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Writing Science: What Makes Scientific Writing Hard and How to Make It Easier

2020; Ecological Society of America; Volume: 102; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bes2.1800

2327-6096

Kathleen E. Grogan,

Career Development and Diversity

Writing is an integral part of science at every stage; it is how we outline a project idea, communicate with collaborators, draft a grant application, synthesize our insights into a manuscript, and share science beyond academia. Yet, when training students to be scientists, we often focus exclusively on the scientific method and the work of data collection. We rarely talk about the equally important topic of writing about science (Reynolds and Thompson 2011, Turbek et al. 2016). When we do discuss writing with students, trainees, and peers, we emphasize the mechanics: how to structure a manuscript, the style conventions of scientific writing, and the submission process (Guilford 2001, Turbek et al. 2016). As a scientific community, we rarely discuss the actual act of scientific writing itself. Unfortunately, the writer's block that plagues most academics has nothing to do with manuscript structure or style conventions (Kwok 2020). Even when we have a detailed outline, know what we want to say, and have the citations bookmarked, we often struggle to turn the outline into a full draft. Indeed, advice columns in Science (Van Bavel and Gruber 2019), Nature (Kwok 2020), Inside Higher Education (Rockquemore 2015, 2016), and many scientific blogs are full of acknowledgments that the act of writing is hard. Here, I discuss why the act of scientific writing is difficult and suggest simple strategies for developing the skill of scientific writing. By understanding why we find writing difficult, we can begin to test different practices that might increase our writing output. This process of understanding and overcoming obstacles to writing for academic scientists of all career levels can increase scholarly output, boost career prospects, and ultimately advance scientific knowledge. Understanding why the act of writing is challenging can help overcome the dreaded writer's block. In particular, writing a manuscript or dissertation is hard because, most of the time, no one has ever before been where you are in the realm of knowledge (Fig. 1); hopefully, no one has ever explored these data in precisely this way. You and every other scientist are writing at the edge of our collective knowledge. That is generally the point of a research publication: to add new knowledge to what is already known (Might 2012, Heard 2015a). Similarly, when writing a grant proposal, you are trying to imagine what might lie beyond our knowledge boundary and determine a path to getting there without much knowledge of what lies ahead. Simultaneously, what makes research exciting is the very thing that makes communicating research hard. The goal of a research publication is communicating what you have discovered, at the very limits of our collective knowledge, to those who were not with you on the journey. The point of a grant is to communicate what you plan to discover and how you plan to discover it, and convince readers why that knowledge is essential to advancing science or addressing societal challenges. Additionally, writing up your research findings for publication can be scary because it signifies the project's readiness to take the next step, to move from data collection and analysis to preparation for sharing with the wider community. Doing so opens you up to criticism by the scientific community and the possibility that you may need to return to the stage of data collection for additional information. Lastly, although manuscripts present the scientific process as linear, the reality is much more meandering, with many failed experiments and loops back to the start before conclusions are finally reached. Distilling the journey into a linear narrative for a manuscript can be challenging and adds layers to the difficulty of writing a manuscript specifically. Those same advice columns have many suggestions for how to write more and publish faster (McCollum 2015, Rockquemore 2015, 2016, Van Bavel and Gruber 2019, Kwok 2020). However, one size does not fit all writers or scientists. Strategies that work for one person may not work for a different person or may need to be tweaked. The good news is that our training as scientists is exactly what we need to become more prolific and confident writers. In the process of doing science, we survey the literature for methodological options, test several methods, and settle on the ones that best generate the data we need to test our hypotheses. Briefly, content generation is getting words on the page without worrying about word choice or flow, whereas copyediting is polishing the text you've written (Wilke 2013a). When you try to generate and edit content simultaneously, you end up in the "Perfect Sentence Vortex, a never ending cycle of incremental improvements that means you write excruciatingly slowly, and are never satisfied with what you write" (Firth 2013). Getting stuck in the perfect sentence vortex generates stress and feelings of failure. Instead, embrace the terrible first draft (Edblad 2016) and get into the mindset of strict content generation. After you review an outline of what you want to write, warming up with a free-write can be an excellent way to get words flowing without worrying about editing (Wilke 2013b). A free-write warm-up is a 5- to 10-minute "warm-up" before you begin working, in which