9 ms·

Cormac McCarthy on how to write a science paper

326 points by danso 7y ago

dmckeon 7y ago
Know your primary audience. Allow for other audiences, but know who you are writing to. The audience for a science paper may be other researchers in your field, researchers in associated fields, or other fields, other scientists, or a more general audience. Audiences for hackers might be other hackers, programmers, computer scientists, users, investors, salespeople, technicians, translators, etc. Pick one main audience, and a very few related audiences, and write so that any of them can understand without confusion or distraction. The red herring for an IPO does not benefit from leet-speak, nor does the FAQ for an online service benefit from legal disclaimers.
save_ferris 7y ago
This is some of the best writing advice I’ve read: straightforward and incredibly digestible. All while totally vindicating me for hating so many of the arbitrary style games I had to learn in school :)
suchire 7y ago
One of my PhD classes was a paper reading seminar that spanned most of the history of modern molecular biology, from 1959 to the present. It was starkly apparent how much worse the writing quality became around the mid-1980s and beyond. Compare the classic [“genetic code” paper by Francis Crick](https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/1024/2cfa4b970e4a1fd816ee18afa95aae98/crick1961.pdf https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/1024/2cfa4b970e4a1fd816ee18afa95aa...) with most modern papers More science authors should read writing advice like this.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  That sounds intriguing, although it strikes me that you might have been observing a survivorship bias. Older papers that are considered notable today would probably be well-written compared to a random paper published last year, even if there weren't any group-level differences. To be fair, given that the papers-published-per-scientist-per-year metric has been increasing (somewhat unhealthily, so it seems), I wouldn't be surprised if there has been at least some decrease in writing quality, simply to due to less time spent editing and polishing.
  - suchire 7y ago
    It’s definitely possible, but I think there’s still a palpable difference today. As an example, this work from 1989 on how telomeres work was awarded a Nobel in 2016. It’s not unreadable, but it has a completely different (and I would say worse) style compared to the Crick paper I linked earlier: https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/1036/810d9cdd2ea2e1a07d887dc432061543/greider1989.pdf https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/1036/810d9cdd2ea2e1a07d887dc432061... It’s also interesting how formats have evolved. Older journals like Nature and Science used to have a “letters” section--essentially letters to the editor. They were brief (200-300 words) and started with “Dear sirs”, like an actual letter. Today, a “letter” in the same journals is essentially a whole (short, 2-3 page) paper, like this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1578-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1578-4
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  I'd bet the advent of computers, not having to work with drafts on paper and suffer from rewriting them, has something to do with this. Godel Escher Bach is a book that was enthusiastically written with a word processor. And that explains a lot about it.
abathur 7y ago
I'm happy Cormac does this work. I'm even happier that he pointed out a few rules to break. This time invested to improve science writing by one of our greatest living writers is a friendly/magnanimous gesture from a discipline that is on the rocks. I'm not sure if Cormac teaches out of necessity or the goodness of his heart, but count me even more despondent if he needs the salary despite his commercial and critical success. Nothing can single-handedly fix scientific (or technical, or academic) writing. Reading your own writing like a stranger is harder than reading your own code like a stranger. Aside from a few polymaths, the best technical/science writing takes careful, understanding partnerships. That said, I think the bigger problem for science writing is how miserably disconnected pop-press coverage is from what is morally justifiable given the research design and results. Some of this is the fault of the scientists (and their reviewers), who don't always appear to see the limitations of their own results. More often, it seems to be about poorly-paid writers churning out clickbait from journal articles. Unless (or until) we see fit to ensure our scientists (and inventors, and developers, and economists, ...) are polymaths capable of communicating their work lucidly, I think there's a lot of forsaken social value. If it's worth giving a grant to study or build something, it's worth bolting a communication budget onto (not into) the grant to make sure the work is understood.
- defen 7y ago
  > I'm not sure if Cormac teaches out of necessity or the goodness of his heart, but count me even more despondent if he needs the salary despite his commercial and critical success. He's always been indifferent or even hostile toward financial success. He also doesn't really "teach" in a formal way - he just prefers hanging around with scientists, and they try to absorb his knowledge. McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. "We lived in total poverty," says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. "We were bathing in the lake," she says with some nostalgia. "Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week." https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/s...
bo1024 7y ago
