Paul Graham

Key takeaways from 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… Open at source

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Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. It's easy to satisfy one if you ignore the other.

Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn't already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.

You can't ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can ensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the ones that aren't.

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Key takeaways from How to Write Usefully

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