Making Scientific Writing Painless

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00:00:13.04 My name is Ian Baldwin.
00:00:14.16 I'm a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology
00:00:17.23 in Jena, Germany.
00:00:19.18 And I want to talk in this episode about
00:00:23.02 one of the most painful processes that you have to master as a scientist,
00:00:26.15 that is, writing scientific publications.
00:00:29.23 And I hope I can give you some tips on how to make this process
00:00:33.21 less painful.
00:00:37.04 It's all written up in a little document that's on my home page.
00:00:40.01 You can find it there.
00:00:41.11 It's called the Baldwin formula for writing scientific papers and reviews,
00:00:43.14 if you wanted to catch a written version of this.
00:00:48.05 One of the points I want to make about writing
00:00:50.15 is that it's an obligation.
00:00:52.11 Basically, if you don't publish your research,
00:00:55.02 you haven't done the research.
00:00:58.01 So, you have to come to terms with this process
00:01:00.17 of writing publications.
00:01:04.07 One of the other points I want to make is that
00:01:07.02 it is critical to the scientific process itself.
00:01:11.02 Writing sharpens your critical thinking.
00:01:14.15 And there is... it is really something that one has to do
00:01:18.03 while you're experimenting.
00:01:21.00 It's not something you do after you've finished experiments.
00:01:22.24 It's a process that's integral to the experimentation process,
00:01:25.05 in particular, honing what I called the red line,
00:01:28.07 and I'll talk more about the red line in a few minutes.
00:01:32.02 I believe that writing is like...
00:01:34.21 something that I consider scientific oral hygiene.
00:01:38.05 It is something, like brushing your teeth,
00:01:40.09 you should do every day.
00:01:42.07 And one should write in such a way
00:01:46.05 that you reward yourself by being successful.
00:01:49.24 And there's nothing worse than trying to write a manuscript
00:01:54.03 from start to finish,
00:01:55.20 having to confront the entire thing,
00:01:58.05 so break it down into small bite-sized pieces
00:02:00.11 that you can accomplish each day,
00:02:02.15 and thereby stimulate that dopamine reward system
00:02:05.09 that comes with accomplishment.
00:02:08.15 Another point I want to make is that writing...
00:02:11.12 scientific writing... it occurs in English.
00:02:13.23 But science English is a foreign language.
00:02:17.14 It's even a foreign language to native speakers.
00:02:20.03 And therefore, it's a process that has to be practiced
00:02:23.19 and honed as if it was a foreign language.
00:02:26.22 And the important part here is the clarity of the language,
00:02:30.03 not the elegance with which you say things.
00:02:33.21 It's clarity that counts in science.
00:02:37.06 Another major challenge of scientific writing...
00:02:41.02 and it's really true for all types of writing,
00:02:43.02 but in particular science,
00:02:44.21 where you have to be able to diagnose the logic
00:02:47.18 that you have tried to encrypt in your language...
00:02:50.20 and that is erasing the memory of what you have written.
00:02:55.14 Because when you've written something,
00:02:57.15 there's a memory of that,
00:02:59.21 and your brain will say, yes, I understand what I have written,
00:03:03.02 but you don't really see the words and the logic behind it,
00:03:05.12 because of this particular memory
00:03:08.07 that's echoing in your brain.
00:03:10.03 And the solution that works for me,
00:03:12.03 and for many of my students,
00:03:13.21 is what I call the Men in Black solution,
00:03:15.15 which is basically... if you've seen the movie,
00:03:17.14 you know exactly what I'm talking about...
00:03:19.04 this process of having some trigger
00:03:22.18 that allows you to erase, completely,
00:03:25.10 what you've just worked on in your memory.
00:03:27.04 And there are lots of different ways of erasing your memory.
00:03:29.09 You can use...
00:03:31.06 you can print out what you've just written in a different font.
00:03:33.15 That helps in breaking up your visual memory of it.
00:03:36.13 You can have someone else read it out loud to you,
00:03:40.03 and thereby the logic and the words
00:03:43.03 come in through your ears, through a different sensory system,
00:03:45.04 rather than through your eyes,
00:03:46.21 and you can hear it as if you had written it for the first time,
00:03:49.16 and be able to be critical of it.
00:03:52.02 You can work on texts that you haven't worked on recently.
00:03:55.00 And that's another way...
