Public Essay Writing

This note covers prose for general readerships: magazine forums such as ACM Interactions, outlets such as The Conversation, and public-facing essays about research. The register differs from journal writing. The note combines my own prose rules with devices taken from Rob Dunn and Stephen Jay Gould, read from the books in the library rather than recalled.

Cf.

Register

The reader is intelligent, is not a specialist, and is under no obligation to continue. Every paragraph earns the next one.

Academic habits that fail here: opening on a literature position, stacking abstract nouns, hedging every claim, and holding the vivid material back for a case study near the end.

Rules I keep

Active voice.
No em-dashes. A full stop or a comma does the work.
No negative parallelism ("this is X, not Y"; "it is not about X, it is about Y").
Plain words wherever plain words exist.

Dunn and Gould both break rules 2 and 3 freely, and Gould's dashes and parentheses are part of his charm. I keep the rules for my own prose because those constructions read as machine tics when they appear in mine.

Openings

Open on a person, a body, a place, or a borrowed cultural object. Let the general claim arrive second, where the reader can feel they reached it. Avoid opening on the discipline, the field, or a problem statement.

Three worth studying:

Dunn begins Never Home Alone with his own childhood outdoors in rural Michigan, in four- and five-word sentences about forts and holes, then widens to the fact that children now spend 93 percent of their time indoors.
Dunn begins The Wild Life of Our Bodies by telling the reader to look at the person asleep beside them, then at their fingernails, which he observes are not unlike claws. A parenthesis accommodates the reader who is alone.
Gould begins Full House with the prodigal son and Tennessee Williams, then calls the book his adored and wayward boy.

The shared pattern: something small, human and near, then the widening.

Concrete detail must be load-bearing

Specific detail earns its place by carrying the argument, setting up something later, or being the thing the argument turns on. Vivid garnish still weakens a piece.

Dunn's van Leeuwenhoek is the model. Leeuwenhoek walks to market for black pepper, steeps a third of an ounce in a teacup to soften the corns and find out what makes them spicy, leaves it three weeks, then examines the cloudy water and becomes the first human to see bacteria. The pepper carries the causal spine of the story, and it carries the book's thesis as well, because the discovery happens at home with kitchen materials.

Test each detail by removing it. Keep the ones that take something with them.

Diversity and recognition

Bringing figures in from outside the field widens the world the argument lives in and gives readers handholds they already recognise. A philosopher, a paleontologist, a disability theorist and an Indigenous geographer in one essay signal that the question is not parochial.

This is Gould's own method. He reaches for poker, baseball, the prodigal son and Tennessee Williams inside a book about evolutionary trends, and each import earns its keep by reframing the technical point.

Keep such passages at the length they need. An objection worth answering deserves room to be stated fairly before it is answered.

The relationship with the reader

Devices, in rough order of value.

Put the reader in a place or a body. Second-person imperatives. Dunn interrupts his own exposition to tell you to breathe in, then to sit down, and tells you what surrounds you as you do. A draft with no second-person address anywhere is lecturing.

Allow one warm aside. The parenthesis in Wild Life that accommodates a reader sleeping alone costs eight words and changes the temperature of the introduction.

Name the objection before the reader raises it. Gould opens Full House by asking out loud whether anyone will read it, whether readers will sit through the preliminaries, whether they will tolerate a graphical argument. Voicing resistance disarms it.

Make a deal. Gould proposes a bet: persist to the end and you will be repaid, and in exchange he has kept the book short. Say what the argument will cost, and promise the return. Do this early when the piece will later ask for something difficult.

Show yourself being wrong. Expectation, reversal, correction. Dunn expected hundreds of species in homes and found upward of two hundred thousand. A piece with no moment of correction reports to the reader instead of thinking with them.

Correct a received phrase in public. Dunn quotes the line about nature abhorring a vacuum, says it is not quite right, and offers a better verb.

Accumulate rather than attack. Gould describes his method as gentle example rather than tendentious frontal assault. Indicting several fields in consecutive sentences achieves less than one further developed case.

Pronouns

English defaults "we", "our" and "us" to the speaker's own group. Intending a wider sense does not produce one, so any sense beyond the default has to be marked on the page.

Three referents recur in this work, and each needs its own handling.

