Paul Graham's plain rhetoric

Deceptively simple writing

Apr 14, 2024

I had a discussion with

in the comments of the Mary Oliver piece and I recommend it to you, especially Rachel’s comparison of Ginnie Bale, Mary Oliver, and Izumi Shikibu.

Paul Graham is one of the most widely read internet writers. Admirers often talk about his distinctive style. But I’ve never seen a detailed analysis of Graham as a writer, as a stylist. Some people have sent me a couple of examples, but they were either very good but not detailed enough, or simply not an analysis at all. Several people recommended David Perell, but here’s Perell’s point number eight.

Don’t try to develop a personal style. PG says: “If you just try to make good things, you’ll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way.”

Eh, maybe. But what I want to know is, what is that personal style? What makes Graham’s writing his? Good writers may not consciously develop their own style (though I think they do, at least partially) but even if their style emerges indirectly that doesn’t make it unworthy of attention. As I wrote in my essay on Malcolm Gladwell, good writing is the result of careful structure and syntax. “Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style.” This is my attempt to understand how Paul Graham does that.

As you’ll see, I believe Graham uses what’s called the plain style, and that he does so with rhetorical techniques that make his writing persuasive and pleasant to read. He may not have studied rhetoric in order to write like this. But he’s a well read, literary person. One way or another, he’s worked himself into this particular form of writing. Studying his techniques will be interesting for his readers and possibly useful for others who want to write essays.

First, genre.

Graham writes essays. In modern terms, he probably belongs to the “how stuff works” genre, an internet-based mode that demonstrates the mechanics of how things work. Think of Brian Potter or Massimo. Potter writes long posts on topics like “Why is it so hard to build an airport?” Graham writes about how start-ups work, how coding works, how talent works, how education works, and so on. Several of his essay titles begin “How to…”.

But, Graham is also writing in an older tradition. The modern “how stuff works” genre is often impartial, detailed writing, with high information density, like

FreakTakes

Eric Gilliam

(strongly recommended). It’s not dull, but it is fairly impersonal. Graham, however, is always present in his writing. In this way, he reminds me of the older “how stuff works” essayists like Francis Bacon. Like Bacon, he has a style that is immediately recognisable.

Bacon wrote short, exploratory essays about a wide range of Renaissance subjects: gardens, revenge, politics, atheism, wisdom, friendship and so on. Graham has this breadth. Whereas many “how stuff works” essays would be out of place in some way in an anthology of essays that traversed the centuries, some of Graham’s writing might not. Graham also shares Bacon’s direct experience of what he writes about. He is to SF/tech/startup/coding culture as Bacon was to the English Renaissance. He’s a player in the game, writing from experience as well as learning.

The final element of Graham’s genre is “marketing content”. I don’t know that he wrote these essays primarily as marketing for Y Combinator, but some of the earlier essays have a banner saying “Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator.” Graham began writing in the early 2000s, the age of content marketing. This content often blended the styles of op-eds, blogging, direct response advertising copy, and traditional essays. Graham is not writing “hard sell” pieces, but he has the direct response writer’s ability to arrange information persuasively, to write long form, and to insist on his central point.

Obviously it’s high-end stuff—he’s not selling diet pills—but still, his genre is partly a product of the internet of its time. Few other organisations have achieved the same “reach”, “engagement”, and “brand value” as Graham’s essays have (jargon which Graham would surely write as: “lots of people read, enjoyed, and talked about the essays”). Sometimes the best marketing isn’t intended as marketing.

Part of the advertising side of Graham’s style comes from him being deceptively personal. He doesn’t write personal essays of the sort that divulge messy details about his life, but he does often take himself, his experiences, as his starting point, rather than something aphoristic or definitional. He is anecdotal, as is so much of the best advertising.

The essence of this genre, from Bacon to blogging, is its use of the plain style.

Second, style.

Graham is plain, but he’s not always pithy. Look at the opening of “Is It Worth Being Wise?”

A few days ago I finally figured out something I’ve wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they’re not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How?

Whereas Bacon’s openings were often declamatory—“God Almighty first planted a garden” or “Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark” or “Revenge is a kind of wild justice”—Graham’s are often anecdotal, such as: “Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids” or “When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money.”

What links them is that both are plain: they are direct and un-ornamented. They get to the point. There is no poetry, no fuss.

