Manuscript Writing

Although writing is usually a dreaded task, it doesn't have to be so. In this essay, we will cover science-based techniques to streamline your manuscript writing process and boost your academic productivity.

I don't need to justify how important is to acquire good manuscript writing skills during grad school. Even if we don't want to have a career in academia, at the very least, this skill will become handy to write our dissertation and graduate. Different people finds different levels of joy in this task. However, writing well and efficiently doesn't need to be tight to our particular taste. Academic writing is a skill we can learn.

There are multiple aspects involved in academic writing. It relies on routines and habits to get done. It also involves a set of skills to accurately craft our writing to our audience and speed up the review and publishing process. As an academic activity, it also needs to follow a specific structure to achieve its main goal of sharing new scientific knowledge with a broader community of scientists.

This essay will cover – what I believe – are the main aspect of academic manuscripts writing, from writing habits to the structure of a manuscripts or a scientific review. If you take the same organized and structured approach that you use in your experimental work to the writing process, you may very much become one of those graduate students that "love to write".

The habit of writing

To become good at writing the first step is to actually write, meaning sitting down and type words in a blank document. As obvious as it seems, making a habit of constantly writing is fundamental to achieve any progress. When it comes to habits, it is hard if not impossible to give advice that is general enough to suit everyone's lives. However, some writers advocate for a set of practices that correlate with prolific manuscript writing. Incorporating a few of these practices into our lives can have a huge impact in our graduate school experience.

Start writing from the first day

Usually, writing it's seen as the last stage of a scientific project. After performing all the experiments and having a story, the principal investigator (PI) says "OK, I think we have enough to start writing the manuscript". What usually follows is a month or so of you struggling in front a blank document, making use of all your willpower to fill it with some insightful words. After that time of struggle and commitment, hopefully sooner than later, you achieve the first complete draft of your manuscript and send it to your PI. You relax for a week or so, meanwhile you wait for your PI to get back to you with the edited document. One day you find that dreaded as well as desired e-mail in your inbox. You carefully open the document. Nothing could have prepared you for what is about to come. The document is a rainbow of colors full of "suggestions" made by your PI. The document has been shattered. It takes you at least a day or two to recover from the impact, probably more. After the mourning period you finally find the strength to open the document again and start accepting suggestions. Whole sections need to be moved, other ten analysis have been suggested by your PI. She even requested you to repeat some experimental procedure to improve imagine in Figure 2. That will take you a solid month of additional work.

Does this sound familiar? Or at least part of it? Well, most graduate students go over this process; this is the "academic standard". But this way of working is highly inefficient, time consuming and it generates a lot of stress. There must be a better way.

First, we need to change the way we think about writing. It is not the final stage of a research project, but rather an integral part of the whole process. You want to start writing as soon as the first day of your research project. But, what are we going to write about at such early stages? You can start the document, come up with a working title, state the main thesis or the goal of the project, and outline the main sections of the manuscript. All these element can change in the future, but when you type them there is no blank page anymore. Sometimes we delude ourselves saying "I'll write when I feel ready". Most likely, what we are actually saying is "I will write when there is a pressing deadline that I cannot ignore anymore". Because the truth is that we will rarely feel ever ready.

Schedule time to write

Then you want to schedule time to write. Tara Gray, who authored the book Publish and Flourish, advise scholars to write daily for 15 to 30 minutes [1]. Maria Gardiner and Hugh Kearns from ThinkWell, recommend "to 1–2 hours a day for graduate students who are writing a dissertation, and about 45–90 minutes a day for researchers trying to increase their publication output" [2]. These recommendations may not be suitable to you. The exact time that you dedicate to write every day is less important that having the habit of writing at a certain time of the day, or certain day of the week. Not surprisingly, it has been shown that this habit of writing leads to more publications [1].

