Scientific Writing: Beyond Tips and Tricks

My own experience in grad school: I had great mentors who taught me the practice of doing science, but when it came time to write nobody had any advice. So you just do it as best you know how.

Although my data remained the same, my results did not. The process of writing changed what I thought I had. And in fact, what I had, and what I published, and what I’m known for.

Because the process of writing causes you to learn and discover new things, it is actually a key part of science.

[3:43]

Think about the person who runs your research group. How many of them write about science once a week or more. Guess what, you just signed up for the job of writer. You are going to live and die, not only by the quality of the research you produce, but more by your ability to get it out fast enough and to get it out in the right place, in the hands of the right readers.

[4:37]

Science writing isn’t only hard because you’re writing about numbers/data or images (which economists and art historians do), but because you’re writing multi-author documents. Scientists are de-facto teachers of writing.

I’ve worked with the EPA where they routinely write 2200 page reports with 60+ co-authors.

You are responsible not only for some results that end up in the publication, but also writing up those results, and additionally for giving feedback to all the other people who are writing with you.

Unless your co-authors give you what you want and what you need without any feedback from you, you are in the same situation as a new writing instructor facing their first stack of papers.

[7:22]

Let me tell you a secret that I tell all my students. Your faculty are expert writers. They’re not expert teachers of writing, and they often don’t even have a language for capturing their expertise. They learned it the hard-earned way. They’ve been copy-edited to death, which is the only way we knew how to teach writing until about 30 years ago.

Because they don’t have a language about writing, they don’t have a way to pass on that knowledge. So we have to develop a systematic way to learn and teach these skills.

[10:15]

The research article is shooting a tiny target from far away, it’s a process of erasure.

Early in your graduate career you’re spending all your time figuring out what is needed to convince yourself your data is real, before you can then figure out what is needed to convince other experts your data is real.

Worry about writing from the reader’s perspective.

I actually would define graduate school […] you’re learning to become a professional reader of science.

[11:31]

Reading takes energy

Readers need to figure out “what does this thing mean?”

Writers produce text. Each reader is trying to interpret the text. They are looking at things they know about the writer (their purpose, setting, language, and field) and what the text means in that context. Because of this, there’s no way to control the way that all readers will interpret your text.

I call this the thermodynamics moment […]. Thermo gets recited as: you can’t win, you can only break even; you can’t break even, except at absolute zero; and you can’t get to absolute zero.

We have to think richly about readers.

[14:45]

Readers read for structure. After they’ve interpreted structure, then they go for substance. And reader energy is finite, so the energy spent on structure and substance is zero-sum, so energy spent to figure out the structure is not available to understand the substance.

[16:27]

Bad scientific writing is writing that requires a disproportionate amount of the reader’s energy simply to figure out what it’s all about

[16:48] Reader expectations

If you know something about what readers expect in given locations, you can make predictions about what they do with information in those locations. Research articles are the most structured document type within any academic field: if you want to see the experimental details, you have to look in the Method section.

[18:09] Emphasis

How can we ensure readers emphasize some information as more important than some other information?

Readers emphasize information in the main clause/independent clause over the subordinate clauses. Or information that comes at a point of closure: end of sentence, end of paragraph, end of section, end of paper. Or, something that the paper spends more length/time on. Or, repetition. Semantics/words can also tell you what’s most important, the writer can spell out “this is the most important result”

Traditional writing instruction says that writing is 80% word choice (finding le mot juste), and 20% structure; but the assertion is that readers take 80% of their instructions from structure.

[24:30] First example: the facts do not speak for themselves

4 sentences present the same 2 facts in different sentence structures: Fred is a nice guy (Compliment), Fred beats his dog (Concerning). Our question about these is not what do you think about Fred, but what do you think the author of this sentence wants you to think about Fred?

What does the audience think was the author’s sentiment about Fred?

• A) Although Compliment, Concerning: >90% Negative
• B) Although Concerning, Compliment: >90% Positive
• C) Compliment but Concerning: 60-70% Negative
• D) Concerning but Compliment: 60-70% Positive

Congratulations, Carnegie Mellon, you are a normal audience. I’ve done this about 100 times, most readers respond as you did.

If you were in the minority on any of these positions, don’t worry, you are part of the normal minority. This is precisely because we’re talking about not the reader, there is no such thing as the reader, it’s readers.