This looks pretty good mostly, but I'd emphasize more that the most important thing is to be understood. When it comes to a difficult mathematical concept, this is actually really really hard. If you can nail that, then worry about stylistic stuff, but you probably didn't nail it. With that in mind, this advice is really problematic: > Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring. Boring is better than incorrect! I love when authors clearly define a term and use it over and over, because I know exactly what they mean every time. Jargon may be necessary to communicate precisely (but define your jargon, avoid assuming it's familiar). E.g. mathematically, there is a difference between a ball and a sphere. And if your L2 ball becomes an L2 balloon in the middle of a proof, readers will be very confused. Also, this is just dead wrong: > Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the same as English, and we shouldn’t pretend it is. I can see this being useful advice when a proof is full of dense lines of inequalities, but the reasoning is still incorrect. Mathematical notation is nothing more nor less than shorthand for English (or any other language). The following is fine for example: If f(x) >= 1, then either x = 0 or x \in [1,2]. So is this: Noting that x < 5, Pr[f(y) + x >= 3] <= 0.1. Perfectly grammatical.
- inimino 7y ago
  These two stuck out. Also, the advice about commas (for pauses) is not entirely wrong but not quite right either, and the advice about dashes (for emphasis) is simply wrong. If you've read Strunk and White, or most any style guide, nothing in this article will strike you as both new and correct. The advice I would give most science writers today is: 1. Have something to say. 2. Say it. Many of the problems with overuse of jargon come from skipping directly to step 2.
- failrate 7y ago
  Mathematical notation is not a shorthand for human language. It is a rigorous grammar with properties that make it possible to express very unambiguous qualities of a system.
  - rocqua 7y ago
    Mathematical notation can be spoken out loud. Hence, you can include it in a sentence without breaking the flow of that sentence. For the more complicated equations, it becomes harder to unambiguously pronounce them, and the ideas are more separate anyway. Hence we need to break them out. Moreover, I disagree that mathematical notation is a rigorous grammar. Notation is used to be consise, to represent ideas so we can work on them. Precision is only added to resolve ambiguities that are hard to resolve based on the surrounding text. One can make notation fully unambiguous, but that often comes at the cost of consiseness, and thus clarity.
moneil971 7y ago
This is so good, great advice for making scientific or technical papers more readable
charlysl 7y ago
Science is often hard to read. Most people assume that its difficulties are born out of necessity, out of the extreme complexity of scientific concepts, data and analysis. We argue here that complexity of thought need not lead to impenetrability of expression; we demonstrate a number of rhetorical principles that can produce clarity in communication without oversimplifying scientific issues. The results are substantive, not merely cosmetic: Improving the quality of writing actually improves the quality of thought. From "The Science of Scientific Writing", 1990; there is a related video, [Judy Swan, Scientific Writing: Beyond Tips and Tricks](https://youtu.be/jLPCdDp_LE0 https://youtu.be/jLPCdDp_LE0)
sb057 7y ago
For a slightly more lofty version, see Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'[1], and in particular its six rules: i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. [1]: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
- dllthomas 7y ago
  https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
EdwardDiego 7y ago
Is step 1 "Be as depressing as possible?". Full respect to McCarthy but damn his books are hard work.
- prawn 7y ago
  I find them sublime. Blood Meridian is my favourite; currently reading Suttree.
  - defen 7y ago
    I'm also reading Suttree. It's much funnier than I expected, especially the parts with Harrogate.
    - Myrmornis 7y ago
      Suttree is fantastic.
- 3stripe 7y ago
  Yes they’re dark but that just makes the glimpses of light shine brighter.
  - EdwardDiego 7y ago
    I think I really struggled with The Road because it really touched on every primal insecurity in a parent - being unable to provide enough food or warmth, unable to protect them.
blt 7y ago
> Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. I agree with this. Newspaper style. But NeurIPS format will eat you alive if you follow this advice.
blix 7y ago
I am editing a paper now where I am removing a lot of non-jargon statements and replacing them with jargon. The reviewers were not pleased. As other commenters have noted, plain english is imprecise. When communicating with other scientists in the field it is often necessary to use language that conveys an exact meaning within their pre-existing body of knowledge. If the audience is people without this knowledge, the precise meanings are useless and can be ignored and rigorous quantifcations are often unimportant. However, this is frustrating to scientists who are then left wondering which of n different definitions of some property/parameter you are using and how this influences results. This is critical knowledge when internalizing and applying new information. I am also adding in many "over-elaborations" because the reviewer had questions that a simple adjective or two would have answered. A paper absolutely ~is~ a dialog with potential questions, and nothing illustrates this more than peer review. The two audiences require different papers, and peer reviewers tend to fall only into one of them.
- probably_wrong 7y ago
  While I don't think anyone would object to precision being a good thing when it comes to papers, I would definitely object that readability is more important. A paper is not source code - it is a tool for scientists to share their discoveries with fellow humans, and fellow humans will always appreciate clearly expressed ideas. After all, what good is a tool for knowledge sharing that's accessible only to a few? Now, I've argued before that some papers are necessarily difficult (because the topic is very specialized) and I stand by it. At the same time I do think a good paper should attempt to reach as wider an audience as possible, and jargon goes against this concept. I think the joke that "Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space" illustrates this concept beautifully. For non-toy examples, there are notes freely available on Donald Knuth's "Mathematical Writing" course [1]. These notes are a must read for scientist, and they include several examples of how replacing jargon with plain English can do wonders to improve readability. Page 7, in particular, explains how to rewrite a proof that "is mathematically correct (except for a minor slip) but stylistically atrocious". [1] http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematical_writing.pdf http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematica...
