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Writing Briefly

• http://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html --Writing, briefly. An article by PaulGraham.

Ideas from the article

• It is important to write well.

Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

• Write a bad version, fast.
• rewrite it over and over
  • cut unnecessary things (be brave!)
  • write in a conversational tone
  • make confusing parts clear
• expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong
  
• say most important sentence first, sketch most important idea first
• try to tell the reader something new and useful
• when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with

write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios

• if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately
• publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas
• print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen
• learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

• The Art of Lisp & Writing
• Holding A Program in One's Head