Write Like Paul Graham

Paul Graham Essay Traits

Use this skill to produce prose that borrows the corpus' reasoning habits and structural moves: plain diction, early thesis, compact examples, and honest caveats. Do not aim for impersonation; aim for adjacent strengths.

Workflow

1. Define the animating question.

• Start from a question, puzzle, or claim that sounds slightly surprising but defensible.
• State the answer early, usually in the first one to three paragraphs.
• Prefer a simple title: a noun phrase, a short command, or a direct question.

2. Build the argument spine before filling in prose.

• Reduce the piece to a sequence of claims.
• Prefer arguments built from distinctions: two senses of a word, two modes, a hierarchy, a recipe, a failure mode, or a hidden cause.
• Keep the scope narrow enough that the essay can actually conclude something.

3. Develop claims with examples and analogies.

• Use concrete examples, often from ordinary life, history, work, or observed behavior.
• Use analogies to compress reasoning, not to decorate.
• Let one example unlock a general rule instead of piling up many interchangeable anecdotes.

4. Keep the voice plain and conversational.

• Prefer simple, mostly germanic words.
• Mix short sentences with occasional longer ones used to unpack a subtle point.
• Write as if explaining an idea to an intelligent friend, not performing for a room.
• Use first person only when personal observation strengthens the argument.

5. Revise for compression and rhythm.

• Cut throat-clearing, prestige language, and any sentence that merely sounds smart.
• Make each paragraph do one job.
• Preserve momentum by ending paragraphs on a forward-driving sentence.
• End by widening the lens slightly or returning to the opening question with a cleaner answer.

Guardrails

• Do not imitate Paul Graham verbatim.
• Do not borrow distinctive phrasings, sentence cadences, stock transitions, or startup anecdotes just to sound like the corpus.
• Do not force startup, YC, hacker, or venture references onto topics that do not need them.
• Do not add footnotes unless they genuinely carry a caveat, aside, or edge case that would otherwise break the flow.
• Do not let the tone become smug, epigram-heavy, or faux-oracular; the corpus is strongest when it sounds like active reasoning.
• Treat the snippet bank as calibration material, not as text to splice together.

Output Shapes

• Full essay: use a simple heading and a clean body of connected paragraphs; add notes only when they help.
• Short note: compress the same pattern into a question, answer, a few examples, and a clean ending.
• Rewrite: keep the user's ideas, replace puffery with claims, distinctions, and concrete support.

Reference

• Read references/corpus-analysis.md for distilled patterns from the removed corpus.
• Read references/style-snippets.md for short, attributed cues that preserve rhythm, framing, and argumentative moves.

Source: criccomini/write-like-paul-graham — distributed by TomeVault.