What are your favorite pieces of writing advice?
There's that quote about how "the most important thing is sincerity, and if you can fake that, you've got it made." So there are two equal and opposite commandments for popular writing. First, you've got to sound like you're chatting with your reader, like you're giving them an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness access to your ideas as you think them. Second, on no account should you actually do that.
Eliezer is one of the masters at this; his essays are littered with phrases like "y'know" and "pretty much", but they're way too tight to be hastily published first drafts (or maybe I'm wrong and Eliezer is one of the few people in the world who can do this; chances are you're not). You've got to put a lot of work into making something look that spontaneous. I'm a fan of words like "sorta" and "kinda" myself, but I have literally gone through paragraphs and replaced all of the "to some degrees" with "sortas" to get the tone how I wanted it.
I like inserting myself and my thought processes into things I write. It's a no-no in serious writing, but in informal writing it...
Some people say to write down everything and only edit later. I take the opposite tack. I used to believe that I rarely edited at all because I usually publish something as soon as it's done. Then a friend watching me write said that she was getting seasick from my tendency to go back and forth deleting and rewriting the same sentence fragment or paragraph before moving on. Most likely the best writers combine both editing methods.
In the past, only the "edit later" method was even possible, because word processors didn't exist yet. There's really no longer any such thing as a "first draft" because we now tend to revise continuously instead of discretely.
Thanks for the Moldbug link-- it's the first thing I've read of his which didn't seem to be soaked in malice and pointlessly obscure.
One thing good writers have in common is that they convey a sense that the world is interesting. I'm not sure what the method is, though possibly Eric Raymond's idea (which I've heard him apply to speeches, but which probably also applies to text) is that frequent changes of tone are essential. It also (unlike the intimate tone) may be something that can't be faked.
This is an honest question-- is there a difference between writing that's simply a pleasure to read, and writing which gets people to do things? It's probable that the latter is a subset of the former.
34. Obey these rules before you obey grammarians, who say things like "Don't split infinitives" or "Don't begin sentences with And or But" and "Don't end a sentence with a preposition."
Real grammarians, i.e. linguists who study the grammar of English as it is, teach us that these aren't actually rules of grammar anyway, so much as prescriptions that were made up out of whole cloth for various reasons and that never had much to do with the way English was spoken or written. Here, for example, is an index of postings on Language Log (a group blog run by several professional linguists) about the split-infinitive issue. (The well-known story of this silly prescription was that it was decided in the 18th century that, since you can't split infinitives in Latin [Latin infinitives are a single word], you shouldn't split them in English either.)
Relatedly, the passive in English has a bad reputation that is not very well deserved. See here for a full explanation by the author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
You'd think this was just so much nitpicking -- and to some extent it is -- but understanding these issues fully can help you make better r...
I hesitate to counter your nitpicking with more nitpicking, but I do agree that "understanding these issues fully can help you make better rhetorical use of English". And so, I'd like to correct some of what you write about the split infinitive. The story is somewhat more subtle and interesting.
The well-known story of this silly prescription was that it was decided in the 18th century that, since you can't split infinitives in Latin [Latin infinitives are a single word], you shouldn't split them in English either.
This well-known story is actually a myth that has no factual basis. It is not true that the prohibition against split infinitives was decided in the 18th century (they started debating it mid-19th century), and more importantly none of the grammarians railing against it in those times based their arguments on anything to do with Latin. Never happened. The story seems to be a modern 20th-century invention, and has spread widely among those who oppose prescriptive grammarians because it makes them look very silly. It is repeated in many popular articles and books (e.g. Pinker's The Language Instinct), but for all that is completely untrue.
The interesting question, ...
Real grammarians, i.e. linguists who study the grammar of English as it is, teach us that these aren't actually rules of grammar anyway, so much as prescriptions that were made up out of whole cloth for various reasons and that never had much to do with the way English was spoken or written.
But do also note that a lot of people do believe those prescriptions to be valid, and view breaking them to be low status. All the "singular they is fine" blog posts in the world are irrelevant if using singular they will annoy half your readers.
