I read a blog post this morning (http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/02/20/the-best-writing-advice-ever/ – heed his words!) and it inspired me to give everyone some unsolicited advice about writing science.
I like to write as much as many of you like to run- and my disdain for the latter is on par with many of yours’ for the former. Nonetheless, we don’t need to run to be scientists (unless it’s away from something), but we all have to write at some point.
Writing, as a technique to be learned like running a column or using a glove box, is woefully underrated. We as educators suck at teaching students how to write about science- we either oversimplify the process or do it completely wrong. Small wonder, then, that so many scientists suffer from writer’s block- nobody told us how to do it right, and so we struggle with the details.
The process of writing, whether you like it or not, is an inherently creative one. The process of choosing words to make statements is entirely up to you, and the guidelines for most manuscripts are sparsely detailed at best- in effect, we have a “blank slate” to create our ideas. But when we spend most of our day preparing and executing tasks in a logical, stratified way, it is understandable to feel leery about having to abandon scientific methods in order to write clearly about the science you have done. But you have to. There is no better way to deal with the realities of logical flaws, lapses in reasoning, missing details, and (most importantly) triumphs in your work than to write about them. A clear presentation of data alone will allow people to construct their own narrative and conclusions- intelligent people will do that with your data regardless of what you write, as they should. But, as scientists, we do not collect data for that purpose. Scientists have something to prove- a hypothesis, a concept, a theory. That “something” is the narrative of your paper, and all of your statements have to relate to the ideas you are pitching. That is what scientists do. We are idea engineers, and we are storytellers. Everything else is mere detail.
In other words: if you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you can’t craft a narrative to describe your ideas and defend them, then you’re not a scientist- you just work for one. And you certainly shouldn’t be writing about it. Writing transcends achievement- it is the only testament to your understanding, creativity, and worth to the scientific community.
That doesn’t mean writing is easy- far from it. But it does get easier with practice. Here are some pointers on how to tackle writing a manuscript might help those who suffer from severe writing-related procrastination and/or writer’s block. Writing any paper should start with the question “why am I writing this?” You should be able to answer this in a nicely-crafted sentence, in your own words- not your boss’, not anyone’s- just yours. It’s amazing what a single sentence of your own creation can do for writer’s block. Once you have that sentence, you can start to deconstruct it. Let’s say I wanted to write a paper because “I developed a cute new way to polymerize olefins.” (I happen to like the word cute.) The entire paper is contained within that sentence, because in the paper I have to explain 1. what i did; 2. why it’s cute; 3. why it’s new; 4. why I care about polymerizing olefins (note I didn’t say “why your boss or anyone else should care”- your boss isn’t writing the paper and I guarantee their inspiration is gonna be different from yours and that kind of intellectual diversity is a good thing); 5. how said cute way was inspired/developed; and so on. There. Answer those questions in an outline, dump in some references, make the data presentable, turn the outline into paragraphs, and you’re done with your first draft! Now, give it to someone else and see if they believe what you wrote and that you spelled everything right. Repeat. Send to boss. Piece of cake, right?
…but what if you get stuck again in the process? Well, that’s the beauty- and beast- about writing- it exposes your logic more baldly than any other way. Writer’s block is annoying, but can be productive in terms of ensuring your narrative is justifiable. If you get stuck, it’s probably because of one of two reasons: either you just don’t really know how to contextualize a particular topic; or you don’t believe, or like, what you’ve written and mentally cannot continue. The former is easy to fix, as you can just repeat the above process of describing in one sentence what you want to say in a particular section, then go from there. The latter is a bit more difficult and will require some introspection. If you can’t continue writing because of your disdain or disapproval for what’s already on the paper, you have to ask yourself: is it a matter of taste, or a matter of poor interpretation? If it’s a matter of taste, then you just have to plow ahead and deal with the fact that a completed garbage dump of a paper is better than a partially-complete dump of a paper, and these feelings will eventually be sorted out. But if it has to do with the science therein, then I suggest skipping that section, and writing in the margin or somewhere what data or experiment that section needs to make you feel more secure about your narrative. This will help calm you down and let you continue writing the other sections in the paper. Putting the pen down and getting back in the lab should only be done in cases where you believe an unperformed experiment will make or break the overall statements of the paper.
The details on how to write a scientific paper are in Whitesides’ “Writing a Paper”. Outlines are essential, though personally I prefer to write mine out in pencil, because of things like organic structures and equations and I like to change my mind a lot and all that.
Well, I hope that this is at least somewhat helpful for you all who struggle with writing. Writing is crucial to being a scientist; it is not a waste of time. And being good at it requires practice and patience and training- just like running a marathon. But with slightly less sweat.