mindlace

I love writing papers because it is the perfect balance between code, the narrative form, and external referents.

I like writing code, but it is tremendously persnickity. There’s no end to the i dotting and t crossing. Even the very high level languages I prefer require you to state things in an extraordinarily pedantic fashion, and it seems like it’s going to be at least a decade before languages improve to the point of handling the sort of slightly ambiguous high-level writing that is closer to my strengths. The one extraordinarily powerful aspect of code is it is writing that literally does something.

The narrative form is probably my favourite form of expression (though you might be hard pressed to see that in my writings). I like storytelling, whodunits, myths and parables. The great part about storytelling is that you can, at your best, induce an emotional commitment on behalf of the reader. The weakness of stories is that they needn’t have any particular sort of internal logic or cohere to any outside truths; for their truth there is only the human, social world to refer to.

With a paper, particularly a science paper, you get to tell a story about whatever it is that you’re researching; but you can’t just spout whatever it is you’d like to say, there are rules of evidence. You must always situate yourself in relation to the extant body of work through citation. In the as-yet hypothetical (for me) case of writing about actual experimentation, your narrative and social world (citation) referents are all called into play in order to illuminate some empirical observation about the world that anyone similarly equipped should be able to duplicate.

A well made paper is a beautiful, palatable presentation of a nugget of Truth as you have found it; it’s communication in one of the most powerful senses of the word.

In my current, admiration from mostly afar mode, I’m even enamoured of the form of papers. Their lack of stylistic adornment brings me back to the moment when I took the first page I had written out of a laser printer, feeling the thick paper, smelling the crisp smell of toner and admiring the sharp, defined lines of my words austere and pure, floating on the surface – not crudely smashed in – like the words had always been there but had only to be called forth.

That this may some day be my bread and butter, that I must one day routinely stand before my peers in these black and white robes and be published or perish in ignominy sounds to my ears like the sweetest of fates.