Results for “writing” 1382 found
My “writing every day” awards
Since I recommend the practice of writing every day, or virtually every day (every day is better!), I thought I should give awards for 2023.
Clear winner in my view in Noah Smith, who just keeps on writing and being productive and improving. Here is Noah’s Substack.
Runner-up awards go to the blog Economists Writing Every Day (duh).
Cass Sunstein remains extraordinarily prolific, and Rainer Zitelmann keeps on writing books, he has a new one Unbreakable Spirit: Rising Above All Odds.
I wonder if the exact same people will win next year? If you don’t see these awards given again, that means the answer has been “yes.”
If you would like to publicize your on-line writings…
No matter in which venue they may appear, including S., please do note that comments are open…
Is scientific writing becoming stupider and more emotional?
Yikes awful absolutely, demeaningly, absurdly so:
Writing in a clear and simple language is critical for scientific communications. Previous studies argued that the use of adjectives and adverbs cluttered writing and made scientific text less readable. The present study aims to investigate if the articles in life sciences have become more cluttered and less readable across the past 50 years in terms of the use of adjectives and adverbs. The data that were used in the study were a large dataset of 775,456 scientific texts published between 1969 and 2019 in 123 scientific journals. Results showed that an increasing number of adjectives and adverbs were used and the readability of scientific texts have decreased in the examined years. More importantly, the use of emotion adjectives and adverbs also demonstrated an upward trend while that of nonemotion adjectives and adverbs did not increase. To our knowledge, this is probably the first large scale diachronic study on the use of adjectives and adverbs in scientific writing. Possible explanations to these findings were discussed.
That is a new paper from Ju Wen and Lei Lei, via Michelle Dawson.
Writing Matters
We estimate the causal effect of writing quality by comparing how experts judge the quality of 30 papers originally written by PhD students in economics. We had two versions of each paper: one original and one that had been language–edited. The language editing was done by two professional editors, who aimed to make the papers easier to read and understand. We then asked 18 writing experts and 30 economists to judge some of the original and edited papers. Each of these experts judged five papers in their original versions and five papers in their edited version, spending around 5 minutes per paper. None of the experts saw both versions of the same paper. None of the experts knew that some of the papers were edited. The writing experts judged the writing quality and the economists judged the academic quality of the papers. All economists in our sample have PhDs in economics and their academic positions range from postdoc to full professor; four of them are editors of academic journals; and all of them are regularly involved in judging the quality of academic papers as referees or members of conference committees. We estimate the effect of language editing on perceived writing quality and perceived academic paper quality by comparing the average judgement of original and edited papers.
Our results show that writing matters. Writing experts judged the edited papers as 0.6 standard deviations (SD) better written overall (1.22 points on an 11–point scale). They further judged the language–edited papers as allowing the reader to find the key message more easily (0.58 SD), having fewer mistakes (0.67 SD), being easier to read (0.53 SD), and being more concise (0.50 SD). These large improvements in writing quality translated into still substantial effects on economists’ evaluations. Economists evaluated the edited versions as being 0.2 SD better overall (0.4 points on an 11–point scale). They were also 8.4 percentage points more likely to accept the paper for a conference, and were 4.1 percentage points more likely to believe that the paper would get published in a good economics journal. Our heterogeneity
analysis shows that the effects of language editing on writing quality and perceived academic quality are particularly large if the original versions were poorly written.
From a very well written paper by Jan Feld, Corinna Lines and Libby Ross.
*Collected Writings of Morton Feldman*
Feldman probably was the most important American composer of his generation, he interacted with the leading NYC painters of his time, and it turns out he is a splendid writer as well. His observations are to the point, often with a Nassim Taleb kind of sting. Here is one bit:
Recently in the Sunday papers an article about Messiaen appeared in which a great virtue was made of his political “disengagement.” Reading this article, we learn how deeply religious this composer is, how much he looks forward to his vacations in Switzerland, how proud he is of Boulez, and how involved he is with bird calls. Can we say man is really disengaged? His chief occupation seems to be this disengagement. There is something curiously official in the way his interests and views are described — as though nothing could now disturb all this.
