1.0 版
原文：A Version 1.0
作者：Paul Graham 发表：2004-10
译者：Claude（baoyu-translate）
2004 年 10 月
E. B. White 说过，“好文章是改出来的”。我上学时不懂这一点。写作和数学、科学一样，学校只给你看成品。你看不到那些跑偏的尝试。这让学生对“东西是怎么做出来的“产生了误解。
部分原因是作者不愿意让人看见自己的失误。但只要能让人明白：把一篇随笔改到成型，得改多少遍——我愿意把早期草稿亮出来。
下面是我能找到的 The Age of the Essay 最早的版本（大概是写作的第二天或第三天），最终留在成稿里的文字标成红色，后来被删掉的标成灰色。删掉的东西大致分几类：写错了的、像在自夸的、骂人的、跑题的、文笔笨拙的，以及多余的废话。
开头删得最多。这并不奇怪；要进入状态总得花点时间。开头跑题更多，因为我还不确定要往哪儿走。
删减量大致正常。一篇随笔里最终留下来的每个字，我大概要写三到四个字。
（在为这里的某些观点对我发火之前，请记住：你看到的、不在终稿里的内容，显然是我选择不发表的，往往是因为我自己也不同意它。）
Recently a friend said that what he liked about my essays was that they weren’t written the way we’d been taught to write essays in school. You remember: topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. It hadn’t occurred to me till then that those horrible things we had to write in school were even connected to what I was doing now. But sure enough, I thought, they did call them “essays,” didn’t they?
Well, they’re not. Those things you have to write in school are not only not essays, they’re one of the most pointless of all the pointless hoops you have to jump through in school. And I worry that they not only teach students the wrong things about writing, but put them off writing entirely.
So I’m going to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. Students be forewarned: if you actually write the kind of essay I describe, you’ll probably get bad grades. But knowing how it’s really done should at least help you to understand the feeling of futility you have when you’re writing the things they tell you to.
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. It’s a fine thing for schools to teach students how to write. But for some bizarre reason (actually, a very specific bizarre reason that I’ll explain in a moment), the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country, students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens. With obvious results. Only a few people really care about symbolism in Dickens. The teacher doesn’t. The students don’t. Most of the people who’ve had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don’t. And certainly Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.
How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a thousand years. Between about 500 and 1000, life was not very good in Europe. The term “dark ages” is presently out of fashion as too judgemental (the period wasn’t dark; it was just different), but if this label didn’t already exist, it would seem an inspired metaphor. What little original thought there was took place in lulls between constant wars and had something of the character of the thoughts of parents with a new baby. The most amusing thing written during this period, Liudprand of Cremona’s Embassy to Constantinople, is, I suspect, mostly inadvertantly so.
Around 1000 Europe began to catch its breath. And once they had the luxury of curiosity, one of the first things they discovered was what we call “the classics.” Imagine if we were visited by aliens. If they could even get here they’d presumably know a few things we don’t. Immediately Alien Studies would become the most dynamic field of scholarship: instead of painstakingly discovering things for ourselves, we could simply suck up everything they’d discovered. So it was in Europe in 1200. When classical texts began to circulate in Europe, they contained not just new answers, but new questions. (If anyone proved a theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, there is no record of it.)
For a couple centuries, some of the most important work being done was intellectual archaelogy. Those were also the centuries during which schools were first established. And since reading ancient texts was the essence of what scholars did then, it became the basis of the curriculum.
By 1700, someone who wanted to learn about physics didn’t need to start by mastering Greek in order to read Aristotle. But schools change slower than scholarship: the study of ancient texts had such prestige that it remained the backbone of education until the late 19th century. By then it was merely a tradition. It did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult, and thus taught discipline, or at least, kept students busy; it introduced students to cultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessness made it function (like white gloves) as a social bulwark. But it certainly wasn’t true, and hadn’t been true for centuries, that students were serving apprenticeships in the hottest area of scholarship.
Classical scholarship had also changed. In the early era, philology actually mattered. The texts that filtered into Europe were all corrupted to some degree by the errors of translators and copyists. Scholars had to figure out what Aristotle said before they could figure out what he meant. But by the modern era such questions were answered as well as they were ever going to be. And so the study of ancient texts became less about ancientness and more about texts.
