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I Never Knew Writing (Research) Could Be So…
By Trevor | December 13, 2006
Laborious. Frustrating. Infuriating. Foreign.
Tonight I came across some comments from Derek Lowe, a chemist who writes great commentary on the pharmaceutical industry and a number of other topics in science at In the Pipeline, on the importance of “brevity” in describing research.
- Some of the worst writing in the scientific journals, though, comes from people who are trying to turn out the best. I’ve seen several people who are overly impressed with their writing skills, and try to dress up their papers with knotty sentence structure, recondite vocabularly, and other cheap tricks. Unfortunately, many readers fall for it. If they can recognize the author’s style, they figure, he must be some writer. A journal article doesn’t give you much room for style, that’s for sure. Having an individual voice for your publications is a real challenge, but here’s the trouble: most of the ways you can do it are bad ideas.
As some of you know, I’m currently in the process of writing my first research paper. This follows on the heels of a number of other firsts: first time that I’d been involved in a research project, first time that I’ve presented research during a poster session at a conference, first time that I took a course in genetics. But I thought I had a decent handle on writing. After all, I had done a fair bit of writing as an editor and writer prior to returning to college to pursue a career in science.
Well, as it turns out, writing a research paper isn’t anything like the writing I’m accustomed to.
This should have been very apparent to me, because I’ve now read and been introduced to hundreds of research articles in a number of different disciplines. But it didn’t really hit me until I got some of my first edits back from my lab mentor.
As it turns out, smooth transitions between topics are out; short, simplistic statements of data (the good stuff) is in. I have never written something so lifeless and cold. I’ve been asked to take my experience in writing things that “everyday” people want to read, and turn that into writing something that scientists would have to read: hard data. No frills, no gimmicks.
It’s been a laborious process, because it seems that with every little change, it begins a cascade in which a number of other areas of the paper must be edited to reflect it. I’m sure that this comes as no surprise to those of you with publication lists in the dozens or hundreds of lines, but to a newbie like myself, this is weird stuff.
And frustrating? I have no doubt that I haven’t even begun to feel real frustration, but I’m on the leading edge of what could be the most frustrating writing experience that I’ve ever had.
The biggest surprise to me in undertaking the writing of this research paper is how foreign the process is, even to a writer and editor like myself. I’m sure every PI has their own system of leading a graduate student, postdoc, etc. in the construction of a research paper, but the process that I’ve encountered thus far is so beyond recognizable as anything that I would call “editing” or “writing.” I would describe it more as “fixing something for the sake of probability to publish,” or, perhaps more appropriately, “incoherent nonsense to layman, perfectly sensible strategy to scientist.”
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