How to write an academic paper, according to me
Disclaimer: this is entirely a personal viewpoint, formed by a few years of publication in a few academic fields. EDIT: Many of the comments are very worth reading as well.
Having recently finished a very rushed submission (turns out you can write a novel paper in a day and half, if you're willing to sacrifice quality and sanity), I've been thinking about how academic papers are structured - and more importantly, how they should be structured.
It seems to me that the key is to consider the audience. Or, more precisely, to consider the audiences - because different people will read you paper to different depths, and you should cater to all of them. An example of this is the "inverted pyramid" structure for many news articles - start with the salient facts, then the most important details, then fill in the other details. The idea is to ensure that a reader who stops reading at any point (which happens often) will nevertheless have got the most complete impression that it was possible to convey in the bit that they did read.
So, with that model in mind, lets consider the different levels of audience for a general academic paper (of course, some papers just can't fit into this mould, but many can):
Effective Writing
Granted, writing is not very effective. But some of us just love writing...
Earning to Give Writing: Which are the places that pay 1USD or more dollars per word?
Mind Changing Writing: What books need being written that can actually help people effectively change the world?
Clarification Writing: What needs being written because it is only through writing that these ideas will emerge in the first place?
Writing About Efficacy: Maybe nothing else needs to be written on this.
What should we be writing about if we have already been, for very long, training the craft? What has not yet been written, what is the new thing?
The world surely won't save itself through writing, but it surely won't write itself either.
How Tim O'Brien gets around the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence
It took me until I read The Things They Carried for the third time until I realized that it contained something very valuable to rationalists. In "The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence," EY explains how using fiction as evidence is bad not only because it's deliberately wrong in particular ways to make it more interesting, but more importantly because it does not provide a probabilistic model of what happened, and gives at best a bit or two of evidence that looks like a hundred or more bits of evidence.
Some background: The Things They Carried is a book by Tim O'Brien that reads as an autobiography where he recollects various stories from being a story in the Vietnam War. However, O'Brien often repeats himself, writing the same story over again, but with details or entire events that change. It is actually a fictional autobiography; O'Brien was in the Vietnam War, but all the stories are fictional.
In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien not only explains how generalization from fictional evidence is bad, but also has his own solution to the problem that actually works, i.e. gives the reader a useful probabilistic model of what happened in such a way that actually interests the reader. He does this by telling his stories many times, changing significant things about them. Literally; he contradicts himself, writing out the same story but with things changed. The best illustration of the principle in the book is the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story," found here (PDF warning, and bad typesetting warning).
A reader is not inclined to read a list of probabilities, but they are inclined to read a bunch of short stories. He talks about this practice a lot in the book itself, writing, "All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. … You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it." He always says war story, but the principle generalizes. At one point, he has a character represent the forces that act on conventional writing, telling a storyteller that he cannot say that he doesn't know what happened, and that he cannot insert any analysis.
O'Brien also writes about a lot of other things I don't want to mention more than briefly here, such as the specific ways in which the model that conventional war stories give of war is wrong, and specific ways in which the audience misinterprets stories. I recommend the book very much, especially if you think writing "tell multiple short stories" fiction is a great idea and want to do it.
I apologize if this post has been made before.
EDIT: Tried to clarify the idea better. I added an example with an excerpt.
EDIT 2: Added a better excerpt.
EDIT 3: Added a paragraph about background.
Strategic Bestseller: Taking the Blog Path (4HS002)
"The scariest moment is just before you start""I think timid writers like the passive voice for the same reason timid lovers like passiveFollow-up to: How can I strategically write a complex bestseller?
partners. The passive voice is safe." - Stephen King
2:27 PM, Mexico City, 08 July 2013
The Blog Path and the Time Dimension
Robin Hanson recently said that writing a book feels lonelier than writing blog posts. Blog posts have many features that books will never have. Not only the obvious ones such as instantaneous gratification, being able to complete a chunk of work in one sitting, and being able to show you are actually doing something, not just claiming you are. Blogs also partition time in a way that makes a primate brain comfortable, both from the reader's and the writer's perspective. But in my case the most important feature of blogs is that generate and test and trial and error are easy to do. So after my first post here, and weeks solving many of the surrounding problems that could impede me from moving forward, I decided to go through the beaten track and blog my way into a bestseller.
The Challenges Theme
The theme of the blog is self challenges, and it envisions the public that enjoys Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, with a side of A J Jacobs. It begins by the #50: Stop Learning, Start Doing.