Or:
But he has nothing to worry about, that chap in Tempo. He’s going to have it all. Pitch relationships, plus sound and chance thrown in. Total consolidation. Those two words define the new academy. You can tie it all up in the well-known formula, “You made a small circle and excluded me; I made a bigger circle and included you.” A kind of Jonah-and-the-whale syndrome is taking place. Everything is being chewed up en masse and for the mass…
It may seem strange to call Boulez and Stockhausen popularizers, but that’s what they are. They glamorized Schoenberg and Webern, now they’re glamorizing something else. But chance to them is just another procedure, another vehicle for new aspects of structure or of sonority independent of pitch organization. They could have gotten these things from Ives or Varèse, but they went to these men with too deep prejudice, the prejudice of the equal, the colleague.
More books should have sentences like: “[Virgil] Thomson disliked me on sight, as a youth, and it’s never changed.”
The full title is Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman,” edited by B.H. Friedman.
I think Feldman two greatest works are For John Cage, and also String Quartet #2, which is about five hours long. This year I have been listening to the Philip Thomas 5-CD set of Feldman’s piano music more than just about any other CD. It is not the very best Feldman, but it is some of the best Feldman to listen to, if only because the pieces typically are shorter.
The three ideas you all are writing me the most about
1. Segregating old people, and letting others go about their regular business. Given how many older people now work (and vote), and how many employees in nursing homes are young, I’ve yet to see a good version of this plan, but if you favor it please do try to write one up. One of you suggested taking everyone over the age of 65 and encasing them in bubble wrap, or something.
2. Tracking and surveillance by smart phones. Here is one story, here is another. Here is an Oxford project. Singapore is using related ideas, China has too.
3. Testing as many Americans as possible, or at least a representative sample, to get data.
I hope to analyze these more in the future.
“Two big names in European writing win literature Nobels”
I chuckled at that FT headline, fortunately the on-line version names Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke in its header.
Can you imagine a sports header: “Big name wins NBA most valuable player award.” No, they would name the “big name” because that big name is in fact big.
I still think Stephen King should get one. I didn’t enjoy trying to read Tokarczuk, though I suspect she is a very good writer in Polish. By Handke I can recommend his Sorrow of Dreams, a memoir of his mother dying, and also a book that influenced Knausgaard. But mostly I am find him boring, pessimistic, and nasty, perhaps consistent with his support for Milosevic and the tyranny in Serbia. I don’t think that disqualifies him from the prize per se, but neither do I see him as an author who had to win, though he is indeed “a big name in European writing.” The thing is, he is nothing more than that.
Here you can buy The Stand for $8.30, by the way I love Houllebecq but the new one isn’t very interesting, as sadly it reads like a parody of his earlier, superior work. Submission remains one of the truly great novels of recent times.
How do you teach writing in a scalable manner to third- and fourth-graders?
This is a bleg, so please leave your sagacious answers in the comments. Kelly Smith, of Prenda, writes me:
To summarize, I want kids to love writing, to see themselves as writers, and to improve their skill. I’d love to know about anyone who has done that systematically.
Are you able to help? Rest assured that your answers will be put to good use.
Philip Serzo on travel writing
Philip sent me this email, and very generously allowed me to reproduce it:
Tyler,
I know you’ve been going back and forth recently on travel writing. I don’t read a ton of travel writing, but I could totally see why it has limitations, like all genres. I say this after studying Graham Greene a favorite writer of mine. He crossed over successfully into many genres of writing. Travel writing being one of them.Here’s my point. Rolf Potts interviews Pico Iyer on a book he wrote about Graham Greene and Pott’s asks this questions below:One interesting contradiction you raise in your book is how Greene was better at evoking the humanity of faraway places in his fiction than in his nonfiction travel books. You even go so far as to say that “his travel books were a near-perfect example of how not to write or think about travel.” Why do you think this is the case, and what does it say about Greene’s way of seeing the world?
We are never less forthright than when writing of ourselves; that’s one of the lessons I feel I share with Greene (or maybe partly learned from him). Memoir to me is a kind of fiction, and the most striking autobiographical works I know—whether Philip Roth’s The Facts or W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn or V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival—all present themselves as novels. So it’s always seemed perfect to me that in his two quasi-memoirs, Greene uses charm and anecdote and childhood memory to avoid really telling us anything about himself, his loves or his beliefs; yet in his novels, given a mask or cover, he’s as naked and unguarded as any author I know. Give yourself an alias or call your work fiction and you can say things you might not say to your closest friends.
