Useful Writing

Found this article titled “How To Write Usefully” (or on the web archive) which dives deep into how knowledge is conveyed to readers where correctness, novelty among other traits are measured; rather than relying in relatively correct but somewhat vague arguments, we aim to carefully make strong claims without jeopardizing their truthiness.

The referred article addresses develops around essays and describes different traits to look out for, however, I feel said traits could also apply when addressing an audience in general —there are of course situations where these don’t apply at all.

The author likes to see these traits as a simple formula:

Which I tried to summarize and are laid out as follows:

Importance and Correctness

Precision and correctness are like opposing forces. It’s easy to satisfy one if you ignore the other. The converse of vaporous academic writing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of demagogues. Useful writing is bold, but true.

A trade-off where one would favor one or the other depending on our audience, without putting at risk the accuracy and truth of our arguments; however, we may be telling people something that they already know, consciously or subconsciously, but what matter mostly, is to what degree.

These traits influence how useful something is and introduce correspondingly something true & important unbeknownst to people, as unequivocally as it is possible; a trick suggested—an permitted in this context—is to state something when it is truly worth knowing, something was evidently of great importance to us and consequently be for others at a different magnitude.

Novelty

The way to get novelty is to write about topics you’ve thought about a lot. Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in this department too. Anything you notice that surprises you, who’ve thought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise a significant number of readers.

It applies to some of facts composing an argument or idea, not everything in it shall be perceived as something new, but those that genuenly are will certainly draw attention and consencuently strengthen its importance; humility is mentioned as a trait and personal exercise where we acknowledge the novelty of something, thus asserting our own ignorance and by extension a degree of ignorance in the target audience —of course there can always be exceptions.

Strength

The fourth component of useful writing, strength, comes from two things: thinking well, and the skillful use of qualification. These two counterbalance each other, like the accelerator and clutch in a car with a manual transmission. As you try to refine the expression of an idea, you adjust the qualification accordingly. Something you’re sure of, you can state baldly with no qualification at all, […] Whereas points that seem dubious have to be held at arm’s length with perhapses.

An element highlighted here is qualification which is applied and adjusted accordingly as we refine an idea or argument, it goes against refinement, that is, refining reduces qualification; furthermore, the amount of it tells how certain we are about something, i.e. the use of the expression “I think” while typically discouraged, it does indicate we are partially certain about something, which is desirable in some circumstances.

Nonetheless, qualification it’s a skill worth learning on its own right, rather than be seen as something used to sugar-coat dubious arguments, it should be better perceived as a necessary step to build strength in them.

A bit on reception…

The root of the problem is novelty. When you tell people something they didn’t know, they don’t always thank you for it. Sometimes the reason people don’t know something is because they don’t want to know it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief. And indeed, if you’re looking for novel ideas, popular but mistaken beliefs are a good place to find them. Every popular mistaken belief creates a dead zone of ideas around it that are relatively unexplored because they contradict it.

The strength component just makes things worse. If there’s anything that annoys people more than having their cherished assumptions contradicted, it’s having them flatly contradicted.

It is instrumental that we gauge our audience, and although the referenced article addresses essay writing —which makes it more challenging—“tuning” these aspects we’ve been speaking about will directly affect how bold or subtle, simple or florid our statements are, something to look out for from situation to situation.