Rhetoric for the Good

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 can emphasize the informality and become endearing, a sort of "we can take off the masks now, because we're all friends here". This only works if your personal asides are actually endearing to people, or at least not actively boring and off-putting, but if you get it right it lets you keep more spontaneity, since talking in first person is a natural impulse. As in everything, "first learn the rules and the reasons for them, then break them as much as you want".

The real meat of writing comes from an intuitive flow of words and ideas that surprises even yourself. Editing can only enhance and purify writing so far; it needs to have some natural potential to begin with. My own process here is to mentally rehearse an idea very many times without even thinking about writing. Once I'm an expert at explaining it to myself or an imaginary partner, then I transcribe the explanation I settle upon (some people say they don't think in words; I predict writing will not come naturally to these people). Then I edit the heck out of it.

The best way to improve the natural flow of ideas, and your writing in general, is to read really good writers so much that you unconsciously pick up their turns of phrase and don't even realize when you're using them. The best time to do that is when you're eight years old; the second best time is now.

Your role models here should be those vampires who hunt down the talented, suck out their souls, and absorb their powers. Which writers' souls you feast upon depends on your own natural style and your goals. I've gained most from reading Eliezer, Mencius Moldbug, Aleister Crowley, and G.K. Chesterton (links go to writing samples from each I consider particularly good); I'm currently making my way through Chesterton's collected works pretty much with the sole aim of imprinting his writing style into my brain.

Stepping from the sublime to the ridiculous, I took a lot from reading Dave Barry when I was a child. He has a very observational sense of humor, the sort where instead of going out looking for jokes, he just writes about a topic and it ends up funny. It's not hard to copy if you're familiar enough with it. And if you can be funny, people will read you whether you have any other redeeming qualities or not.

Getting imprinted with good writers like this will serve you for your entire life. It will serve you whether you're on your fiftieth draft of a thesis paper, or you're rushing a Less Wrong comment in the three minutes before you have to go to work. It will even serve you in regular old non-written conversation, because wit and clarity are independent of medium.

And it will also inform and limit your use of all the other rules above. Luke's fourth point - telling stories about characters taking actions - is a good one, but he very reasonably didn't start this post off with a story about some student working on a term paper. There have been a few LW posts that kind of seemed kludgy and artificial in adding characters and stories, and others that did it really well. Probably some very smart person could figure out why it succeeds somewhere and fails somewhere else, but it's easier to just cultivate the virtue that is nameless.

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.

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 rhetorical use of English. This is particularly true of the passive -- the article I linked above explains how passive and active versions of the same clause help us place emphasis in a sentence exactly where it will do us the most good. (As such, I think the strongest version of your point 13 that I could endorse would be "Understand clearly the difference between active and passive, and choose between them advisedly.")

One more point which I raise not least because it's a stunningly entertaining read: the same author's (Geoff Pullum's) "The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style" (PDF), an utter demolition of the grammar advice given in Strunk and White's book. This is NOT to say that S&W's stylistic advice should be thrown out as well, but Pullum certainly establishes that (a) they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about when grammar is concerned, and that (b) they follow almost none of their own grammatical or stylistic prescriptions, so the whole thing should be taken with a grain of salt. Read Pullum's article if you enjoy a well-deserved poison pen book review and would like to learn a few things about English grammar in the process.

1. Begin in medias res

I think you mean "2. Begin in medias res".

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

Taking an outside view, I would guess a good piece of advice is: spend 10,000 hours writing.

What are your favorite pieces of writing advice?

• Outline first.

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 complex points iteratively
  I'm fond of short-phrase bullet points followed by a few sentences of explanation (and cross-references to longer explanations where needed).

• Specify who is doing what to whom.
  This is related to your point 13, though distinct from it.
  Also related is limiting pronoun use.

• Avoid lists of more than five or six items.
  If I genuinely have that many things to say, I try to chunk them into more comprehensive items and expand each item.

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 "this is the best formulation of what I was thinking all the time".

(13.) Has been criticised a lot.

(14.) I am curious about the rationale behind this, and/or evidence that it works.

(15.) like no.5, not an algorithm to follow.

(23.) Why only improving verbs? Does it have something common with the dubious advice "write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs"?

