Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper (2019)
nature.com
nature.com
This is the worst possible advice to give about technical writing! What you should absolutely do if you want your readers to know what you're talking about is a) define your terminology before you use it and b) stick to the terminology you defined throughout the entire paper. Don't call a thing "red noppertock" the first time you mention it and then "crimson nopper with a tock" the next time. Call the same object, the same concept, the same method by the same name, always. Otherwise, you will only create confusion and make your reader tired and impatient.
"Boring" is not a flaw, in technical writing. The purpose of technical writing is not to entertain, but to explain and clarify. Creative writing is a completely different thing. The worst mistake you can ever make is confuse the two and treat a paper like a short story, or such.
Trust me, I know. What McCarthy advises above is exactly the mistake I made in my first research papers and they all got rejected with frustrated comments by confused reviewers who pointed out they had no idea what I meant when I used a particular term. I had to take a course with an academic writing expert at my university, to realise what I was doing wrong: I was trying to add variety to my writing, just like in literary, creative writing. I stopped that as soon as I realised how wrong it was and now I actually get reviewer comments about the clarity and quality of the writing in my papers. And as _writing_ goes, it's boring as all hell, but it gets the point across without doubt. That's its purpose.
Yet, technical writing doesn't work that way. Synonyms are almost always wrong. We have the luxury of precision, where most often one term means one concept or thing. A 1:1 mapping with little ambiguity. Deviating from that is almost always the wrong decision.
Also notice the style I am writing this comment in. Short, concise, to-the-point sentences. Sparing use of filler words (thus, however, ...). I wish all technical writing was more like that (and I find that good technical writing either is, or is on such a high level that they can get away with longer sentences). I believe it a boon: you get a style of "Statement. Statement. Idea. Question. Idea. Statement. Solution. Conclusion.", if that makes sense, allowing easier mental access and partitioning. Technical topics are hard, and writing should accommodate the reader, making it as easy as possible.
> We have the luxury of precision, where most often one term means one concept or thing. A 1:1 mapping with little ambiguity. Deviating from that is almost always the wrong decision.
This is true of some words in a piece of technical writing, but not most of them. Don't allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that every word in your paper has a single clear meaning. At the same time, you're right that a writer shouldn't reach too far to find synonyms just to mix things up.
> Short, concise, to-the-point sentences. Sparing use of filler words (thus, however, ...).
"Thus" and "however" are not just filler words! Yes, they may be overused. But they also signal the conceptual relationship between one thought and the one that follows it in a clear way, at the beginning of the sentence. This allows the reader to understand how a sentence relates to the previous one before they have fully parsed and understood it.
Which is to say, McCarthy doesn't merely have an opinion. McCarthy has an informed opinion. He's spent more time among better scientists than most people in the sciences. And of course, he's a better writer than just about anyone giving advice about science writing (and writing in general).
Most writing advice targets poor writers. McCarthy essay targets good writers. Maybe because good writers are good not just for technique but for having interesting things to say. Maybe because something not worth writing in an engaging way probably isn't worth writing.
Clearly, challenging authorities is not the way of a true scientist.
I skimmed the comments before deciding to reading the article, and likely would have skipped on this submission if I didn't know about his work at Santa Fe (which was also mentioned in the article itself), as I associate McCarthy with his literary work. I had no previous awareness he has been working with scientists on technical writing.
The advice that makes a poor writer acceptable differs from what makes a good writer better.
I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean that in the context of the article? Are you saying that the article above is aimed at people with some experience of writing?
By the way, your original comment came across as a haughty attempt at a put-down by an appeal to authority, hence my reaction to it. My apologies if I misunderstood your intent.
I didn't read their original comment as a put-down of any sort, for whatever that's worth to you. If you jump into an article like this just getting to the tips (a reasonable thing to do!) you might miss the fact that McCarthy has the expertise to back up what he's saying (and, for that matter, miss the audience of his tips, as you might have).
And you're trying to pull rank via proxy on me. I have the expertise to back up what I'm saying also. See my comment at the top.
What I'm saying is that I do have relevant expertise because publishing papers is my job, and because I know that doing what McCarthy suggests in my quote above is the opposite of what got my papers published.
You're just trying to shut down the conversation by summoning what you think is a higher power. That doesn't work with people like me, who are expected to take down authorities without fear of browbeating by said authorities or their volunteer cheerleaders, as part of our job. You might as well let me know that Beyoncé disagrees with me, for all the good it will do to remind me that McCarthy is a Best Seller-ist. Who works for the Santa Fe Institute.
