more from ρaul 9raham: on writing.

maybe i've spent too many hours awake, typing away on an N$F grant proposal, but this recent essay of paul gr@ham struck a chord in me.

That's not even the worst danger. I think the goal of an essay should be to discover surprising things. That's my goal, at least. And most surprising means most different from what people currently believe. So writing to persuade and writing to discover are diametrically opposed. The more your conclusions disagree with readers' present beliefs, the more effort you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go any faster.

lately, i've been writing to persuade. specifically, i want the government to give me money. then again, i look at my writeup and i realise,

it looks too much like a paper or a lecture.

there's a bad habit of "polishing" a research article. as a general rule, technical writing is concise writing. i'm guilty of this. often i ask myself, even in casual conversations,

what is the best (read: most efficient) way to say this?

as a result, often reading a research article is like decoding, trying to figure out what the author was really thinking.

it's rare that someone writes in roughly the same order in which one discovers the proof of a theorem. that sort of exposition is left for talks and lectures.