A personal view on science writing
Martin Fenner
Tuesday, 26 August 2008 05:26 UTC
Last week FemaleScienceProfessor wrote a blog post about science writing: Barely Writing (thanks for the link Heather). In her post she describes how some of her students are struggling with writing. Not because they don’t know how to do it, but because they have a block. And she writes about how writing different things, including letters to daughter, help her with science writing.
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Replies
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I used to keep this stuck to the wall above my desk, now I know it by heart:
“There’s no such thing as writer’s block. My father drove a truck for forty years. And never once did he wake up in the morning and say: ‘I have truck driver’s block today. I am not going to work.’”
This was apparently said by Roger Simon of the Baltimore Sun – but I first saw the quote in Don Murray’s book The Craft of Revision, which, by the way, also has lots of great tips about getting over writer’s block.
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I think it might help with getting used to writing anything, like FSP suggest. To have a more open relation withb words and sentences and knowing that you ususally need to rewrite and that doesn’t mean bad things.
For me, I have noticed that I find it easier to write if I don’t have a completely empty sheet. I usually write down the structure and try to “fill some of the rows with thoughts” and then work from there.
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In starting a new article, if it will have references (source-citations), I prepare a small temporary bibliography, then extract a quote from one item, and write: Cell biologist so-and-so wrote: [Insert quote]. Then I start writing in ‘reaction’ to the quote. After that I seem to know what come before and after, and in the subsequent writing process may choose to omit the jump-starting quote.
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Writer’s block can be an impediment to putting thoughts on paper but there are other obstacles as well – obstacles that can be overcome once they’re made explicit. For example, many of the students I teach are ‘flummoxed’ because they have difficulty pinpointing their most important finding – they usually want to include – everything – in their articles – especially the technique they’ve struggled to develop. To help remedy this problem, students explain their research to a sympathetic group of their peers. Because this group is multidisciplinary, they can comfortably ask clarifying questions (questions that a specialist reader may not feel comfortable asking – you’re the expert after all!). This process helps researchers think critically about their work – a crucial step on the way to writing clearly about their important finding.
Of course, there’s more to the story than that. Helpful as clear thinking about one’s research is, scientists also need to know basic things – like how to structure logically an abstract, as well as the introduction and discussion sections of the full manuscript. They also need to know how to edit what they write. When they master these techniques, they’re much more likely to write a logical and persuasive paper. These tools also help writers exchange ineffective approaches to writing and revising with specific and effective ones. Armed with this information, many students claim to be less fearful of the blank page and more optimistic about their ability to explain their work to the uninitiated.
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