Good Writing

Scope of “Good Writing”

• Many readers argue the essay is really about essayistic, idea-developing prose, not fiction, poetry, or lyrics.
• Others note that fiction and poetry still convey “truth” via analogy and emotional impact; examples cited include Moby Dick, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”, and Arrival.
• Several distinguish between clear exposition vs. stylistic beauty or memorability: Douglas Adams, Tucholsky, and others are praised for lines that stick even when they’re not “frictionless”.

Style vs. Truth

• Central claim debated: does writing that “sounds good” tend to be more correct?
• One camp: iterative rewriting clarifies both prose and thought, so clumsy writing often signals muddled or wrong ideas. Bad structure in technical proposals is cited as a practical problem.
• Counter-camp: eloquence and correctness are only loosely correlated; sophistry, propaganda, marketing, and political rhetoric show that beautiful writing can be deeply false.
• Non‑native speakers and domain experts with poor prose are raised as counterexamples to “ugly ⇒ wrong”.

LLMs and the Post‑Truth Context

• Several say large language models undermine the heuristic: they produce fluent, plausible, but often factually wrong text, at scale.
• Others respond that the essay explicitly denies “beautiful ⇒ true” and only claims “clumsy ⇒ probably wrong”, so LLMs aren’t a clean refutation.

Nuance, Legibility, and Audience

• Some argue that forcing ideas into highly legible, simplified forms can destroy nuance, invoking “legibility” in the Seeing Like a State sense.
• Others stress audience: what “sounds good” or “reads clearly” depends on who is reading (layperson vs. expert, native vs. non‑native).

Evaluating the Essay and Its Author

• Supporters praise the essay’s clarity and its emphasis on rewriting, likening writing refinement to code refactoring or culling photos.
• Critics find it repetitive, imprecise, self‑regarding, or philosophically naive, and question the leap from “good flow” to “truer ideas”.
• Broader skepticism appears about treating a successful tech investor as an authority on literary quality, though others note his essays helped shape startup culture.