Writing a clear and engaging paper
Maxine Clarke
Thursday, 17 April 2008 16:47 UTC
Some time ago, my colleague Leslie Sage wrote an article called “writing a clear and engaging paper” to advise scientists (astronomers, actually, but the article translates to any discipline) wishing to submit to Nature. Leslie and the publisher, Springer, have kindly given us permission to reproduce the article. Here is the Abstract:
Scientists usually receive no formal training in how to communicate effectively scientific information. What little training we do get comes from our PhD supervisors, who may or may not be good communicators themselves. Moreover, too many scientists seem to feel that the goal of scientific writing is to impress others with the author’s intelligence, and most of the rest forget that even people in closely related fields may not be aware of the jargon, background and technical details specific to each subfield. Yet the principles of clear writing are easily grasped, and with a little practice will become natural to implement. Even in a technical journal the audience is not restricted simply to a few direct competitors, so you need to explain why the general topic is interesting, what problems there are in the field, what you have done and how it has helped advance us towards the resolution of one or more of the problems.
If you would like to read the rest of this editor’s advice about preparing a manuscript for submission to Nature_, please go to this link to download the article as a Word document26.html.
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Replies
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Do you all really get so many “crank” papers?
And how are we to keep the inflated egos of certain scientists in check? Especially once they have their very own Nature article(s) under their belt?
Lastly, I want to take slight exception to this statement: “Express your thoughts on what specific important problems remain, and what must be done to resolve the issues.”
Much as I agree in theory, twice in practice I was asked why I didn’t resolve the issues myself. Each time was because it entailed a good two-three years’ additional work! Or means beyond those attainable by a starting lab run by an unknown female researcher in a country that’s not clear how much it wants to give to biomedical research, but which corresponds to a low single-digit percentage of what the US does.
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Leslie’s area of physical sciences attracts more than most, Heather. The favourites are disproving Einstein, a variant on Fermat’s last theorem (when I first joined Nature, solving it was a favourite crank topic, now it is quite common to show that the solution is in error). Yes, I’d say we receive many crank submissions — but since we introduced a web-based submission, the flow of formal submissions have dried up a bit, as most of them come in on pieces of paper (often handwritten) and mailed — or as emails.
“Express your thoughts on what specific important problems remain, and what must be done to resolve the issues.” Maybe another way of putting this would be to advise an author to provide the context. So often in a paper, the author describes well in the summary paragraph (abstract) the introduction, micro-result and micro-conclusion, but leaves the reader even slightly outside the subdiscipline in the dark about how this result adds to what was known before. (This is what we advise at our guide to authors , where we show an example summary paragraph in rainbow colours.) I think that’s what Leslie’s sentence means, basically — I do dimly recollect being asked to do 3 years’ work in the way you describe, and finding it galling!
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“Yet the principles of clear writing are easily grasped, and with a little practice will become natural to implement”
I think this sentece is too optimistic. I agree that practice (not so little) is the key to achieve a clear and interesting writing, not only of scientific papers, but any text in general. and that’s the point: how often a scientist sits down to write a paper? A couple times a year? I am sure that he or she had to do it every month, the results would be much better. But that’s not the way science works.
I have been editing texts written by scientists and doctors for some years (not for scientific publications like Nature, but for magazines Scientific American-like and books). Sometimes I can recognize a good author even before reading him/her. Those who love reading (literature in general), blog or write occasionally for newspapers usually provide much better texts and are more friendly to accept suggestions and changings. But they are quite few.:-(
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I think you make a very good point, Luciana. We often read articles about “the value of blogging” and see it dismissed as a relatively trivial activity. (I don’t agree! I think there are some very good blogs around.)
One advantage of blogging is, from what you say, the practice that it gives to the writer. A blog writer receives fast and “up-front” feedback from readers. A very good way to hone one’s communication skills!
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