On Writing

   Hello, Young Scientist, my name for this blog is Pen Person, and my first point for you to consider is this: The skills that make you a scientist are the same skills that make a person a writer.

   So it follows that you, a young scientist, have a head start in the quest to become a writer. For nonscientific types who want to become writers, massive mental recalibration is needed.

   Take the (imaginary) case of Johnny, age 15, whose life dream is to have his own business selling foul-mouthed parrots to nuns. But, strangely enough, he also wants to be a writer. For that bit to come true, Johnny will need to learn these utterly foreign concepts: accuracy and precision, careful observation, unemotional assessment of all available data, verification, and all the other key writing things that you, being a young scientist, already know.

   But there remains much for you to learn about writing.

   If you’re not good at it yet, you can get better. If you’re already good at it, you can get faster. If you’re good and fast at one writing specialty, such as scientific writing, then you can start mastering any of the dozens of other specialties, such as academic writing, business writing, political writing, advertising writing, news writing (journalism), fiction-writing, kishotenketsu writ—

   “Wait a minute, Pen Person. I just want to master scientific writing, thank you very much, not all that other stuff, and by the way, what’s ‘kishkabob-whatever’?”

   Kishotenketsu is a writing specialty having to do with Japanese and Chinese narratives. No, Young Scientist, you certainly do not need to master it. And forget about any of the other specialties, if all you really want to do is master the writing of scientific articles. But allow me to make a second point: It’s impossible to be just a scientist.

   Worded another way, every scientist is far more than his or her profession. She or he is a scientist and a citizen, a cat-person and an opera-lover, a football fan and periodically a political activist, the silent partner of a business, a connoisseur of Hong Kong action films, a spouse and a parent, on and on (or any comparable jumble of roles).

   So yes, mastery of scientific writing empowers you as a scientist; but the many other dimensions of your life are empowered by mastery of other writing specialties.

   This, actually, is also true: Being a better “rounded” person makes you a better scientist, because scientific discoveries frequently are made by mental leaps from other fields. As Andy Bernay-Roman notes in Chapter 4 of The Science Club, Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after daydreaming about a snake seizing its own tail. Speaking of daydreaming, Kwon Ping Ho, author of Chapter 16, advises becoming a better scientist by ignoring your teacher:

   “My most vivid memory of high school is sitting at the back of the class looking out the window at the rice fields several floors below, hearing the occasional bark of a dog, the distant slam of a car door, and being lulled into a semi-hypnotic state by the slow whirring of the overhead fan. My mind would wander, between reality and dream, concentration and distraction. For such indulgences I was often rewarded by detention after school. But if you get threatened with detention for daydreaming these days, just tell the teacher, ‘I’m engaged in higher-order thinking.’

   “Seriously, in recent years neuroscientists have discovered that daydreaming actually involves complex mental processes. Far from being empty, our minds are in fact more active when we daydream than during ‘thinking’ hours. Indeed, our minds usually wander when we’re engaged in routine tasks that, due to their familiarity, don’t require focused attention. A 2004 study found that ‘Mind wandering is typically associated with negative things like laziness or inattentiveness. But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream—much more active than when we focus on routine tasks . . . Mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.’”

   So anyway, not all your best science will come from science, to coin a phrase.

   Plus if you’re really well-rounded, meaning knowledgeable about lots of other fields, you can say totally awesome things that everyone remembers forever, like the Father of the Atomic Bomb (Robert Oppenheimer), on first seeing his “baby” explode, gasping out a few lines from an ancient Hindu scripture. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.”

   So let’s assume, Young Scientist, that, having read the preceding eight blindingly brilliant and absolutely riveting paragraphs, you now have totally changed your mind about wanting to master only scientific writing and at this precise moment you are thinking to yourself, Hamlet-style, To be or not to be just a scientific writer, that is no longer the question. ’Tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and to take up arms against a sea of troubles, by mastering all of the writing specialties—except kishkabob-whatever.

