused too?
| gizmo wrote:
| - He means written dialogue. Think Plato.
|
| - It's an example of a statement that rests on a false premise
| erichocean wrote:
| "Jobs" is too large a category; many specific job categories
| have limited slots (e.g. medical residencies).
|
| But more importantly, slots at e.g. Harvard are limited. Seats
| at ball games are limited. Etc. Most things in life are, in
| fact, limited.
|
| Graham is purposefully misleading here, and he knows it.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Slots at Harvard may be limited but slots at excellent
| institutions of higher education are not. Seats at ball games
| are not. Medical residencies are only limited by fiat. That
| could be fixed if we wanted to. The problem is the artificial
| limit, not the people getting the limited placements.
|
| What people fail to understand is that immigrants add to both
| the supply and demand side. An immigrant sitting in a stadium
| seat is taking a place that could have gone to someone else.
| But their presence also drives the capacity to build more
| seats. More demand for higher education results in more
| capacity for higher education.
| raincole wrote:
| Conversation is when you talk to people in your daily life.
| Dialogue is something from books or movies.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| Dialogue and conversation are not the same thing, though
| they're related, just in the same way that stress and anxiety
| are related but not the same. The task of reading comprehension
| involves being able to track important distinctions between
| synonyms.
|
| The second is a counterfactual, and it is correctly deployed to
| help show the difference between a valid argument and a sound
| argument. Graham is saying that a good liar presents pleasing
| and valid but unsound arguments, or rather sophistry.
|
| I think your confusion here is from reading comprehension
| problems.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Counter point:
|
| systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy
| valuable nuance, and richness.
|
| - seeing like a state
| pvg wrote:
| Scott's 'legibility' comes with a very explicit consumer - a
| large power structure like a state. Written style is not like
| that at all - pg can't force to anyone to write in his
| preferred way nor is anyone obliged to like it.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| If you understand some area and would like to explain it and
| use writing as a tool, you need to make it legible to the
| reader. Good writing is distilling and simplifying and
| forcing things through an explanatory process that rubs off
| some of the rough edges while at the same time clarifying.
|
| That loses specific things. Understandability and nuance can
| be in conflict. Legibility is not specific to governments.
| pvg wrote:
| That's your thesis but it's not clear to me how it's
| related to those in _Seeing like a State_
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that "Seeing Like a State" legibility and
| writing legibility are totally different concepts that
| happen to share a word. State legibility is all about
| categorizing and simplifying to allow information
| processing to happen in a distributed fashion among a large
| number of bureaucrats. Writing legibility is about
| conveying information to the individual reader. A hundred
| pages of prose about a single person is incompatible with
| the former but can be a great example of the latter if
| written well.
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Perhaps ironically, I'm not communicating my point well.
|
| There's a book called 80/20 running and the concept is
| you should do 80% of your running running slow. To me,
| that's a very legible concept. It's very clear and small
| and easy to explain.
|
| I think his book is well packaged by having a title that
| condenses all of his thoughts into one little sound bite
| concept.
|
| But actually you know his advice about training for
| running is much more complex. And you know he puts
| together running plans and they have a thousand types of
| running and it's not always 80% slow running. Sometimes
| it's this, sometimes it's that. It's rarely exactly 80%
| slow running. There's a million pieces of nuance to how
| he would train people to run faster but to get the
| concept across to write it down, he makes it more
| legible. He simplifies it to 80% of your running should
| be slow.
|
| To me, and perhaps I'm learning only to me, that concept
| is very related to the concept of legibility in seeing
| like a state. You're taking the complicated forest with
| many different types of trees and you're simplifying it
| down to one uniform thing. That's much easier to
| understand and easy to track and communicate. 97 trees in
| this area.
|
| The same thing can happen to concepts. They have a lot of
| nuance and complexity but to write them it down so that
| they can best be communicated, you often need to remove a
| lot of that.
| idlewords wrote:
| Reading Graham's essays on writing always puts me in mind of the
| videos where Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA), or a Malaysian guy
| has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-
| ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226).
| hnhg wrote:
| He carries the self-confidence that billions of dollars in
| wealth can give you.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's really the self-confidence of a successful person. He
| doesn't need to prove anything to anyone at this point, so
| he's unafraid of criticism. There was another submission here
| recently ("Find Your People") that touched on that: be immune
| to rejection.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Uncle Roger reviewing fried rice recipes.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| Reviewing Jamie Oliver.