This is the first post, so let’s cut to the chase: In this blog we’ll be going through a series of 50 challenges. Whatever you want to do, let’s do this together. You like A. J. Jacobs and Tim Ferriss? That’s a good start. You want to deal with your big picture question too? On top of that you like Science and Philosophy? You’ve come to the right place, but don’t take a seat yet, this is not a place to rest your gaze and get your warm fuzzy feeling inside by making a comment. This is a place to do.
All you’ll need prior to reading this blog is linked below:
You want to be one of the few Self-Actualizers out there? This won’t be any easy, and though we’ll make the journey together, no one besides you can do it for you.
But before we start, there are Six things you need to know, and they’re gonna hurt like few things you (... and it continues from here)
Previous LW Post Comments (ordered by upvotes):
Omid said that if writing is like music, being a bestseller is mostly about luck. Partially (0.5) I concur, but it seems to me that randomness in music interest is mostly dominated by prestige considerations from separate domains.
Trevor Blake told his story and made clear that only writing is writing, talking about it, or even what I'm doing here, writing about it, isn't it. That seemed like an important downward spiral to keep track of. It explains why these LW posts will be less frequent than I thought before.
Gwern and Pjeby had a long discussion about book stats and likelihoods of making bestselling lists. It is clear that it is very hard. But it made me feel it is less hard than I thought before.
ChristianKI asked the words per day question. I'll respond by saying that I read+write more than six hours a day, which is Stephen King's suggested time in his "On Writing"
Michaelos and Qiaochu_Yuan suggested a mixed nagging strategy, getting someone close to me to nag me about writing while also beeminding it. This seems very important. Beeminder is set, and feel free to nag me in private messages if you are reading this far from the date it was written. I'll get a friend whom I see a lot, and a sexy lady, and an authority figure, to nag me every once in a while. So whether I'm feeling gregarious, romantically infatuated or seeking validation, there will always be a chance that writing is the emotionally correct thing to do.
Finally, and of course there will never be time to respond to every comment here, though there might in the blog itself: Viliam_Bur devised "on the fly" a strategy, which nicely coincides with what I'm doing, except in that outlining the book is something I'll do after a few blog posts, now that this new "blog post" element entered the book agenda. Viliam also mentioned humans love reading stories, and the blogs next post will be one of my stories.
Getting informed about what does and doesn't work
Last post I said this post would contain a few things, among them "(d) Gather that information" in Salamon's list of strategic things to do in a project pursuit. From the information I got uptill now, including comments, posts in LW and asking authors by email, things that influence selling odds in non-fiction in a good way are, in no particular order:
1) Being famous
2) Writing a lot
3) Luck
4) Being a professor in a prestigious university
5) Passion
6) A wide circle of influence
7) Having a 1000 true fans, who'll buy your stuff because it is yours
8) Knowing your Grammar, and when to ignore it
9) Ignoring 80% of the criticism you receive
(those would be the "If I can't have it, so can't you" kind of critics, or just naturally spiteful individuals)
10) Paying five times more attention to the remaining 20%
11) If your reader says your writing is confusing, it is, by definition, confusing
12) Dealing with topics in a way that interests many, but focusing on your idealized one reader
13) Understand that lacking the level of obsession and resources used to promote The Four Hour Workweek, the journey could be as long as writing three or four books before making it big, or five hundred blog posts. It helps that I'm riding the four hour brand.
15) Using your strengths however you can
In my case I intend to use my "sure, naked dancing in public citing horoscopes sounds ok to me" strength, and also however many stories of unbelievable days this lack of embarrassment has given me.
Next LW Post
Before the next LW post I intend to copy Svi's idea of using TDT for a personal hacking experience, and also do the same thing with other unusual ideas that pop up in LW frequently. Instead of taking advice from something in LW that is specifically about strategic thinking, which I'm already doing with Great Courses lectures+Salamon's post, I'll just try to see how to administer things like TDT, Everett, Timeless Physics, AIXI, Newcomb, Iterated Prisoner Dilemma and PrudentBot into effective writing - ¿or should I call it effective bestselling now that I know writing itself is but the tip of the iceberg?. I have no idea how to do that transposition, but when last here I exposed my goals, and now it doesn't seem that embarrassing to do it anymore.
