Writing Science
"Doing research is only 80% of doing research. The other 80% is writing it up." - JD, possibly
You are supposed to come out of a PhD program knowing how to write. Once you learn how to write papers and to some degree grants, many other formats open up as well. So how does one go about learning that?
A disturbingly common sentiment is that there is an essential component of suffering to learn how to write. You are supposed to stumble your way through the first paper, be lambasted by reviewers, and humiliated by your advisor when a draft comes back all marked in red. That is, after all, how the previous generation learned it. You are supposed to suffer because they did. I've heard countless stories of scientifically brilliant papers rejected time and time again until they were rewritten in comprehensible language, and then they suddenly blossomed. I've done such edits and rewrites on many texts by others - and myself. Several of my PhD papers were rewritten 3 or 4 times - and I mean down to every last word rewritten. We cannot protect students from all suffering, but let's at least not force it on them. That's gross.
I had many debates with my advisor over what the reader owes to my paper once they picked it up. The answer is simple: absolutely nothing. In the world of endless scientific literature, it is already a miracle that someone came across your paper, and they are not obligated to stay. We give instructions to students on how to read papers. My personal priority order is Title-Authors-Abstract-Figures-Introduction-Conclusion-Bulk-Supplement. If I get bored or find the paper irrelevant at any point, I stop and put it away, and others do the same. If we tell variations of such algorithms to each other, we should assume those are the algorithms in community circulation, those are the algorithms people would use to read your paper. You should write the paper assuming it would be butchered and read piecemeal. If the paper still holds up after going through a blender - it's going to stick.
Early in my work with my PhD advisor, he gave me a book, Writing Science by Joshua Schimel. Some other colleagues gasped: why would you need to read a book to learn that if suffering is the only way to learn? Nevertheless, I read the book for a bit and took a bunch of notes. Some two years later I put on my advisor's table a draft for my next paper (not the first one we ever wrote). After reading the draft, he asked me: "You didn't read the second half of Schimel, did you?" I was embarrassed because that was true. As I found out later that day, my last set of notes from reading Schimmel was two years old, to the day. My notes stopped on chapter 9, of 20.
There is a simple reason why my advisor could make such a claim. In the book, Schimel marches across the length scales of writing. He starts with the grand story arc of the whole paper; different journal types beget different story arcs. Then, he explains why the sections of paper have to be there and how they support the argument. He goes through the job of each section, then descends to paragraphs, then to sentences, then to individual words, before elevating and summarizing it all up. Ironically, this march across length scales is the story arc for Schimel's book, as much as a nonfiction book can have a story arc. The story arc of my paper sections and figures was pretty good. My paragraphs were meh. My sentences sucked. It was obvious that I only learned half the lesson and it was incumbent upon me to finish the book.
Schimel is so good at the rules of writing that he can break any subset of them, on demand, at any scale. On one notable occasion, he wrote a chain of grammatically correct sentences that feed well from one to the next - but the whole paragraph doesn't have a story arc and so it goes nowhere. After my second bout of reading, I got obsessed with these techniques for a bit. I was talking about "schimelizing" every piece of text I touched, both my own and others entrusted to me. I only calmed down when I learned the rules enough to break and bend them creatively.
Understanding the rules, the principles, the structures, the prescriptions is useful but doesn't help with the other problem - how do words come out of us and onto the paper? How to crack the writer's block and get it done? How to write a lot? You might be tempted to paste that italicized phrase into Google and would be greeted with a direct, in-your-face, strategic, correct, optimal answer. Majority of self-help books, including those on writing, are based on the premise "I found The Way to work for me, therefore you all should follow The Way." But I got something better for you. I got Air & Light & Time & Space, by Helen Sword.
Sword is an accomplished writing coach, and at some point she set out to gather data on how people write, in the form of a hundred interviews and several hundred surveys. She set out with a hypothesis that all successful writers follow The Way, in one flavor or another. But that hypothesis is data-testable, and it does not stand up to data. What came out instead is an anti-prescription, it is a book of options. Every successful academic writer found their way to thrive: alone or with friends over coffee; in hotels and retreats or in the office; at 3pm or 3am; fighting grammar or fighting distractions. They found their ways to have writing pleasures and writing suffering.
The book is highly structured around the central theme: 4 sections of 3 chapters each and constant allusions to a four-corner base. It might seem that once you grasp the idea and read a few chapters, you can easily extrapolate to the rest - but no. The structure remains reliable, making it easy to read a chapter a day at a constant rate, but the anecdotes, quotes, characters, and references remain fresh all the way through.
Joshua Schimel taught me to think about the length scales of my papers. Helen Sword taught me to think about the time scales of my writing life. And I really like to think about scales.