   Then my third point for you to consider is good news: Mastery of any writing specialty is actually very easy. It has nothing to do with “talent.” It has nothing to do with spelling and grammar. Nor does it have anything at all to do with how well you can speak. Mastery of any writing specialty has nothing to do with anything except this: a clear understanding of what writing really is. See? Easy-peasy.

   Fourth point: A great many things in modern life block that crucial understanding of what writing is, such as false positives.

   You know the term in its science sense. A false positive occurs when tests show the presence of a certain chemical that is not actually in the sample, etc. In writing, a false positive is high praise for low quality.

   Writing false positives happen all the time among parents these days. Their cardinal rule is, “Never damage little Timmy’s oh-so-fragile-and-precious self-image.” So Timmy, announcing that he’s going to write a story, manages to write five sentences in an hour, then proudly hands it to his mother. She reads: “I is a ball. It is redd not blu. I like 2 bounce. I do not like nails who make me flat. The end.” Her brows soared, Mum gushes, “Oh! Timmy! You are so wonderful! What a thrilling story! You are fantastic! May I call you ‘The Next Hemingway’?”

   Being praised for your writing is always nice. But false-positive praise is as meaningless as one of Johnny’s parrots saying, “Cute butt, sister!” 

   Pareidolia is another thing that blocks the clear understanding of what writing really is. Pareidolia (pa-rey-doh-lia) is the perception of significance where there is none—seeing meaning in meaningless data. Examples: looking at the Moon and seeing a man’s face; or looking at an oil spill in your driveway and seeing the face of Brad Pitt, which convinces you that he is trying desperately to reach you to ask you to star with him in his next film; or viewing writing as a menial chore.

   That perception is amazingly common, almost a global delusion. It staggers the mind, actually, to realize how many otherwise brilliant people think that writing is a menial task, a servant sort of function that mostly secretaries do.

   Don’t believe me? Do your own survey. Ask any ten total strangers, “Are you a writer?” Tabulate how many of them answered, “Can I write, you mean? Sure.” On confirming that all ten said that, text-message your best friend, “Whoa, that Pen Person guy was like TOTALLY right, wow, he’s so smart he must be a semi-divine being or something.”

   You could do a science fair project, by the way, after asking the same ten people, “Are you a scientist?” Only those who are scientists will say yes. The word itself, “scientist,” implies substantial essential preparation, whereas “writer” does not. Then (for your fair project): “doctor,” “lawyer,” “janitor,” etc.

   The origin of the delusion that writing is menial is the fact that essentially anyone and everyone is able, soon after kindergarten, to do the physical act of writing. Oh look, Jennifer is now able to pick up a pencil, position its tip on a sheet of paper, and draw a string of words, so now she’s a writer. When everyone is able to do a thing, doing it is viewed as no big deal. We don’t stand in awe of a person who can blink. But if only ten people on Earth could blink, they would be hounded by autograph-seekers and pursued relentlessly by paparazzi.

   Absolutely conclusive evidence to the contrary—irrefutably proving that writing is the exact opposite of menial labor—is everywhere. So this almost universal notion that anyone who can physically write is a writer, and therefore that being a writer is no big deal, is willful blindness. It’s like a tea party at which everyone is pretending that a 400-kg. gorilla isn’t standing right over there beside the fireplace (882-lb.).

   Here is the seen-by-few truth for which there is evidence everywhere: Writing is the purest of all professions, and the pivot point of all history, and the finest of all the fine arts, and the most powerful of all the sciences.

   Dyslexia comes to mind. Most people think writing is “dog.” In truth, it’s “god.”

   “Purest”? In writing as in no other profession, the one and only thing that matters is itself. Whether the writer was young or old, tall or short, male or female, black or white, right-handed or left-, a high-school dropout or a PhD: all are supremely irrelevant. Where a writer went to school, who she knows, what kind of car she drives: all mean nothing, because the only thing that matters is the quality of her writing. Does anyone care that William Shakespeare wore an outfit that looked like a leotard being swarmed by cannibalistic party balloons? Of course not. The single thing that matters about his writing is that it is masterful.

