writing – puzzling.org

January 1, 2013August 31, 2016

How to do more writing, by someone who has never made any such resolution

Jonathan Lange asked on Google+ for ideas about keeping a “write more” resolution. I took over his comment section, and in the spirit of taking some of my own advice, here’s a synthesis of what I said there. Since not writing as much as I feel I ought is never a problem I’ve had, this advice is in the delightful genre of someone who has never needed the advice simply making some up and giving it to you anyway! Enjoy my half-baked ideas.

Re-use your writing. A lot of people I know spend an enormous amount of time on crafting lengthy, tightly argued emails. These count, and you can make them feel like they count by editing them for a sufficiently general audience and publishing them on your blog. This is one I actually do do: several of my Geek Feminism pieces originated in annoyed private emails I sent to close friends, or in IRC rants.

Accountability and incentives. This is like all of the “how to exercise more” advice: make it public, make it social. Make a public commitment, make a shared commitment with a fellow writer. Have a competition, one-sided or not (“I will write more blog entries than N will this year”?). Deadlines and someone who will be personally disappointed in you can be an excellent motivator (as long as it doesn’t tip you over into an avoidance cycle), and for writing there’s a whole profession which involves, in part, holding people to deadlines and being disappointed if they fail to meet them: so, find an editor.

Unfortunately, in order to get an editor one generally needs to pitch (leaving aside the whole question of finding an agent, especially when it comes to fiction), which means writing, so you will have to be motivated to do some writing before you can partially outsource your motivation to editors and deadlines.

Becoming a freelancer seems like a big effort in order to fulfil a personal goal to “write more”, but part of the attraction is that you can pitch to places that have a ready-made audience, which means that you have outsourced any implicit “write more in places people will read it and find it useful” goal; you don’t need to put an equal or greater amount of work into building an audience for your writing.

Specific goals. This assists with accountability. What does writing more mean? A certain wordcount? A certain number of blog entries? A certain number of pitches sent out? A certain number of pitches converted to published articles? All of these are more artificial but easier to keep accounts of than “write more”.

Spend money. Enrol in a course or similar. This adds deadlines too, typically.

How to do more writing, by someone who has never made any such resolution by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

October 4, 2008April 10, 2026

Writing helpful reviews

I outlined the style of good academic reviews to Jonathan in light of our impending OSDC review responsibilities, and it’s worth noting here too.

For information’s sake, my authority, such as it is, on reviewing comes from being the editorial assistant of Computational Linguistics, which is a journal with a hardworking editor and conscientious reviewers. Not all academic reviews are of the quality I discuss below. They should be.

Begin with stating the title of the paper you are reviewing. Then spend one to three paragraphs summarising its content, particularly what you perceive as its major findings and conclusions.

This has a couple of purposes. The first is that if the reviews have got mixed up in the system the author finds out as soon as possible and doesn’t have to slog through a review that (perhaps) is a partial match for their paper and (especially in academic circles) a privacy problem to boot. The second is so that they know in what light to read the rest of the review. If they see that you have understood its fundamentals they will be inclined to take the entire review seriously. If they see you have misunderstood it, they can do one of two things. One is to realise that their paper is confusing, and to make its focus clearer. The other is to discount your review. The decision here may be affected by the following section.

The main body of the review is a discussion of how to improve the paper. Both the tone and discussion will vary considerably depending on certain factors:

is the paper already accepted?
is this the only reviewing round or will you or another reviewer be checking the changes?

For OSDC, both factors hold. For almost all conferences, there is only (at most) one reviewing round for full papers. This makes reviews more limited in scope than journal reviews, where substantial changes are often recommended even (or perhaps especially) to articles the reviewer fundamentally likes. Journal reviewers can have a role which is not far from being anonymous co-authors. (If a colleague did as much re-reading and suggestions of additional work and additional reading as Computational Linguistics reviewers do, many people would consider adding them to the authors list.)