00:03:56.15 just simply, the passage of time fades your memory.
00:03:58.15 But for me, that's the process that works least effectively,
00:04:01.15 and usually some of those other processes
00:04:04.01 work more effectively in the erasing process.
00:04:07.12 You can practice the editing skills
00:04:10.08 on the words of others.
00:04:11.19 And any time that you have the opportunity
00:04:14.07 to review the work that someone else has done,
00:04:16.13 you should jump at it, because a good editor
00:04:19.10 becomes a good writer.
00:04:20.21 These are very intertwined skills.
00:04:23.23 The hard part is just editing your own words.
00:04:28.09 Now, the key to good scientific writing
00:04:30.15 is to have a good red line.
00:04:33.14 Now, the red line consists, basically, of three parts
00:04:37.04 that you already know about
00:04:38.21 -- a title, an abstract, and figures and captions and tables that... --
00:04:44.19 and the red line defines the logic of your paper.
00:04:48.02 This red line has to be...
00:04:51.08 has to be the most...
00:04:53.10 it's the most fundamental part of your paper.
00:04:55.18 If the logic of this line isn't good,
00:04:58.13 everything else you write from here on has to...
00:05:01.04 has to be done over again.
00:05:03.08 So, I always argue that you should be spending about
00:05:06.13 70% of the time that you write a paper
00:05:08.09 working on the logic of this particular red line.
00:05:10.11 It is absolutely fundamental to your paper.
00:05:12.17 Now, the way you start with the red line
00:05:14.21 is to start with the abstract.
00:05:16.06 Now, the abstract is not the abstract that you'll publish in a paper,
00:05:19.04 but really a limited, 500 words or so narrative
00:05:23.10 that defines the logic of your paper,
00:05:26.09 and the arguments,
00:05:28.19 and the order in which those arguments get presented.
00:05:30.11 After you've written the abstract,
00:05:31.24 you can highlight the key words in there
00:05:33.16 and construct a title from that abstract.
00:05:35.08 The title, of course,
00:05:37.16 should not be filled with a lot of boring things like
00:05:39.22 "the effect of this on that,"
00:05:41.16 but rather really encapsulate
00:05:44.08 the main take-home message of your paper
00:05:46.07 from the keywords in your abstract.
00:05:48.07 Figures should not be a place where you simply dump data.
00:05:51.13 Figures should represent one of five or six
00:05:56.03 major take-home messages
00:05:58.05 that you are presenting in the paper.
00:06:01.00 The figure should be understandable in 30 seconds.
00:06:04.17 And the figure should best be done
00:06:07.04 in a handwritten form in the first draft.
00:06:10.17 I always suggest that people write, in words,
00:06:13.04 on the back of a piece of paper
00:06:15.08 what they want that take-home message to be from the paper...
00:06:18.13 from that.. from that particular figure,
00:06:20.12 and then hand draw the figure,
00:06:22.01 with the axes labeled nicely.
00:06:23.11 And then, once you've hand drawn that figure,
00:06:25.12 hand it to a naive colleague,
00:06:28.07 a colleague who does not understand your story,
00:06:30.03 and then find out, in 30 seconds,
00:06:31.24 whether that colleague can understand what the take-home message is
00:06:34.24 from that figure.
00:06:36.11 If he or she can't understand it in 30 seconds,
00:06:38.22 then you need to go back and reconsider your figure.
00:06:42.00 Now, sometimes you can get a figure to...
00:06:44.19 to articulate a take-home message in 30 seconds
00:06:48.21 with some simple tricks.
00:06:51.01 So, for example, that 30 second rule
00:06:54.09 is not gonna be matched by this particular figure,
00:06:57.10 which is produced by commercial software,
00:06:59.16 where there's a legend produced on the far axis,
00:07:02.24 which gives you the information to understand
00:07:06.17 the three different colored lines here.
00:07:08.08 If you had simply labeled those lines directly,
00:07:11.07 putting the labels right on the line,
00:07:14.05 you could have picked up exactly what that figure says in 30 seconds.
00:07:16.13 So, small changes in a figure
00:07:18.21 can have a dramatic influence on how [long]
00:07:22.19 it takes a reader to understand what the take-home message is.
00:07:25.18 Okay. So, now you have this red line.
00:07:29.04 The red line is, as I say,
00:07:32.22 the fundamental part of your paper.
00:07:34.10 It's the part that you should be practicing and working on
00:07:36.15 as you do experiments.
00:07:38.03 This is not something that you wait until the end,
