WATERFALLS AND BROOKS: ON WRITING STYLE

I first read Akshay’s piece on the blog lamenting the vicious cycle of bad writing that lawyers develop. His recommendation at the end was elegant: write more! I seek not to dispute his claim but to give the reader some food for thought on writing style.

If you are introduced to the classics as I were, in fourth grade itself, and you have grown up listening to stories woven with craft, you cannot help but to develop a taste for fiction. The writing is lucid, descriptive, and smooth as a brook. But should you choose to specialize in an analytical field like economics or even law, for that matter, you’re taught only one thing: write to the point! Your writing cannot be meandering like the brook.

Writing in fiction needs elegantly-woven coherence – a sine qua non. However, writing non-fiction, say reports or journals need structure but need not flow as smoothly. You can discern a structure, like a waterfall but there are multiple breaks in between. I have seldom come across writing that is lucid like fictitious work. Journals have standard statements, much like lawyers, statements like – ‘we estimate so and so’, or ‘we present a theoretical model of how heterogenous agents…’.

Funnily, nothing is at stake except clear dissemination of ideas. Yet the likes of Samuelson and Solow somehow seemed to have reconciled. Samuelson wrote a paper containing arguments, like a play with different acts. The tilt in non-fiction is more toward the analytical side, succinct arguments with no meandering. I somehow pin this bias on our disassociation with fiction over the years. College grads have a tryst with reading with self-help books like ‘How to Grow Rich’. If the reader reforms, 'demand' for creativity follows. Unlike Akshay’s advice, I have another contrary advice: read more fiction!