{"id":139,"date":"2004-09-09T20:31:00","date_gmt":"2004-09-09T20:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=139"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T08:00:00","slug":"paul-graham-on-essays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2004\/09\/09\/paul-graham-on-essays\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Graham on essays"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2004\/07\/31#paul_graham>Paul Graham<\/a> wrote a new essay this month about the process of writing an essay.  Some interesting observations about the essay form, and why he writes essays.  I particularly liked this nugget:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nAn essay is something you write to try to figure something out.<\/p>\n<p>Figure out what? You don&#8217;t know yet. And so you can&#8217;t begin with a thesis, because you don&#8217;t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn&#8217;t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don&#8217;t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that&#8217;s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what&#8217;s inside.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m writing this blog: to take things I&#8217;m thinking about and try to flesh them out a little bit, and see where the process of trying to make my thoughts coherent takes me.  I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;m successful towards that end, but I think it&#8217;s good for both my thinking and my writing.  Hopefully the process is also of interest to the reader&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Graham wrote a new essay this month about the process of writing an essay. Some interesting observations about the essay form, and why he writes essays. I particularly liked this nugget: An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don&#8217;t know yet. And so you can&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}