One of my many duties at work is to help the students learn
how to write scientific manuscripts.
Once in a while it really is just proof-reading and suggesting stylistic
changes. Unfortunately, most of
the time it makes me turn into the old biddy who claims that back in the
mystical days of my youth, we knew how to write scientific papers. I don’t tell the students this, of
course. Nonetheless, it seems odd
that they’ve been reading scientific papers for several years and somehow still
be so bad at writing them.
I’ve never taken a scientific writing class, or even a
college writing class.
Nonetheless, I’m fairly good at it, although I am the first to admit
that it can be slow and painful at times.
I have my weaknesses, including a fairly terse style, a tendency towards
overly brief introductions and discussions, and a lack of self-promotion. I picked up most of these bad habits
from my graduate advisor.* Anyway, I learned the same way everyone learns. I picked up the general style from
reading papers and theses. When I
wrote my first paper, I gave it to a few friends to critique, and then gave it
to my advisor to read. He returned
the manuscript with a bunch of changes – I was kind of traumatized by how many
there were, but my friends told me this was normal. Now that I am on the other end of the process, I realize
that it was only minor stylistic changes – when a manuscript needs a lot of
changes it’s all but impossible to write down all the corrections in the
margins and space between the lines, or return it as fast as he did. Subsequent papers required fewer
changes.
Anyway, now that I’m on the other side of the process, I
don’t get a lot of manuscripts which can be quickly edited by hand using only
the space available in the margins/double spacing. Sometimes it makes me want to tear my hair out. The most common problem is wording
things the exact same way as it would be described verbally in a presentation. The other common mistake is to be too
verbose, too often.
Like poetry, scientific writing has its own pentameter. With students who are fairly good
writers but are novices at scientific writing, it’s relatively easy to
teach. These are not the students
who make me want to tear my hair out.
Anyway, I describe what the general problem is and we go over a
paragraph or two and discuss how I would reword it, and then I have them
practice for little while and help them when they get stuck. Eventually, they pick up the cadence
and conventions of it and then go edit the rest of their paper. However, other students just don’t
catch on easily, and the above approach is mostly useless. They just keep on doing the same sort
of things, even after multiple manuscripts. They end up with lots of corrections from me and their
labmates, and get frustrated, especially when everyone comes in with slightly
different corrections.
I suspect that they think I am trying to make them write
like me, but that’s not it. If
it’s well written, I will mostly leave it alone, even if I would’ve written it
very differently. In the end, it’s
all about telling a story about the science and not distracting people with bad
writing or a disorganized or confusing paper. If you get those things down, no one even notices your
writing style. My boss and I have different writing styles, but when we write
proposals or papers we don’t end up making very many stylistic changes on each
other’s sections. It looks
surprisingly seamless.
* You may notice that I am pretty verbose in my blogs and
emails – I change my writing style according to what I write. I am still pretty weak on conclusions,
though.