The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts? The answer, of course, is that the raison d’etre of classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaelogy that does not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors. But for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer. The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that the people studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least working on problems of minor importance.
And so began the study of modern literature. There was some initial resistance, but it didn’t last long. The limiting reagent in the growth of university departments is what parents will let undergraduates study. If parents will let their children major in x, the rest follows straightforwardly. There will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them. The professors will establish scholarly journals and publish one another’s papers. Universities with x departments will subscribe to the journals. Graduate students who want jobs as professors of x will write dissertations about it. It may take a good long while for the more prestigious universities to cave in and establish departments in cheesier xes, but at the other end of the scale there are so many universities competing to attract students that the mere establishment of a discipline requires little more than the desire to do it.
High schools imitate universities. And so once university English departments were established in the late nineteenth century, the ’riting component of the 3 Rs was morphed into English. With the bizarre consequence that high school students now had to write about English literature– to write, without even realizing it, imitations of whatever English professors had been publishing in their journals a few decades before. It’s no wonder if this seems to the student a pointless exercise, because we’re now three steps removed from real work: the students are imitating English professors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are merely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what was, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.
Perhaps high schools should drop English and just teach writing. The valuable part of English classes is learning to write, and that could be taught better by itself. Students learn better when they’re interested in what they’re doing, and it’s hard to imagine a topic less interesting than symbolism in Dickens. Most of the people who write about that sort of thing professionally are not really interested in it. (Though indeed, it’s been a while since they were writing about symbolism; now they’re writing about gender.)
I have no illusions about how eagerly this suggestion will be adopted. Public schools probably couldn’t stop teaching English even if they wanted to; they’re probably required to by law. But here’s a related suggestion that goes with the grain instead of against it: that universities establish a writing major. Many of the students who now major in English would major in writing if they could, and most would be better off.
It will be argued that it is a good thing for students to be exposed to their literary heritage. Certainly. But is that more important than that they learn to write well? And are English classes even the place to do it? After all, the average public high school student gets zero exposure to his artistic heritage. No disaster results. The people who are interested in art learn about it for themselves, and those who aren’t don’t. I find that American adults are no better or worse informed about literature than art, despite the fact that they spent years studying literature in high school and no time at all studying art. Which presumably means that what they’re taught in school is rounding error compared to what they pick up on their own.
Indeed, English classes may even be harmful. In my case they were effectively aversion therapy. Want to make someone dislike a book? Force him to read it and write an essay about it. And make the topic so intellectually bogus that you could not, if asked, explain why one ought to write about it. I love to read more than anything, but by the end of high school I never read the books we were assigned. I was so disgusted with what we were doing that it became a point of honor with me to write nonsense at least as good at the other students’ without having more than glanced over the book to learn the names of the characters and a few random events in it.
I hoped this might be fixed in college, but I found the same problem there. It was not the teachers. It was English. We were supposed to read novels and write essays about them. About what, and why? That no one seemed to be able to explain. Eventually by trial and error I found that what the teacher wanted us to do was pretend that the story had really taken place, and to analyze based on what the characters said and did (the subtler clues, the better) what their motives must have been. One got extra credit for motives having to do with class, as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and sexuality. I learned how to churn out such stuff well enough to get an A, but I never took another English class.
And the books we did these disgusting things to, like those we mishandled in high school, I find still have black marks against them in my mind. The one saving grace was that English courses tend to favor pompous, dull writers like Henry James, who deserve black marks against their names anyway. One of the principles the IRS uses in deciding whether to allow deductions is that, if something is fun, it isn’t work. Fields that are intellectually unsure of themselves rely on a similar principle. Reading P.G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh or Raymond Chandler is too obviously pleasing to seem like serious work, as reading Shakespeare would have been before English evolved enough to make it an effort to understand him. [sh] And so good writers (just you wait and see who’s still in print in 300 years) are less likely to have readers turned against them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides.
