10 things I did and do to improve my (scientific) writing
There are very few very talented non-native individuals that were gifted to write excellent texts once they left the womb. I made an observation that they also get published easily. The rest (of us, sorry to take you with me :) is not that kind, unfortunately. However, chances are that the sooner one realizes this, the sooner the lack-of-skill can be dealt with.
Here is a list of things I did or I do in order to improve my writing. This is in no way a definite and complete list. There is a host of authoritative articles about how to improve writing elsewhere, and I do not consider myself in a position to tell others what to do. I am posting this with hopes to 1) get feedback about what do you do for this matter, 2) help those who are struggling. So, here we go:
1) Read actively – you can read anything, but by active I mean read so that you are after every word and sentence sure what the author meant. Mark down your favorite constructs and try to put them into your active cartridge. Review papers of your peers. Translate your favorite songs so you get the meaning of the lyrics.
2) Write – practice writing, maybe set up a blog, or contribute somewhere else. Set your mind to the foreign language while writing. Advanced: make writing a passion, write with passion. Advanced 2: Make the improving of the writing a passion.
3) Take a (scientific) writing course, or even better two or three – this is in my opinion a must. You then do not need to read this post anymore, most of what I’ve learned about writing was in the courses. I put it simply: those who haven’t, write crap till today, those who took, improved significantly. Thank you Joann.
4) Use spell checking every time when possible – I find it disturbing that in the era of spell checking and automatic correctors in most of the tools of daily use (there is a spellchecker in the latest Firefox!) there are still individuals who seem to knowingly send me ‘htis’. I can take it, but reviewers often cave in. Although there are downsides, I learned a lot from the spellcheckers.
5) Think about reader – with everything you write, consider your audience. Do you deliver the message? Was this sentence too halting that even you need to re-read?
6) Outline – outlining is a strategy that helps me too. You can fill in the details later, but let’s have a logical structure first. Then the ideas, in your own words, and then the details. Consider different variants of the structure. Does it make sense? Organize!
7) Use a variety of tools - these include dictionaries, thesauruses, typesetting software. It’s not a shame to copy your text from latex and paste it into Word to check for spelling and, even more importantly at the beginning, for grammar suggestions. If for nothing else, Word’s grammar suggestions are correct (read: make the text readable) at most of the times. For writing anything larger than 5 pages and 10 references, I prefer latex (and do compile very often). If you are on the Windows, Texniccenter together with Miktex works very well, on OSX I use TeXShop.
8) Co-author – one of the best strategies to improve writing is to write a paper with somebody else. With less skillful writers I tend to improve my reading skills, and improve writing with the lucky ones :) For scientific writing, it is extremely useful to learn about co-authorship issues.
9) Write regularly – this one deserves a separate item in this list, because it refers to the whole of managing the writing, to the morale, attitude, and self-discipline. Set days and hours for writing and try to write in that time. Set the alarms to not to disturb, set ICQ to DND mode or turn it off. And write, two sentences. Make writing a habit.
10) Re-write – this is a tough one. It is normal one falls in love with own text. And it is difficult to give up and start again from the beginning. However, it shall be the reader for whom you are writing, not for yourself (at least in the scientific text). A good strategy to somehow deal with one’s reluctance to re-write is to write several versions of the same text and then select the best one.
Thanks for reading up to here, I hope there is something you have to tell about writing.
Roman, I think all your points are good and should be taken seriously by our doctoral students. But I’m afraid that there’s a serious chicken and egg-problem here. The problem is: If you don’t see the importance of those 10 points, you won’t begin to follow them; and you only learn to see the importance of those 10 points after you make them a habit.
I firmly think that we should FORCE point number 3 on your list: We should require all new PhD students to take a scientific writing course on their first year, and again on their 3rd year. Joann’s scientific writing courses taught me more than any other course ever. I bet Justus’ course can do the same.
That’s true Matti, I recognize the problem, thanks for pointing it out. But then, after posts like yours, it shall become easier to recognize the importance. I hope :)
I might add here that while it is certain that paying attention to those 10 points improves your writing, they may not help you with pronouns, post- and prefixes, and other idiom-like things in English. So, before submitting your paper, give it to the dept. language editor. He/she’ll fix all your ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘at’, ‘from’, etc. blunders. (I always got them wrong)
Hi Roman,
I really enjoyed this entry. I also have a few suggestions to about a nonnative English speaker’s becoming a great writer of English-language scientific papers.