Notice that you changed your minds, but the data did not change between these sentences.

We have two clauses, both the same length. And here we see the difference main vs subclause and end vs not end.

• “Although Compliment, Concerning” gives a negative at the end in the main clause, so it makes sense that it was viewed as negative
• “Although Concerning, Compliment” gives the positive at the end in the main clause, so it makes sense that the sentiment was perceived as positive

The other two put two signals of emphasis into conflict.

• (C) “Compliment but Concerning” was mostly negative but conflicted
  • What happens here is not that individuals seesaw between a negative and positive sentiment, but the crowd partitions into negative and positive
  • These results might be explained by end-placement outweighing main clause.
  • Or maybe when structures conflict readers are more prone to weigh the facts according to their own preferences
  • It’s a good thing we controlled for this with a 4th example
• (D) “Concerning but Compliment” was mostly positive
  • So it does seem like structure is causing this, and end position imparts more emphasis than clausal dominance.

If you were ever in the minority here, not only should you feel okay about it, but what you’ve just discovered is that most people don’t read like you. You might need to deliberately, consciously force these cues to align for the reader even when they already feel okay to you.

[34:45] You can use this to induce ambivalence

Sometimes you want to do this.

• F) “Even though he beats his dog, Fred is a good husband, a caring father, a fine colleague, and an altogether nice guy”
  • it comes off as a pro-Fred apology: by the time we’re done with the whole sentence, lots of people have forgotten this
• E) “Fred is a good husband, a caring father, a fine colleague, and an altogether nice guy, even though he beats his dog”
  • Length does seem to have made a difference
  • E communicates that the reader is pro-Fred but is worried about his dog problem.

Length seems to intensify whatever the existing structural elements have communicated.

Suppose you’re a congressperson, you just voted on the controversial MRX plan. You got your arm twisted to vote for it (by your party or whatever), but your constituents are ambivalent about it. You want to avoid alienating constituents on either side so you want to communicate ambivalence.

Or, imagine you voted for it, your district has no problems with it, but it’s 2 years before your re-election, and the plan has risks that might be realized when your election campaign is in full swing. If it blows up, you want to be on the record with reservations. So you wish to name the risks but de-emphasize them.

Suppose the MRX plan is the single issue your constituency sent you to Washington to pass. What do you do? Emphasize pro-MRX in as many ways possible: clausally, positionally, and in length, and bury the caveat.

How many of you got the writing advice to omit needless words? Substantially, needless words are useless; structurally they are ballast that keep the ship afloat.

[42:15]

I’m not saying that structure is 100% and words are zero. Okay? If you have a strong enough word, it can carry the day. For instance, try this sentence: “although Fred’s a nice guy, he commits genocide.”

What happens in this situation is not that the structure is erased in the reader’s mind. The initial pro-Fred statement is so overshadowed by the reader’s negative judgment about Fred that the reader concludes that not only is Fred a bad guy but the writer is a horrible apologist.

Subtly different, “although Fred commits genocide, he’s a nice guy” starts with the huge negative, so the reader who gets to the end will be wondering whether the sentence meant sarcastically/satirically.

Readers read linearly through time and are constructing meaning on the fly based on the substance and the structure.

[46:30] NIH handout

At NIH, they constantly have to tell the people upstairs (who make funding decisions) and principal investigators (who wrote the grant) what the judgment was on the grant.

Structure is invisible rhetoric. We don’t notice it, and so it does things to us and we’re not conscious of it.

As a PI, how would you gauge your likelihood and expected funding based on a given NIH summary?

• (1) “This overall scope, though it might prove to be overly ambitious, is a great conceptual strength of the proposal”
  • this is pretty good
  • The main clause is positive, the end is positive
  • the bad news is buried between the subject and verb, a place where readers don’t pay a lot of attention to
• (2) “Although this overall scope is a great conceptual strength of the proposal, it might prove to be overly ambitious”
  • the words are the same but the structure spells out death
• (3) “This is an exciting, but somewhat flawed application from a creative investigator”
  • this is such a puzzle
  • There are two pieces of good news and 1 piece of bad news. The bad news is muted (“somewhat”), and the good news is structured for emphasis
  • But the piece of good news at the end is about the investigator, not the application.
  • And as we saw before, end position carries slightly more emphasis than main clause
  • By wasting the strongest structural cue for emphasis, we are damning with faint praise
  • It’s not good, but it can be salvaged by the coming sentences.
• (4) “This creative investigator has produced an exciting but somewhat flawed application.”
  • With the bad news emphasized, but counterbalanced by some good news, it’s still ambivalent but a bit worse
• (5) “This creative investigator has produced a somewhat flawed but exciting application.”
  • This is pretty good assessment to receive
• (6) “This creative investigator has produced a somewhat flawed but truly exciting application.”
  • As a PI, you know you just need to clean up the flaw and then it’s green lights all the way.
  • “truly” adds length, and serves to minimize the flaw

