Immanence

The Mathematician and the Journalist styles

I’ve been wading through my better posts — the ones that actually “deliver the goods” — and I noticed an important difference between my writing and that of people who appear to be able to succintly convey comparably complex messages. There are two “styles” of storytelling, which I’ve nicknamed the mathematician style and the journalist style.

In a nutshell, the mathematician style is bottom-up and the journalist style is top-down, which means the journalist presents the gist of what’s being said right at the beginning, while the mathematician will demonstrate what he’s trying to say from ideas he assumes you’ll find trivial or obvious. On a blog journal post, that will often prevent the reader from getting his point at all. [The way this post is constructed, it has the journalist style if you read this paragraph or the mathematician style if you strike this one out. Try and start re-reading this post skipping this paragraph.]

A mathematician will always start in familiar territory. If you have basic (calculus, linear algebra, etc.) mathematical training, you can walk into a post-doc lecture on Anosov diffeomorphism in non-ergodic systems and understand the first two or three minutes of it. Much of advanced mathematics relies generalizations of simple structures one has learnt in basic training, and if you’re fluent in Riemann integration you might get an intuitive idea of the Stieltjes integrals the lecturer is drawing on the board. Sure, you’ll get lost soon because you never had the prerequisite knowledge to understand the actual point of the talk.

There are multiple reasons for this phenomenon. A mathematical lecture will often start behind its prerequisites, to get everyone’s brain into “math mode”, to ensure everyone’s in the same starting point — often terminologies vary, and what a brazilian calls a “body” (corpo) is what’s known in english as a “field” — and no one’s thinking of diffeomorphisms in ordinary topology, for example. This is also the way mathematics is done since calculus 101, and it probably trickles up throughout a mathematician’s career. The more important thing, though, is that mathematics is all about deriving the nontrivial from the trivial — which is why the obvious is stated first.

The reasons why one goes to a maths lecture are (a) to see what kinds of unexpected results can be presented from the trivial stuff you already know or (b) to see clever derivations of known results from minimal premises in order to learn good mathematical style and consequently strenghtening your (mostly intuitive, non-ontological) arsenal of demonstration techniques and genres. The reasons why people read a journal , on the other side, are either that they’ve been referred to a post as something cool or that a habitual reader wants to see what the journal-keeper in question is working at in a given moment. Of course, winning habitual readers beyond your circle of friends (a fraction of it, because most people don’t allot time to reading blog journals) is really hard to do.

Good journal-keeping can be done in mathematical style — just look at what Dan “sigfpe” Piponi is doing — but statistics seem to indicate that readers don’t stay long at websites — this journal’s stats are pretty much in line with that. This should come as no surprise: if you’re not sure you’re interested in a printed newspaper article, how many words do you read before dropping it?

This notion begets the “inverted V” scannability theory of writing, a part of journalist training mythos (together with the W-question method of reporting — what, when, who, why). If I had strickened out the second paragraph as stating what has not been argued for, would you have arrived here? Problogger (who seems to have cleaned up his act from his former “monetization” spammy act) claims 96 seconds is how long the average reader will spend scanning your content. I seem to boast a more significant 152 seconds according to Google Analytics estimates, which is all but unexpected in a blog journal that (a) has an “intellectual” reputation and (b) has almost always done things the mathematician style.

This, however, is not a contest over how much more attentive my readers are. The question is: have they gotten the message? Two and a half minutes is alright for the smart, fast readers I hope I have, but often my most important point — the very reason I’ve taken the time to write a long-winded post is so buried down the text they might have not.

Writers like me should, therefore, pay more attention to scannability. QED.

Breadcrumb trails:

Advanced Mathematics, Array, Brain, Corpo, Diffeomorphism, Familiar Territory, Generalizations, Gist, Integrals, Intuitive Idea, Journalist, Lecturer, Linear Algebra, Math Mode, Mathematical Lecture, Mathematician, Nutshell, Phenomenon, Post Doc, Prerequisite Knowledge, Prerequisites, Storytelling, Three Minutes, Topology

© 2008 μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math ↵.