| TimSchumann wrote:
| It helps when you never question if, as in his own essay
| describing other 'bad writers' weaving falsehoods, you're the
| one lying to yourself.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Especially about your own significance.
|
| I think PG's essays are (mostly) well-written, and are worth
| studying as examples of persuasive rhetoric.
|
| But rhetoric has no morals and no relationship to truth.
|
| Persuasion is what salespeople do. Grifters, lawyers, PR
| firms, politicians, and CEOs all make a living from being
| persuasive.
|
| That doesn't mean you can trust them not to lie to you.
|
| It also doesn't mean flawed rhetoric means flawed beliefs.
| Implying it does is itself a misleading rhetorical trick.
| jamesdutc wrote:
| > Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice
| (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226)
|
| Of course, this video is just stupid accent comedy, but we
| should be careful not to draw too much from it. (Let's also set
| aside the specifics of making fried rice.) The implication of
| the section of the clip you linked is that the presenter
| (Hersha Patel) does not know how to make rice properly, and
| this is evidenced by her cooking it in too much water and
| draining it.
|
| But this is not correct.
|
| There are, in fact, many different varieties of rice, different
| cuisines that incorporate rice as a major component, and
| different styles of cooking rice. Cooking (certain varieties of
| long-grained? rice) in an open vessel, cooking with an excess
| of water, and draining the water afterwards is an extremely
| common and popular way to prepare it for use in some cuisines:
| e.g., https://youtu.be/TARO_R4cE24?t=420
|
| When this video first made the rounds some years ago, it was
| surprising to see how confidently people would weigh-in on this
| topic, despite demonstrating very little background or
| knowledge. (There's a big difference between saying "that's not
| the appropriate way to do this in this circumstance" and
| "that's completely wrong," and the former creates space to
| derive knowledge. After all, the dish in the video is a popular
| one, even in cultures that predominantly eat jasmine or basmati
| rice, and there are interesting variations in technique and
| flavour that arise as a consequence!)
|
| > Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA)
|
| I similarly do not understand why these kind of reaction videos
| are popular. There are slightly better versions of this format
| (e.g., https://youtu.be/DsyfYJ5Ou3g?t=182) but they are drowned
| out by this kind of fluff. What does one really gain from
| interacting with such criticism?
|
| Perhaps there is something to be learnt from these situations:
| ones where, equipped with just a little bit of knowledge, we
| derive unearned confidence, and use this confidence not to
| venture forth more boldly in search of knowledge, but to
| convince ourselves of our own superiority.
| not_maz wrote:
| Paul Graham is a good writer. He's not an elite-tier writer's
| writer like "the dead guy" who's not actually dead, but he's
| still better than 99% of business executives, and he's better
| in the skills that businessmen want.
| tptacek wrote:
| Look, anything that gets HN people to write second drafts of
| comments, I'm fine with it. I mean... no, ok, just going to leave
| it there.
| gist wrote:
| Writing wise I have a great deal of respect for you (and other
| top commenters) because you don't have people edit and review
| what you say you just write it (and take lumps or accolaydes).
|
| Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact
| that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to
| publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same
| comment before).
|
| I (as most people do) write clients every day with proposals or
| results or reports. Nobody reviews my writing first and the end
| recipients they either like what I say and pay me money and
| refer others to me or they don't. I certainly don't have the
| time to perseverate over the perfect phrase or paragraph '50 or
| 100 times' but yet I get results more often than I don't.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think, as is often the case, there is something to the idea
| in the post we're commenting on, but it's been taken way too
| far.
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| This is the essence of philosophy. Observe X, now argue
| that everything in the universe is actually X.
| chromatic wrote:
| If there's more than "good editing often improves writing"
| I didn't see it in the essay.