Of course, I tend to use singular they anyway. It's often the best alternative and I doubt that many people in my likely target audience will really care. But you should still know the biggest things that will annoy people, so that if you use them, it will be out of conscious choice and not of ignorance.
I assume there are also limits to the amount of cognitive effort anyone wants to spend writing comments.
I'm not being sarcastic. Sometimes writing in a way that's easy for other people to understand is just hard. Speaking for myself, normally when my own comments aren't clear it's because I've spent as much time as I'm willing to spend on writing a comment trying to come up with clearer ways to convey my idea, not because it feels gross or because I'm not trying. (For example, I rewrote that last sentence at least 4 times and it's still pretty clunky.) This seems to come as second nature to some people, the rest of us have to struggle a bit.
None of this is intended to detract from your point. Clearer writing is better.
Forgive me, but this seems like a little bit of an overreaction. You're the only one who's called me out for writing style (although I have no trouble believing that others have thought the same thing and not said it). Frankly, I don't comment much, but when I do, my comments tend to be reasonably highly rated.
The incomprehensible-to-outsiders thing strikes me as a reach. LW by all appearances is growing rapidly without noticeable worsening in the quality of discourse or community, which is a remarkable accomplishment. When outsiders do complain about LW being unapproachable, it's not because of people like me writing long sentences. It's because of jargon, a lot of shared background that takes time to catch up on, and the novelty of some of the ideas.
I've already said I will make a reasonable effort to do better. So, respectfully, with that promise, I think I've shouldered enough responsibility for improving colloquy around here for the time being.
(Because I don't know how well in control of my tone I am, I want to clarify that I appreciate your feedback on my commenting style, and I very much do not want to come across as annoyed or snippy.)
The average SAT score for a men's basketball player at that school is 916, for football it is 926, over 250 points lower than the average of non-athletes. Consider that there are about 100 football players per school, and not all excel at athletics enough that admission departments change their standards for them equally. If 50 of them average 1050 (about bottom 20th percentile), the other 50 would have to average 790 for the average for all of them to be as low as 920. If 90 average as high as 940 (about bottom 5th percentile), the other ten would have to average 790 for their collective average to be 925. A single student, who might or might not only be a marginal football player, who scored 1140 (not an outlandishly high score, 40th percentile at that school) would raise the football average about two points.
Considering that average football player SAT scores are tracked and schools desire their admissions standards to be perceived as high, both as part of the NCAA certification process and to justify their money-making programs, Goodhart's law should probably be applied an additional time. Not only are SAT scores imperfect proxies for intelligence, average SAT scores for a sport are imperfect proxies of their admission standards, which are probably even lower than implied. This means it is very likely that some individuals have far less than the average program SAT score.
That "Engfish" essay is strange. It's right that textbooks and so on encourage students to write in a way that's impersonal and overly verbose. But it doesn't recognize the advantages of academic English. It doesn't even seem to recognize the role (or existence!) of dialects in general. Instead, it takes bad examples of academic English (the writing textbook) and suggests they should be more like bad examples of informal English (the third-grader).
Good academic writing is concise, precise, and gets quickly to the point, delivering a huge amount of information in a short amount of space.
(Also, by sticking to the point, academic writing minimizes digressions to emotionally charged or controversial topics. This reduces the risk of distracting the reader by getting into mind-killer territory. But that's more about what academic writing says, not how.)
Beware that many things labeled "adverbs" in dictionaries (particularly older dictionaries) aren't the adverbs that we want to eliminate from clear writing. A better summation of the whole bit on adjectives and adverbs is a simple application of "Prefer Brevity": anytime you have , see if you can replace the whole thing with a single word of the same type as the target that expresses the whole idea. This will usually be shorter, clearer, and more interesting.
I agree with this, though since there are probably lots of fiction-writers here as well, I want to point out that for fiction the advice is somewhat different. In fiction, you'll want to replace adverbs with something longer, because an adverb is telling and not showing, and you need more words to show something than to to tell something.