In the event that the article has been accepted, or that this is the single reviewing round, you should limit the scope of your suggestions to much more cosmetic things. Someone who has had an article accepted is just going to be annoyed that you want it to have a whole new body of work incorporated, and they will ignore you. (And if it’s rejected after a single reviewing round, they are probably ill-placed to revise much!) In the OSDC scenario, reviewers are going to be mostly limited to suggestions as to how to structure the argument and the paper better, and not really able to productively suggest changes to the argument or the work described in the paper.

As you write your review and this section in particular, keep in mind the key factor of providing useful critiques: how could this work be better on its own terms? That is, don’t provide a review that is, fundamentally, about how the paper would have been better if you’d written it… about your pet topic. This is a subtle, tempting and common mistake, and if you have never caught yourself in it, you are likely to be the worst affected. Remember: What is the paper trying to do? How can it do it better? Avoid the temptation to suggest that it would be a better paper if it was doing something different from its current aim. (There is a little more leeway for this in journal reviews, but even in that case, generally what happens if a reviewer thinks this is that they review the article on its current form and recommend a fate suited to its current aims, and additionally comment that they would be interested in seeing further work in the additional direction should the authors choose.)

As a recipient of reviews, I do have a couple of things to add. One is to respect page limits. If you are reviewing for a work with a page limit, especially a conference, and you do really want to see a longer discussion of foo, please suggest which bar could be shortened or cut. Otherwise it is close to impossible for an author to consider your suggestion. Also, if you are making suggestions for future work that you think the authors should consider but which you do not actually want to see in the article, make this clear in the text of your review. I would probably recommend a whole separate section for this if you’re going to do it.

A review may conclude with a list of typos, spelling mistakes, suggested rephrasings, etc. Mistakes that affect the reading of the paper (eg mislabeled figures and sections) go right at the start of this list. A sufficiently ill-proofread paper may go back with a suggestion that the authors find the mistakes themselves.

Writing helpful reviews by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

September 20, 2003April 8, 2026

Writing a good online diary

Assuming that you have good reasons for keeping an online diary, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of making your diary readable. I’ll begin by stating the general principles, and then by reviewing a few breakable rules of thumb that, in my experience, are good indicators of an interesting diary.

The general principle of good writing is to determine your audience, and write for them. An online diarist will normally encounter some tension here — the diarists are often writing partly for themselves or their future selves, and the desire to record events that were important to them may conflict with the desire to record events in an interesting way. You will need to decide to what extent you are intending to resolve this tension in the audience’s favour.

It is the case, if I am part of your audience, that your choice of material is generally meaningless to me, and the use to which you put your material is everything, which is why most of these tips tend towards the stylistic.

Tell a story

Of the beginning, middle and end structure, online diarists struggle most with the ending, often because they don’t know it yet. The most successful stories are often trivial anecdotes. However, there may be an ongoing story that you don’t want to record only in hindsight. In this case, you will want to return to it periodically.

It is very very hard to make a story out of emotions you are still experiencing, unless you’re a brutally honest and particularly insightful person, so if you want to write a powerful emotional entry, you may be better off writing an entry that looks back a year or more.

Write long entries

A long diary entry gives you the chance to tell a story, rather than writing an instant message to your readership, and most good online diaries contain at least the odd long entry scattered in their archives.

Very few online diarists seem to be poets, and so generally very few short entries will not become the highlights of your diary.

Drama is the biggest online diary cliche

If your entry is an allusion to misery that only your three best friends in the world can comprehend, your entry will be boring. The high points of an online diary are very seldom the most dramatic entries, save in the case of diaries that resemble an emotional car crash. For the rest, you will need to hone your ability to make the prosaic interesting, because it is actually much easier to do that than to make secretive drama interesting.