   For that matter, consider what you’re reading right now. Where I went to school, how much coffee I drink, etc.: none of it is relevant, because the only thing that matters to you is whether these words are useful and interesting to you—right? It’s said that one can’t judge a book by its cover. Exactly—written works are judged by their writing, full stop.

   “Pivot point of all history”? “Ancient history” means—is defined as—from the beginning of written history (until the Middle Ages), while before that, before writing, is “prehistory.”

   Just try to imagine the incalculable number of brilliant men and women who are entirely unknown to us today because they lived in cultures that didn’t write things down. All over the world: no writing, brilliance lost. Best example: the Nok Civilization of Nigeria.

   And what’s all this then about writing being “the finest fine art”? It is indeed: writing is the greatest, the most glorious, the finest of all the fine arts. Think about it. Is there a Nobel Prize for Painting? There is not. A Sculpture Nobel? No. Music or Singing or Dance or Opera? No, no, no. And no. Only writing gets one: the Nobel Prize for Li-cha-cha (often spelled “Literature”).

   Don’t get me wrong, the other arts are all important. A world without paintings would be like a meadow without flowers (Realism) or wasps (Modern Art). A world without music would be like a neighborhood without songbirds (Classical) or crashing cars (Rap). It’s just that the importance of all the other fine arts combined, compared to the importance of writing, is like a purebred toy poodle compared to an Irish wolfhound-Tibetan mastiff mix with a dash of Doberman.

   Here’s the reason: only writing changes lives. All the other arts enrich or entertain for a while, but then it’s back to real life—which is only ever changed by the written word. For a grand few hours, you go to a theater or an art gallery. To learn the secrets of success in life in anything, you go to a book.

   (Which is why, on any given day, there are more than 300,000 different “how to” titles at Amazon.)

   But does writing actually qualify as an art? Yes. Because in addition to its scientific aspects (careful observation, unemotional assessment, precision, etc.), it has all the aspects of any art, including emotion, spontaneity, creativity, inspiration, passion, instinct, and the supremacy of feelings over thoughts.

   In point of fact, it should be said, Art and Science are not separate worlds. They are the two ends of a spectrum. In every art there is science, and in every science there is art. Behind any artwork are all kinds of technical details—the melting points of metals, all the chemical formulas for patinas (the final coat on a bronze statue), the widely dissimilar drying times of different colors of oil paint, the tensile strength of strings for instruments and of ropes for the background scenes of theatrical productions, etc.; and behind every scientific discovery and invention are intuition, creativity, imagination, spontaneity, and the supremacy of gut-feelings over thoughts trying to tell you that thus and such is impossible.

   “Okay, Pen Person, got that, sure—science and art both. But now how is writing—to use your words now—‘the most powerful of all the sciences’?”

   Simple answer: Without writing, no other science could exist.

   Tourists to Paris zip over to Notre Dame and gaze in awe at its towers, its flying buttresses, its facades, its roof. Nobody looks at its most important, most fundamental feature, the thing that holds everything else up: its floor. That’s writing for every science, from astronomy to zoology: the foundation upon which the whole splendid structure is built.

   Take away its writing, any science collapses. No articles, no books, no written works: no science.

   All this is covered in The Science Club: Young Scientists of the Past Talk to Today’s Young Scientists About the Future, a book to be published later this year by The Butrous Foundation. I had the honor to be its editor, and particularly like these points from two of its appendices:

   “It is often said that each generation of scientists stands on the shoulders of the one before it. That’s a flowery and inaccurate—which is to say, very unscientific—way of stating this truth: The men and women of every new generation of scientists stand on the printed works of all the scientists who came before them.”

