Since I finished The Cauchy-Schwarz Master Class, I have been casting around for my next book project. There are several technical projects that I could pursue, but for some odd reason I am hungry for a project that might reach a larger audience. To prepare for this project (or to put it off!), I have been doing some digging into what has been written about the craft of writing. Far from being unknown, this territory is both huge and well explored.
The purpose of this page is to provide links to some of the writing resources that seem useful to me and which may be useful to you, given that you have read this far.
Robert J. Sawyer is one of Canada's most successful authors and a winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction writing. Sawyer also maintains sfwriter.com which includes among other things a collection of pieces "on writing."
These are all charming, but I particularly liked the piece I would call "Heinlein's Rules Plus One." Sawyer reprises five rules advanced by Robert Heinlein, and he adds one more.
After a just a tiny modification, these rules are perfectly applicable to the academic publishing process --- even if one wishes that they weren't.
One caution: some of Sawyer's pieces are a few years old, and in the few places where he mentions computers he seems hopelessly out-dated. We forget too quickly what Google has done to what writers call research. Fear not. Sawyer now uses the same tools we all do. He just did the scholarly thing and left his older essays unaltered.
An Addendum: My old Princeton buddy Ed Tenner has a lovely NYTS Op-Ed piece Searching for Dummies. For years Ed has been working on things that I am just getting to now.
Have you ever asked yourself, "Why is there no postmodernist movement in Statistics?" The answer is surprisingly simple.