The lab. Anchor it every time: "our team", "in our projects", "we scan trees", "our research". The anchor does the disambiguating, so this sense never causes trouble.
Designers, me and the reader together. The workable sense, because a piece for a design readership establishes its audience early. Use it for shared cost, shared habit and shared error. "We once thought that powerful owls move away when they sense humans hundreds of metres off" belongs here, and the admission only works because the mistake is mine.
All humans. Only ever with an explicit marker. "If that consideration lets us as humans imagine that we remain in control" carries its own definition. An unmarked "we" in this sense collides with the designer sense a few clauses away.

Never let "we" stand for humanity by default, since humans differ enormously and the assumption of a single human position is one this work exists to question.

Marking a sense that crosses the species line

The same rule defeats the inclusive "our" that is meant to cover all life. Two markers work:

Name the sharers. "The planet we share with them", where "them" has a live antecedent in the previous sentence.
Let a nonhuman speak it. Inside an owl's quoted speech, "we have traditions" is unambiguous because the speaker is named.

Prefer the version that puts other beings in the subject position: "the planet they share with us" rather than "the planet we share with them". The grammar then performs the argument.

Watch what inclusive ownership drags in. "Our damaged planet", read as covering all life, makes other beings co-owners of damage humans caused. Shared occupancy and shared blame are separable, and the phrasing should separate them.

"We" against "you"

Both address the same bounded audience and do different jobs. "We" places me beside the reader, sharing a cost or an error. "You" places the reader somewhere alone, deciding, which is Dunn's device when he tells you to breathe in or to look at the fingernails of the person beside you.

Do not convert one into the other for consistency. Questions like "Are we too close? May we bring dogs?" are humans petitioning an owl for permission, and "you" destroys the conceit while producing bad English.

Sentences

Short, short, long. Open paragraphs on a short sentence.
One idea per sentence, one point per paragraph.
Ask who is doing it. Prefer a creature or a person as subject over an abstract noun.
Cash out every abstraction within two sentences into something the reader can see.
Cut three-item abstract lists. Keep a list when the items are concrete and each does different work.
Give verbs work. In Dunn, life sneaks beneath doors and crawls into cabinets, and the moon sneaks through curtains.
Allow one lyrical sentence per stretch, after concrete detail has earned it.

Caution on Gould: his sentences run long, clause-heavy and full of parenthetical qualification. Take his structure and his stance toward the reader. Leave his syntax in his own century.

Numbers and evidence

Attach every number to something visible.
Use the shape: expectation, reversal, number.
A comparison beats a magnitude. Two centuries to grow a hollow against an afternoon to remove one does more than either figure alone.
Prefer the smaller answerable question to the overarching generality. This is Gould's principle from "Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding", and it doubles as a reply to objections about inaccessible inner lives.

Structure

Find one controlling figure that names the piece and pays off at the end. Gould's poker hand names the book, the argument, and the closing joke.
Put the best material in the first quarter.
State the thesis about three times across a piece, in different clothes. Four or more becomes nagging.
Replace a bad mental picture with a better one, and state both. Gould sets trends as a thing moving up or down against trends as changes in variation across a whole system. Naming the picture being replaced does half the persuading.

Headings and titles

Concrete, sometimes a question, occasionally parenthetical. Dunn's chapters include "The Hot Spring in the Basement", "What Good Is a Camel Cricket?" and "I Need My Appendix (and So Do My Bacteria)".

The best heading usually sits in the section already as its liveliest line.

Titles: a short name. Avoid restating the title in a subtitle, and watch for a key word repeating across both halves.

Checks before submitting

Mechanical, safe to delegate:

grep -c "—" FILE                                    # em-dashes, want 0
grep -n ", not \| not [a-z ]* but " FILE            # negative parallelism
grep -cE "\byou\b|\byour\b" FILE                    # any second person at all
grep -oE "[a-z]{4,}, [a-z]{4,}, (and )?[a-z]{4,}" FILE | wc -l   # abstract triples

Judgment:

Count sentence-opening words. "The" opening more than about one sentence in eight signals abstraction.
Find the moment where you were wrong. Add one if it is missing.
Test each concrete detail by removing it.
Read the first 150 words alone and ask whether a stranger would continue.
Locate the best fact. Move it forward if it sits past the halfway mark.

References

Dunn, Rob R. Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

Dunn, Rob R. The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today. New York: Harper, 2011.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.