   “Isaac Newton used Math to explain even more basic processes and forces, such as gravity. One of the greatest scientists ever, he also explained the process by which all the sciences advance: ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Newton made that statement in a letter he wrote to a scientist friend, Robert Hooke (the Father of Microscopy, the man who coined the word ‘cell’ for the basic unit of life, etc.), in 1676. Newton’s statement is the title of a recent huge book edited by a modern Science giant, Stephen Hawking: On the Shoulders of Giants (London: Running Press, 2002), 1,280 pages.”

   Had Newton not published his Principia in 1687, and had Hawking never published his Shoulders or his best-selling A Brief History of Time (1988) or anything else: would they still be giants? 

   Here we’re edging into murky philosophical situations—questions like, “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no ear to hear it, is there still a sound?” and, “If a man says something in a forest and there’s no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?” But (my opinion), no: had they never written anything, neither Newton nor Hawking would be a giant today. They would be minds whose brilliance never left their own skulls except in conversation. And that (in my opinion) is the source of the tremendous power of this all-powerful science: writing is what enables one person’s brilliance to be shared with anyone who can read.

   Now we come to the pure magic aspect of my profession: through writing—and only through writing—brilliant minds are able to speak clearly to readers who won’t be born until centuries after the writing was first published. Confucius and Aristotle lived more than 2,000 years ago, and yet we can stroll into a bookstore, buy a book, and listen to them speaking to us. Through reading, we hear their voices and share their thoughts, and are empowered by the brilliance that was in their skulls when they were alive more than 20 centuries ago.

   I realized that fact when I was 9 (as told in The Science Club, Appendix L):

   “My lifetime fascination with the written word began in a perfect place for divine inspiration: the Vatican.

   “There in Rome in 1958, all of 9 years old, I stared through the glass of a display case at an opened notebook that had been written by Leonardo da Vinci in 1482. In the Third Grade, I had no idea who da Vinci was, other than some old dead guy; but I had only recently learned how to write, and it was a moment of magic as I realized that that writing beneath the glass was 476 years old. That was my life-altering epiphany, the realization that while people all die, what they write is immortal.

   “Forgetting that I was in a church, I ran over to where the rest of my family were standing in awe before Michelangelo’s Pietà, and yanking on my mother’s dress begged her to teach me how to type. On her old Royal manual typewriter, Mom could type 120 words per minute (2 words per second), and she was an excellent teacher. So by my 11th birthday, I was typing 110 words per minute on her Royal. But it was Mr. Reeves who taught me, when I was 15, that in writing there’s one thing that’s far more important than speed: accuracy.

   “I had published my first scientific article in January of 1966, and in a concluding paragraph for acknowledgments I had thanked Mr. Reeves for his help with submitting it to the Siam Society, using the word “priviledge.” After reading his copy and seeing that typo, Mr. Reeves smiled at me and said, ‘Good job, Paul. Just remember that the printed word is forever—and so are any mistakes.’

   “So thanks to my mother, I’ve written around 10,000 published pages over the years (in journals, newspapers, magazines, manuals, books, and reference books); and thanks to Mr. Reeves, I’ve spent the past 43 years hunting for errors and typos, reading mountains of manuscripts (my own and others’) with exorcist eyes, certain that in every manuscript there is always going to be at least one misteak.”

   So that’s the seen-by-few truth about what writing really is—purest, pivotal, finest, most powerful. But (big but): not all written works are masterfully done. In equine terms, writing is a vast herd of horses in which 40% are swaybacked nags, 25% are Clydesdales, 25% are Shetland ponies, 8% are thoroughbreds, and 2% are unicorns.

   Now we come, Young Scientist, to what I hope and predict will be the most useful part of this blog for you personally. Till now, I’ve been making points about writing. From here on, it’s techniques for actually doing it masterfully. Till now, my personal opinions; from here on, my personal trade secrets.

   My first secret for masterful writing of any kind: Remain grateful.

   Wielding the tremendous power of the pen, the writer is tempted to think he is a super-hero. Then he thinks that anything he utters on paper is wonderful because he himself is wonderful. Once that happens to you, you are ruined as a writer.