a_imho 7y ago
Would be great if he presented a paper rewritten according to his advice.
mjw1007 7y ago
« And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring. » This is dangerous advice, and not just because (as others have noted) it can add ambiguity. Finding alternatives to the simplest word for a concept will often narrow the audience. For a simple example, if I decide I've written "Venus" too many times and substitute "the second planet", I'm unnecessarily making it more difficult for people who don't happen to know the order of the planets.
- herendin2 7y ago
  Their guidance might sound clear, but in fact "Venus" is not the kind of repeated word they are talking about, because there's no unambiguous substitute for it. If you're referring to Venus, then please ignore that advice and say "Venus" every time, don't annoy your readers by calling it the second planet, Aphrodite, the planet of love, the evening star, and etc etc ... That is an example of the many severe issues with the advice in this article.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
"Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn’t be too narrowly tied to a region." Avoiding the elephant in the room that is how it's becoming mandatory to write in English for scientific communication. Won't anyone think about how this presents a risk of stagnation for scientific thought? (Starting with native English speakers, who never really have to learn another language...)
- vharuck 7y ago
  There are some sayings that translate meaning well. For example, the Japanese idiom "Even monkeys fall from trees" (i.e., even experts can make a mistake). With context, it works with any audience who know monkeys live in trees. That's a wide audience.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Well, sure, but my concern is specifically about concepts that translate poorly (and for which, therefore, speaking multiple languages is interesting...)
INGELRII 7y ago
> And don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing. Trying to defend against bad reading is impossible and trying to do so in original article is useless. Bad reading is huge problem for social media and internet forums. Bad readers are likely to be the first to comment article in the internet forums and comment sections. They destroy discussion.
anonymousDan 7y ago
Nice article. >> Minimize ... transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message << However, I'm not sure about this advice :) I remember reading a study that appropriate use of transition words is helpful in signposting how the coming sentence relates to the previous one, thereby reducing effort for the reader. What do other's think?
- jessriedel 7y ago
  This was also the point that stood out to me as most wrong. If you have two sentences, the meaning changes completely depending on whether the second starts with "However" vs. "Thus". It does not seem like good writing practice to me to elimate them and leave force the reader to infer. More generally, words like "however", "thus", "although", "therefore", "indeed", and "notwithstanding" are crucial for helping the reader follow the thread of the argument.
  - dmurray 7y ago
    This stood out to me reading the notes from Knuth's Mathematical Writing seminar, linked elsewhere on this comment page. An example from page 21: > He recently spent four hours looking through the collected works of Lagrange trying to find the source of “Lagrange’s inequality,” but he was unsuccessful. Considering the benefit to future authors and readers, he’s not too unhappy with the new law. The second sentence contrasts with the first, and with the rest of the paragraph, which I have omitted here. I had to read it twice to grasp its meaning. A "however" or a "nonetheless" is a nice hint to the lazy reader.
    - jessriedel 7y ago
      Agreed, though I don't think it's a matter of laziness. Language is ambiguous (garden path sentences, etc). Redundancy is necessary to ensure clarity, assuming your goal is to be clear, rather than to entertain.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  I can say, from my experience, that if you try too hard to condense your writing, you are in danger of ending up with something that not even your future self could easily follow. Part of the problem is that you are so familiar with what you mean that you cannot easily see how your words appear to someone reading them for the first time. If you can, don't send your final draft off immediately - let it sit for a while and attend to something else before (hopefully) giving it a final read through from end to end, without stopping. With regard to transitions specifically, the meaning of the text can depend on them - for example, 'therefore', 'on the other hand' and 'in other words' cannot be substituted for one another, and it is not always obvious from the context which reading is intended.
VarFarYonder 7y ago
This lecture contains the best advice I've come across for academic writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
• Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring. • Don’t over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it’s relevant. Your paper is not a dialogue with the readers’ potential questions, so don’t go overboard anticipating them. Don’t say the same thing in three different ways in any single section. Don’t say both ‘elucidate’ and ‘elaborate’. Just choose one, or you risk that your readers will give up. "Don't use the same word repeatedly" and "don't say the same thing in three different ways in any single section" are contradictory. In particular the first bit of advice is not good advice, to my bitter, bitter experience. I used to do this in my papers: I would vary the terminology I used to refer to the same concept throughout a paper, to make the text more interesting. This was criticised very strongly and caused untold confusion among reviewers, and the confusion caused my work to be rejected with very strongly negative comments. And that's not just papers- I kept having to re-do the reports on the progress of my research required by my university, because the internal examiners wer so confused by the way I was writing. Then I had a single session with a woman from the unversity's center for academic English and that was one of the first things she said to me: "use the same term to refer to the same concept, throughout the text". It was like a lightbulb went off and the next set of comments I got for my work was overwhelmingly positive (with respect to my technical writing anyway). It was just This One Simple Trick, right? But it made a world of difference. And here's a more general bit of advice: if you ever enjoyed literature, or indulged in writing your own, woe is you, o damned soul. Do not even consider trying to write a technical paper as if it was literature. You will be damned for ever to the eternal flames of damned damnation. Really- don't do it. Literary writing is evocative, it creates fleeting impressions and conjures emotions. Done right, no two readers will get the same impression from the same literary text. But the same is death for technical writing. Technical writing is precise and unambiguous. Everyone who reads it must understand it and they must all understand the same thing. Don't mix the two kinds of writing up or you'll make a mess. Like I have.
lewis500 7y ago
I write little academic papers for a living as a professor. I think this is good advice on how to write like cormac mccarthy. More important is to pick an academic writer whose journal articles you love and copy them. One of my favorites is Paul Krugman. He’s not in my field but apparently he’s good enough that people want to read him. He uses lots of semicolons and punctuation. I understand where this advice is coming from, though. Lots of academics are truly horrible writers and believe complication itself makes their writing erudite.
- froh 7y ago
  TIL > erudite educated, cultured, cultivated, learned, literate In case you wondered like I did :-)
  - booleandilemma 7y ago
    I first learned this word (and many others) from EverQuest, back in the day.
dekhn 7y ago
For many years I had imposter syndrome because I couldn't read papers. It took a lot of work to extract any information from a paper; I had to spend hours reading it. I was always impressed at folks who could just glance at a single figure, without referring to the methods, and could glean what the paper was trying to say. However, after working through enough papers and replicating the results of the authors, I came to learn a number of things- 1) papers are just written badly and it's not beacuse the authors are smart. It's beacuse the authors are bad writers. 2) most papers- in bio, I'd say about 90%- contain invalidating errors which mean that the figures and conclusions are worthless. It takes skilled readers to uncover methodological flaws (or infer them, as often not all the details are included). After working in bio for a while, it was nice to be in ML because - at least it seemed- I could replicate most papers by downloading the github repo, training on my local GPU for a few days, and then using the trained model to make the same predictions as the papers. Then I realized- in most cases, what was being claimed was far more than what the trained model was actually capable of doing. Now I stick to well-trod engineering literature that most people consider boring. In nearly all cases I can read the lit, repro the work, and get results that make sense (much of my work is ensuring that published benchmarks are reproducible). The advice here is golden.
- rjf72 7y ago
  To first affirm what you're saying, this [1] is Einstein's revolutionary paper on relativity. While people without a mathematical background may have some difficulty following the technical components, what is said is plain enough that a capable high school graduate ought be able to, at least in general, follow the logic and ideas. Indeed even for Einstein it wasn't that far removed from high school. It was published when he was 26, and working as an assistant examiner in a patent office - having been unable to find any university that would take him on. Perhaps you're saying as much, in between the lines, but I think there is a specific reason that modern scientific work has degraded in the way that it has. Most of it is rubbish, and the authors know that its rubbish. They don't want to publish rubbish, but finding new real and meaningful science is something incredibly difficult, yet they're expected to constantly publish - or perish. And so their motivation is not to inform society and help push scientific progress forward by a meaningful and relevant new discovery, but simply to publish something that can hit enough checkboxes to get published and keep moving on forward with. And so in this regard grandiloquent language, excessive jargon/vernacular, and an obfuscation of the fundamental points under the guise of intelligence works as a phenomenal tool. As the countless hoaxes (such as the Sokal affair) have shown so long as you talk the talk and say something that is desired to be heard, you can get published even when what you submit is literally intentional nonsense. Sokal's hoax paper's [3] title was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.". Sokal hypothesized he could get a paper that is literally nonsensical published in a leading journal if " (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." The paper lead with: "There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma...". Yeah, he's already 99% published there. [1] - https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [3] - https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_si...
mordymoop 7y ago
I wish there was some acknowledgement of the inevitable tension between readability and thoroughness. Sometimes it is actually more important to be thorough at the expense of readability.
scelerat 7y ago
This echoes much of the theme of Strunk & White "Elements of Style": write concisely and directly.