The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn’t take a position and then defend it. That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins. It’s often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. In fact they were more law schools. And at least in our tradition lawyers are advocates: they are trained to be able to take either side of an argument and make as good a case for it as they can.
Whether or not this is a good idea (in the case of prosecutors, it probably isn’t), it tended to pervade the atmosphere of early universities. After the lecture the most common form of discussion was the disputation. This idea is at least nominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense– indeed, in the very word thesis. Most people treat the words thesis and dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it.
I’m not complaining that we blur these two words together. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner we lose the original sense of the word thesis, the better. For many, perhaps most, graduate students, it is stuffing a square peg into a round hole to try to recast one’s work as a single thesis. And as for the disputation, that seems clearly a net lose. Arguing two sides of a case may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it’s not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit.
And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the essays they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion— uh, what it the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. If your thesis was well expressed, what need was there to restate it? In theory it seemed that the conclusion of a really good essay ought not to need to say any more than QED. But when you understand the origins of this sort of “essay”, you can see where the conclusion comes from. It’s the concluding remarks to the jury.
What other alternative is there? To answer that we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the essay. He was doing something quite different from what a lawyer does, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” (the cousin of our word assay), and an “essai” is an effort. An essay is something you write in order to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You see a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. 90% of what ends up in my essays was stuff I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.
So there’s another difference between essays and the things you have to write in school. In school you are, in theory, explaining yourself to someone else. In the best case—if you’re really organized—you’re just writing it down. In a real essay you’re writing for yourself. You’re thinking out loud.
But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that you know other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I’ve written just for myself are no good. Indeed, they’re bad in a particular way: they tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I notice that I tend to conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.
This seems a common problem. It’s practically the standard ending in blog entries— with the addition of a “heh” or an emoticon, prompted by the all too accurate sense that something is missing.
And indeed, a lot of published essays peter out in this same way. Particularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines. Outside writers tend to supply editorials of the defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a rousing (and foreordained) conclusion. But the staff writers feel obliged to write something more balanced, which in practice ends up meaning blurry. Since they’re writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most radioactively controversial questions, from which (because they’re writing for a popular magazine) they then proceed to recoil from in terror. Gay marriage, for or against? This group says one thing. That group says another. One thing is certain: the question is a complex one. (But don’t get mad at us. We didn’t draw any conclusions.)
Questions aren’t enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don’t always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don’t publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. Something you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn’t already know.
But what you tell him doesn’t matter, so long as it’s interesting. I’m sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you’re not concerned with truth. You already know where you’re going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But that’s not what you’re trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn’t meander.
The Meander is a river in Asia Minor (aka Turkey). As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But does it do this out of frivolity? Quite the opposite. Like all rivers, it’s rigorously following the laws of physics. The path it has discovered, winding as it is, represents the most economical route to the sea.
The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose whichever seems most interesting.
I’m pushing this metaphor a bit. An essayist can’t have quite as little foresight as a river. In fact what you do (or what I do) is somewhere between a river and a roman road-builder. I have a general idea of the direction I want to go in, and I choose the next topic with that in mind. This essay is about writing, so I do occasionally yank it back in that direction, but it is not all the sort of essay I thought I was going to write about writing.
Note too that hill-climbing (which is what this algorithm is called) can get you in trouble. Sometimes, just like a river, you run up against a blank wall. What I do then is just what the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back n paragraphs and start over in another direction. For illustrative purposes I’ve left the abandoned branch as a footnote.
Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It’s not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don’t find it. I’d much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.
So what’s interesting? For me, interesting means surprise. Design, as Matz has said, should follow the principle of least surprise. A button that looks like it will make a machine stop should make it stop, not speed up. Essays should do the opposite. Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel vicariously. When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn’t just out of politeness that I asked them about their trip. I really wanted to know. And I found that the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of even the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn’t even know they were recording.
Indeed, you can ask it in real time. Now when I go somewhere new, I make a note of what surprises me about it. Sometimes I even make a conscious effort to visualize the place beforehand, so I’ll have a detailed image to diff with reality.
Surprises are facts you didn’t already know. But they’re more than that. They’re facts that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they’re the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They’re like a food that’s not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you’ve already eaten.
