Me write pretty one day: how to write a good scientific paper
Martin Fenner
Monday, 12 May 2008 20:31 UTC
I would like to start a discussion of good papers about scientific writing. My first pick is this paper:
Wells WA. Me write pretty one day: how to write a good scientific paper. J Cell Biol. 2004;165:757-8
The paper starts by discussing the most important point: clearly state the take-home message of a paper. The rest of the short text deals with the structure of a paper and with specific style issues.
Feel free to add other good papers about paper writing in the comments of this post.
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There’s also this surprisingly interesting paper:
Sand-Jensen, K. (2007). How to write consistently boring scientific literature. Oikos 116:723-727. Link.
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Looking through these papers I wonder whether they (or we) disagree in any particular point. In other words, is there a consensus in what constitutes a well-written paper? The point raised by Hans about repetition of the key message would be an example of different views of the topic. We also had a few other minor disagreements about structured abstracts and numbers at the beginning of a sentence.
If the literature is fairly consistent about what constitutes a well-written paper and if this information is readily available – we haven’t yet discussed the available books on the topic – then why aren’t there more well-written papers? We had discussed two issues: lack of training, and little incentive to improve the writing to increase paper acceptance rates. Are there other issues?
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This is an interesting thread. But I wondered if there’s too much emphasis on rules in those “how to write scientific papers” articles?
Perhaps we’re trying to be too scientific about defining what is good and bad writing? I think as scientists we hear about “a rule of writing”, and our eyes light up as if we have been given the keys to getting in Nature every week.
We like to have some certainty, some “laws of physics” in the writing game. But I do feel a lot of the “rules” are snake oil.
I don’t deny there are general principles, but was it someone here who quoted Michael Frayn – the problem with writing is that you slowly learn how to write a novel – but all the skills you picked up doing that project don’t seem to apply to the next novel.
Scientific papers aren’t literary masterpieces, but still, I often ponder Frayn’s throwaway line.
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William, you make a valid point – the rules of writing aren’t everything. That for me is one reason we started this forum. Examples of well-written papers are as important as the whole literature about proper scientific writing.
Bob O’Hara talks in this recent blog post about his dynamic approach to develop the structure of a paper rather than simply following some set of rules.
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I disagree that science writers should take advice from novelists; since when have novelists been forced to summarize their life’s work into 2 1/2 pages, with a brief paragraph description to boot? If science was written by novelists, I wouldn’t be culturing cells, but lavishing the utmost care on the precarious life of flesh-and-blood that resides within the confines of so many tiny houses.
Joking aside, writing a scientific article is not an excercise in poetry. A scientific article is more-or-less an essay – a structured piece of writing intended to convince its reader of a main message by building an argument. I learned, and by this I do not mean that I read a lot of them and got the jist of how they work, but I learned how to write an essay in highschool. I was taught how take my arguments and organise them into a series of paragraphs, with an introductory paragraph, at least three arguments (one per paragraph), and a summary paragraph. Following this, I was taught to construst a more detailed outline, including a proper introductory sentence for each paragraph, a list of argument-supporting points (which were re-arranged for something called flow), and a summary/transition sentence. I was then taught to follow this with multiple edits to avoid common perils of poor quality writing, such as repetition of words/phrases, and dangling participles and modifiers. Only once we had learned these basics did our teachers attempt to explain the fine art of concession.
Now, I had an interest in maintaining my writing habits, but I am aware that my vocabulary has suffered. (Not only my vocabulary as a whole, but what I mean here is my vocabulary concerning parts of speech.) Yet still! When I try to have a conversation with someone about writing, beit theirs or writing in general, I find myself explaining the different between a phrase and a sentence, what a modifier is, why redundancy is bad and not the same as re-iterating the main point of their argument!
Perhaps there needs to be a ‘How to Write an Essay’ forum, which would have to be cleverly named ‘How to Write a Scientific Article’ in order to gain attention from all of those people out there struggling to communicate their ideas, even as they mock the Arts graduates who could teach them a thing or two about doing so.
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Sorry for the ranting. I should not be posting at the end of long days.
Also, is there any way to remove your own posts?
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Hawley, removing a post is possible but complicated. I would just leave it as it is.
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