We are both very, very lucky. I had some ideas and I wrote this article. You found your way here, taking one of the many paths available and now you are reading about my ideas. Imagine the same scenario at different points of times in history.
1950 AD. There are magazines and newspapers around but I have to find one that will accept my ideas. I get my article published and depending on the type of magazine/newspaper it is, you may get to read it. By the way, this is still the state of affairs in 2019 AD. Getting published involves many strategies and stratagems on which a zillion books and articles already exist.
1850 AD. The magazine/newspapers are considerably less in number. I may still get it published but the chances of you reading it have reduced drastically.
1400 AD. Gutenberg has yet to invent the press but if I am in Korea I may get my article printed with movable metal type. The distribution problem is much more severe, though.
Printed in Korea in 1377, 78 years before Gutenberg, this is the world’s oldest extant book printed with movable metal type. Known by its abbreviated name of “Jikji”, only a single copy of one volume of the original 2 volume edition survives, and is held today by @laBnF in Paris. pic.twitter.com/8HWagQnQcY
— Incunabula (@incunabula) January 4, 2019
600 AD. I write on papyrus and I only write praises of the King who pays me. If I write anything else, I may lose my job, my life or both.
2000 BC. I carve things on stones. I paint caves. I do this because I have a deep desire to express myself. At this point of time I am not worried about who will see my work.
We could go back further but you get the point. We are living in age where I am able to transmit my ideas to you directly, without any middleman. This is revolutionary. And for this reason, it becomes very important to convey the right ideas in the right manner.
This article is about identifying high quality nonfiction. By nonfiction I mean all those articles that are not fiction. Just to be clear, this is not an article about how to write nonfiction because what works for me almost certainly won’t work for you. (I never stare at the proverbial blank screen. Why sit in front of a screen if you don’t have anything to write? And if I don’t have anything to write about, that means I need to read/watch/listen/experience/think.)
Here’s an interesting factoid. During the fifties, the critics in UK were singing praises of two authors. I have forgotten who they were. What’s more important is that George Orwell was not even considered worthy enough to be on this list. And today Orwell’s ideas have outlived his critics.
I think of the nonfiction scene as a hilly landscape. Everyone has their own hill or mound. The higher the mountain, the better is the quality of the prose. So let’s have a look at Mount Everest, shall we?
In the summer of 1905, a German clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern wrote an article called “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” His name was Albert Einstein. The world was never the same again as this article showed us the limits of Newtonian physics. This is the gold standard of nonfiction and very few can hope to be anywhere near it. Usually, you hear the names of these select few in the first week of October in Stockholm when the Nobel prizes are announced.
Let us leave these Avengers aside and talk about mortals. In this day and age, with information coming from all directions, how do we identify good quality articles? Going viral or getting likes are no longer trustworthy. Sure, good articles go viral but so do many bad ones. And your friends are going to like your article no matter what. That’s what friends are for. The name of the publication is no good either, with the inexplicable policy of most news media to present ‘both sides of the story.’ So on one side you have a vaccine expert who has spent her life studying diseases and on the other, a dude wearing a baseball cap who just watched a YouTube conspiracy video on how vaccines are making us sick. Both are treated on equal footing.
Here are some qualities of good nonfiction articles.
Longevity : How many people still read the article after a month, a year or few years? This applies to books also. Which books from the fifties, sixties still sell today? Longevity will obviously depend on the content which brings us to next quality.
Originality : Safe bet to assume that Einstein’s paper was more than 99% original. It has zero references, although some say he does owe to philosopher David Hume for his notion of time. For us mortals, at least 50 % originality should be a nice goal. This is the reason why one should avoid reading movie reviews before watching the movie. Otherwise, you are watching it with borrowed concepts.
Is it interesting? : Sure, I have tons of ideas but are they really worth mentioning? Going back to movie reviews, after watching Lincoln, I can write pages singing praises of Daniel Day-Lewis’ acting prowess but does it add anything new for the reader? This can be a little difficult to judge at times because different readers perceive the material differently. The reader’s time is valuable and I cannot waste it by writing fluff to fill the space.
One thing you cannot do is to fool the readers. Sooner or later, they do catch on and then we get things like Create Your Own Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Column. (I once mistakenly bought a hard bound copy of The World Is Flat. Good, solid binding, printed on high quality paper. The book projected such solid strength that I used it as a support structure for few years and then donated it to an unsuspecting library.)
One way to gauge the quality of an article is to look for impact. If an article makes at least a tiny shift in how people think, that’s a sign of a good article. Of course, in this age of predatory digital media, it’s futile to expect people to acknowledge that your article actually benefited them. What’s important is the tiny paradigm shift that will one day become significant enough to be noticed.
Last but not least, some great tips by novelist Cormac McCarthy, theoretical biologist Van Savage and evolutionary biologist Pamela Yeh on how to write a great science paper. Very useful not just for science writers but for all nonfiction writers.
