# Good Writing

I thought this was an interesting post. It's central claim[^yqy8g7df7mq] is that writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. In the following sense:

> 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.

And with the caveat that we're talking about writing that's used to develop ideas.

> 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.

I've always assumed that Graham's claim is wrong. That how good a piece of writing *sounds* is separate from how good the underlying ideas are. Along the lines of what Graham himself says thirteen years ago in [Writing and Speaking](https://paulgraham.com/speak.html):

> I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a good speaker.

But Graham's claim in Good Writing is one that is important if true, so as someone who likes to write, it caught my attention. To the extent that he's right, I'm going to try harder to make my writing sound good. Especially when I [write to think](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SKQmvZMTY6zQf3Ktc/writing-to-think).

More broadly, ideas are important. Engineers discuss the ideas they have for building more efficient energy grids. Epidemiologists discuss the ideas they have for predicting disease outbreaks. Startup founders discuss the ideas they have to build unicorns. If focusing on how your writing sounds makes the underlying ideas better, that's something that all knowledge workers should probably pay attention to.

I'm not sure that I buy Graham's claim though. Well, I buy it to some degree, but I think it needs more nuance. I'm sure that there are some situations where spending time improving eg. your sentence structure will in fact improve the underlying ideas. But how often? And to what extent? What types of magnitudes are we talking about here?

And what about opportunity cost? Spending time searching for words that sound more poetic might be helpful, but I think the question is whether there are other ways you can spend your limited time that would do more to improve the underlying ideas.

I have a hard time thinking about all of this without concrete examples though. I wish the post included some sort of case studies, where the original flow was problematic and fixing the flow also improved the underlying ideas. Having those sorts of [specific](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XosKB3mkvmXMZ3fBQ/specificity-your-brain-s-superpower) instances to latch on to would be really helpful.

But despite having some skepticism, I also think Graham's claim is plausible. Pair that with being "important if true", moving forward[^sf2bwbvs9v], it's something that I'm going to play around with and keep an eye on.

[^yqy8g7df7mq]: Perhaps more interesting than his central claim is the following comment Graham made in a footnote: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 surprising how much you can get away with. But even so you sometimes have to resort to an endnote. 

[^sf2bwbvs9v]: In this post I tried a little bit harder to make things sound good than I normally would. Maybe an extra ten minutes of effort. I definitely wouldn't claim that the flow in this post is exceptional or anything.On that note, I think motivation is an important consideration. Sitting around trying to find the right words can be frustrating, especially when you've been trying your hand at it for a while and they don't seem to be coming. This needs to be considered. I think there's a failure mode at play here where you up your standards too high and end up avoiding writing because of it, making you worse off than you otherwise would be.