Opinionated advice for writing about science

2.4k words, 12 minutes reading time

1. Introduction

2. Some long advice

   1. Write for people who actually exist

   2. History is often fluff

   3. Expressing confusion is interesting

3. Some short advice:

   1. Trust (and develop) your own sense of taste

   2. Stress is unavoidable at the start

   3. Make yourself easy to discover

   4. No matter what, someone will be annoyed with you

Introduction

I’ve been actively writing on this Substack for about 11 months now, and am poking at 4,000 subscribers. It’s a small number in absolute terms, but many of them are people I have looked up to for years and never imagined would even be aware of my existence.

It’s been great! I highly recommend starting a blog over your personal interests. Chances are high you make some great friendships out of it too.

Over this period, at least a few people have reached out to ask for advice on writing technical pieces, how to do better research for articles, how to be more disciplined, and the like. I don’t like advising people, much less people who I barely know. Mostly because my advice is considered bad by almost everyone who doesn’t know me from the internet. I think I’ve lived a life that’s given me a very ‘spiky’ view of the world, and a fair bit of what I genuinely consider to be true/correct is viewed by most as obviously wrong.

Yet, I do usually give advice to people who ask, because being asked for help does feel good and it’s probably annoying to be told ‘I don’t think you should ask me for advice’ when you specifically requested that advice in the first place. There’s this interesting essay I once read about how denying someone’s positive value assessment of you is doing both them and you a disservice; insulting them for having bad judgment and disparaging your own sense of self-worth.

So, in that spirit, I’ll give some advice.

I would also consider SSC’s advice on writing one of the best collations of useful writing wisdom out there. In many ways, the primary advice I have mirrors his advice, so this article will try to deviate from it a little.

Some long advice

Write for people who actually exist

I started my first blog ever in college around 2018. In the blog, I wrote about certain independent ML research projects I was working on, hoping that forcing myself to consistently write would encourage me to make progress on the projects. It didn’t help, and I gave up writing altogether after the third post.

I usually posted my posts to r/MachineLearning right after I published each one, since that was the only method I had for getting eyes on my work. To my surprise, Ferenc Huszár — a now-professor at Cambridge who has an excellent ML blog with an excellent name (inference.vc) — commented on one of them.

In an effort to semi-anonymize the comment and, consequently, my Reddit account, I asked Claude to rewrite it for me:

hey, your post looks solid overall. some quick thoughts on writing blog posts: it’s helpful to think about who your audience is and what they’ll gain from each post. this focus can evolve as you explore.

ask yourself who it's aimed at. if someone’s new to the subject, your post might not give enough detail. and if they already know it well, much of it is unnecessary. just a thought for future posts—i don't always nail it either.

In other words, write for people who actually exist.

We can round the number of readers who are deeply interested in your thoughts about the scaling laws of protein language models and have never heard of MSA’s to roughly zero. So, if your article diving into the physics of mitochondrial uncouplers stops to explain the concept of organelles, you’ve lost the plot a little on who you actually want to target with your essay. Of course, every post you write needn’t purely target experts/beginners, a mix between posts is much more interesting, but each post should be appealing to one demographic at a time.

You could try to target everyone at once, but it’s hard and usually leads to extremely bloated posts that satisfy no one. To echo Ferenc’s comment, this is hard to do and I fail to do it very often!

One of my earliest posts about scRNA-seq foundation models is my least favorite article for this reason. It’s very unclear who exactly I’m targeting with the way I’m writing. I constantly dip in between very simple and very complicated topics, which feels super distracting to read. Maybe it was unavoidable, but I feel like I could have done a better job had I tried writing it today.

Conversely, my microbiome article is one of my favorites, largely because it stays at a medium level of complexity throughout. I assume a fair bit of background knowledge on the reader’s end, but I stay consistent with it throughout.

History is usually fluff