To quote Techniques of the Selling Writer:
Whenever practical, substitute action for the adverb.
"Angrily, she turned on him"? Or, "Her face stiffened, and her hands clenched to small, white-knuckled-fists"?
"Wearily, he sat down"? Or, "With a heavy sigh, he slumped into the chair and let his head loll back, eyes closed"?
Vividness outranks brevity.
At least, sometimes.
This isn't always a bad guideline for non-fiction writing, either. Telling requires the reader to rely on your authority; showing lets them see for themselves. Compare just saying "biologists romanticized evolution" with giving an example of insects defying biologists' expectations by turning into cannibals.
Of course, on some matters you should just state an issue with your authority and get on with it. If you're explaining confirmatio...
Something recently reminded me of Paul McHenry Roberts's How to Say Nothing in 500 Words.
It was written mostly for high school children, but it has lots of solid advice and its primary focus is something crucial: making your writing more interesting to read, aside from writing style.
The sections, "AVOID THE OBVIOUS CONTENT, "TAKE THE LESS USUAL SIDE", and "GET RID OF OBVIOUS PADDING" are most likely useless or groan-worthy obvious to anyone who's at all likely to read this comment. The only section I think is particularly likely to be relevant to rationality writers is "CALL A FOOL A FOOL".
Still, it's a pretty entertaining essay, worth reading in full unless you're really that fucking busy like Luke Muehlhauser is.
The best idea in the whole essay is,
Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup.
My impression is that high school writing assignments tend not to ask for as much volume as a student can reasonably produce without padding, but college writing assignments frequently ask for more.
If one professor gives assignments demanding at least ten pages, about topics that all invite at least that much legitimate content, other professors will feel the need to assign papers of similar length, lest they give the impression that their topics are less important, or their subject less demanding. Everyone learns to pad, and comes away with the impression that an important document should be long, because the more heavily graded their assignments are, the more page volume they demand.
I remember one of my professors assigned a twelve page paper detailing the results of the experiments our groups had spent the semester on. Mine was late, because the amount of informational content really only justified about half of that, and I was struggling to pad the paper to double length without turning it into something I would be embarrassed to hand in. When I turned the paper in to the professor, unhappy with its quality but not wanting to get more points taken off for lateness, he was asto...
The only section I think is particularly likely to be relevant to rationality writers is "CALL A FOOL A FOOL".
I find I get downvoted for calling a fool a fool approximately 33% of the time.
What are your favorite pieces of writing advice?
Use fungibility. People do this sort of thing for you if you pay them money.
My favorite book on writing is Stein on Writing, which has advice for both fiction and non-fiction writing. Possibly the two most important points of his are that non-fiction should not be dry, and that you should ideally grab your reader's curiosity from the very first sentence. If that doesn't work, then at least from the very first paragraph. That's more important than ever online, where the reader can always find something more interesting to read if an article seems boring. (I don't follow this advice nearly as often as I should.)
Here are some of his examples on good non-fiction, excerpted from real articles:
...When it comes to shopping for a computer, the most important peripheral runs at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and is known as a friend.
Here on a stony meadow in West Texas at the end of 10 miles of unpaved road through mesquite-covered, coyote-infested shurb land, several hundred bearers of a strategic commodity of the United States of America are gathered.
They are goats.As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding into buildings all around, a disheveled stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the
Orwell, Politics And The English Language - http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm The whole thing's worth a read, but especially his six-rule summary:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us 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.
I mostly endorse your list, though I often fail to follow it.
Among my favorites (these are not entirely disjoint from your list, but strike me as importantly different in emphasis):
Know where I'm going and why I'm going there
Once I figure out what I'm trying to say, I can say it far more effectively.
Avoid the second person
IME, second-person advice is far more likely to inspire defensiveness. When I'm really fine-tuning, I avoid the word "you" altogether unless I'm CERTAIN that my audience will feel complimented by the sentence.
