English Professor described my writings as a “stream of consciousness” style, and then told me he sees my style of writing a lot less lately (he’s been teaching for a decade now).

By lately, he is almost certainly referring to the advent of Generative AI, and the overformalization of pretty much everything these days.

Anyways, my style, according to the professor, is best for short stories and would struggle with stuff like novel-writing. He also tried to assert that I would struggle with essays but I told him that I don’t change my style at all for academic works and professors seem to love it. He told me that was probably because it’s refreshing to read a paper that tries to dialogue with the reader and uses anecdotes and stuff, but truly academic work like research or analysis would not benefit. This tracks with my personal experience.

I wish research papers were written to be more inductive, but I suppose when you spend 200-300 hours laboring to produce your data, the last thing you want to do is spend another 10 hours formatting your findings in such a way a layman could understand them as if he had come across the phenomenon himself. However, as a reader, I much more prefer works where I could imagine myself in the researchers shoes and engage with the process of getting to the results alongside the researcher.

Scientific literature used to be a lot more inductive, explaining to the reader how one would come across the phenomenon, and then explaining what one would need to know to understand the phenomenon, then explaining how an experiment could discover those need-to-knows, and only then stating the actual results of the experiment. We’ve lost this style of writing over the past century or so in favor of the ultra-professional peer-reviewed-paper. In our modern times, this style has seen a resurgeance in the modern YouTube ‘video essay’, particularly in channels like Veritasium, BobbyBroccoli, and Kurzgesagt, but because of the nature of video content, this narrative style has been relegated to ‘pop science’.

What a shame!