TL;DR
Whom am I speaking to? Who is this going to help?
My Mind Dump.
Here are some take aways I’ve gotten from 3 of Paul’s essays:
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“Here’s a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language”
- Make a choice on what you want your goal to be: to feel smart, or to have the reader understand what you’re saying. Dropping your ego and humility will get you further
- complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you’re saying more than you actually are
- You don’t need complex sentences to express complex ideas
- the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak because they have less to prove, and partly because the harder the ideas you’re talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way.
- Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.
- Ask “Is this the way I’d say this if I were talking to a friend?”
- If you don’t have friends, then how can you expect to contribute to mankind if you don’t even know what mankind needs?
- For a more drastic solution, try explaining to a friend what you just wrote. Then, replace the draft with what you said to your friend.
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How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and important?
- The trick is not to say anything unless you’re sure it’s worth hearing (as sure as 2 + 2 = 4)
- This makes it hard to get opinions out, but when you do, you’re usually right
- 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
- I’m not saying no mistake gets through, but in practice you can catch nearly all of them
- if you write about topics that seem important to you, they’ll probably seem important to a significant number of readers as well (the reader is not completely unlike you)
- Importance has two factors
- It’s the number of people something matters to…
- …times how much it matters to them
- The way to get novelty is to write about topics you’ve thought about a lot
- Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in this department too
- Anything you notice that surprises you, who’ve thought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise a significant number of readers
- Morris technique: If you don’t learn anything from writing an essay, don’t publish it
- You need humility to measure novelty, because acknowledging the novelty of an idea means acknowledging your previous ignorance of it
- Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but in this case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble
- If you know you’re an expert on some topic, you can freely admit when you learn something you didn’t know, because you can be confident that most other people wouldn’t know it either
- Strength is the 4th element of useful writing, and it comes from two components:
- thinking well
- skillful use of qualification (pretense)
- These two counterbalance each other; as you try to refine the expression of an idea, you adjust the qualification accordingly
- Something you’re sure of, you can state baldly with no qualification at all
- As you refine an idea, you’re pushing in the direction of less qualification, But you can rarely get it down to zero
- You need it to express your degree of certainty
- Don’t underestimate qualification. It’s an important skill in its own right, not just a sort of tax you have to pay in order to avoid saying things that are false.
- There’s one other quality I aim for in essays: to say things as simply as possible
- It’s more a matter of consideration for the reader and less a component of usefulness
- In conclusion: a good essay = importance + novelty + correctness + strength
- The trick is not to say anything unless you’re sure it’s worth hearing (as sure as 2 + 2 = 4)
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