Besides the practical aspect of having a designated time to write, there are other less obvious advantages. Mainly, writing is a way of thinking. When you organize your thoughts on written form the logic of your experiments is made explicit. Gaps of knowledge or further experiments required to sustain a certain statement will appear. Also, a written document is a way to start a dialogue with others to receive advice and critique.

If you are convinced about the utility of writing constantly and want to implement it in your life, then you need to pay special attention to actually write during that time. Writing is, as I stated above, type words to a blank document. It doesn't mean editing, formatting, making figures, or reading literature. All these things are clearly important and relevant for publishing our work. But, we should trick ourselves, they are not writing! We need to allocate extra time for these activities on top of writing.

Seek feedback at every stage

We also need to change our perception about feedback. Same as the writing habit, there is a common misconception that we must request feedback at the very end of the process. But feedback is dynamic and way more helpful if it covers all stages of a manuscript. Put a lot of effort and time on a manuscript on which no feedback is given in the process is a very risky game. A best strategy is requesting feedback constantly at different stages of the writing process. We also want to be very specific with the feedback we want. For example, we can start with an outline with topics covered in the introduction, results sections, figures and tables. Send to our PI and close collaborators and ask ask for feedback asking if the structure makes sense or if there are any topics that have been ignored in the process. Then, you can start outlining the introduction in more detail with key sentences (see next section) and ask for more feedback. Then write a section fo the results, and make a figure and ask for feedback. And so on so forth. The more complete the document it is, you can start asking for feedback to less closer collaborators. At the point of a draft you may want to sent it to people not involved in the project. Again, requesting specific feedback is the key to get better answers. Instead of sending the manuscript and saying "what do you think?" ask "Given your expertise in X and Y, I wanted to ask you if paragraph Z and Figure Z clearly explain the relationship between X and Y...".

On writing well

Now that we know "when" to write, the next question is "how" to write. To answer this question, we must first understand what is the goal we want to achieve with our writing. I premise that academic writing is intrinsically different that creative writing, because their goals differ. The goal of Academic writing is to communicate our science with a broader community and ultimately to contribute to our shared human knowledge in that field, expanding the limits of our understanding of the world. Importantly, "sounding smart" is not part of the goals of Academic writing, specially if that stylistic choice comes at the expense of reaching a broader audience. Also, being mysterious, secretive and hoarding knowledge to ourselves is also not a goal of academic writing. However, I bet most of us have read a paper excessively pompous and secretive. Therefore, when writing, let's keep in mind to be accessible, open and a collaborative.

One paper, one thesis

Many advocate that a scientific manuscript must have one main idea [3]. If you happen to have many ideas share, well, then you can write many papers. In biology, this usually can be framed as having one thesis and writing everything around this main idea. This approach have communicational advantages for both, the writer and the reader. Focusing on one thesis facilitates the thinking and writing process. It is easier to know what to include or what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to just simply mention. It will also make room to dive deeper into this ideas and distill it to the reader. It can also facilitate reading, since the logic behind the structure, experiments and analyses will be clear upfront. It is important to notice that this main idea can evolve over time. A turn of events can lead to a completely new finding, shifting your main thesis. This is completely normal. The important part is that this main idea is clear at the end of the of the paper.

Writing is storytelling

After identifying the idea, a good mental model to actually write the manuscript is to imagine that you are "telling a story". Human communication relies heavily on storytelling, as such, there is nothing more engaging for us that listen to a good story. In storytelling, we start with a setting, a context, where our protagonist exists. But this world has a problem, is lacking something or something happened. Our protagonist then embarks on a quest to solve that problem where lots of event happen, but only those that really matter to the quest are told. This implies that a lot of things not directly relevant to the story are not addressed. For example, certainly most characters in movies should pay taxes, but unless the movie is about a person having troubles with taxes, they will rarely show the protagonist engaging in such diverting task. The story then reach a point where the quest is achieved (or not achieved) and the protagonist must come back to its new context changed by the consequences of the quest. This very nice framework can be applied to our paper. Let's rephrase. There is a context, a current state of knowledge in our field. But it has a problem or we lack certain information. We then embark in our research to fill that gap of knowledge. In this process, we perform a lot of experiments and analysis, some of them prove to be relevant to our objective, but others don't. Our experiments and analyses lead to fill the gap and/or solve the issue that we stated at the beginning, and then we discuss about this new context where this problem has been, at least partially, solved.