   Masterful writers remain grateful to their readers for a very good reason: by reading your work, a reader is giving you a portion of her precious time and, more significantly, allowing you into her mind. Gratitude for that is deserved. But there is also this fact, that no master writer ever forgets: though he wields great power as a writer, his reader possesses a far greater power, the ultimate power over him: at any moment, she can simply stop reading and toss the written work into the recycle bin.

   My second secret for masterful writing: Look outward.

   Novice writers look inward, master writers look outward. The novice thinks that writing is all about self-expression. The master knows that writing is all about communication.

   When I used to mentor university-level students in writing, I would always begin Lesson One with a very innocuous-sounding suggestion that would immediately tell me whether the person was a rank amateur or a gifted pro. I would say, “In one paragraph, describe an apple.” The amateur always would nod eagerly, pick up his pen, and start writing. The pro would nod eagerly, and ask, “To whom?”

   Exactly! A written description of an apple for a 6-year-old reader is entirely different from the description written for a 60-year-old, or the one for an Eskimo who’s never seen a tree, much less a fruit. Looking outward, at the reader, is the first and most crucial step in masterful writing of any kind.

   Academic Writing: its aim is to trigger approval and admiration in the reader (the teacher).

   Advertising Writing: its aim is to trigger in the reader a sudden craving for a product.

   Political Writing: its aim is to trigger in the reader the decision to vote for a particular candidate.

   Business Writing: its aim is to trigger brand-loyalty in the reader.

   Science Writing (as in National Geographic): its aim is to trigger environmental appreciation in the reader.

   Scientific Writing (as in The Young Scientist Journal or any other scientific publication): its aim is to contribute knowledge and wisdom that trigger further advances in the field by the reader.

   Humor Writing: its aim is to trigger humor.

   Speech Writing: its aim is to trigger enthusiasm.

   Fiction Writing: its aim is to grip and hold the full attention of the reader through the illusion that the unfolding story is really happening.

   Et cetera.

   In all of the above, ignore the reader and you have nothing but wasted paper. Not thinking about your reader is like dropping a letter in the post with only a person’s name on the envelope, no address—the chances of it reaching him are not good. In contrast, really knowing your reader virtually guarantees that your writing will “reach” him.

   My third secret for masterful writing: Before you begin writing anything, get to know your reader.

   “Just stop right there, Pen Person, and explain, if you will—if you can—how a writer can possibly know who will read his work.”

   Thank you for raising an excellent point. I should have said: “get to know your reader as accurately as you can.” This is actually easy, especially in writing for magazines. Each of them has its own “demographics” for its target readership—age range, gender, income, education, etc. So, for example, you know that readers of a magazine called Gory Blood-Drenched Violent Computer Games will tend to be youngish males, and that the great majority of subscribers to Motherhood Made Easy will not be business tycoons. You want to write an article about your pet turtle? Great! Just don’t send it to The Siamese Cat-Fanciers’ Quarterly.

   In other words, Young Scientist, the intended venue (place) of publication itself tells you a great deal about your reader. But (another big but) that is only the very beginning of getting to know your reader, because of this fact: masterful writing requires that you know him or her as a unique, individual person.

   How is that possible, especially for a reader who won’t be born until two centuries from now? It is possible because the essential humanity of people is a constant. If you focus on the humanity of people, things like the desire for dignity, then you know all the most important likes and dislikes of any individual human being.

   My fourth secret for masterful writing: Follow the Golden Rule.

   Treat others as you would like to be treated—in your daily life (if you like), and in your writing (if you want to succeed as a writer).

   Do you, Young Scientist, like to be made to feel stupid? Of course not. And neither does anyone else, nor will people born in the 22nd Century like to be made to feel stupid. So that is one actual fact that you know about your reader as a unique individual. And so, obviously, in your writing, you don’t want to make your reader feel stupid.