326 points by danso 7y ago

Know your primary audience. Allow for other audiences, but know who you are writing to. The audience for a science paper may be other researchers in your field, researchers in associated fields, or other fields, other scientists, or a more general audience. Audiences for hackers might be other hackers, programmers, computer scientists, users, investors, salespeople, technicians, translators, etc. Pick one main audience, and a very few related audiences, and write so that any of them can understand without confusion or distraction. The red herring for an IPO does not benefit from leet-speak, nor does the FAQ for an online service benefit from legal disclaimers.

save_ferris 7y ago

This is some of the best writing advice I’ve read: straightforward and incredibly digestible. All while totally vindicating me for hating so many of the arbitrary style games I had to learn in school :)

suchire 7y ago

One of my PhD classes was a paper reading seminar that spanned most of the history of modern molecular biology, from 1959 to the present. It was starkly apparent how much worse the writing quality became around the mid-1980s and beyond. Compare the classic [“genetic code” paper by Francis Crick](https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/1024/2cfa4b970e4a1fd816ee18afa95aae98/crick1961.pdf https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/1024/2cfa4b970e4a1fd816ee18afa95aa...) with most modern papers More science authors should read writing advice like this.

dwaltrip 7y ago
That sounds intriguing, although it strikes me that you might have been observing a survivorship bias. Older papers that are considered notable today would probably be well-written compared to a random paper published last year, even if there weren't any group-level differences. To be fair, given that the papers-published-per-scientist-per-year metric has been increasing (somewhat unhealthily, so it seems), I wouldn't be surprised if there has been at least some decrease in writing quality, simply to due to less time spent editing and polishing.
- suchire 7y ago
  It’s definitely possible, but I think there’s still a palpable difference today. As an example, this work from 1989 on how telomeres work was awarded a Nobel in 2016. It’s not unreadable, but it has a completely different (and I would say worse) style compared to the Crick paper I linked earlier: https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/1036/810d9cdd2ea2e1a07d887dc432061543/greider1989.pdf https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/1036/810d9cdd2ea2e1a07d887dc432061... It’s also interesting how formats have evolved. Older journals like Nature and Science used to have a “letters” section--essentially letters to the editor. They were brief (200-300 words) and started with “Dear sirs”, like an actual letter. Today, a “letter” in the same journals is essentially a whole (short, 2-3 page) paper, like this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1578-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1578-4
SamReidHughes 7y ago
I'd bet the advent of computers, not having to work with drafts on paper and suffer from rewriting them, has something to do with this. Godel Escher Bach is a book that was enthusiastically written with a word processor. And that explains a lot about it.

abathur 7y ago

I'm happy Cormac does this work. I'm even happier that he pointed out a few rules to break. This time invested to improve science writing by one of our greatest living writers is a friendly/magnanimous gesture from a discipline that is on the rocks. I'm not sure if Cormac teaches out of necessity or the goodness of his heart, but count me even more despondent if he needs the salary despite his commercial and critical success. Nothing can single-handedly fix scientific (or technical, or academic) writing. Reading your own writing like a stranger is harder than reading your own code like a stranger. Aside from a few polymaths, the best technical/science writing takes careful, understanding partnerships. That said, I think the bigger problem for science writing is how miserably disconnected pop-press coverage is from what is morally justifiable given the research design and results. Some of this is the fault of the scientists (and their reviewers), who don't always appear to see the limitations of their own results. More often, it seems to be about poorly-paid writers churning out clickbait from journal articles. Unless (or until) we see fit to ensure our scientists (and inventors, and developers, and economists, ...) are polymaths capable of communicating their work lucidly, I think there's a lot of forsaken social value. If it's worth giving a grant to study or build something, it's worth bolting a communication budget onto (not into) the grant to make sure the work is understood.

defen 7y ago
> I'm not sure if Cormac teaches out of necessity or the goodness of his heart, but count me even more despondent if he needs the salary despite his commercial and critical success. He's always been indifferent or even hostile toward financial success. He also doesn't really "teach" in a formal way - he just prefers hanging around with scientists, and they try to absorb his knowledge. McCarthy has never shown interest in a steady job, a trait that seems to have annoyed both his ex-wives. "We lived in total poverty," says the second, Annie DeLisle, now a restaurateur in Florida. For nearly eight years they lived in a dairy barn outside Knoxville. "We were bathing in the lake," she says with some nostalgia. "Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week." https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/s...

