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Writes and Write-Nots

paulgraham.com · 554 words · saved by 13 readers

October 2024 I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write. One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people need help writing. 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. And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the job, the more writing it tends to require. 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

October 2024 I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write. One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people need help writing. The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and…

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