How do you find surprises? Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. (The other half is expressing yourself well.) You can at least use yourself as a proxy for the reader. You should only write about things you’ve thought about a lot. And anything you come across that surprises you, who’ve thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.
For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows in programming who the heroes should be. I certainly didn’t realize this when I started writing the essay, and even now I find it kind of weird. That’s what you’re looking for.
So if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients: you need a few topics that you think about a lot, and you need some ability to ferret out the unexpected.
What should you think about? My guess is that it doesn’t matter. Almost everything is interesting if you get deeply enough into it. The one possible exception are things like working in fast food, which have deliberately had all the variation sucked out of them. In retrospect, was there anything interesting about working in Baskin-Robbins? Well, it was interesting to notice how important color was to the customers. Kids a certain age would point into the case and say that they wanted yellow. Did they want French Vanilla or Lemon? They would just look at you blankly. They wanted yellow. And then there was the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines n’ Cream was so appealing. I’m inclined now to think it was the salt. And the mystery of why Passion Fruit tasted so disgusting. People would order it because of the name, and were always disappointed. It should have been called In-sink-erator Fruit. And there was the difference in the way fathers and mothers bought ice cream for their kids. Fathers tended to adopt the attitude of benevolent kings bestowing largesse, and mothers that of harried bureaucrats, giving in to pressure against their better judgement. So, yes, there does seem to be material, even in fast food.
