4 ms·

I can churn out four or five pages an hour. I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum abou

by jorleif 16y ago

I can churn out four or five pages an hour. I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? I write maximum about 1 page of academic text per workday. That is of course real, and contains a significant amount of math, but still producing the amount of material mentioned in the article consistently is very impressive. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging. On a more serious note, I think a key benefit for computer science as an academic discipline is that much work is published in conference articles, rather than journals as in most other fields. This means that computer scientists must be able to communicate complicated ideas on 8 pages, rather than 30-40. It really forces the communication to be terse and efficient. I've done course assignments together with people who only publish in journals and it's amazing how these people can blabber on for ages. We had a maximum page length of 20 pages, which left about 3 pages per author. I was very puzzled when some people wrote 6 pages of stuff which I could have easily expressed in 1.5 pages without any loss of clarity, but I'm blaming the culture of their fields, where many words are better than few, and no hard limits are imposed.

jimbokun 16y ago
"Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph." I almost find this more depressing than the rampant cheating in which this author engages.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  "Politician's Patter" http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politicians-patter-20091129.mp3 http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politici...
rick_2047 16y ago
I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject I write SEO articles for some pocket money. I do not really know what I am writing but churn out 2000 words in a hour or so. I know SEO articles is not close to a academic paper, but just to illustrate.
- jorleif 16y ago
  What is your writing process like? Do you edit a lot, or just write it in one go? I notice with the academic articles I'm involved in, that they are edited to death by the separate authors. Comments are often good, but sometimes I feel that when everything is edited many times, the coherence of the first (sloppy) version is often lost.
  - rick_2047 16y ago
    I just get the keyword from my contractor (who in turn gets it from hi clients) and then google the term. If it is common enough there will be a wikipedia, ask.com or wikihow page. I just use that info. I can take a sentence in those websites and churn out 100-150 words on it. Its really easy to bloat articles (planning a blog post on all this). I have also produced on academic paper (it was a position paper) and I instinctively avoided editing. I believe when you start editing a paper you often cut out the depth of the idea.
    - billswift 16y ago
      Interestingly, that was one of Robert Heinlein's pointers for writers; Don't re-write except to an editor's requests (quote from memory).
jseliger 16y ago
I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? Yes: journalists do this routinely. My family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. We routinely write on subjects that we initially know nothing about; we described some of that process in a post about writing Department of Energy grants: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/05/doe/ http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/05/doe/ . Granted, this is not "academic text," exactly, and neither is journalism. But neither is what the guy cited is doing; he's really just regurgitating stuff that sounds okay. This works surprisingly well surprisingly far into the educational system. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging. You could, if you wanted to. The "want" is the key part here, and the skill is not as easy as it sounds: it took me many years to be able to write proposals efficiently and synthesize unknown information efficiently.
- jorleif 16y ago
  It seems to me that if one becomes a professor, a very big chunk of one's time goes into writing grant applications. All of that is "wasted time", in the sense that it takes time away from the primary goal of making good research. In the private sector one would hire separate people to perform this kind of support functions, but in academia that is often impossible. For these reasons, even being able to synthesize known information efficiently would be a very useful skill in this line of work.
spc476 16y ago
It could very well be a case of quantity leading to quality. http://www.lifeclever.com/what-50-pounds-of-clay-can-teach-you-about-design/ http://www.lifeclever.com/what-50-pounds-of-clay-can-teach-y...
Lewisham 16y ago
It's far easier to write four to five pages of bullshit than to sit there, come up with creative thoughts, then think about how you would say it, back it up with citations, and then condense it for 8 page papers. Four to five pages of crap is pretty easy. Like the author said, all you need is a toolbox from the "style guide" of bullshit.
Natsu 16y ago
> I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? If it's anything like the reports I wrote for my own humanities classes, you can skim a bunch of relevant materials and churn something out in a rather short time. That said, you're much better off if you can wrangle things around to write about something you already know. I seem to recall that for one class, I managed to get out of some weekly writing assignment by turning it into one huge paper about a topic I had already read about. I then wrote it for about 10 hours straight (naturally, the last 12 hours before the assignment was due...) and had an ~80 page paper freshly printed out and in my hand just in time for class. My teacher loved it and asked to be able to use it as a class reading assignment in the future. It was a first draft, hastily written brain dump of everything I had ever known about the subject. But there was no need to pad out my writing to fill pages and I think that's why my teacher liked it.

