Where Do Scientists Learn to Write?

Janet asks “Where do scientists learn to write?” Well, actually, being a good academic, she asks many more questions than that:

  1. Do scientists need to write well? If so, in what contexts and for what audiences? If not, why not?
  2. Where do scientists really learn to write? What kinds of experiences shape their writing? Are these teaching scientists to write clearly and effectively? Are they entrenching bad habits?
  3. Where do you think scientists ought to learn to write? What are the most important things they need to learn about writing in a scientific context? What are the best ways to learn these things?
  4. Are scientists better off learning to write from scientists or non-scientists? Why?
  5. Are scientists better off learning to write in a classroom setting or in a more “realistic” setting? Why?

Update: Janet has more,
including factors that influence writing quality.

The short answer to the short question is: Grad school, at least for me. Everything I know about good scientific writing, I learned in graduate school.

Of course, I’m also an academic, so I can’t leave it at that, not when there are all these other questions demanding longer answers…

1) Do scientists need to write well? Absolutely. It’s hard to convince students of this, but good writing is essential. Lifting a paragraph from the guide to lab writing I use in the intro classes:

As a scientist, you can go into the lab and take data worthy of a Nobel Prize, but if you can’t explain the results of your experiments clearly and concisely in written form, you may as well not have done them. The key to all of modern science is reproducibility– for a result to be accepted as the correct result, other experimenters need to be able to reproduce the result. For that to be possible, you need to be able to explain to other researchers all around the world what your results were, how you got those results, and why those results are important. If you can’t write clearly, you’ll never succeed in communicating your results well enough to get the credit you deserve.

The other important context in which good writing is essential for scientists is grant writing. Modern science is expensive, and at some point, you’re going to need to convince somebody to give you money to do your research. That will require writing a proposal of some sort, and your success will depend in part on how clear and persuasive your writing is.

2) Where do scientists really learn to write well? I’ve talked before about the “paper torture” process my research group in grad school used. Basically, when it came time to write up a paper, somebody would be designated to write a draft, and then there would be a meeting at which the co-authors would rip the draft to pieces. We would argue about every sentence, and sometimes about every word. These meetings could drag on for hours, but nothing went out the door without every author on the paper being satisfied that it was right.

It was a miserable process while I was in the middle of it, but it made me a better writer. I learned what to do, and more importantly what not to do by having my rough drafts torn up and stomped on in front of my face. To this day, I tend to write by doing a rough draft and then asking myself “Where would I have problems in paper torture?”

(It’s not a fast process, though, and I’ve internalized it enough to keep me from ever being a really prolific blogger– even in an informal context like blogging, I keep fiddling with the wording of posts as if my advisor were going to be taking a red pen to them later…)

3-5) Where should scientists learn to write? The final three questions are all asking basically the same thing, and it’s a trick question. There’s no one correct answer that will work for everyone– different scientists will learn to write in different ways, and what works for one person may not work for another.

To give slightly more specific answers to some parts of this, I think that scientists should definitely learn scientific writing from other scientists. Ideally, you should learn from someone in the same field that you’re going to be working in, but at the very least, you need to learn from scientists, not humanities types.

I would say something similar for any field– law students should learn legal writing from lawyers, humanities students should learn writing from humanities faculty, etc.– because each field of study has its own quirks and conventions, and the only way to learn them is to write within that field. Scientific writing is different than scholarly writing in the humanities– for one thing, very few scientists write books– and scientific writing in physics is different than scientific writing in chemistry or biology. (I know this because the chemists and biologists at work teach their students to do some things in lab reports that drive me up the wall…)

The best example probably has to do with writing length. Scholars in the humanities are expected to produce books, or failing that, journal articles that run to tens of pages, and their writing reflects that expectation. Most scientists write primarily for journals (other than the Ph.D. thesis, most scientists don’t ever write full-length books), and papers running to tens of pages are fairly common. In physics, though, the top journal (Physical Review Letters) has a strict limit of four pages, including all figures, tables, and references. That limit forces a certain economy of style, in order to pack as much as possible into a short space without completely losing the reader, and causes physics papers to read very differently from papers in disciplines that don’t regularly work under such tight constraints.

As for the appropriate context in which to learn writing, I would tend to lean toward a “realistic” setting rather than a classroom setting. That may just be me, though– I never found formal writing instruction to be all that useful, and really only learned to write papers when I had to start doing “paper torture” in grad school. I think it’s a little too easy to shrug off classroom assignments for the important lessons to really take hold, even if writing quality is graded heavily.

I’d love to find a way to simulate “paper torture” in a classroom context, but I think the mechanics of this would be really difficult. I’m not sure how to grade students on their participation in such a process, or how to get them to tak it seriously enough to really learn the important lessons. The goal would have to be to get them to torture their own papers, but I’m not sure that a one-term class for a single grade is really going to be enough to accomplish that. I’m open to suggestions, though…

(The other good “learn to write” strategy I would suggest is “marry a lawyer.” These days, when I have something really important to write, I get Kate to go over a draft for me. She spots all sorts of problems that slide right past my eyes, and never fails to improve my writing.

(Of course, this is perhaps not the most practical strategy for students in general. Particularly because Kate’s alreayd married to me, and you can’t have her…)