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):

1. "Why" - description of a motivating concrete experience from which a general pattern can be inferred
2. "What" - conceptual model of the problem space, forming a bridge from the identified pattern to...
3. "How" - concrete step-by-step information on the recommended solution
4. "What if" - suggest connections between situations in the reader's life and the problem/solution presented, and invite them to apply it

This is woefully inadequate as a description of the method, and I don't remember the name of the academic learning theory on which it's based. But when I switched doing my own CD programs from a more adhoc organization to one based on this model, I got a lot of positive comments from listeners about how much more valuable the format was.

Second framework, which is more oriented towards persuasion (in fact, it's a format designed for advertising, selling a product or service, but it works even better for selling ideas):

1. What is the problem?
2. Why is it hard?
3. What is possible? (present an ideal future, i.e., "But what if we could...?")
4. What has changed? (i.e., why is this hard problem now solvable, implicitly leading to the ideal future proposed)
5. What should you do now (to take advantage of this change)?

There are several important psychological and rhetorical points built into this structure. Presenting a reason why the problem is hard, for example, is needed to absolve the audience of responsibility for the problem, as well as to increase curiosity and contrast in part 3 and to continue operating in rapport with the audience.

In essence, parts 1 through 3 build rapport and agreement - you first agree what their problem is, and that it's hard, and that boy, it'd be great if we could do better than that. Now they're ready to listen to your actual information, which comes in at parts 4 and 5 - the discovery and recommended action.

This format is more useful for evangelism and broad advice than it is for detailed teaching; otherwise parts 4 and 5 can overshadow the rest of the thing in size. ;-)

Sometimes, I use a hybrid version of these two frameworks, as there is actually some overlap in how they begin and end. But more often, I begin most serious pieces of writing or training by doing two separate outlines of the idea I have in mind, to see which one is a better fit. Longer works usually end up as a series of multiple why-what-how-what-if modules.

A common element of both approaches, however: begin, if possible, with a single concrete experience, story, anecdote, or episode that establishes the emotional motivation for why the reader should continue reading. (Or listener listening, viewer viewing, etc.)

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.

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.

• What constitutes "good" writing is a matter of taste. As with other aesthetic endeavors, it's practically impossible to write tasteful prose if you don't have taste in reading prose. I don't see any real way to develop taste without reading a lot, and paying attention to what you're reading and how it's written. To some extent I think every person has to pick apart writing that they think is good and figure out for themselves the nuts and bolts of good writing. The resulting insights might be temptingly easy to distill into bullet points, but this is a very leaky process of abstraction. Most of the value of these insights isn't really communicated in the summary, but is in the data in your brain that made these patterns obvious to you. It's the A Monad is Like a Burrito problem.

• Compounding the issue of taste, there's the problem that "good writing" is an underspecified term. There are a lot of extremely popular and wealthy authors whose writing isn't considered "good," at least by those who seem to have taste. Is popularity orthogonal to "good"? Should our goal even be "good," then? Or is maximal popularity not, in fact, our goal? I have no idea what the answers to these questions should be. Would I rather write like Nabokov than like Dan Brown? Yes. Would that be instrumentally useful in spreading my ideas (or ideas that I like) as widely as possible? I don't know. Possibly not.

I have a few comments about specific points on your list, but I'll split those into other comments.

Avoid overuse of italics. Try to write so that the reader can intuit where the emphasis goes.

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 lot and write a lot.

You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I'm afraid, that Geraldo, Keith Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought.

It's always easier to kill someone else's darlings than it is to kill your own.

Stephen King, On Writing

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 organized. If other instructors have said that your writing is unclear or disorganized then definitely use subheadings. Using bullet points often makes papers more clear and concise. Bullet points often work well in introductions or conclusions. Weak writers should almost always use bullet points because bullet points partially compensate for confused writing.

• The first sentence of your paper sets the tone and is a huge hint to me about your writing quality. Your first sentence should be interesting and give me significant information about your paper’s contents. Look at the first sentences of articles in major newspapers for examples of well-written first sentences.

• Students often use clichés and pronouns incorrectly. Avoid clichés. Make sure that it is obvious what noun a pronoun refers to. If there is any doubt, don’t use the pronoun.

• 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.

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. Begin in medias res".

