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>> 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
by 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 agoWell, 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 agoAgreed, 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 agoFair 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 agoMost of my family are lawyers! My intuition is that the quality of writing in the texts that lawyers read is far higher than the average scientific paper, which is after all not valued for its prose, but for its findings. On the other hand, I get the feeling that in some jurisdictions the standard of evidence in courts is far lower than er... than what it's supposed to be in the sciences (but it really isn't). Anyway for me it makes sense that more persuasive language is used in your occupation than in mine. It's not that researchers don't need to structure arguments carefully, it's just that we got formulae and experiments and formal proofs, so we don't really need to argue so much. In any case, most people start reading a paper by looking for the figures... I should say that I spent my childhood thinking I would grow up to be a professional writer. I kind of did, I just didn't think I'd be writing research papers. The errors of imprecision I committed in my rejected papers (mentioned in my OP above) were the result of my habbit of thinking about writing in the way that a creative writer thinks, where the goal is beauty, not precision. I really saw a huge difference in the way my papers were received when I corrected for that. I went from having my papers rejected with angry notes, to being complimented for their clarity and my first published paper even got a Best Student Paper award. The change I made was literally just consistent use of terminology. It was like throwing a switch! I was so surprised. Hence my disagreement with McCarthy on that one particular point. I think his other points are fair, btw.