文章探讨了“好的写作听起来更好，也更可能正确”这一观点。作者认为，在发展想法的过程中，好的写作不仅指表达真实，更在于表达正确的、重要的观点，并进行深入的细节探讨。文章区分了写作在发展观点和事后记录观点这两种情况下的差异，强调了前者中写作质量的重要性。尽管作者对这一观点持谨慎态度，但也认为其值得关注和实践，并呼吁知识工作者重视写作技巧对提升思想质量的潜在影响。

✍️文章的核心观点是，对于用于发展思想的写作来说，文风好坏与思想深度密切相关。好的写作能够帮助作者更好地提炼核心观点，并以适当的细节进行阐述，从而使思想更“正确”。

💡作者认为，这种观点只适用于通过写作来发展思想的情况，而非先有想法后写作。例如，在构建事物或进行实验之后撰写报告，此时思想可能更多地体现在实际操作中，而非写作本身，因此写作质量与思想质量可能脱节。

🤔文章对这一观点持保留态度，认为其需要更多细致的考量。作者承认，改进写作技巧，如改善句子结构，可能有助于提升思想质量，但具体效果如何、影响程度多大，以及是否存在机会成本，仍需进一步探讨。

Published on May 25, 2025 9:52 PM GMT

I thought this was an interesting post. It's central claim is that writing that sounds good is more likely to be right. In the following sense:

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.

And with the caveat that we're talking about writing that's used to develop ideas.

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.

I've always assumed that Graham's claim is wrong. That how good a piece of writing sounds is separate from how good the underlying ideas are. Along the lines of what Graham himself says thirteen years ago in Writing and Speaking:

I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a good speaker.

But Graham's claim in Good Writing is one that is important if true, so as someone who likes to write, it caught my attention. To the extent that he's right, I'm going to try harder to make my writing sound good. Especially when I write to think.

More broadly, ideas are important. Engineers discuss the ideas they have for building more efficient energy grids. Epidemiologists discuss the ideas they have for predicting disease outbreaks. Startup founders discuss the ideas they have to build unicorns. If focusing on how your writing sounds makes the underlying ideas better, that's something that all knowledge workers should probably pay attention to.

I'm not sure that I buy Graham's claim though. Well, I buy it to some degree, but I think it needs more nuance. I'm sure that there are some situations where spending time improving eg. your sentence structure will in fact improve the underlying ideas. But how often? And to what extent? What types of magnitudes are we talking about here?

And what about opportunity cost? Spending time searching for words that sound more poetic might be helpful, but I think the question is whether there are other ways you can spend your limited time that would do more to improve the underlying ideas.

I have a hard time thinking about all of this without concrete examples though. I wish the post included some sort of case studies, where the original flow was problematic and fixing the flow also improved the underlying ideas. Having those sorts of specific instances to latch on to would be really helpful.

But despite having some skepticism, I also think Graham's claim is plausible. Pair that with being "important if true", moving forward, it's something that I'm going to play around with and keep an eye on.

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