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>> And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring. This is the worst possible advice to give about technical writing! What you should absolutely do if yo

>> And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring. This is the worst possible advice to give about technical writing! What you should absolutely do if you want your readers to know what you're talking about is a) define your terminology before you use it and b) stick to the terminology you defined throughout the entire paper. Don't call a thing "red noppertock" the first time you mention it and then "crimson nopper with a tock" the next time. Call the same object, the same concept, the same method by the same name, always. Otherwise, you will only create confusion and make your reader tired and impatient. "Boring" is not a flaw, in technical writing. The purpose of technical writing is not to entertain, but to explain and clarify. Creative writing is a completely different thing. The worst mistake you can ever make is confuse the two and treat a paper like a short story, or such. Trust me, I know. What McCarthy advises above is exactly the mistake I made in my first research papers and they all got rejected with frustrated comments by confused reviewers who pointed out they had no idea what I meant when I used a particular term. I had to take a course with an academic writing expert at my university, to realise what I was doing wrong: I was trying to add variety to my writing, just like in literary, creative writing. I stopped that as soon as I realised how wrong it was and now I actually get reviewer comments about the clarity and quality of the writing in my papers. And as _writing_ goes, it's boring as all hell, but it gets the point across without doubt. That's its purpose.

jackallis 5y ago
i agree with you here. technical paper/writing is "boring" for a reason.
diarrhea 5y ago
Grading theses, this is a very common trap. Students believe they have to be creative, change it up and use a Thesaurus. Because that is in fact what everyone is taught in school! Yet, technical writing doesn't work that way. Synonyms are almost always wrong. We have the luxury of precision, where most often one term means one concept or thing. A 1:1 mapping with little ambiguity. Deviating from that is almost always the wrong decision. Also notice the style I am writing this comment in. Short, concise, to-the-point sentences. Sparing use of filler words (thus, however, ...). I wish all technical writing was more like that (and I find that good technical writing either is, or is on such a high level that they can get away with longer sentences). I believe it a boon: you get a style of "Statement. Statement. Idea. Question. Idea. Statement. Solution. Conclusion.", if that makes sense, allowing easier mental access and partitioning. Technical topics are hard, and writing should accommodate the reader, making it as easy as possible.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  Yes! My intuition about writing is that technical writing should leave every reader with the same understanding of the same ides, whereas creative writing should leave each reader with different emotions, images, thoughts- the ones in the reader themself. My favourite example- H. P. Lovecraft's vague descriptions of Mythos horrors, that contrive to be genuinely disturbing because they leave all the work to the reader's imagination. For me, that's good creative writing technique: allude, evoke, suggest, don't ever, ever show or tell directly. Exactly the opposite of what should go into a thesis, say (like the one I'm writing currently...)!
- pdabbadabba 5y ago
  There is a lot here I agree with. But: > We have the luxury of precision, where most often one term means one concept or thing. A 1:1 mapping with little ambiguity. Deviating from that is almost always the wrong decision. This is true of some words in a piece of technical writing, but not most of them. Don't allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that every word in your paper has a single clear meaning. At the same time, you're right that a writer shouldn't reach too far to find synonyms just to mix things up. > Short, concise, to-the-point sentences. Sparing use of filler words (thus, however, ...). "Thus" and "however" are not just filler words! Yes, they may be overused. But they also signal the conceptual relationship between one thought and the one that follows it in a clear way, at the beginning of the sentence. This allows the reader to understand how a sentence relates to the previous one before they have fully parsed and understood it.
brudgers 5y ago
For context, McCarthy has been at the Santa Fe Institute since 2014 [1], and so in residence among accomplished scientists conducting serious research. For nearly a decade, McCarthy's day job has been writer among scientists. Which is to say, McCarthy doesn't merely have an opinion. McCarthy has an informed opinion. He's spent more time among better scientists than most people in the sciences. And of course, he's a better writer than just about anyone giving advice about science writing (and writing in general). Most writing advice targets poor writers. McCarthy essay targets good writers. Maybe because good writers are good not just for technique but for having interesting things to say. Maybe because something not worth writing in an engaging way probably isn't worth writing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  Yes, yes, I get it. Who am I to challegne an authority in scientific writing, that has so many scientist friends to boot. And what do I know about writing anyway, I don't even have a single best-seller under my belt. Clearly, challenging authorities is not the way of a true scientist.
  - openknot 5y ago
    Though I see your point (that it's good practice to assess logical arguments independent of an author's credentials), brudgers's comment was still quite useful. I skimmed the comments before deciding to reading the article, and likely would have skipped on this submission if I didn't know about his work at Santa Fe (which was also mentioned in the article itself), as I associate McCarthy with his literary work. I had no previous awareness he has been working with scientists on technical writing.