Sorry, I felt I had to expound on that because I find it very interesting when it happens.
I read your root comment about McCarthy being wrong about repeating words in academic writing. I thought to myself, "this is exactly the sort of dismissal we tend to traffic in here, the assumption that we're subject matter experts on research and STEM and that a writer wouldn't be". I figured a bunch of people on HN would be instantly persuaded by the fact that your comment attests to experience in academic writing, especially since so few of them will closely read the article itself, which notes McCarthy's unexpectedly deep experience with hard science academic writing.
Then I thought to myself, "you know what? Cormac McCarthy is pretty universally considered one of the greatest writers of the last 50 years, so it is probably pretty safe to suggest that his writing advice not be dismissed easily, even by someone with their own deep experience with academic writing". That is to say: it's no great put-down to suggest that someone's own writing experience might be subordinate to that of... Cormac freaking McCarthy. :)
There's nothing especially interesting about "taking down authorities" on HN --- it's the air we breathe here. I do it too, all the time. By the same token: pushing back on that instinct seems totally within the bounds of our discussions as well.
So, long story short: I thought your comment was a bit facile and dismissive, and said why (or: almost did, but deleted my comment when I saw 'brudgers better one, then cosigned theirs).
Hope that helps.
I haven't read anything by McCarthy and I'm always suspicious of Best Seller authors. Anyway I have very non-mainstream views on creative writing. But that's another matter.
Appeals to authority are fallacious when the authority has expertise in a field other than that in question: McCarthy’s authority on writing, doesn’t lend weight to his opinions on skateboarding, animal husbandry, and nutrition.
One of the most common self serving fallacious uses of authority is I-have-a-PhD.
Here the PhD-fallacy wasn’t this-is-what-works-for-me. It was McCarthy is wrong followed with a bunch of noise over scientific method instead of listening and learning.
My initial comment was performative erudition (HN’s sine qua non) to place a top comment’s sophomoric exposition in context…so yes, I didn’t think much of the comment. But with the bar on the ground, I didn’t expect the follow up to go under it.
There’s no need to apologize.
In that case, you are absolutely right that I have no need to apologise. But perhaps you should think about where you place "the bar" next time, in your comments, rather than trying to blame me, for being frustrated at your sarcasm.
"Your instructor was right not to give you any points, for your answer was wrong, as he demonstrated using Gauss’ law. You should, in science, believe logic and arguments, carefully drawn, and not authorities."
https://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2020/feynmans-advice-to-wm-s...
Explaining and clarifying are not in conflict with being interesting, except in a few marginal cases like this one. And repetition of terminology is not inherently boring—the guy who wrote "κομόωντας Ἀχαιοὺς" 26 times and "γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη" 32 times would certainly dissent from that, and the Tipitaka or any Beatles song is far more repetitive still—it's just that terminological variation is one possible way to add interest. A bad one, in this context.
When I read scientific papers from a hundred years ago, before the institution of peer review, I'm constantly struck by how much better written they are than current papers. They talk about things that surprised them and disappointments that happened during the experiment, and their choice of words is much more lyrical and even metaphorical than the current literature. Consequently they are much clearer and explain much better. The universal complaint about the modern literature is that nobody reads it, even when they cite it, and that is only a slight exaggeration; one reason for this is that reading it is so painful, so people devote less time to it than they would were it more pleasant.
So, I agree with you that current academic writing norms prohibit publishing well-written, interesting prose; where we differ is that I think that is bad.
For context, my experience publishing peer-reviewed research is not quite zero, but you have much more than I do. I haven't read your papers yet (though they look interesting), so I'm not attacking your papers as dull or badly written. It's possible I've read more research than you have just as a result of being much older.
On the other hand, it's also true that many of those old papers included fatal ambiguities which the modern process would have weeded out. Still, we can have good-quality, interesting writing without ambiguity.
I don't agree either, I think it's _not a flaw_, not a virtue! Anyway, all I talk about is the _writing style_, not the content of a scientific paper. That's a different thing. But you can't really teach how to make exciting research contributions.
I agree also that repetition is not a flaw in and of itself. Minimalism is a thing, after all.
As to older papers, I kind of agree that they are often more pleasant to read, but the problem is that the more people work on a subject, the more new, subtle aspects of the subject become apparent that have to be made clear in writing.
Also, this is very unfortunate but terms can become overloaded with time as people use them in different ways. Sometimes I read older papers that seem to take some term for granted, but I find myself being utterly confused about what, exactly, they mean, among many different meanings of the term. For example, some of the reviewers I note above were frustrated with my work complained about my use of the word "predicate", which I was certain at the time can't be misunderstood... but is in fact used in different ways by different communities.
