31–40 of 87 posts
"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
David Foster Wallace wrote a memorable review of it once in a piece for Salon, which read (in its entirety)
"Don't even ask."[1]
If you've read the book, you know.
[1] The article is "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels > 1960." https://www.salon.com/1999/04/12/wallace/
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." :)
Footnotes make scientific work more accessible and enrich the conversation. In Laurie Garrett’s “The Coming Plague”, the footnotes alone are worth the price. Even in monographs, when reviewing literature in an area where I’m not a specialist, I find footnotes valuable.
> Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the same as English, and we shouldn’t pretend it is.
I don't know what to make of it. Equations are supposed to be part of sentences, and mathematical equations are compact expressions of relations. For example, the sentence,
Newton taught us that force is equal to mass times acceleration, where both mass and accelerations are inertial quantities.
Newton taught us that $F=ma$, where both the mass $m$ and acceleration $a$ are inertial quantities.
many early-career folks are afraid to make things too simple and easy to understand because they (subconsciously?) fear that it makes their work seem simplistic or trivial.
when you're an academic that has built a great deal of your self identity around being perceived as 'the smart one', it takes a fair amount self-confidence to start presenting yourself in a way that is easy to understand
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> the former from the later my writing advice: never use the former and the latter
one thing i've noticed about scientific writing: many early-career folks are afraid to make things too simple and easy to understand because they (subconsciously?) fear that it makes their work seem simplistic or trivial. when you're an academic that has built a great deal of your self identity around being perceived as 'the smart one', it takes a fair amount self-confidence to start presenting yourself in a way that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, that's the only way to write a good paper - first you write 1.5x pages to figure out what you want to say, and then, with this knowledge, you replace entite confusing paragraphs with short sentences focused on exactly that. When i don't know how to express an idea, i ask myself "-so what idea are you trying to communicate? -well, that XYZ holds -if so, just go ahead write literally that!"
I like a lot of the advice here, except > 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…
> short, simply constructed and direct [sentences]
require an honed writing skill; a finely tuned feeling for language, reading flow and contiguous thought; and while time and effort can culminate in such abilities, they shouldn't be prioritized.
It's better to have adept editors who like fiddling--sorry, tinkering, with syntax and semantics.