the only rule is you cannot stop writing until the timer dings. This exercise is designed to accustom you to type your thoughts without worrying about editing. After you warm up, switch to your planned scientific writing task for the next hour. I have no idea what to write but I'm so glad the dogs are sleeping right now which allows me to focus on editing this piece. Wow the number of spelling errors I'm having to correct as I free-write is pretty impressive. Maybe I should type slower but I don't really want to do that because this is free-write time which always makes me feel like I should be typing as fast as possible. I can't imagine doing this by hand. All my thoughts would be gone by the time I got halfway through a sentence. When developing a new skill, it is common to set vague short- and long-term goals, like, "I will work on the introduction," "I'll write for a few hours," or "I'll write this manuscript this year." But these sorts of goals make it hard to know when you have fulfilled them, which, in turn, can drain motivation and reinforce a dislike of writing. If you are never done, you can never feel accomplished. To return to our fitness metaphor, habitual runners don't say "I'm just going to run for a bit," they have a discrete mileage or speed as a short-term goal. Similarly, runners training for a marathon or race have a deadline and work backward to develop a training schedule that gets them to their goal by a specific date. When writing, you should have concrete, accomplishable goals every time you sit down, like writing 500 words, editing four pages, or writing for 30 minutes. You should also have a long-term plan that works toward a concrete deadline. For short-term goals, creating a S.M.A.R.T. writing plan is an excellent place to start (McCollum 2015). S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym that describes the attributes of clear and reachable goals and stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, generating 500 or 1,000 words a day is a S.M.A.R.T. goal. It is specific and measurable (500 words). It is time-bound (a day) and absolutely achievable, once you are actually putting words on paper. And lastly, it is relevant; most manuscripts are 4,000–7,000 words, which means you could have a terrible first draft after two weeks of completing this S.M.A.R.T. goal every day. Because achievable is an important component of setting S.M.A.R.T. goals, I find it helpful to set your goals lower than you would like, especially at first, so you are sure to finish it. For example, start with the S.M.A.R.T. goal of 250 words a day and build up to 500 or 1,000 a day. Completing the day's goal reinforces positive feelings about writing, which in turn makes it easier to return tomorrow. Don't limit yourself to only your goal if you feel motivated and inspired, but always remember to stop for the day feeling accomplished. Using the Pomodoro technique can also be extremely helpful. Pomodoros are 25-minute working sessions followed by 5-minute breaks that you cycle through 2–4 times in a row per session (Cirillo 2006). This strategy helps to stay on track even in your daily, solitary writing sessions. Apps and websites exist which can set up a Pomodoro timer structure for you. Lastly, don't let yourself be side-tracked by more enjoyable or easier tasks like data analysis or literature searching (see tip 3). Accomplish your writing goals first and then track down that citation or double-check that P value. Writing, and especially scientific writing, is not an innate talent. As a learned skill, training and mentorship are critical to successfully mastering writing. Hopefully, this training (provided by professors, advisors, reviewers, and peers) begins during undergraduate education, continues through graduate training, and persists throughout our careers. As a fledgling (or even fledged) writer, you can and should take ownership over obtaining this training. Take a class on science writing offered by your university, check out books on writing science from the library, and solicit feedback from peers and mentors (Heard 2015b). Because receiving and responding to feedback on your writing can be one of the hardest parts, you may feel reluctant to ask for it. But feedback is critical to improving your writing and will be a necessary and persistent presence throughout your career. Approaching the feedback with the right mindset, and practicing receiving feedback when the stakes are low, can help alleviate some of the sting and make asking easier the next time (Mewburn 2014, Ziter 2020). Iteratively receiving good, constructive feedback on your writing is one of the best and most efficient ways to improve and thus make writing easier. The strategies suggested here range from mindfulness to concrete actions for putting words on a page to tactics for building accountability when a task lacks external deadlines. This list is not a panacea for writer's block; every scientist is different, and what works best for you might be the worst strategy for your colleague, friend, or trainee. However, by continually refining your writing practice, you can hone your writing muscles to the point where writing becomes an enjoyable part of being a scientist. I would like to thank Bethann Garramon Merkle for the invitation to contribute this piece and for her editorial comments, Stephen Heard for the initial opportunity to write a version of this piece (Grogan 2019) for his blog, Scientist Sees Squirrel, and Dr. Jennifer Merritt, Dr. Joanna Wardwell-Ozgo, Dr. Vikram Chhatre, and Dr. Teresa Lee for their helpful comments.