   An amateur writer, focused on himself (“self-expression”), wants to show how brilliant he is, so he uses big or rare words. He writes, “It was a hypaethral house,” and preens, patting himself on the back for knowing a word that virtually no one else knows. Then what happens? Expecting applause, he receives contempt, because the reader gets to that word and feels inadequate for not knowing what it means. The master writer, ever careful never to make his reader feel stupid, writes, “It was a house lacking a roof, a hypaethral house.” What happens then? The reader feels gratitude to the writer for a fun new word.

   Do you like to be bored? No. Then never bore your reader. If you have a boring subject that you must write about (either because it was assigned or because someone’s paying you to write it), drop in a few interesting or arresting things, exactly like hiding a few chocolate candies in a bowl of porridge.

   That right there is another universal: just like you do, your reader enjoys receiving a nice little gift now and then.

   For any topic, research lets you dig up interesting or arresting things to use as little gifts. One example: If I had to write a magazine article about census figures, I might casually drop in the fact that the word came from an official in Ancient Rome, the censor, who also gave us “censorship.” Despite the fact that all its chapters are already tremendously interesting, The Science Club consciously has chocolate nuggets here and there for the added delectation and delight of the reader, such as “chemistry” coming from the Ancient Egyptian word for “dirt,” and like the father of Prize-founder Alfred Nobel being the inventor of plywood.

   Suggestion: As you read anything from now on, be alert for fascinating or amazing facts, and add them to your mental inventory of chocolates for future porridges. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can build up a great collection.

   Do you like to be deceived? To realize that you’ve wasted your time? No, and neither does your reader, now or years from now, because essential humanity never changes. A thousand years from now, people will detest being deceived, and hate being tricked into wasting their time. So if your written work is supposed to be a thriller, deliver thrills, and if your title says “Ten Steps to Success,” give ten, and if your article title is “Oxygen Depletion in Acynonix jubatus During Sprints,” deliver a paper on exactly that, how a racing cheetah uses up oxygen at high speed. Deceiving your reader is equivalent to a cheetah at high speed hitting a brick wall.

   My fifth secret for masterful writing: Use the right tools.

   As a writer, you have at your disposal a vast array of tools with which to build (science) and craft (art) any written work. Some are blunt implements, others are precision instruments. Writing mastery means knowing and using the right tools for any given job.

   Adjectives are one class of tool (like “screwdriver” is a class—different types): very important in a poem, not at all appropriate for a scientific article. The sounds of letters are a class of tool—don’t use lots of harsh consonants (k, ch, kh, etc.) in a love scene. Word length is another class of tool: for describing fast action, like a battle scene, use short words, bam-bam-bam; for slow action, like a stroll through a park, use longer words, like meander and mellifluent. On and on: hundreds of different writing tools that you’ll find listed in some of those 300,000 “how to” titles available at Amazon on any given day.

   Note that some tools are required. From Chapter 21 in The Science Club:

  “Another of Science’s many beauties is its accuracy—which is not optional. For her flights of fancy and imaginary creations, British novelist Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Two years earlier, for his flights of fancy and imaginary test results reported in a scientific article on human cloning, South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk was indicted on charges of fraud and embezzlement, fired from his university position, and formally barred from conducting further research on human cloning.”

   My sixth and final secret for masterful writing: Whenever possible, use the singular “you.”

   Books that are written as if the writer is on a stage addressing a big audience sound impersonal. The dictionary is an excellent example: it is not written to you personally. In reference books, that’s usually desirable; and in scientific articles (each of which is, essentially, a “nano-reference book”), same thing—impersonal is fine. 

   But in most other kinds of writing, the masterful examples are the ones that make the reader feel like she’s having a one-on-one chat with a knowledgeable person who is happy to help, focused on her as a unique individual, and respectful of her.

   So, for example, if you were to write a blog about writing for young scientists, then you would take great pains never to sound like you’re talking to a generic bunch of kids . . .

   Thank you, Young Scientist, for listening.