Getting better at technical writing

I took some notes on UChicago's video on YouTube. Here are my takeaways.

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

(The video: The Craft of Writing Effectively.)

Writing badly is a tough problem to solve. It stems from a mismatch between the writer’s goals and the reader’s goals. Readers seek instability. When instability is missing, so is the motivation to continue reading. The reading strategies we use to consume text are informed by this goal. If the search for that instability comes up empty, readers read slower. Lets say this is then paired with comprehension issues. And then the writing unsuccessfully addresses this by providing more explanations, when instead, it would have been more fruitful to contextualize the information by how it’s received within a community—‘widely accepted,’ ‘hotly debated,’ ‘challenged,’ for example. Now the reader is only a few sentences away from experiencing frustration, after which they abandon reading the article.

So why does the search for instability come up empty so often? Lets peer into the goal of writing: the process of writing lets people think. It lets people think of the world in very new and difficult ways. Unlike readers, though, writing strategies are not informed by the writer’s goal. It’s informed by habits, or well-intentioned but outdated advice. Through schooling, we’re trained to write for an audience that cares about grading us. So we’re ‘encouraged’ to create outlines, provide background, elaborate or explain, without giving any thought on how our writing might be received. As long as we clearly show our understanding, we’ve met this external and rather artificial goal, which does not exist outside of schooling.

As a side-note, I’ve often wondered if the tools of writing have changed faster than our approach. I would imagine if our work-horse was still a typewriter, an outline or a plan would probably save us a lot of unwanted rewriting and paper and ink. Our tools or writing have graduated to text editors on our computers, allowing for rewriting, reorganizing, and restarting at a very low cost. Our approach to writing has yet to catch up to this advancement.

With this ‘newfound’ freedom in the way we write, what should writing actually accomplish? Writers must provide the instability that their readers seek by building a problem, and communicating the cost/benefit of understanding—perhaps solving—this problem.

This needs to be reconciled with the idea of using writing as a way of thinking. Spurts of thinking about the world in new and difficult ways does not guarantee that we’ll uncover instability, and it does not always leave room to keep the reader in mind.

But why can’t writers write in their own voice, and not only cater to the established community of experts in a particular field? One way to sort this out is to maintain a connection to the community during these exploratory writing-and-thinking sessions. Signal that this community exists, that the community’s established body of knowledge is impressive, yet has some instability, and that the text they are currently reading will resolve this instability for them.