Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Note to self on shortcomings as an essayist

You enjoy exploiting the work of others to stimulate intellectual insights. Granted, sometimes these insights shed a fair degree of illumination. But a serious problem is that you have a journalistic tendency to string insights and interesting tidbits together, later smoothing out dubious or ragged transitions (if you bother). The resulting essay may have some merit, but all too often the underlying purpose is hidden in a jungle of tangential themes. Unfortunately such a style may leave the reader puzzled as to what you are driving at.

This problem stems from your habit of working from a large number of notes, and also from, after the fact, trying to tack on material that is interesting and related. You might do better to write the outline of your essay without relying heavily on notes. Once you have a fairly good structure and have written your basic points, then you can weave in material from the notes -- if warranted.

Worse is your tendency to play Know-It-All. Aggravating. More humility needed.

Then there are the logico-mathematical blunders that insinuate themselves into your work. Sometimes the issue is straightforward brain freeze. At other times you become overconfident about some idea and plunge ahead heedless of the danger. And quite often such errors result from your attempt to analyze some point that isn't terribly relevant.

On occasion mathematician correspondents will point out an oversight or error, in which case at least you try to repair the damage. But even so the error has been propagated online in the meantime. At present, a number of your errors remain online for years as you have lost control of those pages. Quite often the issue is simply that you have no one close at hand with whom you can discuss such things. And of course these lapses obscure what you do get right, which on infrequent occasion has merit.

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