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1. Don’t get too discouraged about negative reviews of your scientific writing, because there is so much variability between what people consider to be good writing. After a certain point, it is just a matter of opinion and style. A lot of times, especially in conference papers, someone will give me a perfect score on language and the other reviewer will suggest that I should have a native speaker review my paper. The difficulty is figuring out when and where your writing actually needs to be improved and where it is just a difference in opinion. Take heart that something that might draw criticism from one reviewer, probably would draw praise from another reviewer. (Every reviewer likes consistency though. You can get away with a lot of wrong things, if you do them consistently.)
2. You need to be a great writer in your native language. When I review a paper, no matter how bad the English is, I can almost immediately tell if the author is a good writer in his or her own language–the writing will still retain its logic and will come together to create a whole; there will be a force that propels the readers from beginning to end. It is really a piece of cake to turn that type of article (well-written, but poor in grammar and style) into something great , compared to a paper with good English, but poorly written.
I’d say that being a good writer in your native language is the most important ingredient. A language reviewer, like me, can help you turn your non-native English into native-like English until you acquire it on your own. Just following the conventions of scientific writing, can help you transition from a good writer to a good scientific writer. But if you can’t write well period, nothing is going to help you except going back and studying the basics of writing and practicing and practicing and practicing. And so it goes with writing — “Beauty is skin deep, but ugly is to the core.”
3. Realize that good writing is one of the most difficult things to do and plan your time accordingly. Maybe I’m different, but writing for me is an incredibly time-consuming process. I’m shocked when a colleague starts the night before a deadline. I get a first draft done usually months before a deadline, because I know that creating that draft is the easy part. I literally go through 10-30 iterations of reading and revising before I am ready to say that an academic article is something that I would expose the public too. In between each of those iterations, I usually will need a day or two to let things simmer. By signing my name to that article, I am saying to the public that this is the best that I can do. I figure–why ruin my academic reputation by turning anything out but the best? It’s hard enough to get a good job in this field, even when you do your best.
Just one analogy, please: I figure that the process of writing is a little bit like sweeping dirt into a dust pan. You can get a lot of the dirt in on the first brush, but there is a small line of dirt that remains, and will always remain, no matter how many times you sweep it (in a Xeno’s paradox sort of way). In the same way, in the first review you can make a lot of the possible improvements, but you will never reach a point where all of the improvements that can be made have been made. That’s not to mention the fact that fixing one thing usually breaks something else. Where to stop, depends on how comfortable you are with error. In professional academic writing, I don’t think that you can afford any error that could have been remedied through hard work. (It’s different in blogs though. (I just said that so I won’t sound like a hypocrite when you find mistakes in this comment. I’m not going to spend a lot of time reviewing it.)) There will always be some errors in your writing and some ways that it could have been better, but you have a duty to yourself and to your readers(of academic papers) that you are honest and have made your best effort at presenting your ideas and have something important enough that it merits the public’s reading it. It’s a social contract. Having your article published doesn’t mean that you are absolved of that responsibility. Publishers often have different motives than the advancement of science.
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That’s all for now. But I’m sure that I will have more later.
But that is what I do… …My MO is this: I write a quick draft for the call-for-papers deadline, and if the draft gets accepted, then I really invest some time and effort into properly re-writing the paper for the publication deadline. I’ve adopted this modus operandi because those times when my paper has been rejected, the reason has been that it does not fit the conference theme. When a quickly-written draft is rejected because it doesn’t fit the conference theme, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as when a meticulously prepared paper is rejected because it doesn’t fit the conference theme.
I mentioned that there are thousands of online articles about how to write good. Today, I got to know this one. Something to follow!
Hi Roman,
Thanks so much for your recommendations and organizing this blob to share the writing tips. You have mentioned taking a scientific writing course which was taught by Joann and I am interested in it. I wonder whether she has any online course for people who are not based in Finland?
Thanks.
[...] as in traditional homework helps to reflect your own thoughts. Plus I have the luck to have great advices in this matter as the ones of Justus , Matti and Roman . I know that process is not easy at all [...]