21–30 of 87 posts
> Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work.
Haha, sure, I will send it to my LLM -- ... I mean "editor." :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but he takes it too far. McCarthy's omission of punctuation makes his books difficult to understand who is saying what, and a challenge to follow especially with dialogue. The Road and No Country for Old Men both do not contain quotation marks for speech, and he omits the common speech tags like "he said" or "she exclaimed" which makes it a challenge to know who is saying what. It is a choice and the art form…
I would assume that his suggestions for clarity in "scientific papers" and his literary style don't overlap all that much to infer the former from the later.
> Commas denote a pause in speaking.... Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.
made its way into this article. Hard to imagine that this particular point, to which I might attribute many of the comma splices I see in scientific writing, actually came from a professional writer.
"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section?" This echoes advice I first read in Strunk & White. It remains the most actionable tip for better writing I'm aware of, technical or otherwise. Aside: I consider McCarthy's residency at SFI an ideal job
When I read papers I often think: if only the author had the space here to write two sentences instead of one, then perhaps I would immediately understand what they are trying to say.
"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section?" This echoes advice I first read in Strunk & White. It remains the most actionable tip for better writing I'm aware of, technical or otherwise. Aside: I consider McCarthy's residency at SFI an ideal job
Sorry, but he takes it too far. McCarthy's omission of punctuation makes his books difficult to understand who is saying what, and a challenge to follow especially with dialogue. The Road and No Country for Old Men both do not contain quotation marks for speech, and he omits the common speech tags like "he said" or "she exclaimed" which makes it a challenge to know who is saying what. It is a choice and the art form…
I am reading NC4OM right now and this is not, technically, the case. He does use those “speech tags”.
As a non-academic that wrote a paper for the first time, I'll say that writing a good science paper takes an absurd amount of time, even on a topic you are very well versed in. It is also way different than other forms of writing, like blogs or technical documentation.
Frankly, I'm astounded I've even managed to get that result, working on it just one month from the submission deadline (a ridiculously massive time crunch) and only in my spare time, not having touched LaTeX in almost a decade. But if a proper heretic like me managed to get that far on their first try, then everyone who's considering writing a paper for the first time ought to have hope.
I might've somehow got an invitation to present a poster out of this, but that's a story for another day (still wrestling with Inkscape on that one).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet behaving consistently according to well-chosen rules is a path to probable prosperity and, often, greatness.
What kind of greatness? Or prosperity? Well-chosen according to whom?
"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section?" This echoes advice I first read in Strunk & White. It remains the most actionable tip for better writing I'm aware of, technical or otherwise. Aside: I consider McCarthy's residency at SFI an ideal job
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
I like the advice about avoiding footnotes. Citing sources is fine. Almost all other footnotes and information from links should either be omitted or incorporated into the main text. They are too disruptive to the flow of reading. > Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work. Haha, sure, I will send it to my LLM -- ... I mean "editor." :)
> Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.
Repetitive sentence structure is not engaging and lulls a reader to sleep, no matter the context. Clauses and transition words and nontrivial sentence structure allow for qualification and clarification, juxtaposition and contrast, and emphasis, often with many fewer words than if written as a series of single independent clauses. A short sentence following longer ones punctuates its point and can effectively lead into subsequent sentences that express more complex ideas/explanations.
In my own scientific writing I also frequently use compound sentences to indicate that the ideas are related (causally or otherwise). It's also unclear to me how one could more efficiently communicate logical or causal flow between ideas than with transition words like "thus" or "therefore."
I recently wrote a paper for a conference that ended up being rejected, with a split review (2 for, 1 against). As a non-academic that wrote a paper for the first time, I'll say that writing a good science paper takes an absurd amount of time, even on a topic you are very well versed in. It is also way different than other forms of writing, like blogs or technical documentation. Frankly, I'm astounded I've even manag…