00:07:39.20 because if you understand and you hone this red line,
00:07:42.13 the rest of your paper will fall completely in place.
00:07:45.18 So, with a good red line, you're now ready to start
00:07:48.18 on the other parts of the paper.
00:07:50.21 And papers are frequently broken down into different sections,
00:07:53.13 like Introduction, Materials and Methods,
00:07:55.20 and Results and Discussion,
00:07:57.15 but not all journals have those separate sections.
00:07:59.06 Sometimes they blend them all together.
00:08:00.20 Sometimes they break 'em...
00:08:02.23 break Results and Discussions into one package or another.
00:08:04.21 So, you need to know the journal that you're targeting.
00:08:07.09 Now, Materials and Methods deserve a little bit of a discussion here,
00:08:11.02 because it is this part of a manuscript
00:08:13.16 that has become smaller and smaller
00:08:16.09 as journals have...
00:08:18.07 particularly those journals that want to stay with a paper publication...
00:08:21.12 have tried to go electronic.
00:08:23.17 So, Materials and Methods are supposed to describe
00:08:26.07 exactly how you've done the experiments
00:08:28.14 so that someone else can repeat them
00:08:30.07 and reproduce your results.
00:08:31.21 And reproducibility, after all, is the hall... hallmark of science,
00:08:33.18 so you want to make sure that this part of the paper
00:08:36.10 is done well.
00:08:38.16 Now, as a consequence, most journals have made...
00:08:42.07 because of the space limitations,
00:08:43.16 they've made the Materials and Methods shorter and shorter,
00:08:46.03 more and more telegraphic,
00:08:47.23 harder and harder to understand,
00:08:50.01 and moved most of the Materials and Methods
00:08:52.07 into what's called the Supplemental Online Materials,
00:08:54.15 the SOMs, and usually are...
00:08:56.17 require extra digging to go find.
00:08:59.12 Now, times are changing in the world of publications,
00:09:02.17 and things are becoming electronic,
00:09:05.06 and there are all these other venues
00:09:07.24 to give detailed accounts of your Materials and Methods.
00:09:11.08 For example, Bio-protocol is just one of them,
00:09:13.23 where you can do complete videos
00:09:16.03 of all the procedures that you use in your experiments
00:09:18.03 and make it very easy for a scientist
00:09:20.23 to replicate what you've done.
00:09:22.12 So, take adva... take advantage of those opportunities,
00:09:25.00 and make sure that your Materials and Methods
00:09:27.09 really provide the right information that you need.
00:09:30.16 Now, I want to talk also about the Introduction.
00:09:32.17 Because the Introduction, particularly for a young scientist,
00:09:35.04 is one of the biggest challenges,
00:09:37.24 because you're just staring at this big piece of white paper,
00:09:40.04 and you need to construct all the things
00:09:43.18 that have gone into your mind
00:09:45.16 that you think are necessary
00:09:48.03 to introduce the work that you're gonna present.
00:09:50.07 And that big blank piece of paper can be daunting.
00:09:53.04 And frequently, when you start that process,
00:09:54.21 you end up with a 30-page Introduction
00:09:57.06 that no journal ever wants to publish.
00:09:59.12 It has far too much in there.
00:10:01.18 So, the best way to hone your activities
00:10:03.20 and make the writing of an Introduction
00:10:05.21 an efficient process
00:10:07.16 is simply to start with the last paragraph of the introduction.
00:10:10.23 That last paragraph, where you say,
00:10:14.22 basically, here is the logic of the experiments,
00:10:16.13 here's why we did these experiments,
00:10:19.00 and... and go through in a... in a distinct, concise way,
00:10:24.11 summarizing, basically, the Introduction.
00:10:27.03 When you've written that last paragraph,
00:10:29.09 you can go through with your highlighter
00:10:31.12 and just identify the concepts that need to be int...
00:10:34.13 need to be introduced in the other parts of your introduction.
00:10:37.14 So, basically, what you're doing is you're taking that last paragraph,
00:10:40.17 and then you're reverse engineering
00:10:43.08 the rest of the Introduction
00:10:46.06 as defined by the key points in that last paragraph.
00:10:48.19 This allows you to write a very efficient,
00:10:51.00 compact Introduction without a lot of pain.
00:10:54.18 The second part I want to talk about is
00:10:57.07 the Results and Discussion section.
00:10:58.19 In some journals, they require them to be blended together.
00:11:02.24 But in other journals, they acquire them to be separate.
00:11:05.07 And it's important to understand the differences