[54:36] Exercise: rewrite statements to force positive or negative sentiment

I don’t want you to invent new words. You’ll have to change the words as you move things around, so this is not you can’t change the words at all. But, context controls meaning, so you can always change how we interpret this by telling us all these other things, and I want you to do that.

I want you to discover what structure does for you. Because one of the things that will come out of this experience is that we tend to recognize structural problems in our gut, and then try to solve them by throwing words at them. And words cannot undo a problem of structure.

[1:00:40] Discussion of the exercise

[1:05:00]

Think about how we write. Which clause are you likely to write first? The main clause, right? And the positive, or the clause you want to emphasize most. “This is really good, although there is this problem.”, “This is really horrible, although I guess we could consider it this way.” You hear how we’re gonna spontaneously probably produce the ambivalent structure when we think we’re communicating a strong message one way or the other.

[1:09:00]

I have one rule for talking about writing: No rules. We’re doing epistemology, we’re making truth claims, we’re trying to tell the stories of things that cannot speak for themselves. And that I think is more important than making your English teacher, whoever it was, happy with your sentence. So, I don’t want to turn it into rules. The rules will fail. They will fail. If we had more time I could give you a set of expectations that contradict one another and you’d say “what do I do to get it right?”. It’s right if it’s delivering the message you want to send to the majority of your readers.

[1:19:30] Context controls meaning

We’ve looked at sentences in isolation, which is good for workshopping sentence structure, but a very small part of the picture. The last example was “This is a very short application with little experimental detail by two new investigators who are very well trained in mouse genetics.”, and we worked on ways to rephrase it to come across much more positive or much more negative. But knowing the context, the existing sentence is already crystal clear. The subject of the grant application was mouse genetics, so it seems more positive. But the application was on human genetics.

It’s sort of flat, yeah. It’s only if you’re the PI and you know that the project’s on human genetics and the emphasis is on mouse genetics. At that moment, you know what happened. And I think there’s a covert message in here, that says “Hey guys. Guys, we know who you are. You come from really good labs. We expect good things of you, and we know you’re smart. But you’ve done the classic newbie’s mistake. You have written a proposal out-of-field, without sufficient experimental detail to justify it.” And rather than excoriating them, because they think “You know, you’re really smart, you’re gonna get it, as soon as you show this to anybody (and clearly you didn’t show it to anyone until you sent it to us).” But rather than say “Oh you idiots”, they say “Hey, here’s this thing, here’s the score, and now you know what the problem is.” What’s the implicit instruction? “Elaborate. You’ve got room. Resubmit.” And this is implicit, not a guarantee, but almost a promise here that says, when you resubmit what will study section write? “This application is dramatically improved over the first submission and these very talented investigators […]”

[1:21:55]

You might feel uncomfortable here that I’m asking you to make up stories about your data. You’re tied to your data, and I’m going to trust that you’re faithful to your data. But your data don’t speak. They cannot speak.

You have to go figure out, what do you believe you are allowed to claim on the basis of these data. That’s number one. You must choose. There is no neutral sentence. Every sentence sends instructions, and if the instructions are “I have no instructions” then the message is “and I’m incompetent, don’t listen to me.”

You must make up your mind what you think. You must communicate that to yourself and others clearly. And then, […] you have to listen to what your readers say. There will be arguments, science is contentious, it’s difficult. We see the same thing and we interpret it differently. I want those arguments to be about the substance, and we can’t argue about the substance if the structure fails to transmit that substance clearly to us. That’s your job. You need to decide what your facts are, and then speak for them. That’s whether you’re talking to your other scientists, but especially when you are talking to everyone else.

Listen to readers, they are always right. The reasons they give you for what they think, don’t listen to those. [But permute your structure to emphasize your goals, and resubmit, and see if they now understand/agree more with your point]