How to Write Usefully
February 2020What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should…
«Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.»
More from Paul Graham
Do Things that Don't Scale
July 2013One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build…
«the unscalable things you have to do to get started are not merely a necessary evil, but change the company permanently for the better.»
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
December 2014If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less likely it would be false.…
Good and Bad Procrastination
December 2005The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?Most people who write about procrastination write about how to…
Crazy New Ideas
May 2021There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very…
«When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence. But when a reasonable domain expert does it, the situation is reversed.»
Heresy
April 2022One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.In his excellent life of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was…
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Looking at how to make writing easier to read
«Writing text that can be understood by as many people as possible seems like an obvious best practice. But from news media to legal guidance to academic research, the way we write often creates barriers to who can read it. Plain language—a style of writing that uses simplified sentences, everyday vocabulary, and clear structure—aims to remove those barriers.»
The death of literature
We have fallen out of love with good writing
«The paradox of this mystic inner quality is that its depth gets expressed by what we think of as a superficial quality: style.»
How to Write Concisely
It’s not the end of the world if you use an unnecessary word now and then, write the occasional overlapping sentence, or tell us what you’re doing in a sentence before you do it. But the extra words…
«But your readers don’t necessarily need to follow the journey you took while you were drafting the document. They just need to know where you ended up.»
Why Write? - The Paris Review
“I’ve been collecting these theories of why writers write because so many writers have written about it.”
The Slide Deck That Changed My Life
How to make a Keynote presentation that will win hearts, minds and money