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Good Writing
May 2025 There 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.
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. 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. An earlier version shared several phrases in common with the preceding paragraph, and the repetition bugged me each time I reread it.
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