I’ve been reading a lot of trip reports lately. Trip reports are accounts people write about their experiences doing drugs, for the benefit of other people who might do those same drugs. I don’t take illegal drugs myself, but I like learning about other people’s intense experiences, and trip reports are little peeks into the extremes of human consciousness. 

In some of these, people are really trying to communicate the power and revelation they had on a trip. They're trying to share what might be the most meaningful experience of their entire life. 

Here’s another thing: almost all trip reports are kind of mediocre writing.

This is wildly judgmental but I stand by it. Here are some common things you see in them:

• Focusing on details specific to the situation that don’t matter to the reader. (Lengthy accounting of logistics, who the person was with at what time even when they’re not mentioned again, etc.)
• Sort of basic descriptions of phenomena and emotions: “I was very scared”. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
• Cliches: “I was glad to be alive.” “It felt like I was in hell.” “It was an epic struggle.”
• Insights described in sort of classically-high-sounding abstractions. “I realized that the universe is made of love.” “Everything was nothing and time didn’t exist.” These statements are not explained, even if they clearly still mean a lot to the writer, and do not really communicate the force of whatever was going on there.

It's not, like, a crime to write a mediocre trip report. It's not necessarily even a problem. They’re not necessarily trying to convince you of anything. A lot of them are just what it says on the tin: recording some stuff that happened. I can’t criticize these for being bland, because that seems like trying to critique a cookbook for being insufficiently whimsical: they’re just sharing information.

(...Though you can still take that as a personal challenge; “is this the best prose it can be?” For instance, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese by Chao Yang Buwei is a really well-written cookbook with a whimsical-yet-practical style. There’s always room to grow.)

But some of these trip reports very much do have an agenda, like “communicating crucial insights received from machine elves” or “convincing you not to take drug X because it will ruin your life”. In these cases, the goal would be better served if the writing were good, and boy howdy, my friends: the writing is not good.

Which is a little counter-intuitive, right? You’d think these intense and mind-blowing experiences would automatically give you rich psychic grist for sharing with others, but it turns out, no, accounts of the sublime and life-altering can still be astonishingly mid.

Now certain readers may be thinking, not unreasonably, “that’s because drug-induced revelations aren’t real revelations. The drug's effects makes some thoughts feel important – a trip report can’t explain why a particular 'realization' is important, because there’s nothing behind it.”

But you know who has something new and important to say AND knows why it’s important? Academic researchers publishing their latest work.

But alas, academic writing is also, too frequently, not good. 

And if good ideas made for good writing, you’d expect scientific literature to be the prime case for it. Academic scientists are experts: they know why they made all the decisions they did, they know what the steps do, they know why their findings are important. But that’s also not enough.

Ignore academic publishing and the scientific process itself, let’s just look at the writing. It’s very dense, denser than it needs to be. It does not start with simple ideas and build up, it’s practically designed to tax the reader. It’s just boring, it’s not pleasant to read. The rationale behind specific methods or statistical tests aren’t explained. (See The Journal of Actually Well-Written Science by Etienne Fortier-Dubois for more critique of the standard scientific style.) There’s a whole career field of explaining academic studies to laypeople, which is also, famously, often misleading and bad.

This is true for a few reasons:

First, there’s a floor of how “approachable” or “easy” you can make technical topics. A lot of jargon serves useful purposes, and what’s the point in a field of expertise if you can’t assume your reader is caught up on at least the basics? A description of synthesizing alkylated estradiol derivatives, or a study on the genome replication method of a particular virus, is simply very difficult to make layperson-accessible.

Second, academic publishing and the scientific edifice as it currently stands encourage uniformity of many aspects of research output, including style and structure. Some places like Seeds of Science are pushing back on this, but they’re in the minority.

But third, and this is what trips up the trip-reporters and the scientists alike, writing well is hard. Explaining complicated or abstract or powerful ideas is really difficult. Just having the insight isn’t enough - you have to communicate it well, and that is its own, separate skill.

I don’t really believe in esoterica or the innately unexplainable. “One day,” wrote Jack Kerouac, “I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” Better communication is possible. There are great descriptions of being zonked out of one’s gourd and there is great, informative, readable science writing.

So here’s my suggestion: Learn to write well before you have something you really need to tell people about. Practice it on its own. Write early and often. Write a variety of different things and borrow techniques from writing you like. And once you have a message you actually need to share, you'll actually be able to express it.

(A more thorough discussion of how to actually write well is beyond the scope of this blog post – my point here is just that it’s worth improving. if you’re interested, let me know and I might do a follow-up.)

Thank you Kelardry for reviewing a draft of this post.

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Crossposted to: [EukaryoteWritesBlog.com – Substack – LessWrong]