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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"Take any good piece of writing, something that matters to you. Why is it good? Because of what it says. Because what the writer manages to communicate to you, their reader. It’s because of what’s within it, not how they wrote it."

It feels dangerous to disagree with Robin Hanson, but as far as I can tell this is almost completely wrong.

You can make almost any piece of writing good, no matter what it says. "Bond. James Bond." isn't a famous line because it expresses something deep and meaningful. It's a throwaway part of a basic plotline. It's a good line because it's a nice example of the rhetorical technique of diacope.

Take Shakespeare. The greatest writer in the English language, almost without question, but not because his plots were uniquely brilliant (they *were* good, but not alone enough to justify being the best). Shakespeare's particular genius was eloquence. Think of almost any famous Shakespeare line, and I could name the rhetorical trick it relies on. "To be or not to be?"? Diacope. "Sound and fury"? Hendiadys. "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds"? Hyperbaton, polyptoton.

"A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely."

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Dave Lindbergh's avatar

I think Johnson was referring to literary writing - books and articles - not practical documents like contracts and laws, notes and notices, signage, documentation, etc.

Most of the Founders were lawyers by profession - as such they were indeed paid to write.

And, of course, writing comments on blogs is not "hard work"; it's no harder than talking. The hard part is organizing complex thoughts in a larger document.

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