What about the other half, ferreting out the unexpected? That may require some natural ability. I’ve noticed for a long time that I’m pathologically observant. ….
[那是我当时写到的地方。]
下面是同一段草稿的中文翻译，加粗部分对应最终留在终稿里的文字。
最近一位朋友说，他喜欢我的随笔，是因为它们不是按学校教的方式写的。你还记得吧：主题句、引子段、支撑段、结论。 在那之前我从没意识到，我们在学校写的那些可怕的东西，竟然和我现在做的事有任何关联。但仔细一想，他们的确把那玩意儿叫做“essay“——随笔，不是吗？
嗯，它们不是。学校里你必须写的那种东西，不仅不是随笔，而且是学校所有无意义的形式主义里最无意义的一项。我担心它不仅教给学生关于写作的错误观念，更可能让他们对写作整个失去兴趣。
所以我打算讲讲故事的另一面：随笔究竟是什么，怎么写一篇随笔。或者至少，我是怎么写的。 学生们听好了：如果你真照我说的写，分数大概会很难看。但至少了解写作真正是怎么回事，能帮你理解你写老师布置的那些东西时，那种徒劳无功的感觉是从哪儿来的。
真正的随笔和学校里被迫写的那种东西，最显著的区别是：真随笔不是只能写英语文学。 学校教学生学会写作当然很好。但出于某种古怪的原因（其实是一个非常具体的古怪原因，我等下解释），写作教学和文学研究混到了一起。于是全国各地的学生写的不是预算紧巴的棒球队怎么和洋基队对抗、颜色在时尚里的作用，或一份好的甜点该是什么样，而是狄更斯作品里的象征意义。 显然结果就是：真的关心狄更斯象征意义的人寥寥无几。老师不在乎。学生不在乎。被迫写过狄更斯博士论文的人多半也不在乎。狄更斯本人当然也会更乐意读一篇关于颜色或棒球的随笔。
怎么会变成这样？要回答这个问题，我们得倒回去差不多一千年。 公元 500 到 1000 年之间，欧洲过得不太好。“黑暗时代“这个说法现在不流行了，被认为太武断（那个时期并不黑暗，只是 不一样），但若这个标签还不存在，倒会让人觉得是个绝妙的隐喻。当时为数不多的原创思想，是在持续战争的间歇里产生的，多少有点像新生儿父母的所思所想。这一时期写下的最有意思的东西，可能是 Liudprand of Cremona 的《君士坦丁堡使行记》，而我怀疑它的有趣大半是无心之举。
大约在公元 1000 年，欧洲开始喘上一口气。一旦有了好奇的余裕， 他们最早发现的东西之一便是我们所说的“经典“。设想一下，如果有外星人来访问 我们。如果他们能到这里来，想必懂一些我们不懂的事。霎那间，“外星学“将成为最热闹的研究领域：我们不必费力地自己去发现，只要把他们已经发现的全部抽取过来即可。1200 年的欧洲就是这样。古典文本开始在欧洲流传时，里面不仅有新答案，还有新问题。（举例来说，1200 年之前的基督教欧洲若有人证过任何定理，没留下任何记录。）
之后的几个世纪里，最重要的工作之一是智识考古。也正是在那几个世纪，学校开始建立。既然阅读古代文本是当时学者所做事情的核心，它就成了课程的根基。
到了 1700 年，想学物理的人不再需要先精通希腊文才能读到亚里士多德。但学校的变化比学术慢：研究古代文本 的声望太高，因此它一直是教育的支柱，直到 19 世纪末。到那时它已经只是一种传统。它确实有些用处：读外语很难，因此能磨练学生的纪律性，至少能让学生有事可做；它把学生引向与自己迥异的文化；而它的彻头彻尾的“无用“让它（如同白手套）成了一种社会壁垒。但要说学生在最热门的学术领域当学徒——这显然不是真的，几个世纪以来都不再是真的。
古典学问本身也变了。早期，校勘学确实很要紧。流入欧洲的文本被翻译者和抄写者的错误污染得不轻。学者们必须先弄清亚里士多德到底说了什么，才能弄清他到底是什么意思。但到了近代，这类问题已经被尽其所能地回答完毕。于是，对古代文本的研究越来越少关于“古“，越来越多关于“文本“。