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| What is wrong with having someone edit and review? It is just
| feedback. If the writing itself is an assignment editing is
| normal. If the writing is part of another process maybe not.
|
| For fly.io I can see the appeal of unedited content as it can
| be rougher (as in breaks style guides and whatnot) and I like
| that roughness in blogs. E.g. you might get a British idiom
| come through or a more conversational style.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So, this would seem to be fairly easy to test empirically. Get a
| reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing, and use
| it on something where you know if it's true:
|
| 1) court testimony which we know (from outside evidence) is
| either true or not true 2) scientific papers which we know to
| have been reproducible, or not 3) stock pundits predictions about
| the future of some company or other, which we know with hindsight
| to have been accurate or not
|
| Much more convincing to me than any amount of good writing about
| writing, would be to have some empirical evidence.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Get a reasonably object measurement of the quality of writing
|
| There are objective features of writing, but _quality_ is
| subjective.
|
| Of course, as to the thesis of the essay, it is both trivial
| and uninteresting that people, including PG, tend to have views
| of the correctness of an idea and the quality of the
| presentation that are correlated.
|
| It is interesting that PG thinks that this is anything more
| than a cognitive bias to be cautious about, though.
| baxtr wrote:
| Maybe it's true that writing that sounds good is also more likely
| to be right.
|
| But I'm pretty sure this doesn't hold for speech.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Maybe it's true that writing that sounds good is also more
| likely to be right._
|
| That's not what PG is saying in the article. He explicitly says
| that you can't conclude this.
| vzaliva wrote:
| The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time, they
| often become convinced they can succeed at anything. Musk is a
| glaring recent example - and now Paul. I do appreciate his essays
| on tech and related subjects, but not for their literary merit.
| If I'm seeking advice on writing, I'd turn to actual writers -
| people who've earned recognition and acclaim specifically for
| their work in that field.
| ISL wrote:
| One can readily argue that Graham has earned recognition and
| acclaim specifically for his essays. They're part of what drew
| early founders to YC.
| tzury wrote:
| 100%
| ofcourseyoudo wrote:
| Impossible to decouple the quality (or not) of his writing
| from the fact that he had already sold Viaweb to Yahoo at
| that point. Surely that drew early founders to YC as well.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I've commented many times before how I've become a bit
| disillusioned with pg's writing over the past decade or so,
| because it always seemed to lack anything beyond a surface
| level of introspection. He always seemed to be pushing the idea
| that qualities that make a person great at startups are the
| most important thing in the world - not surprising given his
| industry, but to me many of his essays just felt more and more
| self-serving, while never commenting on (or, in my opinion,
| really even understanding) the real societal negatives that I
| think have been a consequence (admittedly unexpected) of the
| startup boom.
|
| But, in pg's defense, when it comes to his writing _style_ and
| the quality of his prose, I think he 's generally top notch,
| and even though I may disagree with him more often now, I
| appreciate the structure and clarity of his writing. Given how
| influential his essays have been, I think he's qualified to
| write about how his communication style makes an impact.
| intermerda wrote:
| He is the quintessential tech bro. His selective caring about
| "free speech" only when it serves to feed into right wing
| outrage was when he showed his true colors years ago. The
| recent essay on "Wokeness" just confirmed it.
| raincole wrote:
| Paul Graham's essays read like typical self-help books.
| Considering how popular self-help books are, I guess you can
| call that "good writing" for general population?
|
| [0]: a typical example: https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
|
| If you didn't tell me this is from PG I would think it's from
| some self help book.
| tzury wrote:
| Paul Graham doesn't moon-light as a writer, rather, writing is
| one of the core skills that made YC what it is.
|
| He spends months chiseling each essay because he understands
| that clear thinking is expressed through clear prose.
| Dismissing that craft because he also knows Lisp is like
| trashing Stephen King's storytelling because he can ride a
| bike.
|
| If you only grant "literary merit" to people who never shipped
| a line of code, your definition's too narrow for the real world
| --where ideas, not resumes, decide who we read.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| > He spends months chiseling each essay
|
| I like Graham's writing, and defend it elsewhere in this
| thread, but that has such an obsequious and somehow macho
| smack to it, wow. One imagines Hercules chiseling his abs. If
| that's what his writing does for you, fair enough, but it
| sure is intense.
| oulipo wrote:
| Paul Graham is spewing rightwing nonsense for a long time now
| lumenwrites wrote:
| I have learned about YCombinator, hacker news, Paul Graham, and
| startups in general through one of his essays. I was first
| blown away by the brilliance and clarity of his writing, and
| only then did I learn that he's a prominent tech figure.
|
| So many years later, I still haven't read a better writer
| (except maybe Scott Alexander). So, at least from my
| perspective, if anyone has the authority to write about good
| writing, it's this guy.
| graham_hater_66 wrote:
| Reminds of this classic tweet:
|
| "Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby watching his second
| movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this..." https
| ://x.com/afraidofwasps/status/1177301482464526337?lang=...
