Some time back, I wrote about the skill-sets that you acquire while doing a PhD. One of them is public speaking. Another one is reading and writing articles. Every PhD student spends a lot of time reading research articles. As you keep on doing this for years, you develop a skill that is necessary to survive under the constant onslaught of information.
The structure of a research article is a little different from a normal magazine article. When you read or write a research article, you always imagine a devil’s advocate, who asks after each sentence “says who?”. And then you either provide the reference of the source, or if it is your own idea, justify it. Failure to do so will never get you published in a scientific journal. This is the reason scientific papers are full of citations.
If you ever get a chance to observe a scientist in her natural habitat, look closely how she reads a new research paper. It is not a linear process – start in the beginning and finish at the end. Most probably she will read the abstract, skip the introduction, take a closer look at the figures and images, skim over the procedure and read the conclusions. When you have read hundreds of research papers on one particular field, you just want to know what’s the new idea. This saves a lot of time. I follow more or less the same procedure when I read normal articles or blog posts on any topic. After reading many articles, reviews and blog posts, certain patterns start to emerge.
Take movie reviews. Many movie reviews can be skipped because all they do is tell you who made the film, who are the actors, what is the movie about and finally the plot – sometimes this last one is given in such detail that there is no need to see the movie. Then there are seasoned reviewers. Often when you read these reviews, you get more information about the reviewer than about the movie. If you already have set ideas in your head about what makes a great movie – for instance, commercial and popular movies are of low quality – then you discard movies that do not fit the bill even before watching them. Many reviewers seem to be doing this either consciously or unconsciously.
So why are articles/books of say, Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael so engaging? Because they are full of original thoughts and ideas. Even when they borrow an idea, they will expand on it and transform it into a different idea. There is a danger here, however. If you read a Kael review before watching the movie, you will already have firm opinions about movie. This is the reason why I avoid 99% of movie reviews, at least before watching the movie.
On to words. Often, the article contains a lot of new or uncommon words. I have nothing against it but is the author using the best word possible? Reading an unclear article with lot of unknown words is like reading a dictionary. While reading Charles Dickens or W. Somerset Maugham, I do not let even one unknown word go by because I know that the way these authors use words is unique.
A side note : I feel sorry for the critics who dismiss Dickens because of Deus ex machina or Maugham because.. I don’t know..why would anyone dismiss Maugham? The profound knowledge of human affairs that these authors exhibit is unparalleled. It is said that when Somerset Maugham walked into a room full of strangers, he would instantly and intuitively know the complex layers of relationships that they have with one another. How did he do it? The answer may well be found in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink.
Sometimes the article is just a jumble of thoughts. Reading through it is like untangling yarn balls after you have left them for an hour in a room full of meowing kittens. The thoughts run in all directions and you go back and forth trying to find the point of the argument or some common thread. For me, clarity is the most important criterion. As an example of clear thinking, watch any interview of Javed Akhtar or Gulzar. The thoughts would be crystal clear.
It is for the same reason that I don’t read articles with lot of buzz-words. Read, for example, the Wiki entry for phenomenological ontology in Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness. And saying that the subject is complex is not a valid argument. If you cannot explain it in simple terms, you have not understood it completely. People have simplified complex theories of quantum mechanics or relativity. This does not mean that the reader becomes an expert after reading the article but she does get a sense of what the theory is all about.
Paul Graham’s essays are a good example of clear and interesting writing. Another example is author and translator Tim Parks. Tim is British but he also speaks Italian and has translated many Italian books in English. His essays and criticisms in The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books are a delight to read. Also, James Wood. Do read his How Fiction Works. I have already mentioned Malcolm Gladwell. These are just few examples. There are many non-fiction writers whose articles are exemplary.