Graham is well-known for his simplicity. He says, “you don’t need complex sentences to explain complex ideas.” His method for achieving this simplicity is to write like he speaks. “If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you’ll be ahead of 95% of writers.” But this isn’t as simple as it looks. When you read a transcript of an interview, you will notice lots of fragmented syntax. People start sentences, stop, rephrase, and carry on—or simply switch to a new sentence. (In rhetorical terms this is called anacoluthon.)

Thus a true speech-writing would be a little irritating, or modernist if taken far enough. Matt Levine does it by adding “like” frequently, which is not only an internet-age-ism, but a verbal tic traditionally left out of formal writing. Graham doesn’t quite do that either.

Instead, Graham writes like he speaks in the same sense that a play or film is realistic. When someone picks up the phone on television or in a movie, they don’t actually talk realistically. The silences and “uhms” and “uh huhs”—and the fragmented syntax—would be boring, maybe confusing. They have to simulate realism. They do enough to make it believable. What Graham does is to write as if he were going to deliver a speech. (Some of his essays are speeches, and it is notable how similar they are to the essays written to be read online.)

He is a conversational writer. It’s not literal conversation, but a conversational style: casual, anecdotal. Look at this extract from “Taste for Makers” to see what I mean:

Mathematicians call good work “beautiful,” and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant? If there is an overlap, can we use one field’s discoveries about beauty to help us in another?

For those of us who design things, these are not just theoretical questions. If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let’s try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?

Each sentences makes one point, which draws on the thread of the last. As in conversation, he doesn’t reductively state his question in one clean sentence, but sets out each stage of his thinking. He could have written it like this.

Beauty is real, and experienced across disciplines. That means it might be a useful thing for makers and designers to understand. So, let’s treat it practically and ask not “What is beauty?” but “how can we make good stuff?”

We can see immediately that, despite the fact Graham edits his essays until they cannot be edited any more, he doesn’t write in the shortest possible manner. He is expansive, but in the way that conversation is expansive. The first two sentences of the second paragraph essentially repeat each other. Instead of “For those of us who design things, these are not just theoretical questions. If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it.” he could have written, “Designers need to be able to recognise beauty.”

Thus, Paul Graham writes with a rhetorical plainness.

Third, rhetoric

Graham isn’t only interested in simplicity. These repetitions and refinements are a form of persuasive rhetoric. They maintain your attention and persuade you small point by small point. Graham takes nothing for granted. His style is based around the idea that his sentences will form links like a silver chain. Compare my version to his again. Mine sounds too brisk; you have to sit with it. Graham breaks each point down to its smallest, most precise iteration. He illustrates (as with the list of disciplines); he recapitulates (as with the repetition of “overlap”); he rephrases to achieve balance (counterpointing “not theoretical” with “need to understand”); he enters, silently, with partisan language (“airy abstractions”, “blathered”). You feel like you are reading the notes taken down at a lecture by a charismatic, opinionated expert.

Indeed, his use of counterpoint, or what in rhetoric is called parallelism can be seen in the two opening lines of his I quoted earlier. “Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids” and “When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money.” Notice how the two halves of these sentences are balanced: had and having, sold and suddenly. And the ideas are balanced too: before and afraid, sold and money. This is a classical rhetorical style. It is also poetic, being the foundation of poetry from the Bible to Walt Whitman. Part of how Graham makes his simple writing sound so mellifluous is through these rhetorical patterns. He puts simple words into the structures, but they are so well used he gets the benefit of their rhythm and cadence. This is much more carefully organised than speech.

Graham also uses the rhetorical technique of antipophora. Antipophora is self-debate. Rather than the asking of rhetorical questions designed to not be answered, it is a series of questions rhetorically asked and answered by the same person. It’s not uncommon in the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s characters. Think of Falstaff, explaining to the audience why he will not let the idea of “honour” force him into battle:

… honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? how then? Can honour set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is in that word honour? what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ’Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.

Now, compare that to these paragraphs from “Is It Worth Being Wise?”.

What is wisdom? I’d say it’s knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I’m not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do.

And yet isn’t being smart also knowing what to do in certain situations? For example, knowing what to do when the teacher tells your elementary school class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100?

Some say wisdom and intelligence apply to different types of problems—wisdom to human problems and intelligence to abstract ones. But that isn’t true. Some wisdom has nothing to do with people: for example, the wisdom of the engineer who knows certain structures are less prone to failure than others. And certainly smart people can find clever solutions to human problems as well as abstract ones.