  - brudgers 5y ago
    My point is that McCarthy has an expert opinion and is writing for people who are not struggling toward a first scientific journal publication. The advice that makes a poor writer acceptable differs from what makes a good writer better.
ofrzeta 5y ago
Boring makes for poor comprehension, though.
kragen 5y ago
I agree about consistent terminology, but I don't agree with your view that it is a virtue for technical writing to be boring. Explaining and clarifying are not in conflict with being interesting, except in a few marginal cases like this one. And repetition of terminology is not inherently boring—the guy who wrote "κομόωντας Ἀχαιοὺς" 26 times and "γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη" 32 times would certainly dissent from that, and the Tipitaka or any Beatles song is far more repetitive still—it's just that terminological variation is one possible way to add interest. A bad one, in this context. When I read scientific papers from a hundred years ago, before the institution of peer review, I'm constantly struck by how much better written they are than current papers. They talk about things that surprised them and disappointments that happened during the experiment, and their choice of words is much more lyrical and even metaphorical than the current literature. Consequently they are much clearer and explain much better. The universal complaint about the modern literature is that nobody reads it, even when they cite it, and that is only a slight exaggeration; one reason for this is that reading it is so painful, so people devote less time to it than they would were it more pleasant. So, I agree with you that current academic writing norms prohibit publishing well-written, interesting prose; where we differ is that I think that is bad. For context, my experience publishing peer-reviewed research is not quite zero, but you have much more than I do. I haven't read your papers yet (though they look interesting), so I'm not attacking your papers as dull or badly written. It's possible I've read more research than you have just as a result of being much older. On the other hand, it's also true that many of those old papers included fatal ambiguities which the modern process would have weeded out. Still, we can have good-quality, interesting writing without ambiguity.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> I agree about consistent terminology, but I don't agree with your view that it is a virtue for technical writing to be boring. I don't agree either, I think it's _not a flaw_, not a virtue! Anyway, all I talk about is the _writing style_, not the content of a scientific paper. That's a different thing. But you can't really teach how to make exciting research contributions. I agree also that repetition is not a flaw in and of itself. Minimalism is a thing, after all. As to older papers, I kind of agree that they are often more pleasant to read, but the problem is that the more people work on a subject, the more new, subtle aspects of the subject become apparent that have to be made clear in writing. Also, this is very unfortunate but terms can become overloaded with time as people use them in different ways. Sometimes I read older papers that seem to take some term for granted, but I find myself being utterly confused about what, exactly, they mean, among many different meanings of the term. For example, some of the reviewers I note above were frustrated with my work complained about my use of the word "predicate", which I was certain at the time can't be misunderstood... but is in fact used in different ways by different communities. Thanks for the interest in my work. My second Machine Learning Journal paper is the much better written one, although it's rather a bit thick with formalisms and proofs etc. and won't be easy to read without a background in logic programming.
pdabbadabba 5y ago
I'd encourage you to take McCarthy's advice a bit more seriously. He isn't saying you should just use different words willy nilly, throwing their technical meaning out the window. He's just saying that you shouldn't excessively repeat words. Avoiding repetition can also mean structuring your writing in a way that allows you to rely on pronouns and other linguistic tools to avoid using the same word repeatedly while preserving clarity. And I often find that technical writers don't do a good job of evaluating which terms need to be treated as rigidly defined technical terms and which ones do not, resulting in writing that it more stilted and jargon laden than necessary to communicate clearly. One benefit of taking McCarthy's advice seriously is that it will encourage you to scrutinize your decisions about when to rely on jargon and defined terms and help you identify where you're using them as a crutch to avoid harder decisions about how to write clearly. The goal is not to be "entertaining." Rather, it is simply to should be to hold the reader's attention so you're not making huge claims on their ability to focus. I wouldn't be so quick to give up on this and embrace the "papers should be boring" mindset. The basic problem is that an extremely tedious paper does not "get your point across without doubt." It may not even get your point across at all because it pains readers to read it. Of course, none of this should be construed to mean that people should use "thesaurus words"--i.e., words that are overly obscure or a poor fit for the situation, just for the sake of mixing it up.