| gist wrote:
| > The problem with successful tech figures is that, over time,
| they often become convinced they can succeed at anything.
|
| I think at the core the problem (if you want to call it that)
| can be boiled down to the following:
|
| "I am smart. That's why I was successful at what I did. So I
| need to prove to myself and others that it wasn't luck it was I
| am damn smart"
|
| The problem with hubris is that if you took someone like Musk
| or PG and you kept them in some off the beaten path place ie
| not Silicon Valley, not NYC pick your hot location (and
| stipulate they couldn't move because of family or other
| obligations) and they weren't surrounded by others who were top
| notch (as a result of also being in the right place at the
| right time) there wouldn't be anything particularly notable
| about them.
|
| Having gone myself to one of those 'good' universities I will
| say that Paul being at Harvard would certainly amplify this
| type of behavior by being surrounded early on at a formidable
| age by accomplished members of that community.
| ryandrake wrote:
| When people become insanely rich, they tend to attract a dozen
| or so sycophants into their orbit who never tell them "no",
| never say they're wrong, and basically spend all their time
| praising and enabling them. Otherwise, they'd be out. It's not
| surprising that some of them start to believe they are always
| right and that they are good at everything.
| n2d4 wrote:
| You're saying that about Paul Graham, of all people? His
| Wikipedia page lists him as a "computer scientist, writer and
| essayist, entrepreneur and investor", in that order. He wrote
| various Lisp books before founding Viaweb, and arguably it was
| the essays that made YC a thing in the first place. He is
| arguably one of the best writers in the startup scene.
|
| I wonder if you're just unaware of all of this, or if you just
| have an axe to grind here?
| bilater wrote:
| I think he's put an order of magnitude more effort into writing
| than you
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Successful people outgrowing their jodhpurs and losing their
| reason is a thing, sure, but that does not apply in this
| specific case. Tech writing is still writing, my friend.
|
| Have you read ANSI Common Lisp? Or even the introduction to it?
|
| I have criticisms of Mr. Graham, but the man can write, and
| consistently. Some of the essays can be a tad too terse for me
| at times, but when he gets it right, his stuff can be
| exquisite.
|
| Another example that comes immediately crashing to mind is
| Donald Knuth - have you read any of his tech writing? It's
| glorious.
|
| Anyone who wants to claim there's a hard line between writing
| worthy of "literary merit" and tech writing is going to have
| their work cut out for them with those two already.
| fogleman wrote:
| Possible counterpoint: LLMs are notoriously good at writing
| plausible sounding ideas that are wrong.
| jxjnskkzxxhx wrote:
| Lol your response is even better than mine, thank you.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| "Plausible sounding" != good sounding in the way that (I think)
| PG is using it.
|
| LLMs produce plausible, wrong, and very _bad_ prose. Arguably
| evidence for his point, if anything.
| pvg wrote:
| Fire up an LLM and write a Malcolm Gladwell article.
| legends2k wrote:
| Paul clearly excludes non-native writers. I know excellent
| thinkers who struggle to express an idea in a given language that
| they're not fluent in.
|
| Another related point: I've seen geeks who're solid in thinking
| but terrible at explaining what they think.
| ajoberstar wrote:
| It doesn't seem like you're talking about the same thing the
| article is. Graham doesn't say "you must be a good writer to be
| a good thinker".
|
| > 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.
|
| Writers who have trouble expressing thoughts in a non-native
| language are not actually developing the idea in that language.
| That doesn't mean they are producing bad ideas, but it _might_
| mean they won't produce good writing (in that non-native
| language).
|
| I took the essay to be highlighting that if you use writing as
| a tool for thinking, clunky writing is likely to highlight
| places where your ideas themselves aren't clear or correct yet.
| The iterative process of refining the writing to "sound good"
| will help shape the ideas.
|
| This seems to be a commonly expressed idea in other forms. For
| example, when thinking through ideas in code, the process of
| making the code more "beautiful" can also result in a clearer
| expression of more correct ideas.
| DanAtC wrote:
| I know this is his site, but who here honestly gives a shit what
| Paul Graham thinks? If you do, touch grass.
| jmorf wrote:
| "It's hard to be right without sounding right."
|
| No. It's hard to sound right even when you are. And if you don't,
| you might as well be wrong.
