diff --git a/README.asc b/README.asc
index 2e0a0e626c..6360fe913c 100644
--- a/README.asc
+++ b/README.asc
@@ -25,14 +25,7 @@ First, we'll unpack our archive:
   $ tar -zxvf apache-cassandra-$VERSION.tar.gz
   $ cd apache-cassandra-$VERSION
 
-and create the log and data directories.  These correspond to the defaults from conf/ and may be adjusted to suit your own environment:
-
-  $ sudo mkdir -p /var/log/cassandra
-  $ sudo chown -R `whoami` /var/log/cassandra
-  $ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/cassandra
-  $ sudo chown -R `whoami` /var/lib/cassandra
-
-Finally, we start the server.  Running the startup script with the -f argument will cause
+After that we start the server.  Running the startup script with the -f argument will cause
 Cassandra to remain in the foreground and log to standard out; it can be stopped with ctrl-C.
 
   $ bin/cassandra -f