bo1024 7y ago

This looks pretty good mostly, but I'd emphasize more that the most important thing is to be understood. When it comes to a difficult mathematical concept, this is actually really really hard. If you can nail that, then worry about stylistic stuff, but you probably didn't nail it. With that in mind, this advice is really problematic: > Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring. Boring is better than incorrect! I love when authors clearly define a term and use it over and over, because I know exactly what they mean every time. Jargon may be necessary to communicate precisely (but define your jargon, avoid assuming it's familiar). E.g. mathematically, there is a difference between a ball and a sphere. And if your L2 ball becomes an L2 balloon in the middle of a proof, readers will be very confused. Also, this is just dead wrong: > Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the same as English, and we shouldn’t pretend it is. I can see this being useful advice when a proof is full of dense lines of inequalities, but the reasoning is still incorrect. Mathematical notation is nothing more nor less than shorthand for English (or any other language). The following is fine for example: If f(x) >= 1, then either x = 0 or x \in [1,2]. So is this: Noting that x < 5, Pr[f(y) + x >= 3] <= 0.1. Perfectly grammatical.

inimino 7y ago
These two stuck out. Also, the advice about commas (for pauses) is not entirely wrong but not quite right either, and the advice about dashes (for emphasis) is simply wrong. If you've read Strunk and White, or most any style guide, nothing in this article will strike you as both new and correct. The advice I would give most science writers today is: 1. Have something to say. 2. Say it. Many of the problems with overuse of jargon come from skipping directly to step 2.
failrate 7y ago
Mathematical notation is not a shorthand for human language. It is a rigorous grammar with properties that make it possible to express very unambiguous qualities of a system.
- rocqua 7y ago
  Mathematical notation can be spoken out loud. Hence, you can include it in a sentence without breaking the flow of that sentence. For the more complicated equations, it becomes harder to unambiguously pronounce them, and the ideas are more separate anyway. Hence we need to break them out. Moreover, I disagree that mathematical notation is a rigorous grammar. Notation is used to be consise, to represent ideas so we can work on them. Precision is only added to resolve ambiguities that are hard to resolve based on the surrounding text. One can make notation fully unambiguous, but that often comes at the cost of consiseness, and thus clarity.

moneil971 7y ago

This is so good, great advice for making scientific or technical papers more readable

charlysl 7y ago

Science is often hard to read. Most people assume that its difficulties are born out of necessity, out of the extreme complexity of scientific concepts, data and analysis. We argue here that complexity of thought need not lead to impenetrability of expression; we demonstrate a number of rhetorical principles that can produce clarity in communication without oversimplifying scientific issues. The results are substantive, not merely cosmetic: Improving the quality of writing actually improves the quality of thought. From "The Science of Scientific Writing", 1990; there is a related video, [Judy Swan, Scientific Writing: Beyond Tips and Tricks](https://youtu.be/jLPCdDp_LE0 https://youtu.be/jLPCdDp_LE0)

sb057 7y ago

For a slightly more lofty version, see Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'[1], and in particular its six rules: i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. [1]: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...

dllthomas 7y ago
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992

EdwardDiego 7y ago

Is step 1 "Be as depressing as possible?". Full respect to McCarthy but damn his books are hard work.

prawn 7y ago
I find them sublime. Blood Meridian is my favourite; currently reading Suttree.
- defen 7y ago
  I'm also reading Suttree. It's much funnier than I expected, especially the parts with Harrogate.
  - Myrmornis 7y ago
    Suttree is fantastic.
3stripe 7y ago
Yes they’re dark but that just makes the glimpses of light shine brighter.
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  I think I really struggled with The Road because it really touched on every primal insecurity in a parent - being unable to provide enough food or warmth, unable to protect them.

blt 7y ago

> Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. I agree with this. Newspaper style. But NeurIPS format will eat you alive if you follow this advice.

blix 7y ago

I am editing a paper now where I am removing a lot of non-jargon statements and replacing them with jargon. The reviewers were not pleased. As other commenters have noted, plain english is imprecise. When communicating with other scientists in the field it is often necessary to use language that conveys an exact meaning within their pre-existing body of knowledge. If the audience is people without this knowledge, the precise meanings are useless and can be ignored and rigorous quantifcations are often unimportant. However, this is frustrating to scientists who are then left wondering which of n different definitions of some property/parameter you are using and how this influences results. This is critical knowledge when internalizing and applying new information. I am also adding in many "over-elaborations" because the reviewer had questions that a simple adjective or two would have answered. A paper absolutely ~is~ a dialog with potential questions, and nothing illustrates this more than peer review. The two audiences require different papers, and peer reviewers tend to fall only into one of them.