| lutusp wrote:
| "Good writing" nearly always collides with something else, for
| example a writer paid by the word. Or a writer granted too little
| time to _compose_ prose, as opposed to merely _creating_ it.
|
| A shorter exposition is nearly always (a) better, and (b) more
| work. I'm reminded of Mark Twain's remark, "I didn't have time to
| write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
|
| A classic writing book, now nearly forgotten -- "Strunk &
| White"/"The Elements of Style"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style) -- famously
| exhorts authors to "Make every word count."
|
| An underlying cause is that people don't _read_ enough, before
| presuming to _write_. This results in malaprops like "reign him
| in", an example I see almost daily now. (A monarch _reigns_ over
| a kingdom, a cowboy _reins_ in a horse.) Examples abound, this is
| a common one.
|
| Even worse, I now see automatic grammar checkers making
| ungrammatical "corrections" (incorrections?) like replacing "its"
| with "it's," or the reverse, but in the wrong circumstances.
|
| But my all-time greatest annoyance are constructions like
| "Similar effect to ...", which in nearly all cases ought to be
| "Effect similar to ..." with copious variations, all wrong.
| Online searches discover that, in many such cases, the wrong form
| prevails over the right one.
|
| Someone may object that language is an art form without fixed
| rules, that seems right. But granted that truth, many popular
| word sequences sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| _Elements of Style_ is one of the most assigned textbooks
| around. It 's far from "forgotten."
| breckinloggins wrote:
| Didn't the ancients define "sophistry" as (in part) exactly the
| kind of writing one does when influence is more important than
| truth?
|
| It might be that it's hard to create sophistry accidentally in
| one's writing, but it's certainly a possible - and common -
| trick.
|
| The danger is when you convince yourself that what you're writing
| isn't sophistry... because - after all - it looks good.
| pdonis wrote:
| PG agrees that you can't conclude that beautiful writing,
| writing that seems plausible and convincing, actually is.
| Sophistry is writing (or speaking) that seems plausible and
| convincing, but is false. PG is not saying that's not possible.
|
| What he's saying is that writing that is ugly is highly likely
| to be wrong. Which has nothing to do with sophistry.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| In which Paul Graham (re)-discovers Aristotelian and medieval
| metaphysics and the unity of truth, beauty and goodness. Or maybe
| more pragmatic in the word of Andrei Tupolev, head of the Soviet
| design bureau of the same name, "An ugly plane doesn't fly"
| MinimalAction wrote:
| I do not agree with the premise of the article --- writing that
| sounds good is more likely to be right. I've seen enough
| beautiful lies, fictionalized versions of the truth, and cunning
| orchestrations of a string of well-woven sentences, none of which
| had any intention of revealing the truth, but of convincing the
| reader to believe it's true.
|
| I propose the following -- writing the sounds good manipulates
| the reader into thinking that it is right. Feels better to
| believe it.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| Also, this article is ironically long and quite vague for PG's
| standards. The writing doesn't feel sound enough to be right.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| And then you have people like Kant and Hegel who have both been
| criticized for their writing styles, but I would bet in 200 years
| time people would still be reading and studying them. And with
| Paul Graham they'd ask, "Who?"
| bee_rider wrote:
| He's like some startup guy or something, right? His blog posts
| are well written, and the arguments seem... I mean, fine. I
| think there's a third dimension here; in 200 years people will
| probably be more likely to talk about Kant or Hegel because
| Graham's subject matter is just inherently more ephemeral.
|
| But, most of humanity's endeavors have been ephemeral.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think a strong sense of confidence (perhaps overconfidence) and
| inflated self-worth are likely closely related to increased
| likelihood of success. "Those who dare, win" and all that.
|
| But I think most of the opinions and advice rich, successful
| people like to share is just a side-effect, not a productive
| output, of these traits.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Sometimes luck and starting position is far more important than
| skill in being successful.
|
| That's why a lot of advice from successful people is so varied
| and is not as helpful as advertised.
| throwanem wrote:
| End of the first paragraph and we're already in the weeds with a
| totally nonsensical and implausible thesis. Never change, Paul.
| kristianc wrote:
| Interested to know how much Immanuel Kant pg has read. Kant's
| whole project was about grappling with how the mind structures
| experience--and how language mediates, rather than transparently
| transmits, thought. You can never fully get to the thing in
| itself.
