There are loads of scholarly folks who write well—at least before the LLM Age. But very few writers can write cogently, comprehensively, and compactly, all at once, when conveying dense subject matters.

This deficiency is almost a pandemic in #STEM. It is remarkably easy for a STEM writer to hide behind fine turns of phrase: “astute readers can see”, “this is left as an exercise“, “without losing generality”, and so on. And everyone’s favourite: toss in a long equation with a cursory, almost dismissive, discussion that imparts no insight to the readers.

I admit that I, too, suffer from this institutional debility. I admire the #writing styles of Hemingway, Strunk, Asimov, Kernighan, et al., but it is difficult to emulate those greats.