Paul Graham wrote an essay titled Good Writing (May 2025).
« I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right… Fixing sentences that sound bad seems to help get the ideas right. »
« 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. »
« If you have to rewrite an awkward passage, you’ll never do it in a way that makes it less true. »
« 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. »
« 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. »
« 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.»
« But what about liars? … 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. »
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