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> I wouldn't be so quick to give up on this and embrace the "papers should be boring" mindset I never said, nor meant, that "papers should be boring", or even that technical writing should be boring. What I said, exactly, was: "Boring" is not a flaw, in technical writing. I think it's interesting how not only your comment, but those of others, misread that part of my comment and made a jump from "boring is not a flaw" to "papers should be boring". The reason I think it is interesting is because it reveals the amount of work that must go into a technical text to avoid such misunderstandings. For every single statement that matters, for every single point that is made, in a paper, there is a number of ways to misunderstand it, of varying degrees of obvious-ness. As a paper author, you have to try to think of each and every one of them, try to predict how likely it is that different kinds of readers will commit those kinds of misundestanding, and then try to defend your text against the most likely ones, at the very least. Since some of your readers are going to be reviewers, doing this well is the difference between getting your paper published, getting it rejected, or having it accepted with "minor" revisions (which are only so "minor" as the possibility for misunderstandings, so usually, not that much). So this anticipation of potential misunderstandings is a vital, essential skill that you develop as a paper writer. Er. I mean "scientist", of course. For this (oops) reason, I disagree with the use of pronouns etc. I actively try to avoid sentences like "This suggests" or "That means" or "It is an efficient way to" etc. just because I'm sure that "this", "that", "it", and their friends, will only serve to misdirect the reader's attention. Because when you write "it", you're thinking of X, but when the reader reads "it", they are actually thinking of Y, just because they're more interested in Y, so "it" is just a point of confusion. And that (oops) will _always_ happen because the author of a paper and the paper's readers will have different interests and tend to focus on different parts of a paper. The way I think about the use of pronouns is a little bit like loops in assembly: you want to "unroll" them to improve efficiency. Similarly, I always "dereference" pointer-words like pronouns etc, to remove ambiguity.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> "don’t use the same word repeatedly" is the worst possible advice to give Agreed, this is often described as the error of "Said Bookism" > People are so used to the word "said" that they can mentally skip over it when reading; when the word changes over and over again, it becomes a distraction. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SaidBookism https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SaidBookism
- iiv 5y ago
  Have you read anything by McCarthy? His writing style is as far from "Said Bookism" as you can come.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    Yes, and recently. His technique is more to Find/replace "he said" with "". Your question has no point though, the advice was given as per grandparent comment; and it is not great advice as per several replies.
- gowld 5y ago
  Anonymous wiki posters vs best-selling author. Hmmm.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    a) Although the "Anonymous wiki" authors are a good reference for the trope of Said bookism", they did not originate it. You can also find it in the Turkey City Lexicon from 1988 (1) and no doubt other earlier sources. In that document, see also "“Burly Detective” Syndrome" b) I marvel at Mr McCarthy's prose. it breaks all the rules, and is sometimes impenetrable, sometimes so direct. It's fantastic, it's hard work. I couldn't do that well; very few could. There are far easier ways to get to "best seller". https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/ https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer...
hammock 5y ago
>This is the worst possible advice to give about technical writing! What you should absolutely do if you want your readers to know what you're talking about is a) define your terminology before you use it and b) stick to the terminology you defined throughout the entire paper. Don't call a thing "red noppertock" the first time you mention it and then "crimson nopper with a tock" the next time. Call the same object, the same concept, the same method by the same name, always. Otherwise, you will only create confusion and make your reader tired and impatient. What you are saying and what McCarthy is saying can both be true. Using the same word repeatedly is boring, technical writing or not. If you find yourself using the same word repeatedly, don't - as you seem to be assuming McCarthy is suggesting - pluck an alternate word out of a thesaurus; rather, take a step back and rethink if there is a different way to express your idea without using the word at all, or by using it less frequently.
- borroka 5y ago
  "Using the same word repeatedly is boring, technical writing or not." -- A technical or scientific paper does not need to be entertaining. I mean, it can be, but it adds zero to the value of the discovery made or methods developed. I know it is intriguing to think in terms of "fun", "creativity", "entertainment", but the scientific or technical paper needs to be as clear as possible, which is more often than not in contrast with a desire to make a paper "engaging". Nobody cares if a surgical operation is "entertaining". I don't remember having thought, when reading a paper, that it was boring, or "not fun", but I remember many times to have thought, "man, I have no clue what's going on here", "so many unnecessary details".
  - hammock 5y ago
    Nowhere did I say that clarity ought to be compromised. You seem to believe there's a tradeoff where I see none. If a paper is clear and also easy to read, entertaining or otherwise not boring, it stands to reason that it will be more readily comprehended, remembered and shared by the reader.
    - borroka 5y ago
krrrh 5y ago
I was surprised to learn how much more this is considered a mark of good writing in English than in other languages. Because English has a larger vocabulary with cognates from both Germanic and Romance languages it’s much easier to vary the words used. In Spanish writing it’s much more acceptable and common to repeat the same word sentence to sentence.
- dekhn 5y ago
  any time I use the same word twice in any sentence, I always rewrite it to avoid any repetition
l33tbro 5y ago
I think you may be misinterpreting him. Didn't he say don't re-use words in the context of unnecessary jargon and buzzwords, as it gets boring reading the same superfluous words?

