- Often we write to please someone else and we mince our words. To truly spark a discussion or to create new knowledge it's important to write to offend someone. - Most writers write to persuade someone but the goal of writing should rather be to discover something or to figure something out. - When we write to persuade we shy away from certain ideas that we know would be hard to sell. --- Most writers write to persuade, if only out of habit or politeness. But I don't write to persuade; I write to figure out. I write to persuade a hypothetical perfectly unbiased reader. - Paul Graham in [Link](http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html)