(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 applied to persuasive writing. Most often, the research is misinterpreted to favor the old plain-language pablum of one-sided simplification. The most persuasive writing doesn't clock in with a low Gunning fog index; consider Darwin's writing style, which is anything but simple—rather, simply excellent. (See http://tinyurl.com/48dxal4)

My blog, "Disputed Issues: Controversies in Legal Writing," is at the link. The advantages of disfluency are discussed at http://tinyurl.com/3e9fqcs; integration of cognitive-fluency research with working-memory research, at http://tinyurl.com/3qz3gxd

[The final link was bad: corrected 7:54 p.m., 8/30.]

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", yet he clearly follows a fairly rigid formula. Each chapter seems to go something like this: "So, here's a conundrum you can relate to. I'll give that conundrum a cutesy name. Here's a hard example where the conundrum is pretty easy to solve, after all, and an experiment to back up my reasoning, recounted in story form, not data form. The solution generalizes over . [then, the hard-hitting part] The conundrum, is solved by ."

I have not tried writing a popular book, so I can't vouch for sure that the pattern I've noticed in Gilbert is all one would need to translate from science-speak to pop-speak... But it's something I couldn't help noticing when I read the book, such that your post made me think of it immediately. Maybe worth checking out.

Would it be possible to divide the list of rules into subsections?

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").

On Africa and hopelessness

First approximation: Make your writing similar to a blockbuster movie.

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 the vast majority of words in English, and this despite taking 5 years of French in school. This advice doesn't look like it was actually meant to be followed in any practical sense, and I would need some convincing that it's even a good idea.

\14. Almost always list things in threes, in ascending order of the word length of the list item.

This advice seems similarly quite arbitrary and unmotivated.

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 ideas in grand words, and to clothe their very ordinary thoughts in the most extraordinary phrases, the most far-fetched, unnatural, and out-of-the-way expressions. Their sentences perpetually stalk about on stilts. They take so much pleasure in bombast, and write in such a high-flown, bloated, affected, hyperbolical and acrobatic style that their prototype is Ancient Pistol, whom his friend Falstaff once impatiently told to say what he had to say 'like a man of this world'."

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:

• Avoid formulas
• Use key words, catch phrases, highlighting.
• Use a Summary and/or Conclusion where possible.

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 direction of the development is.

Ideas are comparatively cheap. It's the development and details of ideas that can be difficult. So you need to give yourself room to make those developments.

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. A beta reader who can report accurately on their own specific reactions is a treasure.

Tentative: think about what cognitive resources you're invoking. I realized that one of the reasons I don't like most milsf is that my ability at visualization for tactics is limited. I'll take the trouble for Tolkien, but not much of anyone else.

Discussion of skimming and fiction-- short version: there are people who skim sex scenes, action scenes, and/or description. No one skims dialogue.

I'd recommend Orwell's articles on writing. And Korzybski for thinking and writing.

• Down voted for this? Well, maybe I was unclear. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that you should write like Korzybski does. Yes, he's a rather painful read. Just apply the insights he provides about thinking and communicating to writing.

Do you think fiction has a place in moving minds? Or should rationalists boycott fiction?

Some problems:

1. "Rhetoric moves minds." Well, what do you make of this? Is using rhetoric the exploitation of rhetoric a dark art? Why not?

2. "(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.

I am at a loss how you could list Dawkins as "good science writing". In my opinion, Dawkins is one of the worst things that could happen to intelligent atheism. I have never heard or read him say anything remotely interesting to the intelligent theist. Dawkins apparently thinks "theism" equals "stupid theism" and does a great job debunking variants of theism that are vastly inferior to himself in terms of intellect. Afaik he has so far shown no sign that he even understands intelligent theism. This has had the effect on countless of intelligent people to think that theism is stupid, and you only need to be a little rational to see that. In other words, rhetorics of the Dawkins kind makes sure that the debate that should he had does not take place. In my book, this is not rhetorics "for good". Such has been the impact of Dawkins that I seriously wonder how many of the self-described atheists on this site have ever even stopped to consider the point of view of intelligent theists. In my opinion, as long as you haven't considered or understood intelligent theists, you have no right calling yourself an atheist ("hur, hur, talking snake" is not a refutation of theism).