Graham often doesn’t use antipophora, to be clear. Many of his essays contain no questions. But in those essays, he has other forms of rhetoric. Look at the opening from “The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius”.

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there’s a third ingredient that’s not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

First, the power of three, or tricolon. (To make it more obvious, recast the sentence like this: To do great work, you need natural ability, determination, and an obsessive interest in a particular topic.) Note that the final idea, “obsessive interest in a particular topic”, is a longer phrase than the first two, a good use of tricolon to put the focus on the most important part and to give euphony. The length gives a sense of building towards the focal point. There’s also repetition (“you need”, “a third ingredient”) and parallellism (“everyone knows” versus “not as well understood”.) Again, note how much this makes Graham’s style akin to a speech. Even the phrase “Everyone knows” is rhetoric. It assumes you know (or lets you pretend you did, or immediately teaches you something you ought to know.) It’s a form of getting the reader on side, of being conversational but also intelligent. Think again of Graham as a brilliant, charismatic lecturer—you all know this… (Compare that to the opening of Bacon’s essay Of Seeming Wise, “It hath been an opinion…”)

For all his rhetoric, Graham is still plain. None of this is ornamental or rococo. Graham once defined the best essay like this: “The best essay would be on the most important topic you could tell people something surprising about.” To do this, he says, “You don’t need to have a complete thesis; you just need some kind of gap you can explore.” Exploring a gap is exactly how we can explain his style: parallelism is inherently exploratory, a literal “on the one hand, one the other” kind of style. Antipophora too.

So we reach an unexpected conclusion. Graham is not trying to write in the most concise way, but the most concise way that is simultaneously exploratory and persuasive. He wants to anticipate your questions without becoming dry and fussy. Combining a logic-chopping structure with discursive, vernacular, anecdotal language is what gives Graham his own personal style, like a reformed theologian in sandals who has renounced jargon but retains his deep learning in rhetoric.

The other thing he likes to do is tell a story.

Fourth, narrative

Graham is well read. He admires writers like P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Jane Austen. And he borrows the techniques of fiction. Here’s the opening of “The Reddits”.

I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it.

This is so novelistic. Compare it to the opening line of On the Road.

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.

This is not to say Graham is directly imitating this book, but you see a pattern. You open by dropping right into the situation, and in the second sentence you make some switch, a twist that gives new context that gives the first sentence a bigger meaning. Novelists like to open with drama and problems, Graham with a nugget of interesting information, but the pattern of the sentences is comparable.

The Reddits continues like this:

YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis came up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were seniors. Since they’d come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee. They told me about the startup idea we’d later fund them to drop: a way to order fast food on your cellphone.

This is an example of the simulated realism I mentioned above. Of course, this sounds like Graham as he really is. But because of the way he structures it like story (thirty-two words of context before getting back to “the Reddits”) it also sounds like a narrator, a sort of mini character. Notice, too, the prolepsis combined with litotes (jargon for foreshadowing with understatement, yet another form of rheotric: “the startup idea we’d later fund them to drop”) which is also characteristic of a fictional narrator. In this way, like a good conversationalist, or someone telling a joke, Graham is setting up his story. We are hooked to follow-up on these details.

We can find some of the inspiration for this writing style in Graham’s essay “Some Heroes”. Of Kenneth Clark, the art historian, Graham says, “His style is deceptively casual, but there is more in his books than in a library of art monographs.” Deceptively casual is a good description of the mid-century American fiction voice Graham was channeling in the opening of “The Reddits”. And it sums up Graham’s use of rhetoric in the plain style. It looks simple, as simple as spontaneous talk. It is, however, carefully structured to be exploratory and persuasive.

This, in turn, links to his admiration for Wodehouse, Waugh, and Mitford.

Wodehouse may have begun with simple atoms, but the way he composed them into molecules was near faultless. His rhythm in particular. It makes me self-conscious to write about it. I can think of only two other writers who came near him for style: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Those three used the English language like they owned it.

Again, I am not directly comparing Graham to these writers, but those are very self descriptive ideas: simple atoms, rhythmically composed, in a manner that only comes from using language like you own it. Wodehouse wrote “exactly as he wanted”—Graham too.

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