In his travel-writing, likewise, Greene was always on the outside of what he was observing, ever more English, seated in a corner, pouring abuse and scorn on the alien scene around him. Yet as soon as he worked up the material he’d seen in Mexico into a novel—The Power and the Glory—he was so deeply inside his characters, both the whisky priest protagonist and even the lieutenant in pursuit of him, that he wrote perhaps his most affecting and compassionate novel, and the one, liberatingly, without a single English character in it.
He might be almost offering us—inadvertently—a lesson on the limitations of travel-writing, much as Naipaul or Theroux or Maugham also do in novels that are far more compassionate and sympathetic than the travel-books that gave rise to them. In writing a non-fictional book about travel, you usually have to create a fictional persona of sorts, some convenient version of the self that will make the narrative work. But that front is almost never as rich or deep or conflicted as the self we allow ourselves to entertain in fiction; it can’t be. Very often the travel-writers we enjoy are engaging or buoyant or splenetic on the page, but all those are really just useful props, tiny fragments of the self, and don’t always take us very deep.
Why is most travel writing so bad?
The most painful sections of a bookshop to have to read through would be the management books, self-help, and also the travel books. Yet management, self-help, and travel are all very important and indeed extremely interesting matters, so I am wondering why these books are so bad. Today let’s focus on travel.
My biggest complaint is that travel books seem not to discriminate between what the reader might care about or not. Here is a randomly chosen passage from a recent travel book of Jedidiah Jenkins:
We walked our bikes over one more bridge and into Tijuana. Weston was barefoot, which he noted out loud as we entered Mexico. We got on our bikes and rode into immediate chaos.
Or this:
I drank my coffee and read the news on my phone. I felt him sitting next to me.
Who cares? And who is Weston anyway? (Longer excerpts would not seduce you.) Yet this book — To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret — has 85 reviews on Amazon with an average of four and a half stars and it was a NYT bestseller.
Is travel like (some) sex, namely that you can’t write about it because it is viscerally exciting in a “you had to be there” way? Why cannot that constraint be overcome by shifting the focus to matters more factual?
Too many travel books seem like an inefficient blending of memoir, novel, and travel narration, and they are throughout too light on information. Ideally I want someone with a background in geography, natural history, or maybe urban studies to serve up a semi-rigorous account of what they are doing and seeing.
Here is one mood-affiliated blurb for the Jenkins book:
“A thrilling, tender, utterly absorbing book. With winning candor, Jedidiah Jenkins takes us with him as he bicycles across two continents and delves deeply into his own beautiful heart. We laugh. We cry. We feel the glory and the agony of his adventure; the monotony and the magic; the grace and the grit. Every page of this book made me ache to know what happened next. Every chapter shimmered with truth. It’s an unforgettable debut.”
—Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things
What do people want from travel books anyway? It seems the Jenkins work sold well because he is famous on Instagram, which may or may not correlate with book-writing skills.
Here is another randomly chosen passage:
I wait. I drink some more water. It sit in the grass and chat with the others. I have a few false starts: “Ooh, I’m feeling it…just kidding, no I’m not.” “Okay, now I am! No, that’s an ant on my ankle.”
Is the problem an absence of barriers to entry for writing travel books? That many books will sell automatically “by country” rather than because of the quality of their content, leading to an excessively segmented market? Other travel book readers seem to obsess over the mode of transportation, such as whether a particular trip was undertaken by bicycle. Are there too many celebrities and semi-celebrities trying their hand at a relatively easy-to-fudge literary genre?
What are the microfoundations for this failure in the quality of travel books?
Here are various lists of the best travel books of all time. Even there I find many overrated, noting that Elizabeth Gilbert is better than most.
If you are wondering, three of my favorite travel books are Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, David G. Campbell, The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica, and also Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, perhaps the best travel book ever written.
Somebody — fix this problem!
Model this is songwriting becoming more complex?
In the 1960s, an average hit song on the Billboard Top 10 had an average of 1.87 writers and 1.68 publishers each year. Songwriting duos were common, and creativity a simpler endeavor…
During the LP era (60s-80s), the number of songwriters and publishers on hit songs didn’t rise as dramatically. Based on the Songdex analysis, in the 70s, hit songs on the Billboard Top 10 had an average of 1.95 writers and 2.04 publishers each. During the 80s, the number of average publishers in top 10 songs slightly rose to 2.06. The number of writers remained the same.
In the 90s, the number spiked to an average of 3.13 writers and 3.49 publishers per top 10 song. Incidentally, the change coincides with the rise of digital music formats, such as the MP3. Napster also launched in 1999. All of which ushered in an era of massive data overload (and that’s before streaming took hold).