Present compl
Few comments to the rules:
(5.) is a goal, but not a task. Wishing to make the text exciting doesn't help me to accomplish it.
(6.) Don't be too brief (style of mathematical textbooks is certainly not an ideal to aspire to) and don't make too many endnotes (they are intimidating).
(11.) I'd like to see concrete example of how to do it.
(12.) Presence of few "I could have said this" moments activates confirmation bias algorithms and actually keeps the reader happy and interested. A dark technique, but successful, the most when the reader thinks "...
Two general formulas for structuring material to convey information and persuade others to apply it.
First, the "why-what-how-what-if" framework (for tutorials, where the audience is seeking a solution):
Write like you talk. When possible, use small, old, Germanic words.
Oh dear. Those two goals are ... contradictory for me. I've had the fact that "people don't talk like that, {Logos01}" stated to me on more occassions than I care to recall.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.language.artificial/msg/69250bac6c7cbaff?pli=1
The tailbit of Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding":
Some of the higher samesteads are splitly. That is, when a neitherbit strikes the kernel of one, as for a showdeal ymirstuff-235, it bursts into lesser kernels and free neitherbits; the latter can then split more ymirstuff-235. When this happens, weight shifts into work. It is not much of the whole, but nevertheless it is awesome.
With enough strength, lightweight unclefts can be made to togethermelt. In the sun, through a row of strikings and lightrottings, four unclefts of waterstuff in this wise become one of sunstuff. Again some weight is lost as work, and again this is greatly big when set beside the work gotten from a minglingish doing such as fire.
Today we wield both kind of uncleftish doings in weapons, and kernelish splitting gives us heat and bernstoneness. We hope to do likewise with togethermelting, which would yield an unhemmed wellspring of work for mankindish goodgain.
Soothly we live in mighty years!
I agree with your conclusion (this is a worthwhile pursuit), but I have some qualms.
There are a couple of general points that I think really need to be addressed before most of the individual points on this list can be considered seriously:
Following a list of prescriptions and proscriptions is a really poor way to learn any complex skill. A bad writer who earnestly tries to follow all the advice on this list will almost certainly still be bad at writing. I think the absolute best, most important advice to give to an aspiring writer is to write. A lot.
Luke, this has little to do with this post, but I'd like to know how you're consuming a seemingly inhuman amount of information. Maybe you can write a post on rationalist news/data consumption? Like, for example, are you using clip files, notebooks, RSS readers, and so on? How are you optimizing the amount of time spent per unit of useful data consumption? How much time per day are you spending in doing all this research?
...I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn it's pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they are, but by then it's--GASP!!--too late.
If you want to be a writer, then you must do two things above all others: read a
Advice I give to my students at Smith College:
1) Be clear! 2) Be concise! 3) Be interesting!
• I am your audience. When you write a paper imagine what objections James Miller would make to your arguments and then either counter these objections or admit that these objections weaken your thesis. It’s better to admit a flaw in your argument than it is to ignore such a flaw. Consider having a pretend conversation with me in which I point out everything that is wrong with your paper.
• Using many subheadings often makes papers clearer and better orga...
To see what's distinctive about lukeprog's approach to writing, I think it's important to read his essay, "The Art of Plain Talk" (http://tinyurl.com/18r)—which he links at point 27. Without this background, it's hard to see how his 37 rules are connected. But in my view, unexpressed inter-relation, as in the present piece, is at the root of what's problematic about the "plain-talk" style. (See http://tinyurl.com/3glcy28)
Begin with movement. Excitement. Humor. Surprise. Insight. Explosions.
I know I am a total nitpicker here but I think there is such a thing as too short a sentence.
Look at every sentence and ask yourself if you could rewrite the sentence in a way such that (a) you have conveyed the same information in fewer words and (b) the rewritten sentence is grammatically correct. If so then you should probably go with the more concise sentence. If you are not an excellent writer then you should always go with the shorter sentence.
Expel words that don't pay rent!
Rules are more memorable when written like so:
(2) How should you open? With a question.