Make your entries complete within themselves

Again, if your entry is full of allusions to events you cannot describe in full, and people you cannot say anything about, and feelings that you are unwilling to share, your entry will be boring. If you need to censor something that is crucial to understanding a story, you may as well censor the entire story. In other cases, tell the story in such a way that it is a complete anecdote, even if it is not totally uncensored. If your reader can tell that you’ve left part of the story out, your entry is not as good as it could be.

A subtle style will serve you well

A diary with a unique voice is often an interesting read. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to let your spoken style influence your written style. It should be relatively sparing, but a touch of spoken mannerisms in a diary makes it more readable.

Writing a good online diary by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

July 22, 2003April 8, 2026

Why keep an online diary?

I think there are several bad reasons to keep an online diary, including using it as a poor substitute for a paper diary, using it to experiment with hyperlinking writing, or using it as a forum for your opinions. Each of these needs is better served by alternative forms. On the other hand, online diaries are maligned as being necessarily uninteresting due to their trivial nature. Trivial and uninteresting do not always go hand in hand, as diarists and letter writers have appreciated for hundreds of years.

The online diary is a format held in peculiar contempt, for several reasons. Most of those reasons are due to the usual meaning of ‘diary’ — that is, a more-or-less secret record of one’s life, written, presumably, for your satisfaction alone, and deriving much of its power from the fact that it has no readers, freeing the author both from the stylistic constraints of writing for an audience, and from the judgements of that audience.

The online diary format naturally loses much of that power. The disadvantages of the online diary format compared to the paper diary format include less honesty (or less sweeping honesty anyway), and much less privacy. It also leaves the author wide open to charges of narcissism, since they are writing about themself for an audience of other people.

So, let’s free the online diary from those constraints. You do not keep an online diary for the same reasons you keep a paper diary. The disadvantages include a lack of complete honesty and privacy. If you want to write with complete honesty and privacy you should keep a paper diary or correspond in private with trusted friends who will destroy your missives rather than hand them to anyone else.

I also suggest that you do not keep an online diary in order to experiment with stylised writing, because you’re likely to attract the wrong audience. Audiences seeking experimental writing styles don’t expect to find it in online diaries, and audiences reading online diaries don’t expect highly stylised writing, or content that deviates radically from the normally online diary content (that is, a person’s record of their life).

Most of the good stylised writing I’ve seen on the Web has been noticably free from the constraints of chronology. Online diaries are tied to a date based format, and people who are interested in telling stories or linking ideas together would be better off with a more integrated site, all of which is an ongoing work. I consider gruntle, raze, and the Jargon File to be excellent examples of the power that loosely organised, heavily hyperlinked sites offer to writers interested in experimenting with style and content that doesn’t fit in a chronological format. If you want to tell stories, I highly recommend this form over the online diary format.

If you’re interested in writing opinion pieces, rather than snippets of your daily life, I suggest you consider blogging, rather than keeping an online diary. Blogging and online diaries are both presently primarily chronological formats, and there is a gray area between them, since people use the same tools for both. The primary distinction between the stereotypical blog and the stereotypical online diary is the amount of linking in the former. Blogs link to websites, link to each other, comment on each other, discuss each other, discuss links, and discuss ideas. If you’re interested in taking part in intellectual crossfire, the blogging tools and communities will be much more satisfying than the online diary format.

Where experimental sites link internally, and blogs link externally, online diaries are largely hyperlink-free. The form requires authors to relate chosen aspects of their life on a loosely chronological basis. They attract readers who like to follow simple story lines, who like to feel involved in the lives of others. As often as not, the readership is made up of people who know the author and people who would like to.

So, what are good reasons to keep an online diary? If you need pre-digital examples of online diary-like writing, consider letter writing one hundred years or more ago. Letters of this time were often gossipy, personal, entertaining, bitchy and informative. In retrospect, some of the writing in informal letters is not only historically interesting, but very very good. So, if you think that one hundred years ago you would have liked to sit in your drawing room and write to your sister in the next town about your housekeeping, giving interest to the mundanities of your life, then online diary writing is probably a format you would enjoy.

Why keep an online diary? by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.