Writing

I was thinking of inserting something like this in my next science articles and writing in active voice, breaking the norm. By Yudkowsky:

Journal articles are often written in passive voice. (Pardon me, some scientists write their journal articles in passive voice. It's not as if the articles are being written by no one, with no one to blame.) It sounds more authoritative to say "The subjects were administered Progenitorivox" than "I gave each college student a bottle of 20 Progenitorivox, and told them to take one every night until they were gone." If you remove the scientist from the description, that leaves only the all-important data. But in reality the scientist is there, and the subjects are college students, and the Progenitorivox wasn't "administered" but handed over with instructions. Passive voice obscures reality.

Often when I read a study in the passive voice, I will anyway want to ask "and how did you administer Progenitorivox? When? What words did you use? What order did you talk to the subjects in? Why? Where?", so it is not wasted verbiage to include all that from the start. Actually it compresses the writing, as much of the information is communicated implicitly when you use active voice, so there is no need to write a sequence of passive-voice statements like "The location was… The time was… The method was…". A third argument is that it's generally more pleasant to read, which should be a high goal of any scientific writing: what's not accessible to laymen may as well not exist (it scares off indie peer-review, will not be understood even by those in your field, will not spread, etc). Sure, this isn't fiction you're writing, but fiction is written to be easy to read, so your article should read like fiction as far as possible; saying it looks like fiction is the same as saying it's well-written!

And here's Orwell:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy… A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself…

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

Which would not affect the article's style visibly to others, but has implications for how to write and read articles. Be aware that a researcher may just be stringing words together and letting the words do a portion of their thinking. There's a second reason to be skeptical of recycled prose: it indicates the author has other purposes in mind than research, e.g. graduating or getting published. And when you want to describe your research, ask yourself "What did you research? Was it useful? Do you care about it? How was it done? Were the methods good? What information do you want to give to humankind?" and for each answer, do not think any words.

And there's something Jaynes said about backing up proofs overmuch. But that's for another day.

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• 2024-06-27
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