Last, I ask a favor with a story:
There is a one domain I never felt like learning more about. Seeking for truth is a noble goal, but some truths are information hazards, and I always had the impression that music, for me, was a dark terrain. It feels like the more I know - from almost nothing - about music, about structure, math, chords, composition, harmony, style, it all boils down to "unweaving the rainbow" in Dawkins' parlance. It detracts from the experience. Going to a music show for me is a torture, for the last thing I want to associate music with is a bunch of humans making coordinated physical motions in complex devices that cause the air to oscillate. I want music to be what makes my eyes teary when a Myiazaki's character finally saves the forgotten forest from the mountain spirit. Music should be a memoir of my grandma bringing me as a child to bed while Vivaldi's Spring surrounded the bed. By the same token, there are many details of people's lives we are better off unaware of, and in the case of a blogger, or a writer, you frequently just don't want to know the details, how easy or hard it was for her to write, or how long does she usually take in the shower. Most people are not hardcore epistemic rationalists, and I'd prefer that those didn't find any link, mention or pointer from the blog comments to the LW posts about it. Perhaps not so much in this community, but mystery is, and will forever remain, an important component in excitement and interest.
I'll finish off as I did before, by mentioning what this is all about: I don't know which LW posts contain the most compact, memorable or effective techniques for winning at being strategic, but I'm hoping by the end of this process the territory is better mapped for those who'd like to follow suit. Or point and laugh.
How to Write Deep Characters
Triggered by: Future Story Status
A helpful key to understanding the art and technique of character in storytelling, is to consider the folk-psychological notion from Internal Family Systems of people being composed of different 'parts' embodying different drives or goals. A shallow character is a character with only one 'part'.
A good rule of thumb is that to create a 3D character, that person must contain at least two different 2D characters who come into conflict. Contrary to the first thought that crosses your mind, three-dimensional good people are constructed by combining at least two different good people with two different ideals, not by combining a good person and a bad person. Deep sympathetic characters have two sympathetic parts in conflict, not a sympathetic part in conflict with an unsympathetic part. Deep smart characters are created by combining at least two different people who are geniuses.
E.g. HPMOR!Hermione contains both a sensible young girl who tries to keep herself and her friends out of trouble, and a starry-eyed heroine, neither of whom are stupid. (Actually, since HPMOR!Hermione is also the one character who I created as close to her canon self as I could manage - she didn't *need* upgrading - I should credit this one to J. K. Rowling.) (Admittedly, I didn't actually follow that rule deliberately to construct Methods, I figured it out afterward when everyone was praising the characterization and I was like, "Wait, people are calling me a character author now? What the hell did I just do right?")
If instead you try to construct a genius character by having an emotionally impoverished 'genius' part in conflict with a warm nongenius part... ugh. Cliche. Don't write the first thing that pops into your head from watching Star Trek. This is not how real geniuses work. HPMOR!Harry, the primary protagonist, contains so many different people he has to give them names, and none of them are stupid, nor does any one of them contain his emotions set aside in a neat jar; they contain different mixtures of emotions and ideals. Combining two cliche characters won't be enough to build a deep character. Combining two different realistic people in that character's situation works much better. Two is not a limit, it's a minimum, but everyone involved still has to be recognizably the same person when combined.
Closely related is Orson Scott Card's observation that a conflict between Good and Evil can be interesting, but it's often not half as interesting as a conflict between Good and Good. All standard rules about cliches still apply, and a conflict between good and good which you've previously read about and to which the reader can already guess your correct approved answer, cannot carry the story. A good rule of thumb is that if you have a conflict between good and good which you feel unsure about yourself, or which you can remember feeling unsure about, or you're not sure where exactly to draw the line, you can build a story around it. I consider the most successful moral conflict in HPMOR to be the argument between Harry and Dumbledore in Ch. 77 because it almost perfectly divided the readers on who was in the right *and* about whose side the author was taking. (*This* was done by deliberately following Orson Scott Card's rule, not by accident. Likewise _Three Worlds Collide_, though it was only afterward that I realized how much of the praise for that story, which I hadn't dreamed would be considered literarily meritful by serious SF writers, stemmed from the sheer rarity of stories built around genuinely open moral arguments. Orson Scott Card: "Propaganda only works when the reader feels like you've been absolutely fair to other side", and writing about a moral dilemma where *you're* still trying to figure out the answer is an excellent way to achieve this.)
