According to the New York Times, corporate America doesn't know how to write.
I'm not sure how much poor writing skills plague science, but my master's thesis advisor used to repeatedly praise my writing. I don't believe my words are particularly incisive or eloquent, so if my writing is truly the gold standard, I don't really want to see bad scientific prose. Fortunately, I've been lucky to work with students and researchers who are good writers, so I haven't had to face the music yet.
What does it take to be a good writer? From my experience, the first thing is to "omit needless words!" as Strunk exclaims in his famous manual on style. Another piece of advice is not to be sloppy. Don't drop punctuation or capitalize words that are not supposed to be capitalized. Third, use your common sense. Once you know the basic rules of grammar and sentence structure, you will come across situations where the punctuation may be ambiguous. For example, a common problem is whether to put a comma after/before a clause. The best way to decide is to read the sentence out loud and only insert a comma if there is a pause in the speech. Finally, make sure there is a logical flow to the prose. There's nothing worse than a paper that reads like bullet points.
After that, writing is very audience dependent. I avoid using "big words" in scientific writing because the reader is likely to be a foreigner. Also, prose that is quite passable among scientists often looks sophomoric to sophisticated humanities professionals (at least in my experience.) Of course that doesn't mean that people in the humanities always write better, but on the average, humanities graduate students are much better writers. Scientists only do technical writing for the most part which is formulaic and restrictive. For instance, I can't use "big words" in scientific writing because it would be difficult for a non-native reader to understand.
The majority of my recent writing has been scientific with the benefit that my writing has become more clear and logical. Unfortunately, I feel that I'm losing my vocabulary and literary eloquence compared to my high school days. I suppose I should try my hand at writing some short stories or beautific descriptions in my blog entries. And take some time out of my day to read classy literature. It's like watching British movies and shortly afterwards realizing that your brain is thinking in a British accent.
No, it's not a scathing review. Your statement was far better than mine. I don't know why but those kinds of things are impossible to write. But your statement was in the back of my mind when I was typing the blog entry.
ReplyDeleteWriting is a topic that I often ponder and the New York Times article was a catalyst for me to spill a few random thoughts.