An important corollary of the story analogy is that the data and analyses must be presented in a way that contribute to the story. Another important corollary of this analogy is that you should provide enough context so the ready don't make feel like they are picking up the third book of a series. Each scientific article must be a legit story on tis own.

Again, seek feedback

It's important to remember that writing is a skill and as such it needs to be learned trough study and practice. This is particularly true for academic writing, which relies heavily on structure, logic and clear communication style. As grad students, one of the key skill that must strive to acquire during our training years is the ability to write. Primarily, we will learn a lot in this regard from our mentors, the people that review our written documents and give us feedback. Pay close attention to these pieces of advice and ask questions. However, don't hesitate to get help from people outside your lab setting. External feedback can be enriching and provide novel perspectives. This can be especially helpful to check how accessible our writing is for people outside our specific are of research. Also, there a people that actually studied how to write and teach workshops and provide feedback one-on-one. Take Advantage of the resources that the university provides!

The structure of a manuscript

Scientific manuscripts must have a very well defined structure that facilitates readers to distill the main content of the paper. This structure applies to several levels, from the main section of a paper to how to write a sentence. Despite its importance, i there is few formal training in graduate education to help us understand such structure. In the absence of formal training, we rely on emulating our favorite papers or our PIs voice, regardless its quality and/or effectiveness.

Considering that manuscript writing will be a key aspect of our career if we remain in research, then developing systems for good writing is a smart investment of our time. There are several guidelines available online to set the structure of our manuscripts. However, my favorite one comes from an unexpected place: The Journal of Orthopaedic Research. In their essay "Writing for the Journal of Orthopaedic Research" [4] they masterfully covered each one of the main sections of a manuscripts as well as general good writing strategies. Its practical and concise approach answers questions that other articles about scientific writing usually ignore, such as "what tense should I use in the Material and Methods section?" (spoiler alert: past tense). Since their ability to explain these topics greatly exceeds mine, I strongly encourage you to read directly the essay to guide your writing.

Be kind to yourself

Writing manuscripts is a fundamental part of our career as scientists no matter what we do after graduate school. Although writing the manuscript is usually seen as the very last step of our research, if we do it from the very first day it can help us to organize our ideas, think more clearly and get feedback earlier. When writing, we want to focus on our main thesis to structure the paper and guide which content we must include. It is also helpful to think about writing manuscripts as storytelling and focusing on the data that serves the story and not the other way around. Following a tight structure can facilitate to communicate complex concepts to the readers and actually make an impact with our research. The real innovation of our work comes from our results and interpretations.

Writing is a skill that we can learn. And no matter how much experience we have, we should ask for help to mentors, peers or through workshops at all stages of our career. And more importantly, writing is not an easy task. Sometimes it will be hard to write, sometimes we will not like what it's on the page. Be kind to yourself! Set small goals, write without criticism and edit later. You got this.

References

[1] Gray, T. (2005). Publish & Flourish: Become a Prolific Scholar. Teaching Academy, New Mexico State University.

[2] Gardiner, M., & Kearns, H. (2011). Turbocharge your writing today. Nature, 475(7354), 129–130. Link.

[3] “How to Write a Great Research Paper - Microsoft Research.” Microsoft Research, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/write-great-research-paper/.

[4] Wright, T. M., Buckwalter, J. A., & Hayes, W. C. (1999). Writing for the Journal of Orthopaedic Research. Journal of Orthopaedic Research: Official Publication of the Orthopaedic Research Society, 17(4), 459–466. Link.

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