00:11:07.23 between a result and the discussion.
00:11:09.14 What goes into what, and what goes into the other?
00:11:12.10 The results are not the same as the discussion.
00:11:14.08 The results should present
00:11:17.01 exactly those points that you...
00:11:18.24 that logically arise from the data that you have,
00:11:21.01 that don't require a discussion.
00:11:23.09 The data is so good, the data is so solid,
00:11:25.19 that you can simply conclude X from the data
00:11:28.11 that you have.
00:11:30.08 And so, they should draw logically from those results,
00:11:33.17 they don't require a discussion,
00:11:35.07 and they should follow the order
00:11:37.23 that is depicted in the red line that you have.
00:11:41.14 The Discussion, on the other hand,
00:11:45.02 should be those points...
00:11:47.16 those inferences that you make from your data that require discussion.
00:11:52.00 The data is not so solid, so you can... so not...
00:11:54.22 so not every reader is going to agree
00:11:57.01 that you can draw the following inference or the following conclusion
00:11:58.24 from the data than you have.
00:12:00.14 So, that's what goes into the Discussion.
00:12:03.05 That's the main meat of a Discussion part.
00:12:05.03 And of course, the Discussion
00:12:07.05 also includes interpretation of hypotheses.
00:12:08.20 But the Discussion also allows you
00:12:11.01 an opportunity to protect the integrity of the paper
00:12:14.12 that you wanted to write,
00:12:16.21 and to make sure that it's not...
00:12:19.03 becomes the paper that the reviewers want you to write.
00:12:22.08 And therefore, the Discussion offers the opportunity
00:12:24.06 to anticipate criticisms,
00:12:26.20 to say, we understand that this experiment has other...
00:12:30.23 other interpretations.
00:12:32.10 And here, in the future, one could imagine
00:12:34.12 doing the following experiment that would clarify it.
00:12:36.24 That basically allows you to control what you consider
00:12:41.03 being inside the scope of your paper
00:12:42.20 and things that will be outside the scope of your paper.
00:12:45.01 And it prevents reviewers from coming back at you,
00:12:47.19 saying, you've got to do the ten extra follow...
00:12:49.21 the following ten extra experiments
00:12:51.23 before we'll be able to accept your paper.
00:12:54.00 So, that is a point that is a very valuable thing
00:12:57.19 to contribute to your Discussion,
00:12:59.09 and it also allows you to sort of
00:13:02.14 increase the level of scientific discourse
00:13:05.14 about the manuscript that you have.
00:13:07.09 So, those are the main points that I have about scientific writing.
00:13:09.16 That it's an essential part of the critical thinking process.
00:13:12.07 It's something that you should be doing
00:13:14.14 while you're experimenting, particularly that red line.
00:13:16.19 And it's something that you should do every day,
00:13:20.07 particularly at the time when the rating...
00:13:22.11 the writing part of your brain works best.
00:13:25.02 For me, that's mornings,
00:13:26.19 but for other people it's late at night.
00:13:28.17 And you should just do your writing at the time
00:13:30.20 when it's least painful.
00:13:32.17 So, I hope these thoughts will help you
00:13:34.23 be able to carry out this really important part
00:13:37.11 of your professional obligation,
00:13:39.08 which is to write up your experiments
00:13:41.08 and have them ready for peer review.
00:13:43.16 Thanks for your attention.

This Talk

Speaker: Ian Baldwin

Audience:

Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Student
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Researcher
Educators

Recorded: June 2016

Talk Overview

Scientific writing is a crucial skill that scientists develop throughout their careers. In this talk, Dr. Ian Baldwin provides his perspective on the best scientific writing practices and gives some tips on how to improve one’s scientific writing skills. He encourages scientists to write as they perform their experiments, emphasizes the importance of providing a clear message, and introduces reverse engineering techniques as an important tool to reach a concise, but clear introduction

Speaker Bio

Ian Baldwin

Dr. Ian Baldwin is a professor and director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology where he studies the Nicotiana attenuata as a model organism to understand how plants solve ecological problems. Baldwin received his AB in Chemistry and Biology from Dartmouth College in 1981 and started his graduate studies at Cornell University where… Continue Reading