Thanks for the interest in my work. My second Machine Learning Journal paper is the much better written one, although it's rather a bit thick with formalisms and proofs etc. and won't be easy to read without a background in logic programming.
I've also run into the same terminological overloading problem. In CS it's especially bad; papers from the 01980s would be already difficult to read for someone who'd only read the recent literature. The worst is when the different meanings are almost, but not quite, the same. For example, I was reading one of Steinmetz's first papers from the 01890s, and he uses the term "inductance" where now we would use "inductive reactance"; at a given frequency these quantities are proportional but the second one varies by frequency.
My knowledge of logic programming is not literally zero in that I've written Prolog code a few times and ported μKanren to OCaml in order to understand it, but it's also far from a deep understanding. Still, I'm optimistic about my ability to understand things.
Avoiding repetition can also mean structuring your writing in a way that allows you to rely on pronouns and other linguistic tools to avoid using the same word repeatedly while preserving clarity.
And I often find that technical writers don't do a good job of evaluating which terms need to be treated as rigidly defined technical terms and which ones do not, resulting in writing that it more stilted and jargon laden than necessary to communicate clearly. One benefit of taking McCarthy's advice seriously is that it will encourage you to scrutinize your decisions about when to rely on jargon and defined terms and help you identify where you're using them as a crutch to avoid harder decisions about how to write clearly.
The goal is not to be "entertaining." Rather, it is simply to should be to hold the reader's attention so you're not making huge claims on their ability to focus. I wouldn't be so quick to give up on this and embrace the "papers should be boring" mindset. The basic problem is that an extremely tedious paper does not "get your point across without doubt." It may not even get your point across at all because it pains readers to read it.
Of course, none of this should be construed to mean that people should use "thesaurus words"--i.e., words that are overly obscure or a poor fit for the situation, just for the sake of mixing it up.
I never said, nor meant, that "papers should be boring", or even that technical writing should be boring. What I said, exactly, was:
"Boring" is not a flaw, in technical writing.
I think it's interesting how not only your comment, but those of others, misread that part of my comment and made a jump from "boring is not a flaw" to "papers should be boring".
The reason I think it is interesting is because it reveals the amount of work that must go into a technical text to avoid such misunderstandings. For every single statement that matters, for every single point that is made, in a paper, there is a number of ways to misunderstand it, of varying degrees of obvious-ness. As a paper author, you have to try to think of each and every one of them, try to predict how likely it is that different kinds of readers will commit those kinds of misundestanding, and then try to defend your text against the most likely ones, at the very least. Since some of your readers are going to be reviewers, doing this well is the difference between getting your paper published, getting it rejected, or having it accepted with "minor" revisions (which are only so "minor" as the possibility for misunderstandings, so usually, not that much). So this anticipation of potential misunderstandings is a vital, essential skill that you develop as a paper writer.
Er. I mean "scientist", of course.
For this (oops) reason, I disagree with the use of pronouns etc. I actively try to avoid sentences like "This suggests" or "That means" or "It is an efficient way to" etc. just because I'm sure that "this", "that", "it", and their friends, will only serve to misdirect the reader's attention. Because when you write "it", you're thinking of X, but when the reader reads "it", they are actually thinking of Y, just because they're more interested in Y, so "it" is just a point of confusion. And that (oops) will _always_ happen because the author of a paper and the paper's readers will have different interests and tend to focus on different parts of a paper.
The way I think about the use of pronouns is a little bit like loops in assembly: you want to "unroll" them to improve efficiency. Similarly, I always "dereference" pointer-words like pronouns etc, to remove ambiguity.
But you've overlooked the point of the paragraph you quote, which is that the issue isn't really whether a paper is boring or entertaining. It's about whether it is tedious or engaging. And being tedious certainly is a flaw in technical writing. The problem with tedious writing is that fewer people will actually read it and those that do will become fatigued, lose focus, and may not understand the document even if it uses language in a crystal clear way.
I hear you on the risks inherent in the use of pronouns. Not using pronouns at all is certainly one strategy for addressing the risk of ambiguity or misunderstanding, but it is one with the serious disadvantage of making your text burdensome to read. And it certainly is not true that all pronoun use is ambiguous or misleading. You just have to be careful in how you use them. This can be difficult, but the reward is that you produce a piece of writing that it both clear and engaging (perhaps even not boring).