probably_wrong 7y ago
While I don't think anyone would object to precision being a good thing when it comes to papers, I would definitely object that readability is more important. A paper is not source code - it is a tool for scientists to share their discoveries with fellow humans, and fellow humans will always appreciate clearly expressed ideas. After all, what good is a tool for knowledge sharing that's accessible only to a few? Now, I've argued before that some papers are necessarily difficult (because the topic is very specialized) and I stand by it. At the same time I do think a good paper should attempt to reach as wider an audience as possible, and jargon goes against this concept. I think the joke that "Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space" illustrates this concept beautifully. For non-toy examples, there are notes freely available on Donald Knuth's "Mathematical Writing" course [1]. These notes are a must read for scientist, and they include several examples of how replacing jargon with plain English can do wonders to improve readability. Page 7, in particular, explains how to rewrite a proof that "is mathematically correct (except for a minor slip) but stylistically atrocious". [1] http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematical_writing.pdf http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematica...

a_imho 7y ago

Would be great if he presented a paper rewritten according to his advice.

mjw1007 7y ago

« And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring. » This is dangerous advice, and not just because (as others have noted) it can add ambiguity. Finding alternatives to the simplest word for a concept will often narrow the audience. For a simple example, if I decide I've written "Venus" too many times and substitute "the second planet", I'm unnecessarily making it more difficult for people who don't happen to know the order of the planets.

herendin2 7y ago
Their guidance might sound clear, but in fact "Venus" is not the kind of repeated word they are talking about, because there's no unambiguous substitute for it. If you're referring to Venus, then please ignore that advice and say "Venus" every time, don't annoy your readers by calling it the second planet, Aphrodite, the planet of love, the evening star, and etc etc ... That is an example of the many severe issues with the advice in this article.

BlueTemplar 7y ago

"Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn’t be too narrowly tied to a region." Avoiding the elephant in the room that is how it's becoming mandatory to write in English for scientific communication. Won't anyone think about how this presents a risk of stagnation for scientific thought? (Starting with native English speakers, who never really have to learn another language...)

vharuck 7y ago
There are some sayings that translate meaning well. For example, the Japanese idiom "Even monkeys fall from trees" (i.e., even experts can make a mistake). With context, it works with any audience who know monkeys live in trees. That's a wide audience.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Well, sure, but my concern is specifically about concepts that translate poorly (and for which, therefore, speaking multiple languages is interesting...)

INGELRII 7y ago

> And don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing. Trying to defend against bad reading is impossible and trying to do so in original article is useless. Bad reading is huge problem for social media and internet forums. Bad readers are likely to be the first to comment article in the internet forums and comment sections. They destroy discussion.

anonymousDan 7y ago

Nice article. >> Minimize ... transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message << However, I'm not sure about this advice :) I remember reading a study that appropriate use of transition words is helpful in signposting how the coming sentence relates to the previous one, thereby reducing effort for the reader. What do other's think?

jessriedel 7y ago
This was also the point that stood out to me as most wrong. If you have two sentences, the meaning changes completely depending on whether the second starts with "However" vs. "Thus". It does not seem like good writing practice to me to elimate them and leave force the reader to infer. More generally, words like "however", "thus", "although", "therefore", "indeed", and "notwithstanding" are crucial for helping the reader follow the thread of the argument.
- dmurray 7y ago
  This stood out to me reading the notes from Knuth's Mathematical Writing seminar, linked elsewhere on this comment page. An example from page 21: > He recently spent four hours looking through the collected works of Lagrange trying to find the source of “Lagrange’s inequality,” but he was unsuccessful. Considering the benefit to future authors and readers, he’s not too unhappy with the new law. The second sentence contrasts with the first, and with the rest of the paragraph, which I have omitted here. I had to read it twice to grasp its meaning. A "however" or a "nonetheless" is a nice hint to the lazy reader.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    Agreed, though I don't think it's a matter of laziness. Language is ambiguous (garden path sentences, etc). Redundancy is necessary to ensure clarity, assuming your goal is to be clear, rather than to entertain.
mannykannot 7y ago
I can say, from my experience, that if you try too hard to condense your writing, you are in danger of ending up with something that not even your future self could easily follow. Part of the problem is that you are so familiar with what you mean that you cannot easily see how your words appear to someone reading them for the first time. If you can, don't send your final draft off immediately - let it sit for a while and attend to something else before (hopefully) giving it a final read through from end to end, without stopping. With regard to transitions specifically, the meaning of the text can depend on them - for example, 'therefore', 'on the other hand' and 'in other words' cannot be substituted for one another, and it is not always obvious from the context which reading is intended.

