In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. Then I’d write. It worked pretty well. Or horribly, depending on how you look at it. I was able to produce 10-page papers etc. on time. But I think it crippled my writing style for years. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. And I’m still working on the “why” part. There’s a thin line between verbosity and terseness.
I went to MIT and my roommate was a computer science major. He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. For my senior thesis I broke down and used the computers in campus. I formatted it in troff which worked out just fine.
In grad school I moved toward the Latex approach of starting with the template and an outline (starting with the Introduction and ending with Discussion and References), then putting in paragraphs here and there until the paper was done. I followed the same approach for my first few books.
Blogging was different. When I blog I tend to start at the beginning and just keep writing until I’m done. I’ve learned that it’s best to write an entry all at once–it’s hard to come back a day or a week later to fill in any gaps. I think this has helped my writing style and my writing efficiency. The only trouble is that my entries tend to be story-like rather than article-like. In a story you begin with the motivation and then gradually reveal what’s happening. When I’m blogging I commonly start at one place but then, once I’m halfway through, I realize I want to go somewhere else. In contrast, in a proper article you jump right in and say the key point right away, and everything gets structured from there. I’ve tried to improve my blog-writing by contracting introductory paragraphs into introductory sentences.
I’ve been blogging for over six years, and it’s affected my writing. More and more I write articles from beginning to end. It’s worked for me to use Word rather than Latex. Somehow in Word, as in the blogging window, it’s easy for me to just get started and write, whereas in Latex everything’s just too structured. Really what’s relevant here, though, is the style not the software.
Sometimes, though, I have a complicated argument to make and it helps to outline it first. In that case I’ll write the outline and then use it as the basis for an article.
But recently I came up with a new strategy–the best of both worlds, perhaps. I write the outline but then set it aside and write the article from scratch, from the beginning, not worrying about the outline. The purpose of the outline is to get everything down so I don’t forget any key ideas. Having the outline gives me the freedom to write the article without worrying that I might be missing something–I can always check the outline at the end.
I know some people say that TeX encourages you to outline articles but — maybe b'se I use a primitive editor — I've never found this to be the case; one hammers away at things in much the same way as w/ Word, except that equations are easier. Re sequential vs. sectioned writing, overall length is a decisive factor, at least for me. A four-page paper can usually be written starting at the beginning, but a 50pp. paper has to be more modular, partly because it's not meant to be read straight through; as a reader, I find it helpful when long papers have some degree of redundancy as one typically doesn't read the whole thing and it is annoying to have to skip around looking for definitions. (It might be possible to write a very modular paper from beginning to end but probably isn't.)
i'm a graduate student and writing is the one thing i struggle with more than anything else. any recommendations for great writing books? i have Strunk & White, "On Writing Well", and a few others, but i'm open to any other suggestions.
I like to draft new text in a simple text editor. I use viJournal, but most any user friendly and simple text editor would work. I find that there is something too formal about writing directly in the LaTeX document. It encourages me to stair at the blinking cursor instead of just getting in there and making a mess of things.
Thanks.
I would make a hardware recommendation that helps implement whatever system for composition you use: having at least two computer screens (at least one large) so that you can see your final draft, your outline or notes, and at least the webpage you are referencing at the moment, all visible at once. Buying a second screen made me notably more productive. I see that Al Gore has three 30" Apple monitors.
This will sound stupid. But, I've written 2 PhD theses, 4 books, quite a few journal articles, probably 1000 blogposts of more than 200 words, and maybe 100 newspaper articles. I began writing in Word as an undergrad, hated every moment, and then saw the light when my MA advisor showed me LaTeX. A good 4 years was spent writing technical articles using it. Then, writing for non technical audiences, and constrained by publishers used to Word, I went back to using it. Now I'm fairly sure the program has evolved, but to be honest, I can't see myself going back to TeX in a serious way, because it is just easier to write well in Word, and that's because I can see the words as they'll look on the page. And that lets me write faster. I'm under pressure to write, as are we all in academia, so this matters. Told you it would sound stupid. The simple fact is that a text editor like TextMate doesn't let me write as quickly. I'm constantly hitting apple+R to see how the text 'looks' on the processed document. It's odd, I know, but Word is where it's at for me right now.
Jarrod (and everyone else, for that matter), here's a comment I wrote about a year ago, about scientific writing:
One of my heroes of science and science writing is physiologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen. In about 1993 I bought his short book "How Animals Work" — which may be the best short data-based book ever written — from a used book sale, and thought I had discovered an unknown gem. I later found that Knut is relatively famous for both his science and his writing.
In 1998 Knut's autobiography (The Camel's Nose) came out, and I read it. He devotes four pages near the end to a discussion of writing for scientific journals…looking at those pages now, I'm reminded that for more than ten years he taught a course on scientific writing at Duke.
One thing Knut emphasizes is the importance of the title. He notes that a potential reader might glance at the title of 5,000 or 10,000 papers in a year — if you just read the titles of papers in Nature and Science, you're at 4,000 already — so if you want people to take the time even to read the abstract, the title had better interest them. He gives an example: "Further Comparative Studies of Food Competition among Grazing Herbivores." He says this would be better as "Food Competition among Grazing Animals."
And of course he gives advice that we all know but find hard to follow, like, you can almost always cut "It has been shown that"; and often a long phrase ("due to the fact that") can be eliminated or replaced by something simpler ("because"). He says people often try to sound sophisticated when they should be trying to simply be clear.
Around the time I read the book, Andrew and I were working on some papers together. I told him about Knut's principles, but couldn't remember any exact examples when Andrew asked for one. I made one up: "Instead of 'Even desert-adapted mammals show signs of distress when deprived of hydration,' Knut would recommend 'Even camels get thirsty.'" I don't know if Andrew remembers, but for several years, when Andrew and I were struggling with a sentence or paragraph that seemed convoluted, confusing, or simply too long, one or the other of us might say "even camels get thirsty," to remind ourselves of the ideal of clarity and simplicity we were trying to achieve. Amusingly, looking through Knut's autobiography now, I see that he gives no example as good as the one I made up for him.
I strive for Knut-like clarity in all of my papers, and the papers are better because of it. But I'm very far from perfect, perhaps especially with the titles. I think I did OK with the title of a paper a couple of years ago, "Trade-offs between moving and stationary particle collectors for detecting a bio-agent plume," but this is still nowhere near as good as the title of the paper Andrew and I were working on during the period I was reading Knut's autobiography. It's probably no coincidence that that title remains the favorite among all of my papers: "All maps of parameter estimates are misleading." The title truly says it all. You don't even have to read the abstract.
Steve: Currently I keep several windows open and separate on one screen, but as my eyes get worse maybe I'll switch to multiple screens.
Phil: It's hard to come up with good titles. Updike couldn't do it.
The deepest truth about writing is that it is not simply outputting the ideas that are already there, preformed, in your mind. Instead, writing is thinking. You don't know what you think until you see what you say — and once it is on the page you can react to it, change it, clarify and sharpen it, etc.
Given this perspective, the best advice on writing can be expressed as "first get it written, then get it right." For a lot of people I have known, productivity problems in writing have been due to the feeling that what goes into the word processor has to be relatively smooth, clear, and polished. A rough first draft (even full of inconsistencies, bad usages, unclarities) is immensely valuable as a starting point. Come back a day later and reread it; you'll understand better what you think and be better positioned to revise it in the directions it needs to go.
These comments are technology-agnostic, but I suppose they generally favor Word or other programs that display (mostly) just what you are writing without lots of extraneous markup language on the screen.