FWIW its worth, I'm a lawyer. So I have my fair share of experience with one type of technical writing where clarity is particularly important. But given that our job is to persuade, I think lawyers may be more keenly aware than most that someone has to actually read your words and do so attentively if your writing is to achieve anything. It takes substantial work on the part of the writer to make that happen while ensuring that the writing remains sufficiently clear.
It's not that researchers don't need to structure arguments carefully, it's just that we got formulae and experiments and formal proofs, so we don't really need to argue so much. In any case, most people start reading a paper by looking for the figures...
I should say that I spent my childhood thinking I would grow up to be a professional writer. I kind of did, I just didn't think I'd be writing research papers. The errors of imprecision I committed in my rejected papers (mentioned in my OP above) were the result of my habbit of thinking about writing in the way that a creative writer thinks, where the goal is beauty, not precision. I really saw a huge difference in the way my papers were received when I corrected for that. I went from having my papers rejected with angry notes, to being complimented for their clarity and my first published paper even got a Best Student Paper award. The change I made was literally just consistent use of terminology. It was like throwing a switch! I was so surprised. Hence my disagreement with McCarthy on that one particular point.
I think his other points are fair, btw.
Agreed, this is often described as the error of "Said Bookism"
> People are so used to the word "said" that they can mentally skip over it when reading; when the word changes over and over again, it becomes a distraction.
Your question has no point though, the advice was given as per grandparent comment; and it is not great advice as per several replies.
b) I marvel at Mr McCarthy's prose. it breaks all the rules, and is sometimes impenetrable, sometimes so direct. It's fantastic, it's hard work. I couldn't do that well; very few could. There are far easier ways to get to "best seller".
https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer...
What you are saying and what McCarthy is saying can both be true.
Using the same word repeatedly is boring, technical writing or not.
If you find yourself using the same word repeatedly, don't - as you seem to be assuming McCarthy is suggesting - pluck an alternate word out of a thesaurus; rather, take a step back and rethink if there is a different way to express your idea without using the word at all, or by using it less frequently.
I don't remember having thought, when reading a paper, that it was boring, or "not fun", but I remember many times to have thought, "man, I have no clue what's going on here", "so many unnecessary details".
I am not speaking from a a position of any authority, but I have worked as a scientist in academia for 15 years and neither nor any of my many colleagues has ever remembered or noticed a paper for its flair. I notice papers that are brilliant, wrong, novel, impressive, not any particularly creative writing. Boring? You typically need to read a paper 10+ times to understand it, after the first read nobody outside the non-professional (who read papers like they are "investigations") cares about any ornate or rich language.
I kindly urge writers to use his subjective opinion here as an argument FOR rather than against the precision application of punctuation!
No. His (lack of) use of punctuation in his work is mesmerising and beautiful, and part of what made Blood Meridian one of the greatest novels of the last century.
Obviously that technique is less likely to be constructive in science writing.
Do you not see the irony in his own use of four commas and a colon while telling us to minimize our punctuation use in this article?
> While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.
Perhaps he merely considered the "Oxford comma" unnecessary!
I focused on reading "Cormac McCarthy's tips" and missed that they'd been regurgitated by others. Sort of diminishes the whole point of reading it!
Thank you!
The description of the Commanche attack near the beginning of the novel, where they suddenly appear out of nowhere and attack the soldiers has an amazing run-on sentence: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328033-a-legion-of-horrible...
> It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
Anyway, I am on another McMurtry kick since the new year that began rereading Texasville and then a first reading of Custer…For me, McMurtry is a triple threat of fiction, nonfiction, and essays: I enjoy everything he wrote.
I am used to reading text with punctuation marks. When I enjoy a book, I forget that I am reading words on a page, and it feels like I'm seeing the story play out in my mind. The syntax of The Road constantly took me out of that feeling. It served only to remind me that I was reading a book by a dude who thinks adhering to the conventions of written English is beneath him.
The book was fine. I would have liked it a little more if it was punctuated normally, but of course, different strokes for different folks.
I would compare it to adjective order. You might say that the Goodyear Blimp is a big old blue polyester balloon. Never that it's a polyester old blue big balloon. It sounds wrong the second way. If I were a novelist searching for a gimmick, I could intentionally disregard standard adjective order and arrange the adjectives in another order every time I described something. It would give my writing a unique flavor. But it wouldn't make me any more descriptive, just annoying to read, because every time you hit a description your brain would throw an exception and then catch it going "oh, he's doing this again..."
That cognitive interruption, which I've kindly added multiple times to my first paragraph, is precisely what McCarthy says not to do in the very first bullet point of the article:
"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can."
Neither McCarthy nor anyone else in this conversation is referring to the punctuation at the end of a sentence.