VarFarYonder 7y ago

This lecture contains the best advice I've come across for academic writing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

• Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring. • Don’t over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it’s relevant. Your paper is not a dialogue with the readers’ potential questions, so don’t go overboard anticipating them. Don’t say the same thing in three different ways in any single section. Don’t say both ‘elucidate’ and ‘elaborate’. Just choose one, or you risk that your readers will give up. "Don't use the same word repeatedly" and "don't say the same thing in three different ways in any single section" are contradictory. In particular the first bit of advice is not good advice, to my bitter, bitter experience. I used to do this in my papers: I would vary the terminology I used to refer to the same concept throughout a paper, to make the text more interesting. This was criticised very strongly and caused untold confusion among reviewers, and the confusion caused my work to be rejected with very strongly negative comments. And that's not just papers- I kept having to re-do the reports on the progress of my research required by my university, because the internal examiners wer so confused by the way I was writing. Then I had a single session with a woman from the unversity's center for academic English and that was one of the first things she said to me: "use the same term to refer to the same concept, throughout the text". It was like a lightbulb went off and the next set of comments I got for my work was overwhelmingly positive (with respect to my technical writing anyway). It was just This One Simple Trick, right? But it made a world of difference. And here's a more general bit of advice: if you ever enjoyed literature, or indulged in writing your own, woe is you, o damned soul. Do not even consider trying to write a technical paper as if it was literature. You will be damned for ever to the eternal flames of damned damnation. Really- don't do it. Literary writing is evocative, it creates fleeting impressions and conjures emotions. Done right, no two readers will get the same impression from the same literary text. But the same is death for technical writing. Technical writing is precise and unambiguous. Everyone who reads it must understand it and they must all understand the same thing. Don't mix the two kinds of writing up or you'll make a mess. Like I have.

lewis500 7y ago

I write little academic papers for a living as a professor. I think this is good advice on how to write like cormac mccarthy. More important is to pick an academic writer whose journal articles you love and copy them. One of my favorites is Paul Krugman. He’s not in my field but apparently he’s good enough that people want to read him. He uses lots of semicolons and punctuation. I understand where this advice is coming from, though. Lots of academics are truly horrible writers and believe complication itself makes their writing erudite.

froh 7y ago
TIL > erudite educated, cultured, cultivated, learned, literate In case you wondered like I did :-)
- booleandilemma 7y ago
  I first learned this word (and many others) from EverQuest, back in the day.

dekhn 7y ago

For many years I had imposter syndrome because I couldn't read papers. It took a lot of work to extract any information from a paper; I had to spend hours reading it. I was always impressed at folks who could just glance at a single figure, without referring to the methods, and could glean what the paper was trying to say. However, after working through enough papers and replicating the results of the authors, I came to learn a number of things- 1) papers are just written badly and it's not beacuse the authors are smart. It's beacuse the authors are bad writers. 2) most papers- in bio, I'd say about 90%- contain invalidating errors which mean that the figures and conclusions are worthless. It takes skilled readers to uncover methodological flaws (or infer them, as often not all the details are included). After working in bio for a while, it was nice to be in ML because - at least it seemed- I could replicate most papers by downloading the github repo, training on my local GPU for a few days, and then using the trained model to make the same predictions as the papers. Then I realized- in most cases, what was being claimed was far more than what the trained model was actually capable of doing. Now I stick to well-trod engineering literature that most people consider boring. In nearly all cases I can read the lit, repro the work, and get results that make sense (much of my work is ensuring that published benchmarks are reproducible). The advice here is golden.

rjf72 7y ago
To first affirm what you're saying, this [1] is Einstein's revolutionary paper on relativity. While people without a mathematical background may have some difficulty following the technical components, what is said is plain enough that a capable high school graduate ought be able to, at least in general, follow the logic and ideas. Indeed even for Einstein it wasn't that far removed from high school. It was published when he was 26, and working as an assistant examiner in a patent office - having been unable to find any university that would take him on. Perhaps you're saying as much, in between the lines, but I think there is a specific reason that modern scientific work has degraded in the way that it has. Most of it is rubbish, and the authors know that its rubbish. They don't want to publish rubbish, but finding new real and meaningful science is something incredibly difficult, yet they're expected to constantly publish - or perish. And so their motivation is not to inform society and help push scientific progress forward by a meaningful and relevant new discovery, but simply to publish something that can hit enough checkboxes to get published and keep moving on forward with. And so in this regard grandiloquent language, excessive jargon/vernacular, and an obfuscation of the fundamental points under the guise of intelligence works as a phenomenal tool. As the countless hoaxes (such as the Sokal affair) have shown so long as you talk the talk and say something that is desired to be heard, you can get published even when what you submit is literally intentional nonsense. Sokal's hoax paper's [3] title was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.". Sokal hypothesized he could get a paper that is literally nonsensical published in a leading journal if " (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." The paper lead with: "There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma...". Yeah, he's already 99% published there. [1] - https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [3] - https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_si...

mordymoop 7y ago

I wish there was some acknowledgement of the inevitable tension between readability and thoroughness. Sometimes it is actually more important to be thorough at the expense of readability.

scelerat 7y ago

This echoes much of the theme of Strunk & White "Elements of Style": write concisely and directly.