On Writing

At School

School teaches poor writing habits. Here's how we can learn better ones.

In American elementary schools, students often face writing assignments that ask them to respond to questions such as, "What is the best thing on a school playground?” They’ll get 45 minutes to write their essay in a pre-defined, boilerplate format.

The details of the format are irrelevant, but what’s important is the rubric. Yes, teachers award points for clarity and organization, but the lion’s share belongs to style, ‘quality of writing’, and grammar. In the words of Charlie Munger: “Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcomes.” These rubrics crank out hordes of students focused more on flowery language than on developing solid ideas.

"Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes."

My peers and I were especially plagued by this bad habit. As a 6th grader, I found myself surrounded by classmates who clumsily inserted words like “plethora” and “magnanimous” into their essays. Most of them, myself included, lacked the fundamental understanding of what those words meant. A common practice at my school was going on Thesaurus.com the night before our essays were due to find and replace all the verbs with “higher level word choice”.

These bad habits trickled into other aspects of our learning. There were too many times that I participated in a Q+A session in class where a student raised their hand, talked in circles with big words, failed to make a point, and smugly smiled to themselves after. It was a painfully frustrating experience.

Again, big words do not equal big brains. A presidential candidate would never use a word like ‘superfluous’ in a speech. Why? For him to get elected by the masses, his words need to strike the same chord with a mill worker as they do with a theoretical physicist. Anything else that takes away from the clarity of his ideas is just, well, superfluous!

Caesar

It's worthwhile to study the best writers of both past and present to discover better writing habits.

Julius Caesar was known in Rome for his mastery of writing. His recounts of his battles in Gaul drew both praise from Roman citizens and respect from his enemies. Here’s Cicero on Caesar’s writing:

“Admirable indeed… like naked forms, upright and beautiful, pared of all ornamentation as if they removed a robe…for there is nothing better in the writing of history than clear and distinguished brevity.”

It’s obvious that Cicero lacked the "clear and distinguished brevity" that he admired in Caesar. Still, even he was impressed by the simplicity and clarity that powered Caesar’s words and ideas. Caesar wrote like someone hitting you in the head with a baseball bat. The strokes were short, blunt, and effective.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham (PG), founder of Y-Combinator, is an essayist whom I particularly enjoy. It’s not just me — his essays have a cult-like following in Silicon Valley. His writing is fantastic because he boils down difficult business concepts into digestible essays. In a Quora post from 2014, Michael Wolfe described PG’s writing perfectly:

“ Paul writes the way that great coders code.

1. He uses exactly the right number of words, no more, no less.

2. He expresses his points clearly and directly.

3. The product looks effortless, although lots of work probably went into it.

4. The writing solves a very clear problem - getting a very relevant set of thoughts exactly to a specific audience who needs to hear them.

5. He is not afraid to use analogies. Many "real" writers are taught to use them sparingly, but they are extremely effective.”

If you’ve ever programmed, you know that the most elegant software is not complex. It is the opposite — like taking a long for loop with nested ifs and collapsing it into a single, beautiful line of chained Array methods*. It’s simple, magically simple.

PG writes clearly so that his readers must confront his ideas head-on. There is no subtlety. As a reader, you feel like a cape-less matador in the ring with an angry bull. Nothing is standing between you and the ugly truth.

And yet, PG never tells you “So here’s what this means” or “This is why X is important.” Instead, his plainly described ideas do this for him. PG rarely asserts anything; still, an entire industry takes his word as gold!

My Learnings

I’ll likely spend the rest of my life trying and failing to write like Caesar and PG. Here are some lessons that I’ll take with me along the way.

1. Be concise. Occam’s Razor suggests that if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one. I’ll always look to err on the side of being concise.
2. Edit ruthlessly. Like anything else, a graceful final product is molded by countless iterations and failures beforehand.
3. Use analogies! They allow your reader to empathize with you, which helps their understanding. Imagine this scenario: Your friend just returned from a vacation in Alaska. If you ask her, “How was the weather?” She won’t reply, “It was -12 Fahrenheit.” Instead, she’ll probably say, “Dude, it was cold as f*ck!”And you'll thank her all the more for it.

*Array methods like forEach(), map(), and filter() allow you to execute looped tasks in a single statement. Chained together, they can be extremely powerful. I’ve been learning JS for the past few weeks ;)

Thanks to Theiija, Jack, Prayaag, and Rohan for helping me revise this.

Writing this was fun, and I hope you found some of the ideas useful. I’m going to continue experimenting with longer-form posts. My writing muscle is weak, and the only way it'll get stronger is with more repetitions.

Until next time,

V