'It Turns Out'

Source: Hacker News

Introduction

“It turns out” became a favorite phrase of mine sometime in mid‑2006, which, it turns out, was just about the time that I first started tearing through Paul Graham essays. Coincidence? I think not. It isn’t that pg is a particularly heavy user of the phrase—​I counted just 46 unique instances in a simple search of his site—but that he knows how to use it. He works it, gets mileage out of it, in a way that other writers don’t.

That probably sounds like a compliment. But it turns out that “it turns out” does the sort of work, for a writer, that a writer should be doing himself. So saying that someone uses the phrase particularly well is really just an underhanded way of saying that they’re particularly good at being lazy.

Examples

The Deli

Suppose I walk into a new deli expecting a roast‑beef sandwich, only to be told the counter clerk that they don’t have roast beef. Relaying the disappointment to friends, I might say, “You know that new deli on Fifth St.? It turns out they don’t even have roast beef!”

The Movie

Or imagine I’m describing a film with a striking plot twist. To be dramatic I could say, “…and so they let him go, thinking nothing of it. But it turns out that he, the very guy they just released, was the killer all along.”

The Argument

Now suppose I’m a writer making an argument that hinges on a bold claim—one that many readers might dismiss at first glance. For instance, I might try to convince my audience that Cambridge, Massachusetts is the intellectual capital of the world. To do so, I’d need to rule out every other city, including plausible contenders like New York. I might write something like:

When I moved to New York, I was very excited at first. It’s an exciting place. So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn’t like the people there. I kept searching for the Cambridge of New York. It turned out it was way, way uptown: an hour uptown by air.

That isn’t an argument at all; it’s a blind assertion based only on personal experience. The only reason it might seem to work is that it’s couched in the same tone of surprised discovery used in the two innocuous examples above—​as though after rigorous searching, the conclusion simply turned out to be true, like a pie crust turning out too crispy or a chemical solution turning out acidic.

How Paul Graham Uses It

That’s what I mean when I say that pg (who, by the way, actually wrote the passage about Cambridge and New York) “gets mileage” out of the phrase: he takes advantage of the fact that it often accompanies real, simple, occasionally hard‑won neutral observations.

In other words, because “it turns out” is the sort of phrase you would use to convey something unexpected about a phenomenon you’ve studied extensively—​as in a scientist saying, “…but the E. coli turned out to be totally resistant”—​or a buried fact you’ve recently uncovered for your readers—​as when Malcolm Gladwell says, “…and it turns out all these experts have something in common: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice”—​readers are gradually disarmed by it. They learn to trust writers who use the phrase, largely because they associate it with the author’s own dispassionate surprise: “I, too, once believed X, but whaddya know, X turns out to be false.”

Conclusion

Readers are simply more willing to tolerate a lightspeed jump from belief X to belief Y if the writer himself (a) seems taken aback by it and (b) acts as if they had no say in the matter—​as though the situation simply unfolded that way. That is precisely what the phrase “it turns out” accomplishes, and why it’s so useful in circumstances where you don’t have any substantive path from X to Y. In that sense it’s a handy writerly shortcut, or, as pg would probably put it, a hack.