And, for the record, I was exclaiming that the takeaway is exactly the opposite of what the author suggests. That is, in fact, the precise meaning of an exclamation point.
I've kindly included some actual cognitive interruptions for you, to aid in your understanding of this discussion.
Until, after giving my copy to my brother, he had the same response as you. At the time, twenty five years ago, I was surprised but now I accept everything isn’t for everyone and hence all books are not for all readers.
My brother and I had different reading experiences and developed different tastes. I couldn’t get through the Carl Hiassen paperback I got in exchange. There wasn’t anything I cared about there.
“Properly punctuated” is not a blurb to captivate my attention. YMMV.
If you want information presented in a clear, unambiguous and logical order, it's best to wait for the textbook.
Might as well fulfill the expectation.
I found the prose of Blood Meridian and The Road absolutely extraordinary, so I'm eager for more of it. I haven't read his other past novels yet, don't ask why. Maybe because I saw the movie of No Country For Old Men, and I wasn't sure if the horses trilogy would interest me.
Are there any other examples of good academic writing?
I utilize primary research all day every day for my job and my definition of good academic writing is clear, concise writing that enables me to answer the specific questions I am seeking to answers for quickly and in a manner that allows me to confidently cite the work (assuming the relevant information is present within the manuscript).
10 years later and 2 years into a PhD, I think I am ready to admit that most papers are terrible. Most people are not native speakers. It makes a huge difference. Filler words, synonyms, long sentences, grammar errors... the list goes on. The only thing not on it are typos, because those are caught by software and are an easy fix. The rest takes genuine work and effort.
Papers are so hard to read, they can be headache-inducing and I am often completely exhausted from them.
And that's only touching on the stylistic part. Nowadays, everything is either all code or (strongly) relies on it (experimental work still needs collecting, evaluation, plotting, ...). But good luck finding actual, published source code (and if it's public, the sad-but-true adage of horrific academic coding takes effect). Methods are obscured and unclear. Sometimes, people can't even cite a single source properly almost verbatim -- fundamental reading comprehension seems to be lacking. Often, private data is used in private or public but unusable code, making papers entirely irreproducible. It's mental and frustrating. Coming across good papers in between the cruft really stands out, but happens at a low rate (10-20%?).
[0]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/fredo/student.html
[1]: http://www.principiae.be/pdfs/UGent-X-003-slideshow.pdf
This sounds reasonable for technical writing, though it's interesting to read McCarthy's recommendation after considering David Foster Wallace's work, where there is a very frequent usage of footnotes.
In his non-fictional essays essays—often in the role of a reporter like in his well-known "Consider the Lobster" for Gourmet magazine [0]—Wallace uses extensive footnotes. This isn't technical writing, though the quality of Wallace's convinced me that footnotes can have a useful place in fictional writing.
> And don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing.
From Hacker News discussions (and also speaking to a colleague who competed at a high level on a debate team in high school), I learned the opposite lesson. If there is a weakness in an argument, it's likely it will be pointed out. I've found it important to consider weaknesses in logic and try to anticipate counter-arguments whenever possible, when writing for readers from more technical problems.
I don't think hacker news is representative of the type of communication that papers communicate. A lot of times the communication on this website can default to adversarial, which I think is not the default for academic discourse. Plus I imagine there are other forums in academia aside from published studies (I think there are published discussion journals, and you also have blogs and such) that are suitable for that type of communication.
The advice in this article seems apt if you are writing a 'great' paper, in the sense of 'going to be a classic in your field.' But it doesn't seem like very good advice for writing a 'good' paper, meaning one that advances the state of knowledge in one particular direction.
True classics in the fields I know best (political science and economics) tend to be written very memorably, meaning the author's perspective is obvious. But not everyone is Gary Becker [0] or Kenneth Waltz [1], and if everyone tried to write like them, we'd have a lot less dialogue between papers -- a lot of the stuff people find boring in academic research is authors' trying very hard to situate their contributions within the broader literature -- and more people trying to strike out as stylistically distinct iconoclasts.
Another comment here [2] makes this point well about the repetition of words. Repeating a technical term might make for a boring read, and if you are writing a paper that's going to revolutionize your field, perhaps you don't need to repeat yourself much because your main point can (should?) be made in a few different of ways. But if you're writing a typical science paper, which makes a narrow point about a new finding, then yes, you should repeat yourself as much as you need to create precise buttressing around that new finding.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1807222
[1] https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article-abstract/18/2/44/11449/T...
This is strange advice.
In many fields, following this suggestion can make it harder for the reader to understand the message.