Another post by Paul Graham, Writes and Write-Nots.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
For some reason, writing and thinking are often equated. They are not the same thing. Writing is a subset of thinking, but not all thinking is writing or can explicated in writing. Writing is more about organizing thoughts or ideas to communicate them effectively. It’s possible to think clearly yet communicate your thoughts poorly in writing, as writing is a skill unto itself, separate from the idea-generation process.
In math, organization is secondary to if the underlying idea or concept is correct or novel. I have read many math papers that are poorly organized, yet the author has useful or interesting results. A paper which proves a long-standing conjecture will not be rejected if the organization or writing is poor. In writing, style and organization are more important than correctness. If the quality of the writing is poor, the reader will be disinclined to stick around to decide if it’s also correct.
As Dan Lu discusses in his excellent essay, “Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]?,” many people display clear thinking when communicating on Twitter in discrete chunks of text, but tying these posts into a contiguous piece of writing such as a blog post, is daunting, especially for those with ADHD:
The issue Foone is referring to isn’t even uncommon — three of my favorite bloggers have mentioned that they can really only write things in one sitting, so either they have enough momentum to write an entire blog post or they don’t. There’s a difference in scale between only being able to get yourself to write a tweet at a time and only being able to write what you can fit into a single writing session, but these are differences in degree, not differences in kind.
Formal, expositional writing requires transitions, organization, correctness of spelling and grammar, pacing, varying the language, and everything else that goes into writing. If anything, the laborious process of writing is a distraction from having ideas.
Paul Graham continues:
And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the job, the more writing it tends to require.
This depends on the type of writing and the audience. Differences of audiences entails different expectations and styles. There is a chasm-wide difference between extemporaneous, short-form business writing (e.g. an email or other memo) for colleagues, compared long-form writing for a general audience or strangers, or writing a thesis for a professor. The latter is a more discriminating audience compared to the former. Writing an email to my mom is sure going to be easier compared to writing one to my boss.
If you’ve ever seen leaked business/internal memos, the content tends to be divided into action/bullet points for readability, with lots of white space. This is the exact opposite of writing an academic thesis. The difficulty also is not linear. It’s easier to write 10 emails at 100 words each compared to a 1000-word essay, as the latter requires more organization and coherence and has a greater probability of error, that which grows exponentially with length.
These two powerful opposing forces, the pervasive expectation of writing and the irreducible difficulty of doing it, create enormous pressure. This is why eminent professors often turn out to have resorted to plagiarism. The most striking thing to me about these cases is the pettiness of the thefts. The stuff they steal is usually the most mundane boilerplate — the sort of thing that anyone who was even halfway decent at writing could turn out with no effort at all. Which means they’re not even halfway decent at writing.
I think this can be better-explained by laziness and the low perceived risk of plagiarism. As evidence of this, plagiarism and the replication crisis seem to go hand in hand, meaning professors faking results and also being too lazy or dishonest to not plagiarize. If these professors were also producing useful research, this would suggest a skill issue regarding writing, not an ethical one.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
It’s really not dangerous. The vast majority of professions entail very little writing, except for those who do it for a living, which is a vanishingly small percentage of the population. For everyone else, writing is limited to memos or social media posts, which people already do this well as shown by the popularity of Twitter and other social media. It’s when writing at length do people struggle, but fortunately this writing is much more uncommon outside of an academic setting, and AI can be of help.