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Vox 21: David Mermin’s Voice in Physics Writing

Here’s a great passage about how Mermin and a coauthor produced a coherent voice that was neither of theirs:

A special problem for the writing of physics is created by the predominance of multi-author papers… It is hard to discern an authorial voice in such papers. It is now almost impossible to acquire a sense of a physicist’s style from a perusal of his or her collected papers, since many people have never in their lives written a paper without coauthors.

My solution has been to avoid collaboration. This is easier for a theorist than an experimentalist. With one important exception, my collaborators over the years have been almost exclusively my own graduate students… The striking exception to my inability to write collaboratively is my eight-year collaboration with Neil Ashcroft on our 800 page book on solid state physics. We have very different prose styles. Yet the book has a clear and distinctive uniform tone, which can’t be identified as belonging to either of us.

I think the reason this worked was that Neil knows solid state physics much better than I do. So he would produce the first drafts. Characteristically, I would not understand them. So I would try to make sense of what he was saying, and then produce my typical kind of irritating second draft. Neil, however, would now have to correct all my mistakes in a massively rewritten third draft. I would then have to root out any new obscurities he had introduced in a fourth draft. By this kind of tennis-playing, we would go through five or six drafts, and emerge with something that was clear, correct, and sounded like a human voice. That voice, however, was neither of ours. (Mermin, N. David. “Writing Physics.” Knight Distinguished Lecture in Writing in the Disciplines. Cornell, 4/19/99.)