jackallis 5y ago

i agree with you here. technical paper/writing is "boring" for a reason.

diarrhea 5y ago

Grading theses, this is a very common trap. Students believe they have to be creative, change it up and use a Thesaurus. Because that is in fact what everyone is taught in school! Yet, technical writing doesn't work that way. Synonyms are almost always wrong. We have the luxury of precision, where most often one term means one concept or thing. A 1:1 mapping with little ambiguity. Deviating from that is almost always the wrong decision. Also notice the style I am writing this comment in. Short, concise, to-the-point sentences. Sparing use of filler words (thus, however, ...). I wish all technical writing was more like that (and I find that good technical writing either is, or is on such a high level that they can get away with longer sentences). I believe it a boon: you get a style of "Statement. Statement. Idea. Question. Idea. Statement. Solution. Conclusion.", if that makes sense, allowing easier mental access and partitioning. Technical topics are hard, and writing should accommodate the reader, making it as easy as possible.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Yes! My intuition about writing is that technical writing should leave every reader with the same understanding of the same ides, whereas creative writing should leave each reader with different emotions, images, thoughts- the ones in the reader themself. My favourite example- H. P. Lovecraft's vague descriptions of Mythos horrors, that contrive to be genuinely disturbing because they leave all the work to the reader's imagination. For me, that's good creative writing technique: allude, evoke, suggest, don't ever, ever show or tell directly. Exactly the opposite of what should go into a thesis, say (like the one I'm writing currently...)!
pdabbadabba 5y ago
There is a lot here I agree with. But: > We have the luxury of precision, where most often one term means one concept or thing. A 1:1 mapping with little ambiguity. Deviating from that is almost always the wrong decision. This is true of some words in a piece of technical writing, but not most of them. Don't allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that every word in your paper has a single clear meaning. At the same time, you're right that a writer shouldn't reach too far to find synonyms just to mix things up. > Short, concise, to-the-point sentences. Sparing use of filler words (thus, however, ...). "Thus" and "however" are not just filler words! Yes, they may be overused. But they also signal the conceptual relationship between one thought and the one that follows it in a clear way, at the beginning of the sentence. This allows the reader to understand how a sentence relates to the previous one before they have fully parsed and understood it.

brudgers 5y ago

For context, McCarthy has been at the Santa Fe Institute since 2014 [1], and so in residence among accomplished scientists conducting serious research. For nearly a decade, McCarthy's day job has been writer among scientists. Which is to say, McCarthy doesn't merely have an opinion. McCarthy has an informed opinion. He's spent more time among better scientists than most people in the sciences. And of course, he's a better writer than just about anyone giving advice about science writing (and writing in general). Most writing advice targets poor writers. McCarthy essay targets good writers. Maybe because good writers are good not just for technique but for having interesting things to say. Maybe because something not worth writing in an engaging way probably isn't worth writing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Yes, yes, I get it. Who am I to challegne an authority in scientific writing, that has so many scientist friends to boot. And what do I know about writing anyway, I don't even have a single best-seller under my belt. Clearly, challenging authorities is not the way of a true scientist.
- openknot 5y ago
  Though I see your point (that it's good practice to assess logical arguments independent of an author's credentials), brudgers's comment was still quite useful. I skimmed the comments before deciding to reading the article, and likely would have skipped on this submission if I didn't know about his work at Santa Fe (which was also mentioned in the article itself), as I associate McCarthy with his literary work. I had no previous awareness he has been working with scientists on technical writing.
- brudgers 5y ago
  My point is that McCarthy has an expert opinion and is writing for people who are not struggling toward a first scientific journal publication. The advice that makes a poor writer acceptable differs from what makes a good writer better.

ofrzeta 5y ago

Boring makes for poor comprehension, though.