Or like so:
(6) Prefer brevity. Cut what isn't needed, or at least move it to an endnote.
(12) Avoid cliches like the plague, they're old hat.
(21).Shorten your sentences and paragraphs; replace semicolons with periods.
(27) Employ the vernacular.
Etc.
Simplicity is overrated, and a spate of research on "cognitive fluency" and "disfluency" is just starting to put it in perspective. One study that should jar some "plain language" proponents, for example, found that making high-school texts harder to read improved retention. (See http://tinyurl.com/3aouvja) Balancing simplicity and complexity is no simple matter, but science is finally addressing it.
I have a blog on writing—legal writing, actually—and it's the only place I've seen the cognitive-fluency research seriously appli...
I've always felt like Sagan and Dawkins have a certain talent for writing so far beyond my own that they're not even worth emulating. They write poetry. And in so doing, they manage to hide the process that created the work in the first place. That's the reason it's such a pleasure to read, but it doesn't help me get there, if you know what I mean.
An example of an excellently written pop-science book where I could glean the rules that were being followed was Stumbling Upon Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It's very readable, and doesn't feel "fake", ...
Hey Luke,
This is great to hear. What drew me to you and your works initially was your extraordinary ability to take concepts foreign to me and make them accessible, easy to understand and even enjoyable. It's good to see that you intend to capitalize on this talent, and I can't wait to see what more comes of it. That being said seeing how far you've come already in the past few years is mind-blowing.
You really make me want to do better. Thank you.
-31. Put the most impacting words at the end of a sentence.
Am I the only one that sees something wrong with this?
Great advice! I also thought it was funny as I was scanning rather than reading as I saw the line about scanning.
Do great writers (fiction or not) say that following composition advice helped them? Do they give consistent composition advice themselves? If the answer to both questions is 'no', that suggests that great writing is not something easily trainable.
(Disclaimer: I think Luke's a really good writer, so don't read this as "if you haven't got it, you never will, give up").
First approximation: Make your writing similar to a blockbuster movie.
"Really nice cleavage and explosions" doesn't look nearly as impressive on paper.
That's why I asked LWers for their picks of best nonfiction writing on Less Wrong.
Excuse me, but almost all writing on Less Wrong is nonfiction. Shouldn't you have simply asked for the best writing on Less Wrong?
(I meant to ask this in the linked post, but forgot.)
I can't say I agree with all of your examples of good science writers. Hawking, for example, is a terrible science writer unless he's got somebody like Mlodinow to do all the actual writing for him. I've talked to a lot of people who are completely turned off to pop-cosmology books because of A Brief History of Time. Oliver Sacks too, though I absolute love the guy, can be overly convoluted. Hell, the guy has footnotes that literally fill the majority of the page!
You should check out Mary Roach. Her book Stiff is probably one of the best pop-science books I've read.
"Favor surprise, as long as it doesn't engender too much disbelief. Avoid anything that lets the reader think, "I could have written that sentence." That'll depend on your audience, there are people who enjoy having their own thoughts affirmed. Sometimes its a surprise that someone else thinks like we do.
Use a concrete-then-abstract pattern to pull readers forward. Start with a concrete example, probably more concrete than you feel it needs to be, and then make the more general point.
Any rationale? I generally state the principle first and then give a concrete example.
If I do it the other way around, I fear the reader will go: "what's up with the story?" - and turn off.
That is pretty much what happens in reverse when other authors launch into examples without telling me where they are going with them.
Edit: Grouchymusicologist has already covered silly grammar-nazism, passives, and Strunk and White, complete with the Languagelog links I was looking for.
\25. Write like you talk. When possible, use small, old, Germanic words.
I think this one should be deleted. The first sentence of it is wrong as written, but the idea behind it is expressed clearly and sufficiently in #26 anyway. People do not talk in grammatical, complete sentences.
As for the second half, do you really look up etymologies as you write? I have only the vaguest sense of the origins of ...
