On Writing Well

A quicky on good writing.

I've been looking at a wide variety of jobs lately, all, but some more than others, looking for "excellent writing skills" or something to that effect. That pushes me to ask, am I a good writer? I know good writing when I see it, but I find it hard to answer in the first person.

I used to assume I was a good writer because I got good marks in English class. But that's mostly looking for a large vocabulary and lack of grammatical mistakes, that's not what I mean when I say someone is a good writer.

I've mentioned a few times that I think Scott Alexander is a good writer. It's eminently enjoyable to read his writing, regardless of the topic. I've written a hundred or so blog posts by now, so I could look at those to get some idea of my own strengths. But there are some big caveats to this approach. I write these long form essays for almost zero audience, so I'm spending essentially zero time proof-reading them. This was especially true when it was "Daily Anything", it just didn't seem worth my time. But most salient is the lack of an audience. I don't care about being fluent or witty when I'm just jotting down my thoughts.

My supervisor recommended I get a book on writing well before embarking on my thesis. That's a bit of a humbling thing to do. I'm also worried that "writes chemistry as it's expected to be written" is also a poor substitute for what I mean when I say someone is a good writer.

One example is the supplication to avoid so called "noun piles". I can't tell if the term "noun pile" is specific to Darren Lipomi, but the essence is to replace terms like "computer hard-drive" in favour of "hard-drive of the computer". Especially for complex scientific terms, it can be hard to understand a sentence made up of long (grammatically correct) strings of nouns. However, that means that my published paper on silicon crystallization, after editing by my supervisor, has the exact phrase "formation of the c-Li15Si4 phase" roughly 100 times, with no variation or artistic license, and the absolute gem of a line: "..we attempt to establish a generalization of the role of the formation of the c-Li15Si4 phase..." I have a hard time believing that a single noun-pile couldn't have improved the rhythm for the reader.

More specifically, though, most scientific writing is turgid and unreadable. Maybe English as a second language is to blame for some of it, or maybe it's impossible to make such dense ideas be both readable and scientifically rigorous with any reliability.

But it still makes it hard for me to say if I'm a good writer, or what that would even mean in my current job. For now, being a good writer means impressing my supervisor and getting by reviewers. Fair enough.