Technical Writing

Okay. Technical writing is difficult. It's not like regular writing, and lord knows that normal prose is challenging enough. Informal language gives a writer so much leeway with which to dance around a statement that yes, sometimes it is possible to lose one's point in the flowery discourse; at least the wording and pacing can be intuitive.

Technical writing is a whole other beast. This isn't writing a paper for class. Nobody's going to look at what you've written and say "this wasn't great, but it was good... B plus". You are judged on a far more binary scale: Accepted or Rejected. Ideally, the merits of your work, of the underlying science or thought, would be the only metrics on which you are evaluated. Nothing, of course, is ever ideal.

So you spend a year (at the very least) of your life working on a project. You fill notebooks full of ideas, results, afterthoughts, etc. You run into problems that grind your progress to a halt, for which there are no workarounds.

By the time you're writing things up, you've overcome the worst part... that there is no right answer. Nobody designed and ran your experiment beforehand, or approached that novel the way you approach it, or whatever. The whole point of this academic endeavor was to innovate, which meant that you never had a guarantee that success was even possible.

So you've survived this far, and now you get to start writing things up. This is when you hit the ugly part, that linguistic headwind that is technical writing. Sure, it's prose, but it's terse and parsimonious and cotton-mouth dry. It can suck the life out of you, forcing you to condense a year of your life into a few pages. Those monumental problems you had to solve? They get no more than a sentence.

Everything has to be just-so. Your conclusions have to proclaim their own awesomeness, to shout from the hilltops "I AM ALL THAT IS SCIENCE!" but must do so without really using any adjectives. The shorter your work, the better, especially if there's a page limit... any room left over must be yielded to the figures, so that your audience, who will only be glancing at your writing anyway, can guess what your point was.

It's not always so painful, though (but it usually is). Sometimes the words just flow. I find this to be the case when it's the first time I'm writing up a project, when the organization and descriptions of it have been percolating inside me for weeks and months. In those cases, my fingers fly as soon as they touch the keyboard, and before I know it, I have created. Let me tell you, it feels good.

My Baby