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Notes -
What's a good way to get better at writing?
I kind of suck at it, and this is troubling me. I'm a working academic, and sitting on a growing cache of results that I can't get out because (outside of some unpredictable periods where the chemical stars in my brain align just right or something) I tend to stare down the same paragraph for two hours and finally squeeze out, word by painful word, something that sounds like the ramblings of a schizophrenic with aphasia, and then feel so drained that I will viscerally fear opening vim again for a week or two. "Professional issues" is an easy sell as far as evidence that something must be done goes, but even outside that, there are so many things - posts, stories, explanations - that I wish I could write but can't. The circumstance that every so often, this problem briefly just goes away and I can in fact vomit out several pages that do in fact hold up even if I look at them again later, just makes my problem all the more frustrating - it feels like it's not like there is something I just lack (and therefore could obtain, making the problem go away), but rather that the necessary circuitry is there but defective.
You write beautifully on the motte, so I don't think writing ability is fundamentally your trouble. For me it was about my uncertainties about being in academia, but I imagine there are any number of types of baggage that would fit the bill. I also found it annoying how stilted the academic writing style is, and how lonely academia can be: I'm proud of myself for this result, but now I have to suck all the life out of it and wait months for anybody else to find out about it? That said, looking back on grad school, I'm proud of all the results I published, and I do envy my academic friends at least a little.
It can help to inject some humanity in the process, and I'd be happy to hop on a video call sometime and hear about your research while we transcribe it to a shared doc. I don't know if that would produce a finished paper but it could help get the bones in place.
Thanks for your kind words. I think writing on the Motte is not quite the same as writing an article; I've thought about why it is that I can fight internet arguments at near the WPM cap but struggle so much with anything closed-form, and came to the conclusion that it makes a big difference to me if I can model the process as talking statefully to a single concrete person. (You might notice that I have very few top-level posts on here, too.) However, the obvious trick of trying to imagine the hypothetical reader of the paper as a particular individual doesn't work; there is no actual individual person being targeted and whatever process enables me to talk to real people does not work with respect to a make-believe simulacrum.
Thank you also for the offer about a video call, but I have some opsec concerns about linking my Motte identity to the real world in that fashion. (Do I want to find out how compellingly I have to argue for immanentizing the wrong eschaton before the Mottizen who knows my real-life identity decides that stopping me takes moral precedence over other concerns?)
Well and on top of that I always prefer in person to video, so you'd probably be better off finding somebody local anyway. I feel like there's some potential in modeling your audience as a single person; half the thing that makes papers such a drag to write and read is how impersonal they are, and the really great academic writers seem less susceptible to that. Seems like if you managed to write an email to a friend describing all the stuff that'd go into the paper, the remaining task of putting it into stuffy academic style could be done almost mechanically. Heck, I bet you could just about get gpt3 to do that part for you.
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