kragen 5y ago

I agree about consistent terminology, but I don't agree with your view that it is a virtue for technical writing to be boring. Explaining and clarifying are not in conflict with being interesting, except in a few marginal cases like this one. And repetition of terminology is not inherently boring—the guy who wrote "κομόωντας Ἀχαιοὺς" 26 times and "γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη" 32 times would certainly dissent from that, and the Tipitaka or any Beatles song is far more repetitive still—it's just that terminological variation is one possible way to add interest. A bad one, in this context. When I read scientific papers from a hundred years ago, before the institution of peer review, I'm constantly struck by how much better written they are than current papers. They talk about things that surprised them and disappointments that happened during the experiment, and their choice of words is much more lyrical and even metaphorical than the current literature. Consequently they are much clearer and explain much better. The universal complaint about the modern literature is that nobody reads it, even when they cite it, and that is only a slight exaggeration; one reason for this is that reading it is so painful, so people devote less time to it than they would were it more pleasant. So, I agree with you that current academic writing norms prohibit publishing well-written, interesting prose; where we differ is that I think that is bad. For context, my experience publishing peer-reviewed research is not quite zero, but you have much more than I do. I haven't read your papers yet (though they look interesting), so I'm not attacking your papers as dull or badly written. It's possible I've read more research than you have just as a result of being much older. On the other hand, it's also true that many of those old papers included fatal ambiguities which the modern process would have weeded out. Still, we can have good-quality, interesting writing without ambiguity.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> I agree about consistent terminology, but I don't agree with your view that it is a virtue for technical writing to be boring. I don't agree either, I think it's _not a flaw_, not a virtue! Anyway, all I talk about is the _writing style_, not the content of a scientific paper. That's a different thing. But you can't really teach how to make exciting research contributions. I agree also that repetition is not a flaw in and of itself. Minimalism is a thing, after all. As to older papers, I kind of agree that they are often more pleasant to read, but the problem is that the more people work on a subject, the more new, subtle aspects of the subject become apparent that have to be made clear in writing. Also, this is very unfortunate but terms can become overloaded with time as people use them in different ways. Sometimes I read older papers that seem to take some term for granted, but I find myself being utterly confused about what, exactly, they mean, among many different meanings of the term. For example, some of the reviewers I note above were frustrated with my work complained about my use of the word "predicate", which I was certain at the time can't be misunderstood... but is in fact used in different ways by different communities. Thanks for the interest in my work. My second Machine Learning Journal paper is the much better written one, although it's rather a bit thick with formalisms and proofs etc. and won't be easy to read without a background in logic programming.

pdabbadabba 5y ago

I'd encourage you to take McCarthy's advice a bit more seriously. He isn't saying you should just use different words willy nilly, throwing their technical meaning out the window. He's just saying that you shouldn't excessively repeat words. Avoiding repetition can also mean structuring your writing in a way that allows you to rely on pronouns and other linguistic tools to avoid using the same word repeatedly while preserving clarity. And I often find that technical writers don't do a good job of evaluating which terms need to be treated as rigidly defined technical terms and which ones do not, resulting in writing that it more stilted and jargon laden than necessary to communicate clearly. One benefit of taking McCarthy's advice seriously is that it will encourage you to scrutinize your decisions about when to rely on jargon and defined terms and help you identify where you're using them as a crutch to avoid harder decisions about how to write clearly. The goal is not to be "entertaining." Rather, it is simply to should be to hold the reader's attention so you're not making huge claims on their ability to focus. I wouldn't be so quick to give up on this and embrace the "papers should be boring" mindset. The basic problem is that an extremely tedious paper does not "get your point across without doubt." It may not even get your point across at all because it pains readers to read it. Of course, none of this should be construed to mean that people should use "thesaurus words"--i.e., words that are overly obscure or a poor fit for the situation, just for the sake of mixing it up.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> I wouldn't be so quick to give up on this and embrace the "papers should be boring" mindset I never said, nor meant, that "papers should be boring", or even that technical writing should be boring. What I said, exactly, was: "Boring" is not a flaw, in technical writing. I think it's interesting how not only your comment, but those of others, misread that part of my comment and made a jump from "boring is not a flaw" to "papers should be boring". The reason I think it is interesting is because it reveals the amount of work that must go into a technical text to avoid such misunderstandings. For every single statement that matters, for every single point that is made, in a paper, there is a number of ways to misunderstand it, of varying degrees of obvious-ness. As a paper author, you have to try to think of each and every one of them, try to predict how likely it is that different kinds of readers will commit those kinds of misundestanding, and then try to defend your text against the most likely ones, at the very least. Since some of your readers are going to be reviewers, doing this well is the difference between getting your paper published, getting it rejected, or having it accepted with "minor" revisions (which are only so "minor" as the possibility for misunderstandings, so usually, not that much). So this anticipation of potential misunderstandings is a vital, essential skill that you develop as a paper writer. Er. I mean "scientist", of course. For this (oops) reason, I disagree with the use of pronouns etc. I actively try to avoid sentences like "This suggests" or "That means" or "It is an efficient way to" etc. just because I'm sure that "this", "that", "it", and their friends, will only serve to misdirect the reader's attention. Because when you write "it", you're thinking of X, but when the reader reads "it", they are actually thinking of Y, just because they're more interested in Y, so "it" is just a point of confusion. And that (oops) will _always_ happen because the author of a paper and the paper's readers will have different interests and tend to focus on different parts of a paper. The way I think about the use of pronouns is a little bit like loops in assembly: you want to "unroll" them to improve efficiency. Similarly, I always "dereference" pointer-words like pronouns etc, to remove ambiguity.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

