How to be a convincing science writer
Rebecca R. Pompano, PhD
University of Virginia
Scientific writing is one of the most important skills you will work on during your PhD and postdoctoral period. Writing is our primary means of communication with other scientists, funding agencies, policy makers, and the general public. Therefore, science writing has to be accurate, clear, concise, and grammatically pristine.
When writing a paper, proposal, thesis, etc., expect to go through many rounds of editing. This is a chance to learn! Be open minded and patient. There is an excellent and amusing discussion of this point on the Blue Lab Coats blog: https://bluelabcoats.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/did-your-student-write-the-paper-or-did-you/
Disclaimer: Many of the tips below were adapted from other discussions of high-quality writing. Writing is a skill that everyone needs, and tips are abundant online and in workshops and textbooks.
Strategies for effective writing:
- This is obvious, but worth stating. If writing to a prompt, make sure that you address the question posed. Examples of prompts include the “Significance” section in a grant, or the “Lit Critique” part of a candidacy exam paper. A very common error is to get sidetracked when writing, so that the final written document doesn’t address the prompt, or contains extraneous information. When you finish writing, read the prompt again and check that you answered it and stayed on topic.
- The purpose of almost all science writing is to convince the reader of something. That means you have to know who your readers are. Are they experts in your field? Experts in related fields? Other scientists? Other academics? Business people? The general public? You will write differently to each of these audiences.
- In writing a scientific paper or proposal, you are making a series of “arguments” that your topic/unsolved problem is important, that your approach is reasonable, that your data (if present) were collected in a scientifically sound manner, and that the conclusions are supported by the data. Some excellent guidance on making logical arguments is found in Grounds for Argument.
- Start by identifying your main argument or point for the overall paper. Then, create an outline of the conceptual steps that are needed to make your argument and any sub-arguments. When putting together a publishable paper on your data, you should start with an outline for the whole paper, as well as a sub-outline for the Introduction. We often refer to the flow of logic found in these outlines as the “story” for your paper. Once you have drafted an outline, it is comparatively easy to fill in the main bullet points with details.
- The logic of an Introduction for a paper is always roughly the same. It starts broad and then narrows in on the problem of interest, then onto your specific work:
- Frame the big picture
- Introduce a specific unsolved problem (or unanswered question)
- Explain your approach to solve the problem, introducing any background needed to understand your method as you go
- Summarize the main objectives of the paper (e.g. “we tested X, validated Y, showed Z”)
- After writing the details in paragraphs, you can go backwards: Re-read your paper, and extract the main point that each paragraph conveys. If it doesn’t match your original outline, ask yourself why and fix it if necessary.
- Try for simple paragraph structures, like the old-fashioned grade-school Hamburger model. Although simplistic, this structure makes it easy for readers to follow your logic. So, each paragraph opens with a topic sentence, and all other sentences in the paragraph need to support the topic sentence. If you switch to a new topic, then you need a new paragraph. Usually you need a transition sentence that connects the ideas in consecutive paragraphs. Excellent tips on paragraph structure can be found at the Purdue OWL site.
- Cite where needed, using the most appropriate citations.
- Each factual statement you make, aside from general knowledge, needs to be supported by appropriate citations.
- Broader statements usually should be supported by reviews, rather than randomly choosing one or two narrowly-focused papers out of thousands that relate to the statement.
- Very specific statements should be supported by primary papers that focused on that topic.
- Ideally you will choose papers to cite whose main point is related to the sentence you wrote.
- A common error is to write a sentence about fact X, then cite a paper about a different topic Y just because they briefly mentioned fact X in the introduction. Such a citation is not helpful for your readers. Instead, choose citations that readers will find educational on the topic of X.
- In choosing which papers or reviews to cite, you have two simultaneous goals:
- To support the content of statement you wrote.
- To cite the relevant papers or reviews from the thought leaders in your field(s). This not only guarantees that you are aware of the leading ideas in the field, but also also helps educate readers who want to learn more.
- Style: I prefer to write in a style where you describe results directly, rather than saying what the figure shows. It makes the sentences much shorter and more exciting. For example:
- “We found that tissue slices were viable (Figure 1).”
- Instead of “Figure 1 shows that tissue slices were viable.”
- “The percent yield of the reactions were all > 98 % (Fig. 3c).”
- Instead of “Figure 3C plots the bar graph showing that the percent yield of the reactions were all > 98%.”
After writing, you have to edit and revise:
- Re-read the paper like a confused potential reader. What words or phrases might be vague or misleading from their point of view? Define those words and phrases clearly. What misconceptions might they have about what you did in your experiment? Preempt those confusions by addressing them directly. This is especially critical when writing for an interdisciplinary audience, because people from different scientific fields start with different assumptions and different vocabulary. (For chemists, Ag means silver. For immunologists, it means antigen. Very different!)
- Self-edit before sending the paper off to someone else. Try reading it out loud to yourself. Doing so will help you catch sentences that are structured oddly or don’t quite make sense.
- Be proactive when responding to comments and edits from others. Specifically, don’t fall into the trap of doing just the minimal edits asked for by someone who goes through your paper. Try to understand what they were really getting at. If they edit the wording of a sentence, check to make sure that the sentence still flows smoothly with the rest of the paragraph. If it doesn’t, adjust things until it does. If they comment that one sentence is unclear, consider whether you used similar sentences elsewhere, and fix them too. If they misunderstood something, remember that it is your job to make the writing so clear that misunderstanding is avoided.
- For a final product, the details matter. Don’t submit a paper for publication or a grant for funding if it still has typos, misspelled words, awkward grammar, or formatting quirks. A reader will take one look at those and lose respect for you, regardless of the quality of your ideas and your science. It is like showing up to a job interview with your shirt buttoned wrong.
Small grammar, punctuation, and style tips that come up often:
- Avoid run-on sentences. A sentence that takes up three lines of text is often too long. If a sentence seems long, try reading it out loud. You’ll know right away if it is a run-on because it will seem to go on and on.
- If you struggle with run-on sentences, allow yourself just one idea per sentence.
- “That” versus “which” clauses-- don’t use a comma before “that”; always use a comma before “which”.
- Use two spaces after a period if the text will be left-aligned. Use one space after a period if the text will be justified (to avoid huge white gaps between sentences).
- Hyphens can make your writing a lot clearer. Tips for hyphenation:
- Please write all methods and all results in the past tense: “The device consisted of…” “Tissues secreted XYZ cytokine…” etc.
- Equations should be integrated into the text, and set into their own line if they are long or large. See this paper by Skykova and Nicholson (Physiol Rev, 2009) for many good examples of how to integrate equations and define the variables in formal language.
- Be consistent about spacing around mathematical operators. There should be a space on each side, just like with words. Examples:
- n = 15 samples, not n=15 or n =15.
- a + b = c, not a+b=c.
- Always use a space between a number and a unit. Examples:
- 10 mM, not 10mM.
- 37 °C, 5 % CO2, not 37°C, 5% CO2
Peer editing within the lab
To enhance the writing of everyone in the group, any written document (abstract, manuscript, undergrad research report; PhD candidacy paper, etc) should be peer edited by at least one person within the lab (or possibly outside of it) before it comes to me. This has a lot of benefits – it gives you practice providing feedback to fellow scientists; it ensures you get feedback from more than just me; it keeps you up to date on one another’s work; it exposes you to other people’s science writing styles; and it cuts down on the turnaround time from me, since I’ll have fewer edits to make. It does mean allowing enough time before the deadline to give your peer readers adequate notice, so set your own internal deadline enough in advance.
Additional expert guidance on how to draft a scientific paper: