I found it quite impressive that people are capable of this. For me, I have neither energy, nor ability, nor comprehensive knowledge to do so. So, it is always fascinating (and a bit intimidating) to see people writing these all the time. I want to ask how you guys achieve this feat.
Maybe, is it that I am nonverbal so I cannit write coherently?
I am guilty of writing walls of text as comments, but I try to stick to my lane. You can see my most recent wall of text about freeze dryers as an example. There are a few things that I think need to come together to create a good, high-effort post:
- Passion - If you don’t care, you aren’t going to spend the time to write about something
- Knowledge - For some topics this may be less required, but I tend to create walls of text about technical issues. I have a PhD in physics, so that gives me a pretty good foundation of knowledge to work from in this regard
- Writing Ability - You need to be able to write effectively to make a wall of text worthwhile. This is a skill that gets better the more you do it.
The other thing I tend to do when writing a high-effort post is I actually proofread it before making it. I try to cut out unneeded tangents, reword things that might be confusing, or supplement things that aren’t motivated enough.
For me personally, this doesn’t take me too long to do since I have been writing and presenting about extremely technical topics for about two decades at this point. Like I mentioned above, informative writing is a skill that gets better with practice. So, doing it regularly as a significant part of my job as well as providing feedback to others on their writing/presentations, has provided me with tons of practice to improve these things.
If you want some formal guidance on scientific writing/presentations specifically, two books I have found informative (mostly on presentations) have been:
- The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley
- slide:ology - The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte
I find myself having to delete tangents as well! I feel that my writing begins conversational, with brief asides for nuance or comedy. That style does work well for presentations. But if I am trying to be as concise and informative as possible, I find that I need to trim a lot.
It is an interesting excersice in observing how your brain relays information naturally and how you need to ‘translate’ that into effective communication with others.
I try to keep my writing somewhere in the middle. Easy examples include intent, which is sometimes more important than the explanation itself, as well as outlining alternative ideas/approaches and why they weren’t used.
I greatly appreciate insight into the thought process of others and try to pay it forward.
That style does work well for presentations
I honestly prefer presentations to writing for the reasons you pointed out. I have never been too nervous when it comes to public speaking, and I feel much more able to convey my point through a more conversational style. However, my presentation style (specifically slide design) has had to change a lot over the course of my career.
When I was in grad school, my preferred method of presentation was to have a slide with a single graph/image/diagram on it and then verbally talk through all the things I wanted to convey for that slide. It allowed me tons of flexibility, kept the slides from becoming cluttered and distracting, and created a more conversational atmosphere as people felt more empowered to ask questions as I was going (this also helps keep the audience engaged).
However, as I moved into a professional setting, I had a mentor sit me down and tell me how great my presentations were, but they were not really effective in a corporate setting like this one (global company, split across timezones, etc). The simple reason being that the slides I was making were being shared to others who couldn’t make it to my presentation and a good chunk of the actual audience of the presentation only ever got to see the slides, without the benefit of my talking to help them understand. So, this has led me to move more towards including text on my slides. I basically have to ask myself if there is enough information on this slide to understand things without my explaining it, but without anything extra to make it confusing.
Since the pandemic, I have also had to change things up a bit to make presentations more amenable to presenting via Teams/Zoom. This means things like removing videos, complex animation, or any audio. It just doesn’t work reliably enough through screen sharing and if you can find a way around it, then it makes everybody’s life easier.
Speaking of tangents, this has been a long one, but I care a lot about effective communication and specifically presentations. So many people are so bad at giving a good presentation, and I find it frustrating personally, when I have to sit through so many.
I see. Maybe learning mathematics have screwed my writing since so much of mathematical literature is simply equations, definitions and propositions. Lots of papers, and even books, are just bad at expositions, in my experience.
I actually agree with you about math education and math texts. It is really bad at conveying understanding and my math-heavy courses were the toughest for me (E&M in grad school was awful). Too often math textbooks simply present things and leave the proof as an exercise for the reader, or they will lean too far the other way and present formal proofs for everything. Either way is not helpful for developing an intuitive understanding of what is going on.
The things that helped me develop communication skills the most were simply doing it a lot followed by having some good mentors that I found to be good communicators. My grad school advisor was great at communicating physics and one of my early bosses in industry was an excellent presenter. So, I would often bounce either writing or slides off of them for feedback.
I also found that watching ‘video essays’ on Youtube helped me develop and understand communication skills after years of math education. Depending on what you are interested in, Youtubers like Tom Scott, Every Frame of Painting, Miniminuteman, and Ask a Mortician are fantastic places to start.
Regarding comprehensive knowledge: there might be a lot of topics where you lack the knowledge to write a good and detailed answer. There might even be topics where you don’t even have a clue what they are actually asking about.
But I am sure there are topics where you are the person in the know. And someday, someone will ask a question where you are the person perfectly qualified to answer it.
Adding to what everyone else has said.
… You know what helped me learn how to write (which I now do for a living)? Yes, talking in comment sections – But specifically.
I spent a lot of time in fandom forums.
Why does this matter?
Well.
TV Show fandoms are very low-stakes, you know? If you’re learning to swim you start at the kiddy pool, not the olympic one. So you can participate in discussions, make up headcanons, and learn how to express your ideas… And if you do get picked apart or something, even if you actually, genuinely, fucked up and were straight up wrong. It’s… Y’know. It’s just a TV show. So you can, in fact, let it go.
It’s different from when you’re talking about something serious, something important. If you’re writing about something technical and you mess up, you can end up spreading misinformation. On a political discussion, being clear on what you mean is important because the stuff being talked about matters. Not so for a fandom.
Oh and – Re-read what you wrote, and use that edit button if you catch something you missed.
Oh and – Re-read what you wrote, and use that edit button if you catch something you missed.
This is a big one. I see social media posts and online comments that are so poorly misspelled and incoherent, that I would swear English was their second language, but I went to school with some of these people. I KNOW they should know better!
It’s just a TV show. So you can, in fact, let it go.
The MST3K mantra is always good advice.
Read a lot, cite sources and explain thouroughly what you think.
I mostly use the last method. Basically, you want to make sure that the other person understands fully what you mean. You can use examples and anecdotes as well.
Training yourself in philosophy also helps, as it makes sure you argument well what you want to say.
There are many people on lemmy who are very passionate and/or opinionated about certain topics. So when a discussion about that topic comes up, they tend to go hard on the comment section. Also, for some terminally online people, this is literally their only social space to express themselves.