Character shallowness can be a symptom of moral shallowness if it reflects a conflict between Good and Evil drawn along lines too clear to bring two good parts of a good character into conflict. This is why it would've been hard for Lord of the Rings to contain conflicted characters without becoming an entirely different story, though as Robin Hanson has just remarked, LotR is a Mileu story, not a Character story. Conflicts between evil and evil are even shallower than conflicts between good and evil, which is why what passes for 'maturity' in some literature is so uninteresting. There's nothing to choose there, no decision to await with bated breath, just an author showing off their disillusionment as a claim of sophistication.
How can I strategically write a complex bestseller? (4HS001)
“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
- Neil Gaiman
3:00 AM, Mexico City, 12 June 2013
Seven years ago I made a promise I didn't keep. I was 17 at the time, and mildly unaware of how complex and large the World is. The conversation went something like this:
Me: I could write a bestseller, come on, it is not that complicated. Just read a random bestseller, they are not even that smart anyway!
Mentor: Yeah, right, I dare you to go back home right now and write a bestseller, go!
Me: I'm busy with all this school stuff right now, so I have to do my homework and....
Mentor: Ok, ok, I'll concede we are very busy right now, how about in five years?
Me: Five years seems more than enough. Take a note, in five years time I'll have written a bestseller. I promise.
Somehow later on I got busy with cooking pasta I needn't eat and listening to gossip about people I didn't care. Not a good start.
It's never too late to start over though, and now is as good a time as any.
But wait! Humans are not automatically strategic right?
True. Also humans are not as good at detecting their own strategic failures and dead-ends as other humans. If we can't even face more than three minutes of work, how could we ever intuitively look at our work and see where it is bad?
Which is why it seems that the rational way to do it is to find a place where people trained at being strategic can pinpoint your failures and accomplishments as you go along, rewarding you for winning and twisting your mental knobs when you fail, so that over time, either you learn how to do it right, or you learn the right thing to do was something else altogether. This is the project. I'm hoping as an exercise in self-experimentation with Lesswrong rationality techniques that it both helps others who may be undertaking writing or related projects, and inspires others into remaining as strategic as they learned to be over time, or even more.
I won't write the book here, but I'll keep track of the writing process and everything involved around it here (killing plausible deniability of my goals), and encourage anyone who perchance might be doing something similar to keep track in the same way through commentaries or taking private notes. Starting by the checklist in Humans are not automatically strategic:
We do not automatically:
- (a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
Descriptive definition: The goal is to have written a book that, despite having interesting complex content, and being within my interest scope, sells enough to get me a free and clear profit of 1700 Big Mac Indexes per month. 54 Big Macs a day. Current US $7140,00 per month, for three consecutive months.
Ostensive Definition: Being the author of something that enters my cognitive intensional cluster containing Drop Dead Healthy, The Four Hour Workweek, Outliers, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stumbling on Happiness, The Game, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Mistery Method, Freakonomics, Flourish, The Guinea Pig Diaries,
- (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
Achieve: The income part is easy to detect. If it has interesting content will have to depend on a fallible 'at the time judgment' and a quick consultation with a friend who knew me before the process. (Miss T, she is great)
Track: Writing here about the process. Checking for the twelfth virtue frequently. Track a long to do list with specific and impossible deadlines as soon as it makes sense to fully write one.
- (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
Possible danger: It is easy to be curious about the info for the book, and much harder to be curious about how to write much better, even harder how to write aiming at selling - or whichever reflective shield needs to be looked at to stare into the eyes of the selling Medusa.
- (d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
This will be next post's topic. Here only what didn't work: (1)Writing purely for fun made me write a book but not create a product. (2)Waiting for creativity made no difference in writing quality, actually writing did. (3) Writing a book in Spanish was a terrible idea. (4)Choosing writer peers according to mild proximity helped with writing fiction movie scripts, but not non-fiction books.
- (e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
Conjectures: (1)Trying to sell before writing may shorten the process manyfold. (2)Riding someone else's fame and marketing eases the process. (3)Writing with the purpose of causing the reader to show a friend what he has - who am I kidding, it's a guy, look at the ostensive examples - just read is the best meta-goal to keep in mind. (4) It is not that hard to get my goal, it isn't that far from a sarcastic quote: "One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That's enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year." (4)There is always a third alternative, and many times I'm not the one who will see it first. Keep an attentive ear.
- (f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
I don't have a clear idea of what Salamon meant by "isn't going into systematic exploration" and I can't constrain my experience based on this line alone, if anyone feels qualified to clarify, please do. I'll deal with this on later posts.