by jorleif 16y ago

jimbokun 16y ago

"Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph." I almost find this more depressing than the rampant cheating in which this author engages.

stcredzero 16y ago
"Politician's Patter" http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politicians-patter-20091129.mp3 http://homepage.mac.com/douglowder/PloughRecordings/politici...

rick_2047 16y ago

I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject I write SEO articles for some pocket money. I do not really know what I am writing but churn out 2000 words in a hour or so. I know SEO articles is not close to a academic paper, but just to illustrate.

jorleif 16y ago
What is your writing process like? Do you edit a lot, or just write it in one go? I notice with the academic articles I'm involved in, that they are edited to death by the separate authors. Comments are often good, but sometimes I feel that when everything is edited many times, the coherence of the first (sloppy) version is often lost.
- rick_2047 16y ago
  I just get the keyword from my contractor (who in turn gets it from hi clients) and then google the term. If it is common enough there will be a wikipedia, ask.com or wikihow page. I just use that info. I can take a sentence in those websites and churn out 100-150 words on it. Its really easy to bloat articles (planning a blog post on all this). I have also produced on academic paper (it was a position paper) and I instinctively avoided editing. I believe when you start editing a paper you often cut out the depth of the idea.
  - billswift 16y ago
    Interestingly, that was one of Robert Heinlein's pointers for writers; Don't re-write except to an editor's requests (quote from memory).

jseliger 16y ago

I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? Yes: journalists do this routinely. My family's business does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. We routinely write on subjects that we initially know nothing about; we described some of that process in a post about writing Department of Energy grants: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/05/doe/ http://blog.seliger.com/2009/04/05/doe/ . Granted, this is not "academic text," exactly, and neither is journalism. But neither is what the guy cited is doing; he's really just regurgitating stuff that sounds okay. This works surprisingly well surprisingly far into the educational system. I wonder if one way to improve writing skills would be to produce this kind of massive levels of output. Maybe that is a key benefit of blogging. You could, if you wanted to. The "want" is the key part here, and the skill is not as easy as it sounds: it took me many years to be able to write proposals efficiently and synthesize unknown information efficiently.

jorleif 16y ago
It seems to me that if one becomes a professor, a very big chunk of one's time goes into writing grant applications. All of that is "wasted time", in the sense that it takes time away from the primary goal of making good research. In the private sector one would hire separate people to perform this kind of support functions, but in academia that is often impossible. For these reasons, even being able to synthesize known information efficiently would be a very useful skill in this line of work.

spc476 16y ago

It could very well be a case of quantity leading to quality. http://www.lifeclever.com/what-50-pounds-of-clay-can-teach-you-about-design/ http://www.lifeclever.com/what-50-pounds-of-clay-can-teach-y...

Lewisham 16y ago

It's far easier to write four to five pages of bullshit than to sit there, come up with creative thoughts, then think about how you would say it, back it up with citations, and then condense it for 8 page papers. Four to five pages of crap is pretty easy. Like the author said, all you need is a toolbox from the "style guide" of bullshit.

Natsu 16y ago

> I'm utterly fascinated, is it really possible to produce that much text on an unknown subject? If it's anything like the reports I wrote for my own humanities classes, you can skim a bunch of relevant materials and churn something out in a rather short time. That said, you're much better off if you can wrangle things around to write about something you already know. I seem to recall that for one class, I managed to get out of some weekly writing assignment by turning it into one huge paper about a topic I had already read about. I then wrote it for about 10 hours straight (naturally, the last 12 hours before the assignment was due...) and had an ~80 page paper freshly printed out and in my hand just in time for class. My teacher loved it and asked to be able to use it as a class reading assignment in the future. It was a first draft, hastily written brain dump of everything I had ever known about the subject. But there was no need to pad out my writing to fill pages and I think that's why my teacher liked it.