那么时候到了，可以问这样一个问题：如果古代文本研究是合法的学术领域，为什么现代文本不行？答案当然是，古典学问的存在理由乃是一种智识考古，而对于当代作者，根本不需要做这种考古。但出于显而易见的原因，没人愿意给出这个答案。考古工作大致已经做完，这意味着研究古典的人即便不算是浪费时间，至少也是在处理无关紧要的问题。
于是，对现代文学的研究开始了。一开始有些 阻力**，但没持续多久。** 大学院系成长的限速因素，是父母愿意让本科生学什么。如果父母允许孩子主修 x，剩下的事就顺理成章。会有教 x 的工作岗位，也会有教授去填这些岗。教授会创办学术期刊，互相发表彼此的论文。设有 x 系的大学会订阅这些期刊。想当 x 教授的研究生会写关于 x 的博士论文。最有声望的几所大学要在更廉价的 x 上设系，可能要拖很久；但在另一端，那么多大学竞相吸引学生，要让一个学科成立，几乎只需要“想做“这个意愿就够了。
高中模仿大学。 19 世纪末大学英语系一旦成立，3R（读写算）里的“写“ 就变形成了“英语“。其荒诞的后果是：高中生现在必须写关于英语文学的文章——而他们自己甚至意识不到，他们在模仿的是英语教授几十年前发在期刊上的东西。如果学生觉得这是无意义的练习，毫不奇怪：因为我们离真正的工作已经隔了三步：学生在模仿英语教授，英语教授在模仿古典学者，而古典学者不过是 700 年前那项曾经迷人且急需做的工作的传统继承者。
也许高中应该把“英语课“撤掉，只教写作。英语课里有价值的部分就是学写作，而它单独教效果会更好。学生对所做的事感兴趣时学得更好，而你很难想象比“狄更斯象征意义“更无趣的题目。专业写这类东西的人多半也不真感兴趣。（不过他们写象征也已经是过去时了；他们现在写的是性别。）
我对这个建议被采纳的热情没有任何幻想。公立学校大概想停也停不了；多半是法律规定必须教。但还有一个顺势而非逆势的相关建议：大学应该开设写作专业。许多现在主修英语的学生，如果可以选写作就会选，而且他们大多数会过得更好。
有人会争辩说，让学生接触自己的文学传统是件好事。当然。但这比让他们学会好好写作更重要吗？英语课就是干这件事的合适地方吗？毕竟，普通公立高中的学生对自己的艺术传统的接触为零。也没有发生灾难。对艺术感兴趣的人会自己去学，不感兴趣的人不会。我发现美国成年人对文学的了解并不比对艺术更多或更少，尽管他们在高中花了好几年学文学，而对艺术毫无涉猎。这大概意味着，他们在学校学到的，相比他们自己捡来的，几乎可以忽略不计。
实际上，英语课甚至可能有害。在我这里，它实际起到了厌恶疗法的作用。想让一个人讨厌一本书？强迫他读，再让他写一篇随笔。再让题目智识上荒唐到让你即使被问也答不上来“为什么要写这个“。我比什么都爱读书，但到高中末，老师布置的书我一本没读过。我对我们做的事厌恶到了一种程度——以至于我把“在不读书、只浏览人物名字和几个零散事件的情况下，把胡话写得至少和别的同学一样好“当成了一种荣誉准则。
我本希望大学能解决这问题，结果发现一样。不是老师的问题，是英语本身的问题。我们要读小说，写论文。写什么？为什么写？没人能解释清楚。最终我靠试错发现：老师想要的是假装故事真的发生过，然后根据角色的言行（线索越微妙越好）分析他们的动机一定是什么。涉及阶级的动机能加分；现在大概涉及性别和性的动机会加分。我学会了把这种东西批量产出到能拿 A 的程度，但再也没选过英语课。
我们这样糟蹋过的书，加上高中时被糟蹋过的那些，至今在我心里都打了黑叉。唯一的安慰是：英语课偏爱亨利·詹姆斯这种自命不凡又无趣的作家，他们本来就该被打黑叉。美国国税局判断能否抵税时遵循一条原则：如果一件事是有趣的，那它就不算工作。智识上自我怀疑的领域依赖类似的原则。读 P. G. Wodehouse、Evelyn Waugh 或 Raymond Chandler 显然太愉快了，看着不像正经工作；如同英语足够“进化“以至于读莎士比亚需要费力气之前的莎士比亚一样。[sh] 因此，好作家（你等着看 300 年后还有谁的书在版）反而不太容易因为笨拙的、自封的“导游“而让读者反感。
真正的随笔与学校里那些写作要求的另一大区别是：真正的随笔不是先选一个立场再去捍卫它。这个原则——和“我们应该写文学“一样——也是一种来源早已被遗忘的智识宿醉。常有人误以为中世纪大学多半是神学院。实际上它们更像法学院。至少在我们这一传统里，律师是辩护人：他们被训练得能 为论辩任何一方都做出最有力的陈述。
