Cormac Mccarthy's Tips on How to Write a Science Paper (2019) [pdf]

This echoes advice I first read in Strunk & White. It remains the most actionable tip for better writing I'm aware of, technical or otherwise.

Aside: I consider McCarthy's residency at SFI an ideal job

> Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work.

Haha, sure, I will send it to my LLM -- ... I mean "editor." :)

As a non-academic that wrote a paper for the first time, I'll say that writing a good science paper takes an absurd amount of time, even on a topic you are very well versed in. It is also way different than other forms of writing, like blogs or technical documentation.

Frankly, I'm astounded I've even managed to get that result, working on it just one month from the submission deadline (a ridiculously massive time crunch) and only in my spare time, not having touched LaTeX in almost a decade. But if a proper heretic like me managed to get that far on their first try, then everyone who's considering writing a paper for the first time ought to have hope.

I might've somehow got an invitation to present a poster out of this, but that's a story for another day (still wrestling with Inkscape on that one).

> Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.

Repetitive sentence structure is not engaging and lulls a reader to sleep, no matter the context. Clauses and transition words and nontrivial sentence structure allow for qualification and clarification, juxtaposition and contrast, and emphasis, often with many fewer words than if written as a series of single independent clauses. A short sentence following longer ones punctuates its point and can effectively lead into subsequent sentences that express more complex ideas/explanations.

In my own scientific writing I also frequently use compound sentences to indicate that the ideas are related (causally or otherwise). It's also unclear to me how one could more efficiently communicate logical or causal flow between ideas than with transition words like "thus" or "therefore."

> Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the same as English, and we shouldn’t pretend it is.

I don't know what to make of it. Equations are supposed to be part of sentences, and mathematical equations are compact expressions of relations. For example, the sentence,

    Newton taught us that force is equal to mass times acceleration, where both mass and accelerations are inertial quantities.

    Newton taught us that $F=ma$, where both the mass $m$ and acceleration $a$ are inertial quantities.

many early-career folks are afraid to make things too simple and easy to understand because they (subconsciously?) fear that it makes their work seem simplistic or trivial.

when you're an academic that has built a great deal of your self identity around being perceived as 'the smart one', it takes a fair amount self-confidence to start presenting yourself in a way that is easy to understand

[1] https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/11950502897/taco-b...

David Foster Wallace wrote a memorable review of it once in a piece for Salon, which read (in its entirety)

"Don't even ask."[1]

If you've read the book, you know.

[1] The article is "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels > 1960." https://www.salon.com/1999/04/12/wallace/

So this is why the LLMs do it