Good Writing

May 2025There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can
sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice,
flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions
about important things. It might seem as if these two
kinds of good would be unrelated, like the speed of a car
and the color it's painted. And yet I don't think they
are. I think writing that sounds good is more likely to
be right.So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that
seems both preposterous and true. Let's examine it. How
can this possibly be true?I know it's true from writing. You can't simultaneously
optimize two unrelated things; when you push one far
enough, you always end up sacrificing the other. And yet
no matter how hard I push, I never find myself having to
choose between the sentence that sounds best and the one
that expresses an idea best. If I did, it would be
frivolous to care how sentences sound. But in practice it
feels the opposite of frivolous. Fixing sentences that
sound bad seems to help get the ideas right.
[1]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.How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do
that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30
years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book.
Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck.
For example, you get a section that runs one line longer
than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do
in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section
to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary
constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my
surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with
something I liked better.I don't think this was because my writing was especially
careless. I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in
anything written by anyone and told them to make it
slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to
come up with something better.The best analogy for this phenomenon is when you shake a
bin full of different objects. The shakes are arbitrary
motions. Or more precisely, they're not calculated to
make any two specific objects fit more closely together.
And yet repeated shaking inevitably makes the objects
discover brilliantly clever ways of packing themselves.
Gravity won't let them become less tightly packed, so any
change has to be a change for the better.
[2]So it is with writing. If you have to rewrite an awkward
passage, you'll never do it in a way that makes it less
true. You couldn't bear it, any more than gravity could
bear things floating upward. So any change in the ideas
has to be a change for the better.It's obvious once you think about it. Writing that sounds
good is more likely to be right for the same reason that
a well-shaken bin is more likely to be tightly packed.
But there's something else going on as well. Sounding
good isn't just a random external force that leaves the
ideas in an essay better off. It actually helps you to
get them right.The reason is that it makes the essay easier to read.
It's less work to read writing that flows well. How does
that help the writer? Because the writer is the first
reader. When I'm working on an essay, I spend far more
time reading than writing. I'll reread some parts 50 or
100 times, replaying the thoughts in them and asking
myself, like someone sanding a piece of wood, does
anything catch? Does anything feel wrong? And the easier
the essay is to read, the easier it is to notice if
something catches.So yes, the two senses of good writing are connected in
at least two ways. Trying to make writing sound good
makes you fix mistakes unconsciously, and also helps you
fix them consciously; it shakes the bin of ideas, and
also makes mistakes easier to see. But now that we've
dissolved one layer of preposterousness, I can't resist
adding another. Does sounding good do more than just help
you get the ideas right? Is writing that sounds good
inherently more likely to be right? Crazy as it may
seem, I think that's true too.Obviously there's a connection at the level of individual
words. There are lots of words in English that sound like
what they mean, often in wonderfully subtle ways.
Glitter. Round. Scrape. Prim. Cavalcade. But the sound of
good writing depends even more on the way you put words
together, and there's a connection at that level too.When writing sounds good, it's mostly because it has good
rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm
of music, or the meter of verse. It's not so regular. If
it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good
writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all
kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and
you just state them. But other times they're more subtle,
and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease
out all the implications.An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same
way dialogue is cleaned up conversation, and a train of
thought has a natural rhythm. So when an essay sounds
good, it's not merely because it has a pleasing rhythm,
but because it has its natural one. Which means you can
use getting the rhythm right as a heuristic for getting
the ideas right. And not just in principle: good writers
do both simultaneously as a matter of course. Often I
don't even distinguish between the two problems. I just
think Ugh, this doesn't sound right; what do I mean to
say here?
[3]The sound of writing turns out to be more like the shape
of a plane than the color of a car. If it looks good, as
Kelly Johnson used to say, it will fly well.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. The writing in textbooks and popular surveys
can be bad for the same reason: the author isn't
developing the ideas, merely describing other people's.
It's only when you're writing to develop ideas that
there's such a close connection between the two senses of
doing it well.Ok, many people will be thinking, this seems plausible so
far, but what about liars? Is it not notoriously possible
for a smooth-tongued liar to write something beautiful
that's completely false?It is, of course. But not without method acting. The way
to write something beautiful and false is to begin by
making yourself almost believe it. So just like someone
writing something beautiful and true, you're presenting a
perfectly-formed train of thought. The difference is the
point where it attaches to the world. You're saying
something that would be true if certain false premises
were. If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a
country were fixed, then immigrants really would be
taking our jobs.So it's not quite right to say that better sounding
writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding
writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If
the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth
converge.But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing
is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse:
something that seems clumsily written will usually have
gotten the ideas wrong too.Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two
ends of the same thing. The connection between them is
not a rigid one; the goodness of good writing is not a
rod but a rope, with multiple overlapping connections
running through it. But it's hard to move one end without
moving the other. It's hard to be right without sounding
right.
Notes[1]
The closest thing to an exception is when you have
to go back and insert a new point into the middle of
something you've written. This often messes up the flow,
sometimes in ways you can never quite repair. But I think
the ultimate source of this problem is that ideas are
tree-shaped and essays are linear. You inevitably run
into difficulties when you try to cram the former into
the latter. Frankly it's surprising how much you can get
away with. But even so you sometimes have to resort to an
endnote.[2]
Obviously if you shake the bin hard enough the
objects in it can become less tightly packed. And
similarly, if you imposed some huge external constraint
on your writing, like using alternating one and two
syllable words, the ideas would start to suffer.[3]
Bizarrely enough, this happened in the writing of
this very paragraph. An earlier version shared several
phrases in common with the preceding paragraph, and the
repetition bugged me each time I reread it. When I got
annoyed enough to fix it, I discovered that the
repetition reflected a problem in the underlying ideas,
and I fixed both simultaneously.
Thanks to Jessica Livingston
and Courtenay Pipkin for reading drafts of this.