Also see Pinker's talk "The Sense of Style: Scientific Communication for the 21st Century", a preview of his upcoming book on writing style.
Is there a copy of Singularity Writing Advice anywhere? I'd very much like to re-read it, but the actual page seems have been down for a while.
I found that the book Made to Stick was very helpful, especially for conveying statistics and other data with the right emotional context to make people care.
Edit: I guess I scanned instead of reading - I didn't see on my first read that you did include the SUCCESS formula from Made to Stick. Sorry about that.
lukeprog wrote: "Now: What are your favorite pieces of writing advice?"
"On Style" by Arthur Schopenhauer
German original: http://aboq.org/schopenhauer/parerga2/stil.htm
English translation: http://tinyurl.com/68oajcg
Excerpt: "It would generally serve writers in good stead if they would see that, whilst a man should, if possible, think like a great genius, he should talk the same language as everyone else. Authors should use common words to say uncommon things. But they do just the opposite. We find them trying to wrap up trivial idea...
You might also consider adding Isaac Asimov to your list of great science writers. Asimov's New Guide To Science, though a touch dated now is still an excellent read across many fields.
If you're willing to step outside academia then check out Edward DeBono also, he will fit in beautifully with the SUCCESS formula you present.
At least 29 and 32 are process advice, too.
31: Anything can be done in dialogue (cf. Plato), but probably shoudn't.
22: Reader of blogs or of papers? What's the target audience?
Further points:
Personally, I'm very much against the idea of writing down "whatever horrible shit comes out of you." Maybe it's me personally. I think it's faster to actually outline, revise, develop, revise, etc. in a much more cyclical manner. Planning can break the looming threat of writer's block. Quite often, I won't have enough ideas to start to get anywhere in a worthwhile manner.
Instead, I want to flesh out the major ideas and develop them as much as I can along the entirety of your work. Write out parts here and there to determine what the directio...
Thanks for posting this list. I've also been feeling this lately:
Also, it appears I produce better writing without really trying than most people produce with trying.
What are you doing to practice on a regular basis? I'm active on several forums, which are great for snapping out brief (1-3 paragraph) blurbs of persuasive text. I've been wondering what the next step should be. Start a blog and make it part of my routine to post every day? How does that square with revising appropriately, though?
Thanks for this.
Both your links on point 21 are to the same page.
Would you care to take a crack at how much and what sort of redundancy is useful, and how to supply it? I think I err too much on the side of only saying things once.
The Hot Zone struck me as a perfect example of how non-fiction is written for a popular audience, especially the way it alternated between stories and abstraction. I don't know that's still current, or if fashions have changed.
Consensus from writers: your beta readers are much better at identifying problems than solving them. ...
I'd recommend Orwell's articles on writing. And Korzybski for thinking and writing.
Yes, fiction moves minds. Especially movies. Rationalists definitely should not boycott fiction.
Some problems:
"Rhetoric moves minds." Well, what do you make of this? Is using rhetoric the exploitation of rhetoric a dark art? Why not?
"(I won't try to write everything well. Sometimes I should just crank things out. To be honest, I didn't spend much time optimizing this post.)"
A questionable, temporizing stance. First, if you want to improve your writing, you should write everything well. Poor or mediocre writing practices bad habits. Second, language is tightly integrated with thought: you can't perfect an idea without perfecting its expression. Shitty writing risks shitty cognition.
My favorite book on writing is Stein on Writing, which has advice for both fiction and non-fiction writing. Possibly the two most important points of his are that non-fiction should not be dry, and that you should ideally grab your reader's curiosity from the very first sentence. If that doesn't work, then at least from the very first paragraph. That's more important than ever online, where the reader can always find something more interesting to read if an article seems boring. (I don't follow this advice nearly as often as I should.)
Here are some of his examples on good non-fiction, excerpted from real articles:
When it comes to shopping for a computer, the most important peripheral runs at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and is known as a friend.
Here on a stony meadow in West Texas at the end of 10 miles of unpaved road through mesquite-covered, coyote-infested shurb land, several hundred bearers of a strategic commodity of the United States of America are gathered.
