Textbook Writing

Surprise, I’m writing a textbook…which you will probably never see.  It’s not a real, substantial textbook such as would be published, but rather more of a reference book for my “real” job, covering fundamental concepts for people coming into the field who need training.  I’m only mentioning it because of the writing-related thoughts which I’ve had as I’ve been working my way through its few, long chapters.  The first is that it’s a little strange to be writing a book that I know people aren’t really going to read.

Oh, people might reference it, but no one is likely to just sit down and read it, which means writing it requires a rather different mindset.  Who just sits down a reads a textbook (other than me)?  This might seem like a strange thing for someone who hasn’t actually published a book to say, but when I write a book, it is with the thought in mind that other people will be reading it, and many of the choices that I make in the writing process are, in some sense, based on the way that someone else would read the book.  Those assumptions have to be different for writing a textbook-like object.  No matter how many times I make references to previous sections, I cannot entirely assume that a reader will have read that section.

There is also the matter of where to begin.  With a story, the advice is often “in late, out early,” meaning you want to begin the story as close to the action as possible, and end it as soon after the action as possible, so as the grab and maintain the reader’s interest.  This advice is probably the opposite of what is appropriate for textbook writing – if I were writing a textbook on quantum physics, I can’t just jump ahead to the interesting parts about entanglement without established what particles are – but I also can’t start from the beginning.  If I were to attempt to build up to every concept I’m presenting in the textbook from first principles, the textbook would be unreadable and useless.  With each topic it includes, therefore, I must start from some place, make certain assumptions, and hope that the reader will keep pace and understand what I’m attempting to communicate.  I’m comfortable doing this in a classroom setting, when I am right there to answer any questions that arise from the assumptions I make; it’s a different matter to put the content into a textbook, where unknown nonreaders will not be able to look up and ask me a question.

The nature of this particular text is such that it must cover many topics at a surface level, without going into too much depth on most of them.  This makes deciding what to include, and how detailed to be, intimately linked with deciding what not to include and what can be simplified without losing fidelity.  We discussed these ideas at some length in our post on educational omissions.  I find myself creating a massive series of appendices to explore in further depths topics which I can only reference briefly in the main body.

While I’ve built a syllabus, complete with assignments and examinations, to accompany the textbook, it is not a syllabus which will be used by any formal class, and the nature of the content I’m attempting to communicate is not given to extensive exercises.  This further complicates considerations of precisely how people will interact with the text; for instance, if it is used in support of a training course utilizing a different syllabus and perhaps with different emphases.

If we think of a textbook as attempting to tell a story, then the core issue with the particular one I’m writing is how scattered it is.  There are too many different topics, but it is the nature of what is, essentially, a survey text.  There is no clear beginning; the book could perhaps be better thought of as a collection of short stories than a cohesive novel.  One section might tell the story of satellite design, for instance, while another focuses on ground stations and yet another on software.

I genuinely enjoy teaching, and not just because it gives me an excuse to talk about many of the topics I most like talking about (it’s rather difficult to fit a discussion of the finer points of heliophysics into a conversation over hors d’oeuvres, though that doesn’t stop me from trying); it is quite satisfying to take complicated concepts and communicate them in a way that someone new to the field or the subject can understand.  Indeed, one of my fundamental convictions in teaching is that there is no one who is incapable of learning something – it’s just a matter of finding the right way to explain it.  My students (formal and inadvertent) tell me I’m pretty good at it.  This textbook project is tapping into the same ideas; time (and readers) will tell if it is successful.