- (g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;
Fears: Having learned in Lesswrong to do things I had never considered myself able to, I don't feel any fear of trying it wrong. I do however feel anxiety and fear that peeking into my reasoning process and strategic attempt at this goal won't be motivating enough for others to want to translate by analogy my experience into theirs, which wouldn't give me the critical minimal threshold of upvotes and comments necessary to keep me motivated to write about writing. That could stymie my exposition of the shortcuts that help me, and the biases that hinder me, in hope of improving my winning ability. Because I'm opening up the goal and process before it takes place, it could also forestall a case study of an attempt at strategic goal-pursuit free of survivorship bias.
Energy Vortexes: No Vortex is like the web for me. More on that later.
- (h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;
My workspace is pretty optimized at this point. Nowhere under these freakishly bright lights I can look around and see anything but things that make me want to write more, make me happy, or avoid distractions, like anti-mosquitoes or earplugs.
I've just found out that writing about you goals feels like getting naked in public. The idea is for the next posts to be very similar to this one: find a set of strategic advices in Lesswrong, find out how to use them, and write about how am I implementing, or intending to implement them as much as possible in a way people can relate their own goal agenda, providing a case study of what happens as we go along. My favorite writer, AJ Jacobs, once set out to follow all 613 rules written anywhere in the Bible, literally. The idea here is to do something similar, but connotative. I will try to openly implement all of Lesswrong strategic offerings, and see how that goes. I don't know which posts contain the most compact, memorable or effective techniques for winning at being strategic, but I'm hoping by the end of this process the territory is better mapped for those who'd like to follow suit. Or point and laugh.
A rationalist My Little Pony fanfic
For the past two months, I've been writing, and posting, roughly two thousand words a day of "Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me", a story set in a "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fanfic universe, "Chess Game of the Gods". Outside of the sheer NaNoWriMo-like exercise of pushing out near-daily chapters, I've also been trying to keep in mind the various principles I've learned from Yudkowsky and LessWrong, and to try to present them in a way that people who like reading MLP fanfics might be able to appreciate.
I've just come to something of a minor climax with chapter 60, and while I'll definitely be continuing the story, this seems like a good time to mention it here, for whatever feedback and constructive criticism anyone cares to offer.
Quixey is hiring a writer

We've posted about jobs at Quixey before:
Quixey - startup applying LW-style rationality - hiring engineers
Since then we've hired LessWrong user cata. And it occurred to us that the LessWrong community is not only full of software engineers, it's also full of unusually strong writers.
Eutopia is Scary - for the author
As Eliezer makes the point that real utopias will be scary - certainly more scary that my latest attempt. Mainly they will be scary because they'll be different, and humans don't like different, and it's vital that the authors realise this if they want to create a realistic scenario. It's necessary to craft a world where we would be out of place.
But it's important to remember that utopias will not be scary for the people living there - the aspects that we find scary at the beginning of the 21st century are not what the locals will be afraid of (put your hand up if you are currently terrified that the majority of women can vote in modern democracies). Scary is in the observer, not the territory.
This is a special challenge when writing a fictional utopia. Dystopias and flawed utopias are much easier to write than utopias; when you can drop an anvil on your protagonist whenever you feel like it, then the tension and interest are much easier to sustain. And the scary parts of utopia are a cheap and easy way of dropping anvils: the reader thrills to this frightening and interesting concept, start objecting/agreeing/thinking about and with it. But it's all ok, you think, it's not dystopia, it's just a scary utopia; you can get your thrills without going astray.
But all that detracts from your real mission, which is to write a utopia that is genuinely good for the people in it, and would be genuinely interesting to read about even if it weren't scary. I found this particularly hard, and I'd recommend that those who write utopias do a first draft or summary without any scary bits in it - if this doesn't feel interesting on its own, then you've failed.
Then when you do add the scary bits, make sure they don't suck all the energy out of your story, and make sure you emphasise that the protagonists find these aspects commonplace rather than frightening. There is a length issue - if your story is long, you can afford to put more scary bits in, and even make the reader start seeing them just as the locals do, without the main point being swallowed up. If your story's short, however, I'd cut down on the scary radically: if "rape is legal" and you only have a few pages, then that's what most people are going to remember about your story. The scariness is a flavouring, not the main dish.