> "don’t use the same word repeatedly" is the worst possible advice to give Agreed, this is often described as the error of "Said Bookism" > People are so used to the word "said" that they can mentally skip over it when reading; when the word changes over and over again, it becomes a distraction. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SaidBookism https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SaidBookism

iiv 5y ago
Have you read anything by McCarthy? His writing style is as far from "Said Bookism" as you can come.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  Yes, and recently. His technique is more to Find/replace "he said" with "". Your question has no point though, the advice was given as per grandparent comment; and it is not great advice as per several replies.
gowld 5y ago
Anonymous wiki posters vs best-selling author. Hmmm.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  a) Although the "Anonymous wiki" authors are a good reference for the trope of Said bookism", they did not originate it. You can also find it in the Turkey City Lexicon from 1988 (1) and no doubt other earlier sources. In that document, see also "“Burly Detective” Syndrome" b) I marvel at Mr McCarthy's prose. it breaks all the rules, and is sometimes impenetrable, sometimes so direct. It's fantastic, it's hard work. I couldn't do that well; very few could. There are far easier ways to get to "best seller". https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/ https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer...

hammock 5y ago

>This is the worst possible advice to give about technical writing! What you should absolutely do if you want your readers to know what you're talking about is a) define your terminology before you use it and b) stick to the terminology you defined throughout the entire paper. Don't call a thing "red noppertock" the first time you mention it and then "crimson nopper with a tock" the next time. Call the same object, the same concept, the same method by the same name, always. Otherwise, you will only create confusion and make your reader tired and impatient. What you are saying and what McCarthy is saying can both be true. Using the same word repeatedly is boring, technical writing or not. If you find yourself using the same word repeatedly, don't - as you seem to be assuming McCarthy is suggesting - pluck an alternate word out of a thesaurus; rather, take a step back and rethink if there is a different way to express your idea without using the word at all, or by using it less frequently.

borroka 5y ago
"Using the same word repeatedly is boring, technical writing or not." -- A technical or scientific paper does not need to be entertaining. I mean, it can be, but it adds zero to the value of the discovery made or methods developed. I know it is intriguing to think in terms of "fun", "creativity", "entertainment", but the scientific or technical paper needs to be as clear as possible, which is more often than not in contrast with a desire to make a paper "engaging". Nobody cares if a surgical operation is "entertaining". I don't remember having thought, when reading a paper, that it was boring, or "not fun", but I remember many times to have thought, "man, I have no clue what's going on here", "so many unnecessary details".
- hammock 5y ago
  Nowhere did I say that clarity ought to be compromised. You seem to believe there's a tradeoff where I see none. If a paper is clear and also easy to read, entertaining or otherwise not boring, it stands to reason that it will be more readily comprehended, remembered and shared by the reader.
  - borroka 5y ago

krrrh 5y ago

I was surprised to learn how much more this is considered a mark of good writing in English than in other languages. Because English has a larger vocabulary with cognates from both Germanic and Romance languages it’s much easier to vary the words used. In Spanish writing it’s much more acceptable and common to repeat the same word sentence to sentence.

dekhn 5y ago
any time I use the same word twice in any sentence, I always rewrite it to avoid any repetition

l33tbro 5y ago

I think you may be misinterpreting him. Didn't he say don't re-use words in the context of unnecessary jargon and buzzwords, as it gets boring reading the same superfluous words?