487—Writing

Scientific writing falls into two broad categories based on the intended scope of distribution. Limited distribution writing encompasses those texts which are typically read by only a few individuals, or maybe only yourself. Public writing is the style that you might typically think about for scientific writing—papers intended to be read by everyone (or at least the few who are interested and willing to read your papers).

Notebooks Every scientist keeps a notebook. That is an idea we've emphasized in most every laboratory course through your undergraduate education. That writing is intended to be a complete record of your work in the laboratory, your successes, failures and every detail in between. In an academic setting, your notebook is largely for you and your advisor where as in an industrial setting it is more toward corporate property. While your notebook is largely intended for limited distribution, if you discover something important, it can quickly become a public document. Thus, it is very important to conform to the guidelines and policies under which you work. In industry, these will be spelled out clearly. As an academic, you have a little more freedom as to the method, but the essential of all your work is still paramount.

It is not unreasonable to have your own notebook of ideas independent of, or integrated into, your laboratory record. As you journey into the world of ideas, good ideas begin to come and come rapidly. They come much too fast to be able to stop and test each one. Thus having a record of those ideas is valuable when you have free time, or more likely, a new intern in need of a project.

In addition to those things you devise, you'll be learning from a variety of sources on a regular basis. Papers, seminars and informal discussions will present new ideas, some of which may be valuable, and having a record of what you learned when and from whom is important to find those ideas again.

Electronic Mail Formally this should be described as colleague communication, but since email is the standard medium, we'll just call it that. Due to the ease and speed, email allows collaborations and contacts with a wide variety of people around the globe. As a result, much coordination happens through electronic mail. The challenge, however, is that electronic mail is an unstructured (and often informal) medium. Humor that might work very in person doesn't always translate well to text.

Electronic mail is very easy to forward, and, as a result, it can often have a much wider distribution than originally intended. This wide distribution often allows for greater insight into the inner workings of an organization as email text tends to lay every detail out clearly. The astrophysics department at a large university is purported to have experienced this when an electronic mail message from the graduate committee to young graduate students was widely distributed in 2012. The first paragraph of the quoted message is very telling about the nature of graduate school.

Another consideration for email is that, of the time of this writing, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act defines any email still on a server after six months as abandonded. As such, it is just a subpoena from a federal prosecutor away from becoming public record. The problem that Gmail set out to solve (having to delete old email) has come back around to haunt many. Thus, it is important to consider these electronic communications as open records from the start, not writing anything you wouldn't want to see again publicly in the future.

Grants Grants are the lifeblood funding of all research. In academic circles, the methodologies pioneered at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after the Second World War reign supreme. In this system, funds are awarded directly to individual researchers in order to complete well-detailed research proposals (there is some leeway on what you actually study with the money). The decisions for funding are made be a group of peer scientists who review and rank the grants (at the NIH, grants are ranked 10 to 90 with low scores being best. Money is then awarded to the best grant proposals as deeply as the funding allows). This direct competition has led to remarkable advances in a wide variety of fields.

The research grant is often a small document in which you lay out all of your intellectual history, what you’ve already learned, and a series of questions and corresponding experimental proposals to answer them. A grant request must be clear, enlightening and persuasive all at the same time (NIH grant writing tips), and usually in a very tight package (grant guidelines always give the size requirements as a maximum size, as opposed to college essays where the size requirement is usually a minimum). All of the work that goes into a grant proposal is likely to only be read by a very small number (single digits) or reviewers.

What about industry? Often there are similar internal granting procedures for novel enterprises. The benefits of competition, as evidenced in the public sector, are often applied within the corporation to garner support for new ventures, activities beyond the core competencies that have the potential to be the future of the business (classic research and development).

Writing grants, a tremendous effort for only a few (albeit important) readers, is a major undertaking for many scientists. Writing clearly, succinctly and compellingly is a key to winning grant funding (proposing novel research in a field deemed "important" is the other key, in case you were curious).

PapersPrimary research reports (the classic report of new findings) and review articles (summaries of recent advances, either as stand alone papers or as book chapters) are the legacy of a scientist. This work is intended to be preserved indefinitely and accessible to anyone who wants to read it.

Scientific communities are small. It may not seem that way now as you spend the majority of your time at school with others who have chosen similar first majors, but if you were to poll interest in biochemistry at a campus dance, you'd likely find yourself in the minority (and this not a joke about the social awkwardness of biochemists). Scale that up and ask about biochemistry interest at a professional sporting event (and no, this isn't a joke about those who attend athletics). Communities are small, and if you spend about ten years in any one field, you will have the great pleasure of meeting (almost) everyone who has an extreme interest in that topic.

That works for the here and now, but it does cover meeting the pioneers of a field who have moved to a different field or retired. Nor will it allow meeting those who will build on your work in the distant future. Only your publications can fully bridge the time and space gaps of scientific investigation.

As for the question of why and how to write research papers, we'll turn to the ACS Publishing Your Research 101 series. The following interview is with George Whitesides, professor at Harvard University in the department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Writing Style The classic reference for writing English prose is little book (less than 100 pages) first published in 1959. Strunk, W and White, EB (1995) The Elements of Style, Third Edition. Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, NY (or a later edition/revision, there are several with additional authors) is a great place to start for the finer points of English grammar and usage. It is a short text presenting a few basic points to grammar, composition and style. There are also a variety of usage examples in the incorrect/correct style. There are several copies of this text in the Henry Buhl Library (PE1408.S772).

Want a job? There are professional science writers. These would be individuals with degrees (or multiple degrees) in science who write science, or write about science, for a living. Here is the ACS description of science writing field. That's a pretty good description of the work for scientists who write professionally (or write part-time). The one writing service they don't mention is that there are professionals who will edit, translate or ghost write scientific publications prior to their submission for review. These services are typically used by international authors who do not write English or write English as a second, third or forth language (although a native English writer isn't prohibited from purchasing editing services). There are several of these editing and writing services. I will not point you to one in particular, but here is a typical web search on the topic if you're interested. Suffice it to say that there are professional writing jobs for scientists.

EditingWriting is only half (or a third or a quarter) of the battle. Good editing is at least as important as good writing—it certainly takes more time. The most important element of editing is reading your writing, truly reading your writing. There are two easy ways to make sure you read what is written (and not what you think you've written).
One is to allow a day (or more) between writing and reading. This will give you time to forget what you think you wrote and allow you to read what you really wrote. I know what your thinking, "I learned to read a long time ago, and I can do it just fine, even if I've just written it." Maybe. I'm dubious. Do you know how you read? A good long answer version is chapters 4–7 of "The Magic of Reading" by Bill Hill. The short is that you don't look at every letter when reading—you read by recoginzing the shapes of words, when everything is working well. Thus, since you've just written it, it isn't hard to misread what you think is there instead of reading what you've written. So give it a day, or more, between writing and editing (I know, it challenges your normal work schedule).
A second method to do exactly the same thing is have your computer read your writing to you. Speech synthesis is built into Microsoft® Word (although finding the button to use it is a little difficult); the computer can read your paper to you. Since the computer is going to read every word, it is very easy to pick up on missing words, poor phrasing or very regular sentences. The only challenge is that the text to speech synthesis isn't tuned to read biochemistry—you'll hear some mispronounciations of chemical and enzyme names in your paper. This will help you edit while saving you the effort of reading your paper (although it might cause your roomate(s) to look on you a little less favorably).