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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 mean

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.
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- auggierose 5y ago
  Well, boring IS a flaw in technical writing. I didn't read the rest of your comment, but I can see how your papers are confusing ... ;-)
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  - dpritchett 5y ago
    Agreed, if folks don’t finish reading the paper you can’t very well claim to have made the desired impact.
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- pdabbadabba 5y ago
  Fair enough. You didn't quite say that "papers should be boring." But you've overlooked the point of the paragraph you quote, which is that the issue isn't really whether a paper is boring or entertaining. It's about whether it is tedious or engaging. And being tedious certainly is a flaw in technical writing. The problem with tedious writing is that fewer people will actually read it and those that do will become fatigued, lose focus, and may not understand the document even if it uses language in a crystal clear way. I hear you on the risks inherent in the use of pronouns. Not using pronouns at all is certainly one strategy for addressing the risk of ambiguity or misunderstanding, but it is one with the serious disadvantage of making your text burdensome to read. And it certainly is not true that all pronoun use is ambiguous or misleading. You just have to be careful in how you use them. This can be difficult, but the reward is that you produce a piece of writing that it both clear and engaging (perhaps even not boring). FWIW its worth, I'm a lawyer. So I have my fair share of experience with one type of technical writing where clarity is particularly important. But given that our job is to persuade, I think lawyers may be more keenly aware than most that someone has to actually read your words and do so attentively if your writing is to achieve anything. It takes substantial work on the part of the writer to make that happen while ensuring that the writing remains sufficiently clear.

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.

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auggierose 5y ago
Well, boring IS a flaw in technical writing. I didn't read the rest of your comment, but I can see how your papers are confusing ... ;-)
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- dpritchett 5y ago
  Agreed, if folks don’t finish reading the paper you can’t very well claim to have made the desired impact.
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pdabbadabba 5y ago
Fair enough. You didn't quite say that "papers should be boring." But you've overlooked the point of the paragraph you quote, which is that the issue isn't really whether a paper is boring or entertaining. It's about whether it is tedious or engaging. And being tedious certainly is a flaw in technical writing. The problem with tedious writing is that fewer people will actually read it and those that do will become fatigued, lose focus, and may not understand the document even if it uses language in a crystal clear way. I hear you on the risks inherent in the use of pronouns. Not using pronouns at all is certainly one strategy for addressing the risk of ambiguity or misunderstanding, but it is one with the serious disadvantage of making your text burdensome to read. And it certainly is not true that all pronoun use is ambiguous or misleading. You just have to be careful in how you use them. This can be difficult, but the reward is that you produce a piece of writing that it both clear and engaging (perhaps even not boring). FWIW its worth, I'm a lawyer. So I have my fair share of experience with one type of technical writing where clarity is particularly important. But given that our job is to persuade, I think lawyers may be more keenly aware than most that someone has to actually read your words and do so attentively if your writing is to achieve anything. It takes substantial work on the part of the writer to make that happen while ensuring that the writing remains sufficiently clear.