Consumers quickly adopted digital music formats, resulting in a “market need for registration, licensing and reporting systems,” says Music Reports. In the 2000s, Billboard Top 10 hits had an average of 3.50 writers and 4.96 publishers each year.
This past decade, streaming has emerged as a major source of revenue for record labels. Using its Songdex catalog registry, Music Reports noted that Billboard Top 10 hits saw an average of 4.07 writers and six publishers.
Here is the full story, I am glad Beethoven never did much co-authoring, with apologies to Diabelli.
A short interview with me about writing
It is with Writing Routines, here is the interview, here is one bit:
When you first sit down to write, how do you start?
The keyboard is the most useful part, though I will check my email and maybe Twitter first, so I don’t miss something big.
What’s your process for editing your own work?
I repeatedly edit it many times, at least ten. I just keep on doing it, until I can’t think of further improvements. I can’t say that is a process in any formal sense, simply a recognition that the “process” to date hasn’t worked very well and so it must continue. I don’t pretend this is efficient.
And this:
For better or worse, I just don’t have that many modes.
Anne Enright on plot and writing
AE: Plot is a kind of paranoia, actually. It implies that events are connected, that characters are connected, just because they are in the same book. I like the way Pynchon exposed the essential paranoia of plot in The Crying of Lot 49. When I read that book as a student, I realized that if you bring coincidence or the mechanics of plotting into a book, it begs all the questions about who is writing this book and why, or why you’re making this mechanical toy do these things. That, to me as a reader, is slightly alienating. But, you know, things do happen in real life. People die in car accidents. There are connections and coincidences.
She is an Irish writer, there is more here, interesting throughout. I also liked this sentence:
The unknowability of one human being to another is an endless subject for novelists.
And this bit about writing:
It’s like getting a herd of sheep across a field. If you try to control them too much, they resist. It’s the same with a book. If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.
Hat tip goes to The Browser.
American writing is now more emotional than British writing (big data for books)
From Alberto Acerbi, Vasileios Lampos, Philip Garnett, and R. Alexander Bentley:
Our results also support the popular notion that American authors express more emotion than the British. Somewhat surprisingly, this difference has apparently developed only since the 1960s, and as part of a more general stylistic differentiation in American versus British English, reflected similarly in content-free word frequencies. This relative increase of American mood word use roughly coincides with the increase of anti–social and narcissistic sentiments in U.S. popular song lyrics from 1980 to 2007, as evidenced by steady increases in angry/antisocial lyrics and in the percentage of first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me, mine), with a corresponding decrease in words indicating social interactions (e.g., mate, talk, child) over the same 27-year period.
And there is this:
As these findings appear to genuinely reflect changes in published language, a remaining question is whether word usage represents real behavior in a population, or possibly an absence of that behavior which is increasingly played out via literary fiction (or online discourse). It has been suggested, for example, that it was the suppression of desire in ordinary Elizabethan English life that increased demand for writing “obsessed with romance and sex”. So while it is easy to conclude that Americans have themselves become more ‘emotional’ over the past several decades, perhaps songs and books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body; the observed changes reflect the book market, rather than a direct change in American culture. We believe the changes do reflect changes in culture, however, because unlike lyrics of the top 10 songs, the book data are independent of book sales.
The full article is here, with other points of interest. For instance of the major emotions coded for, disgust is the one least likely to show up in book writing. I owe the pointer to someone or other on Twitter, but right now it is simply an open window on my computer, next to the Twitter window.
Writing for free
The always-insightful Matt Yglesias discusses the benefits and propriety of writing for free.
I would add that I see the new “writing for free” model as changing in (at least) two ways. First, high living costs make it harder to leverage the patronage of writers into significant impact. There will arise new arrangements where newbies are offered 15k a year to go blog from the Yucatan, or somewhere else with low living costs but ok broadband. Foundations or donors will pick up the bill and the newbies will consider the country to be an adventure not a burden. The “winners” of these tournaments will end up with jobs similar to Matt’s. Some people, especially those with “lender of first resort” parents, will manage to cover a Brooklyn lifestyle with the 15k.
Second, one’s choice of spouse will matter increasingly for journalism and also commentary. The returns to a good marriage will rise. Look for on-line writers to become slightly more establishment, slightly more romantic, and just a wee bit closer to the philosophy of Ross Douthat, minus the enthusiasm for a higher birth rate of course.