不论这是不是好事（在公诉人那里，多半不是），它都倾向于渗透进早期大学的氛围。讲座之后最常见的讨论形式是 disputation——辩驳。这 个想法至少在我们今天的“论文答辩“里得到了名义上的保留——确实，“thesis“这个词本身就保留了它。多数人把 thesis（论点）和 dissertation（论文）混用，但起初，至少最初，thesis 是你所持的立场，dissertation 是你为之辩护的论证。
我并不抱怨我们把这两个词混到一块。在我看来，“thesis“那个原义被遗忘得越快越好。对于许多——也许是大多数——研究生来说，把自己的工作硬套成单一论点，是把方钉子塞进圆孔。至于辩驳，那显然是净亏。在一桩案件中两边都辩也许在法律纠纷里是必要之恶，但它绝不是逼近真相的最好方法，律师本人大概是最先承认这一点的。
然而，这个原则恰恰被刻进了学校教你写的那种随笔的结构里。主题句就是你的论点，预先选好；支撑段是你在交锋中挥出的招式；结论嘛——呃，结论到底是什么？我在高中从来搞不清。 如果你的论点已经表达得很好，又何必再说一遍？理论上，一篇真正好的随笔的结尾，应该不需要说更多，只需要“证毕“。但当你理解了这种“essay“的来源，你就明白结论从哪儿来：那是律师面向陪审团做的总结陈词。
还有什么别的可能？要回答这个问题，我们得再回到历史里——不过这一次没那么远。回到米歇尔·德·蒙田， 随笔的发明人。他做的事和 一个律师做的 完全不同，这种差别藏在“随笔“这个词本身里。Essayer 是法语动词，意思是“尝试“ （和我们的 assay 同源），而“essai“是一种 努力。一篇随笔，是你为了搞清某件事而写的东西。
搞清什么？你还不知道。所以你不能从一个论点开始，因为你没有论点，也许永远不会有。一篇随笔不是从陈述开始，而是从问题开始。在真正的随笔里，你不是先选立场再去捍卫。你看到一扇虚掩的门，于是推开它走进去，看里面有什么。
那么，如果你只想搞清事情，又何必动笔？为什么不就坐着想？嗯，蒙田最伟大的发现就在这里。把想法表达出来，有助于把它们成型。其实，“有助于“这个词太弱了。 我随笔里 90% 的最终内容都是我坐下来写时才想到的。这就是为什么我要写。
所以随笔和学校里你必须写的那种东西还有一个区别。在学校里，理论上，你是在向 别人解释你自己。 最理想的情况下——如果你真的有条理——你只是把它写下来。 而真随笔里，你是在为自己写。你是在把思考说出声。
但又不全是。就像邀请人来你家会逼你打扫公寓，写一篇你知道别人会读的东西，会逼你认真思考。所以有读者还是要紧的。我只为自己写的东西都不行。 而且差得有种特别的方式：它们容易越写越散。每次遇到困难，我 就发现自己倾向于用几个含糊的问题做结尾，然后飘走，去倒杯茶。
这似乎是个普遍问题。它几乎是博客文章的标准结尾——再加一个 “heh” 或表情符号，全因作者太准确地察觉到：这里少了点什么。
而事实上，许多已发表的随笔也是用 同样的方式越写越散。尤其是新闻杂志的内勤撰稿人写的那种。外部撰稿人倾向于供稿“捍卫立场“型的社论，直奔（早就决定好的）激昂结论。但内勤撰稿人觉得有义务写更 平衡的东西，结果在实践中就是模糊。既然他们是为大众杂志写作，便从最具放射性、最具争议的问题开始切入；接着 （因为他们是为大众杂志写作），他们便从其中 惊恐地退缩。 同性婚姻，支持还是反对？这一群人这么说。那一群人那么说。可以确定的一点是：这是一个复杂的问题。（但请别冲我们发火。我们没有得出任何结论。）
问题是不够的。一篇随笔得给出答案。当然不一定都给得出。有时你从一个有前景的问题出发却走不到任何地方。那种东西你就不发表。它们就像得到不确定结果的实验。要发表的东西，应当告诉读者一些他原本不知道的事。
但 你 告诉他什么并不重要，只要它有趣。我有时被指责“东扯西扯“。在捍卫立场式的写作里那当然是缺陷。在那里你不在乎真相，你已经知道目的地，要直奔过去，硬撞穿障碍，挥手装作渡过沼泽。但那不是随笔要做的事。随笔本应是寻找真相的过程。如果它不绕弯，反倒可疑了。
The Meander 是 小亚细亚（也就是土耳其）的一条河。正如你预料的，它到处蜿蜒。但 它这样做是出于无聊吗？恰恰相反。和所有河流一样，它严格遵循物理定律。它发现的那条蜿蜒之路，正是通往海洋最经济的路线。