|
| I can see how re-editing can make the ideas more coherent within
| pg's frame of representation, but I'm struggling with the idea
| that it makes them any more true.
| Veen wrote:
| I would like to imagine that pg's obsession with pared-down,
| simple sentences is a post-traumatic stress response to an
| early encounter with Kant's prose.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Good writing comes from horny, hungry desperate artists.
| Everything else is content.
| r33b33 wrote:
| This is actually true. Also, the mentally ill. A model citizen
| (NPC) will never produce great art.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| While writing, you edit your writing towards both sounding good
| and having solid ideas.
|
| That's the entire essay's point and I largely agree with it.
|
| Its why I think current LLMs are bad writers, not because their
| prose or ideas are off, but AI generated writing does not have
| the same quality of robustness from ideas that are thoroughly
| vetted through the author's editing of it.
|
| At the end of the day, good writing takes a lot of time thinking
| through what you are really saying and standing behind it. LLMs
| cannot do that for you (yet).
|
| LLMs can certainly be a helpful tool, mostly by unblocking
| authors via creating prose, honing in on accurate expressions,
| researching edge cases and suggesting arguments or counter
| arguments.
|
| But the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful,
| well written point is something that is still far off.
|
| Of course, until the next research paper completely proves me
| wrong.
|
| Step 1. RLHF on real time edited documents Step 2. Profit??
| logic_node wrote:
| This essay nails it, clear thinking really does lead to clear
| writing. It's a good reminder that writing is less about sounding
| smart and more about being understood.
| andrewrn wrote:
| The point about end-notes being a mechanism to ease the strain of
| fitting tree-like ideas into a linear essay is lovely. It brings
| to mind David Foster Wallace's writing, which is obsessively end-
| noted and if you listen to his speeches, you can see that he
| basically tortures himself in sanding down his ideas, much like
| PG says.
|
| PG's ideas in here, to the extent that I agree with them (which
| is not fully), does break down for ideas. Example being:
| brilliant engineers who are incredibly capable at having ideas
| and executing against them but incredibly incapable of
| communicating said ideas. Their ideas are very true, evidenced by
| their ability to produce real results, but also oftentimes ugly
| when communicated.
|
| A final counterpoint is JFK's eulogy, which sounds amazing, but,
| after the initial emotional appeal wore off, I realized doesn't
| really have a strong unified thread running through it, and is
| thus forgettable in terms of the truths it ostensibly delivers.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E. Compare to "This Is
| Water" by DFW, which doesn't have the same epic prose, but is
| maybe the most true-seeming speech I've ever heard
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw. It could be that
| PG's ideas were never intended for spoken speeches, but whatever
| this is still an adjacent truth != beauty example.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A tree structure of ideas naturally fits into a linear essay of
| text, so I don't understand this. The opening paragraphs of a
| section of text are a broad theme on which subsequent
| paragraphs expand. Paragraphs also carry a similar structure in
| their sentences, and every great essay builds large trees of
| logical ideas within a linear rhetorical structure. A footnote
| as an expansion is a crutch: either the text of the footnote is
| important enough to appear on the page, in which case you
| should generally find a way to put it in the prose, or it is
| not, in which case you should omit it entirely.
|
| The only truly good use of expository footnotes is to expand on
| things that the reader might be interested in (and point to
| further reading), but are orthogonal to the main argument of
| the essay. They are not for expansion of the tree of logical
| arguments present in the body of the essay.
| twodave wrote:
| I think I agree with the central point here. I think the key
| phrase is "internal consistency". This is also very true of
| programming. It's difficult to build good software without having
| a handle on the subject matter (and/or a domain expert to get
| feedback from).
|
| But often writing is also a process of discovery. Maybe you are
| trying to write something that hasn't been written about before.
| This is like building software without a spec. You can still
| write well and be irrelevant, just as one can build great
| software upon bad assumptions and fail to sell it. This doesn't
| make it bad writing in its own right, but it also may not be very
| useful to anyone. In my opinion both software and prose should be
| produced for a purpose.
|
| Thus, if there's no meaning to it, writing, like software, falls
| pretty flat.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Oh Mr. Graham again. I'm not a fan. I tried to read along, I
| really did, and then I came upon this sentence:
|
| "But not without method acting."
|
| This is one of the most terribly written sentences in the English
| language I've seen since getting out of jail in January. It
| violates every reasonable convention regarding communication. It
| is terrible and please take note that a person who put this
| sentence out into the wild, without intentional comedy, is a
| fucking terrible writer.