Writing feedback requested: activists should pursue a positive Singularity
I managed to turn an essay assignment into an opportunity to write about the Singularity, and I thought I'd turn to LW for feedback on the paper. The paper is about Thomas Pogge, a German philosopher who works on institutional efforts to end poverty and is a pledger for Giving What We Can.
I offer a basic argument that he and other poverty activists should work on creating a positive Singularity, sampling liberally from well-known Less Wrong arguments. It's more academic than I would prefer, and it includes some loose talk of 'duties' (which bothers me), but for its goals, these things shouldn't be a huge problem. But maybe they are - I want to know that too.
I've already turned the assignment in, but when I make a better version, I'll send the paper to Pogge himself. I'd like to see if I can successfully introduce him to these ideas. My one conversation with him indicates that he would be open to actually changing his mind. He's clearly thought deeply about how to do good, and may simply have not been exposed to the idea of the Singularity yet.
I want feedback on all aspects of the paper - style, argumentation, clarity. Be as constructively cruel as I know only you can.
If anyone's up for it, fee free to add feedback using Track Changes and email me a copy - mjcurzi[at]wustl.edu. I obviously welcome comments on the thread as well.
You can read the paper here in various formats.
Upvotes for all. Thank you!
Best Nonfiction Writing on Less Wrong
However useful the content, what are some examples of the best nonfiction writing on Less Wrong? Are there pieces you think are as good as recent classics of essay form like I Think You're Fat or Lies We Tell Kids? For example, I like Yvain's The Apologist and the Revolutionary.
Which pieces would you nominate as some of the best nonfiction writing on Less Wrong?
Are there better ways of identifying the most creative scientists?
Marginal Revolution linked today an old 1963 essay by Isaac Asimov, who argues that a very cheap test for scientific capability in children & adolescents is to see whether they like science fiction and in particular, harder science fiction, "The Sword of Achilles".
I copied it out and made an HTML version of the essay: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1963-asimov-sword-of-achilles
I'd be interested if anyone knows of better tests for such scientific aptitude.
I think it'd also be interesting to see how well the SF test's predictive power has held up. Asimov's numbers seem reasonable for 1963, but may be very different these days: perhaps SF readers back then were <1% of the population and >50% of scientists, so it was a very informative, but these days? SF seems more popular, even discounting the comic books and Hollywood material as Asimov explicitly does, but the SF magazines are mostly dead and my understanding is that scientists are a vastly larger group in 2011 than 1963, both in absolute numbers and per capita.
Rationalist approach to developing Writing skills
The ability to write efficiently and persuasively is important in many areas of life, and especially for spreading rationalist memes and hence raising the sanity waterline.
While there are a lot of very good and persuasive writers of both fiction and non-fiction on Less Wrong there seems to be relatively little advice on how to improve one's writing skills.
While there are a huge number of writing guides available, much like general self help they rarely reference studies on the effectiveness of the advice contained, and while some come from very successful authors, the problems of generalising from one example are well known.
Given this, would people be willing to supply rationalist supported strategies for improving writing skills?
Notes,
I've looked for previous posts on this subject, but if I have missed a previous good discussion please link to it and I will close this thread.
The most obvious piece of advice would be to engage in large amounts of writing practice, but hopefully you will be able to supply some more strategic advice than that.
Edit,
Consensus so far is that a high level of practice is very important, ideally paired with useful and continuous feedback. Otherwise a general agreement that the process is very idiosyncratic, with a few good suggestions for resources that have worked for individuals.
Ideally we'd be looking for advice that has helped a large majority of people to have tried it, if any such exists.
(Also added links)
Writing and enthusiasm
Steve Pavlina explains that the method he'd been taught in school-- a highly structured writing process of organizing what to say before it's written-- tends to produce dull writing, but starting from enthusiasm results in articles which are a pleasure to write and are apt to be more fun and memorable to read.
Inspirational energy has a half life of about 24 hours. If I act on an idea immediately (or at least within the first few hours), I feel optimally motivated, and I can surf that wave of energy all the way to clicking “Publish.” If I sit on an idea for one day, I feel only half as inspired by it, and I have to paddle a lot more to get it done. If I sit on it for 2 days, the inspiration level has dropped by 75%, and for all practical purposes, the idea is dead. If I try to write it at that point, it feels like pulling teeth. It’s much better for me to let it go and wait for a fresh wave. There will always be another wave, so there’s no need to chase the ones I missed.
This looks like PJ Eby territory-- it's about the importance of pleasure as a motivator.
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