这条河的算法很简单。每一步：往低处流。对随笔作者来说，翻译过来就是：往“有趣“流。在所有可能的下一站里，选 看起来最有趣的那个。
我把这个比喻推得有点远。一个随笔作者不可能像河流那样几乎没有前瞻。 实际上你做的（或者我做的）是介于河流和罗马筑路工之间。我对方向有大致的概念，根据这个去选下一个话题。这篇随笔写的是写作，所以我偶尔会把它拽回那个方向，但它根本不是我原以为我要写的那种关于写作的随笔。
还要注意，爬山法（这个算法的名字）会把你带进麻烦。有时候， 就像河流， 你会撞上一堵空墙。 那时我做的 和河流做的一样：回溯。在写这篇随笔的某一点，我发现沿某一条线索往下走时灵感断了。我只能往回退 n 段，从另一个方向重新开始。 为了示范，我把那条被废弃的支线作为脚注留了下来。
宁可偏向河流。随笔不是参考工具书。它不是你为了找一个具体答案而读、找不到就觉得被骗的东西。我宁愿读一篇朝着意外但有趣的方向跑掉的随笔，也不愿读一篇沿规定路线尽职行进的。
那么，什么才“有趣“？对我而言，有趣意味着惊奇。设计——如 Matz 所说——应该遵循“最小 惊奇**“原则。一个看起来按下去会让机器停下来的按钮，就该让它停下来，不该让它加速。随笔应该相反。随笔应当追求最大惊奇。**
我有很长一段时间怕坐飞机，只能借朋友之口去远方旅行。当朋友们从远方回来，我问他们关于 旅行的事绝不只是出于客套。我是真想知道。我发现 ——从他们嘴里榨出信息的最好办法，是问他们什么事让他们感到惊奇。这地方和你预想的有什么不同？这是个极有用的问题。你甚至可以问 那些最不善于观察的人，它能挤出连他们自己都不知道自己在记录的信息。
实际上，你也可以实时这么问自己。现在每去一个新地方，我都会记下让我惊讶的东西。有时我甚至会先在脑中刻意把那个地方想象出来，好让我有一幅细致的图像，可以拿去和现实做差。
惊奇是 你早就不知道的 事实。但它们不止于此。它们是与你以为知道的东西相矛盾的事实。所以它们是你能得到的最有价值的事实。它们像一种食物：不仅本身健康，还能反向中和你已经吃下的不健康东西的副作用。
怎么找到惊奇？嗯，写随笔的工作有一半藏在这里。（另一半是把自己表达好。） 你至少可以把自己当作读者的代理。你应该只写你已经想了很多的话题。在这种话题上，你这个想了很多的人都会觉得惊奇的东西，多半也会让大多数读者惊奇。
比如，最近我在一篇随笔里指出：因为只能通过共事来判断程序员，所以没人知道编程领域的英雄应该是谁。开始写那篇 随笔时我 当然也没意识到这一点， 即使到现在还觉得有点怪。这就是你要找的东西。
所以，要写随笔，你需要两样东西： 你需要一些你想了很多的话题， 还需要一点把意外揪出来的能力。
该想些什么？我猜不重要。几乎任何东西，只要钻得够深，都会有趣。 唯一的可能例外 是像在快餐店打工这种，它被刻意把所有变化都抽光了。回过头看，在 31 冰淇淋（Baskin-Robbins）打工，有任何有趣的事吗？嗯，确实有趣的是 注意到颜色对顾客有多重要。某个年纪的小孩会指着柜台说他们要“黄色“。问他们要法式香草还是柠檬？他们就一脸茫然。他们要的就是黄色。还有一个谜：为什么常年最受欢迎的那一款 Pralines n’ Cream（蜜糖坚果奶油）这么诱人？我现在倾向于认为是因为里面有盐。 还有一个谜：为什么 Passion Fruit（百香果）味这么难吃？人们会因为名字点它，然后总是失望。它应该改名叫“碎渣机果“（In-sink-erator Fruit）。还有 一点：父亲和母亲为孩子买冰淇淋的方式是不同的。父亲 倾向于摆出仁慈君王赏赐恩泽的姿态， 而母亲 像疲于奔命的官僚，违背自己的判断、向压力让步。所以，是的，连快餐店里也有素材。
那么另一半呢，把意外揪出来？这可能需要一点天分。我很久以前就注意到，自己的观察力近乎病态…………
[那是我当时写到的地方。]
注释
[sh] 在莎士比亚自己的时代，“严肃写作“指的是神学论著，不是河对岸熊苑和妓院之间上演的那些粗俗戏剧。
另一个极端——一出生就显得令人望而生畏的作品（实际上就是有意如此）——的代表是弥尔顿。和《埃涅阿斯纪》一样，《失乐园》是一块石头，模仿一只蝴蝶，碰巧又化成了石。连塞缪尔·约翰逊似乎都对此踌躇：一方面给弥尔顿写了详尽的传记表示敬意，另一方面又写道，《失乐园》“读过它的人，没有谁希望它再长一点”。