←back to thread

Rules of good writing (2007)

(dilbertblog.typepad.com)
103 points santiviquez | 4 comments | 07 Jul 25 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.663s | source
Show context
raincole ◴[09 Jul 25 00:18 UTC] No.44505200[source]▶
Surely. Then you check Paul Graham, whose writing is influential in the world of startup, and find most of them are very long. Arguably unnecessarily so.

Perhaps it's a tech startup thing? After all programmers are not famous for their refined literary taste. And then you check the few LitMag that people care enough to pay for even when the content is available for free, like Clarkesworld or BCS. Then you find sentences there are generally not crispy and short.

It turns out there aren't rules. All guidelines are contextual.

replies(4): >>44505369 #>>44505430 #>>44505544 #>>44510069 #
treve ◴[09 Jul 25 00:58 UTC] No.44505369[source]▶
PG is not influential because of his writing though. His name is what gets his writing circulated, so I'm not sure if it's a good couter example.
replies(3): >>44505392 #>>44505477 #>>44506415 #
1. tomhow ◴[09 Jul 25 01:02 UTC] No.44505392[source]▶
He became well-known via his writing in the early-mid 00s; first his book about Lisp then his essays that became popular on Slashdot. His investing happened as a consequence of his writing.
replies(1): >>44506099 #
2. gammarator ◴[09 Jul 25 03:28 UTC] No.44506099[source]▶
His investing happened as a consequence of having available capital (and, certainty, forward-looking ideas about how to seed startups).

As to the writing, I think its influence (in terms of ideas) makes people overrate its stylistic quality. An enjoyable critique: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

replies(2): >>44506151 #>>44506298 #
3. tptacek ◴[09 Jul 25 03:40 UTC] No.44506151[source]▶
Paul Graham had an audience before he was an investor, which is the point Tom was making. He didn't get famous because of Viaweb; he got famous as an eloquent smug lisp weenie.
4. tomhow ◴[09 Jul 25 04:16 UTC] No.44506298[source]▶
pg writes [1]:

YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis came up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were seniors. Since they'd come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee.

The talk he gave was How To Start A Startup [2]. The reason he was asked to give that talk was not because he had money, but because he was a Harvard CS alum who had built/sold a successful startup then spent the subsequent few years sharing his knowledge/ideas via books and essays.

The reason Steve knew about pg was that he had read/liked his Lisp book and read/liked his essays on Slashdot.

Money was a necessary but not sufficient condition for him to start YC. Nobody would have applied to YC if not for his books and essays.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits

[2] https://paulgraham.com/start.html