Internal talk on writing process for research on 4th March, 2021.
Here we covered reasons for writing.
People write during the process of creation itself. These usually materialize in forms of research journals and notes that are used for refining ideas and conceptions over time.
Here is an example of Darwin’s Manuscripts.
When working with others, we use writing to prepare interfaces for others working on the same project. Interface documentations are common examples of this kind.
We also write to communicate an idea that we create. These have a few properties that are visible in writings like The Technium: Better Than Free.
At times writing is more explanatory, uncovering new insights in already present concepts and communicating them more clearly than ever. Here is an example: Lost World | Carl Zimmer.
While writing itself is a thing we can’t avoid, why focus on doing it well? Why not just get away with the bare minimum formality?
Compromises in the act of writing are more severe than most of us believe. Ideas and projects have dramatically higher chance of success if the involved writings in every stage are of high quality. Poorly written papers are unread. Bad documentation repels users.
Additionally bad writing is bad communication, and bad communication can be disastrous. A lot many projects fail because of misses in communication, many in the written form.
At present, we don’t value quality in communicative writing and keep writing an after thought in most of our work.
But, ”clear writing means clear thinking”. If we can’t write something clearly, it’s very likely that we are not clear about the thing in our own head. And things that are not clear can’t be worked on, they only get dragged on till someone’s patience runs out.
- Read and develop a scale of quality. You can’t improve if you can’t see that something is not good. Subscribe to good blogs and content outlets. Follow good writers and keep experimenting with your own personal style.
- Experiment with a research journal. Iterate on your notes, hypotheses, and plans periodically. Have a good note keeping system handy. Many people recently are loving roam like softwares. There are many open alternatives on github.
- Start your personal blog or write for the team blog. Ask around the team on how to set up a blog for yourself.
- Set up processes and tools for writing. Be fluent with technologies that can improve your work. Use prose linters, language checkers, and other assistive tools. Learn LaTeX, use symbols and algorithmic expressions if they help frame your thoughts better. Try using dropbox paper for collaborating on drafts.
- Think about structuring all kinds of documents in your work better, from project inception to conclusion.
- Double check the messages and emails you write. See how they can be improved. Are they expressing what you want to express?
- Keep asking new questions to old write-ups. Iterate.
Few internal guidelines (many missing and yet to come) that might be of use:
Last bit of advice coming from Hemingway.
Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.