I am a big fan of McCarhty's and I think Blood Meridian is absolutely transcendent. The advice in this article seems apt if you are writing a 'great' paper, in

I am a big fan of McCarhty's and I think Blood Meridian is absolutely transcendent. The advice in this article seems apt if you are writing a 'great' paper, in the sense of 'going to be a classic in your field.' But it doesn't seem like very good advice for writing a 'good' paper, meaning one that advances the state of knowledge in one particular direction. True classics in the fields I know best (political science and economics) tend to be written very memorably, meaning the author's perspective is obvious. But not everyone is Gary Becker [0] or Kenneth Waltz [1], and if everyone tried to write like them, we'd have a lot less dialogue between papers -- a lot of the stuff people find boring in academic research is authors' trying very hard to situate their contributions within the broader literature -- and more people trying to strike out as stylistically distinct iconoclasts. Another comment here [2] makes this point well about the repetition of words. Repeating a technical term might make for a boring read, and if you are writing a paper that's going to revolutionize your field, perhaps you don't need to repeat yourself much because your main point can (should?) be made in a few different of ways. But if you're writing a typical science paper, which makes a narrow point about a new finding, then yes, you should repeat yourself as much as you need to create precise buttressing around that new finding. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1807222 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1807222 [1] https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-abstract/18/2/44/11449/The-Emerging-Structure-of-International-Politics?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-abstract/18/2/44/11449/T... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30616522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30616522