They are goats.As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding into buildings all around, a disheveled stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni's Adagio.
Repetition is sometimes a useful technique:
Yesterday morning Henry Sorbino walked into the K-Mart on Eleventh Street carrying an umbrella and walked out carrying an umbrella and someone else's purse.
Adding color can be done subtly - note the one word that makes this sentence more interesting:
At exactly 10:19 A.M. yesterday, a grandmother's purse on a conveyor belt at Orange Country airport set off an alarm that caused two security guards to rush to the scene.
An otherwise uninteresting piece of news can be made more interesting with an eye for detail:
Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing wrong, was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning.
Note how much better the preceeding sentence works than if we'd used the cliché of "maintaining his innocence".
The real subject of the next story was the suspension of auto union talks because workers were loath to chip in for health care costs:
Since learning last year that he had multiple sclerosis, Andy Torok has become less and less steady on his feet, and his worries have accumulated along with the hand prints on his apartment's white walls.
An obit or memorial piece doesn't have to be dull:
Andy Warhol, draftsman of shoes, is dead, and the people viewing his remains are mostly wearing scuffed white sneakers.
A year after his death, the recurring image I associate with Raymond Carver is one of people leaning toward him, working very hard at the act of listening.
Nor does the opening of an autobiography:
Many problems confront an autobiographer, and I am confident that I have not solved them.
I see no reason why the reader should be interested in my private life.
note the one word that makes this sentence more interesting:
At exactly 10:19 A.M. yesterday, a grandmother's purse on a conveyor belt at Orange Country airport set off an alarm that caused two security guard's to rush to the scene.
Is it the word left out after "guard's"? Because, man, it really makes me want to know what two things of the security guard rushed to the scene.
The topics of rationality and existential risk reduction need their own Richard Dawkins. Their own Darwin. Their own Voltaire.
Rhetoric moves minds.
Students and masochists aside, people read only what is exciting. So: Want to make an impact? Be exciting. You must be heard before you can turn heads in the right direction.
Thus, I've decided to try harder and actually put effort into the quality of my writing instead of just cranking stuff out quickly so I can fill in inferential gaps and get to the cutting edge of the research subjects I care about.
That's why I asked LWers for their picks of best nonfiction writing on Less Wrong.
It's also why I've been reading lots of good science writing, focusing on those who manage to be exciting while covering fairly complex subjects: Dawkins, Sagan, Gleick, Zimmer, Shermer, Ramachandran, Roach, Sacks, Hawking, Greene, Hofstadter, Penrose, Wilson, Feynman, Kaku, Gould, Bryson, Pinker, Kurzban, and others.
I've also been re-reading lots of books and articles on how to write well: Keys to Great Writing, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Elements of Style, On Writing Well, The Classic Guide to Better Writing, The Book on Writing, Telling True Stories, Writing Tools, Ideas into Words, The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science, A Field Guide for Science Writers, Six Rules for Rewriting, Writing, Briefly, and Singularity Writing Advice. (Conversations with Eliezer also helped.)
I don't know if I can become the Voltaire of rationality and existential risk reduction, but it seems worth a shot. Every improvement in writing style is beneficial even if my starry goal is never met. Also, it appears I produce better writing without really trying than most people produce with trying. (If you've ever had to grade essays by honors English seniors, you'll know what I mean.) I expect to gain more by striving where I already excel than by pushing where I have little natural talent.
(I won't try to write everything well. Sometimes I should just crank things out. To be honest, I didn't spend much time optimizing this post.)
My other hope is that a few other writers decide they would like to be the Voltaire of rationality and/or existential risk reduction. May this post be useful to them. It's a list of recommendations on writing style pulled from many sources, in no particular order.
And, just one piece of process advice. Do not apply any of these rules while drafting. Instead, write down whatever horrible shit comes out of you and do it quickly. Then revise, revise, revise.
Now: What are your favorite pieces of writing advice?