Writing I LIke: Wired's Psychologist And The Netflix Prize

I spend a lot of time here griping about laughable published writing that shouldn’t have slipped past an editor’s red pen. Let’s look a piece that makes me smile in a good way: Wired’s piece about an English psychologist/operations engineer who has rocketed up the leaderboard for the Netflix prize, a $1 million reward for anyone who can improve the company’s recommendation system by 10 percent.

First of all, hats off to the author, Jordan Ellenberg, for distilling complex math into a usable form for the smart, but not expert, reader. Ellenberg is a mathematician in his own right, and he summarizes the high-math concepts used by the competitors into common English, using analogies to illustrate his points. As someone who increasingly finds himself writing technical, “wine geek” wine pieces for a mainstream, layperson audience, I am impressed by his skill.

But the biggest draw of this piece is the compelling narrative: A classic “little guy beats the big guy” scenario. Good fiction, which is the model for narrative non-fiction, revolves around conflict, and the author has rightfully used the inherent battle — a single psychologist and his high-school daughter, the math consultant, trouncing teams of math and computer science professionals working with sophisticated programs — as the axis of his piece. From conflict comes crisis, the boiling point, and Ellenberg provides it with the current status: all the contestants close to the final prize from a numerical point of view, but very far from a realistic point of view. Ideally, one wants a resolution as well, but that remains in the future, an acceptable ending for a newsy narrative nonfiction piece.

The author doesn’t lock himself into this story, though. “Digress often, but never for long,” reads one of the few axioms laid out in the classic The Art and Craft of Feature Writing. Ellenberg spins a quick history of Netflix, a brief description of the prize, a look into the minds of the Netflix statisticians, the surprising collaboration of the competing groups, and more, all through short digressions that linger just long enough: As soon as you start to think, “Get back to the psychologist!” he does.

My final point — though there are other things to like in this piece — is that Ellenberg allows himself to be in the piece. Feature wells don’t often permit first-person narrative for obvious reasons: Too much first-person, and the reader begins to wonder why s/he should care about the writer so much. Among my clients, only The Art of Eating finds it natural, though others allow it when it makes a difference. But Ellenberg sometimes steps away from his story to give his own view: “He refers to the psychological model underlying their mathematical approach as ‘crude.’ His tone suggests that if I weren’t taping, he might use a stronger word.” Ellenberg exposes himself to the reader, but in doing so draws a more detailed picture of the person you actually care about. And he doesn’t forget to show and not tell, though he has a harder time in his straightforward reporting sections: Small details like the notebook and the elderly Dell allow the reader to paint a more vivid picture.

I might try to incorporate a bit more color and rhythm into the prose, were I writing this, but the story is good enough that only someone looking for nits will drill down on that.