| stevetron wrote:
| The web site, on my browser, is typical of so many I encounter
| these days: patently unreadable. Chrome in dark mode renders it
| white-on-white text. I press contral-a, and it can be read, but
| it is still not easy.
| bsaul wrote:
| In french we have this very old expression : "ce qui se concoit
| bien s'enonce clairement". "what is well understood will be
| clearly phrased".
|
| It's been consistently used by parents and teachers since the
| 17th century, so i guess there must be some truth to it.
| antithesizer wrote:
| Lacan developed the idea of "deferred understanding" in his
| clinical practice and (infamously) deployed it in his teaching
| as well. It sounds a little suspicious at first, but it's not
| difficult to grasp what it is or why it might be beneficial in
| certain contexts where repression is faced. For example, it's a
| cliche on the left that far more people like the idea of
| socialism when it's described to them piecemeal without being
| labeled as such than would be willing to endorse "socialism" by
| name. Drawing out that tacit endorsement is a matter of
| "deferring understanding"--bypassing someone's resistance to an
| idea they don't understand well, but nevertheless have strong
| feelings about, by introducing them to it in a somewhat
| confusing way, so that they come to understand it better before
| they realize what exactly it is that they're coming to
| understand. In Lacan's approach understanding is a specific
| process with its own benefits and drawbacks, rather than the
| universal purpose of all communication, nor beneficial for
| every purpose communication might be engaged in to pursue.
| Confusing writing is like the proverbial knife that can be used
| to injure or, in the hands of a surgeon, to heal. This is why
| art students sometimes practice drawing images that have been
| turned upside down, so that they can focus on the details that
| are there in front of their eyes without being distracted by
| their own comprehension standing in for the colors and shapes
| actually present: "this is an image of a cow and I know what a
| cow is supposed to look like, so once I have recognized that it
| is a cow, there is no longer any need to keep looking." One of
| the big leaps that art students make is in learning to
| rigorously look at what they're drawing beyond merely seeing
| and recognizing what it is, which is the usual everyday way of
| looking. In the same way Lacan taught his students to
| rigorously listen to their patients and all the little oddities
| in the way they describe their problems that might otherwise be
| dismissed out of hand by a less attentive doctor who too
| quickly decides they know what is going on. This way they might
| avoid being fooled by their own understanding before they've
| had a chance to engage with the irreducible complexity and
| uniqueness of this or that specific neurosis. Understanding is
| not always the right tool for the job, or at least not the
| right tool for every step of every communicative job.
| moogly wrote:
| Isn't that the same thing as the oft-repeated "if you can't
| explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough", which
| is a saying I really, really, really dislike a lot, because
| understanding is one thing, and transferring that understanding
| is a skill unto its own.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A similar idea in English is David McCullough's quote, "To
| write well is to think clearly."
| roxolotl wrote:
| > I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.
|
| This is a wild belief to hold in the post truth age of bs
| generation machines.
| antithesizer wrote:
| Marx wrote the following about Proudhon:
|
| >M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly
| misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a
| bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German
| philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad
| philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest
| French economists. Being both German and economist at the same
| time, we desire to protest against this double error.
|
| I don't know if Paul has much of a reputation as a technologist
| among tech lay people, but this quote reminds me of Paul's fame
| as a thinker among tech people.
| hoherd wrote:
| This reminds of this cognitive bias
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme-as-reason_effect
| r33b33 wrote:
| TL:DR: Writing is rewriting.
| voidhorse wrote:
| pg is an expert at cranking out vapid, insubstantial pieces of
| writing that the gullible eat up as the pronouncements of genius.
| If I actually wanted to be known as a _writer_ the last person I
| 'd consult for advice is Paul Graham.
| blast wrote:
| > If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth
| converge.
|
| Can't one be honestly mistaken?
| doodaddy wrote:
| For all the writing there is about writing, Orwell's six rules
| have yet to do my wrong:
|
| 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which
| you are used to seeing in print.
|
| 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. (To add:
| short words are best, and old words when short are best of all)
|
| 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
|
| 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
|
| 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon
| word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
|
| 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright
| barbarous.
|
| Though there is one more that is deserving of seventh place: 7.
| Edit ruthlessly. "Murder your darlings."
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