Yes. (Hemingway).
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.
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
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.
Of course a lot of rich people got readers just because they're rich, but PG isn't the one of them.
If you approach (or would like to approach) writing more from the perspective of a craft rather than meeting KPIs, Stephen King's On Writing is great.
Or maybe I mean "Omit."
Or maybe if I didn't even post a reply, I would have added the same value to this thread.
Spoiler: You are not Paul Graham.
"Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)".
It should be, "the SUBJECT (the boy) before the action (the hitting)." (I added caps for emphasis.)
In this sentence, boy=subject, hit=verb, ball=object.
> All brains work that way.
If language sentence structure reflects how brains think, then that's not entirely true. While most languages are SVO (subject-verb-object), not all are. Japanese is SOV (subject-object-verb), while biblical Hebrew is/was VSO (verb-subject-object). I'm sure there are other variations.
EDIT: it just occurred to me that Japanese SVO is syntactically similar to Forth/RPN.
If you're content to remain nameless then you can reach millions of readers.
Why should namelessness help? None of the examples you mention seem to require it.
Paul Graham illustrates in his post, “Good Writing”.[1]
“How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader.”
This is also supported by Graham’s post “Writes and Write-Nots”[2]
“To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.”
I don’t take Paul Graham’s word as gospel, but I have yet to find any contradictory stance, let alone one that’s been useful to me.
1: https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html 2: https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html
Whether the title draws more readers than "Rules of clear writing" is a separate topic, one dealing less with principles and more with marketing.
Strunk & White, the source for most of the article's ideas, isn't mentioned. We may bury the past, but we can't deny it.
I recently boiled my copy of Strunk & White until little remained. At the bottom of the pot was "Make every word count."
Orwell also knew to avoid clichés, and lo, he made a much stronger argument for simplicity in his essays. "Keep it simple" means nothing by itself and Adams does not explain the concepts he hints at or even call them by their proper names.
None of the above would seem obnoxious had he actually cited Orwell.
mtlynch•4h ago
I agree with this, but I doubt that all brains work this way. It's probably true of almost all English speakers.
I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sentence constructions that go subject->verb->object. Not all languages do that, so I suspect that your brain has an easier time processing whatever's most common in the language.
hiAndrewQuinn•4h ago
mackeye•4h ago
senkora•3h ago
skrueger•2h ago
jll29•2h ago
burnt-resistor•4h ago
LoganDark•2h ago
bbor•4h ago
cAtte_•3h ago
ChrisMarshallNY•3h ago
I'm not a huge fan of Scott Adams, because I disagree with his worldview, but I have other hills to die on.
He’s not wrong about this, but he’s just repeating very old “tribal knowledge,” about writing. I’ve been hearing the same advice, since I was a kid. Sometimes, I even follow it.
alvah•2h ago
Didn't he write "no reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened" in the blog post you are referring to? That's an....unusual way to deny the Holocaust.
jameshart•3h ago
Brajeshwar•3h ago
Early on, I forced myself to write and speak in the active voice. Now, I believe, it comes naturally to write or speak English the “right” way.
pansa2•2h ago
Not really. The first sentence is about a boy, the second is about a ball. The best one to use depends on context.
MangoToupe•2h ago
riwsky•49m ago
MangoToupe•26m ago
I don't follow. How do you connect taste and efficiency in your perspective? Efficiency in what terms? They seem almost unrelated from my perspective.
> Most writers aren’t optimizing for anything at all, and they have no taste, and their writing is boring, and it wastes my time, and I hate it.
Wasting time is probably my favorite reason to read. Cannot disagree more.