Writing Isn’t Natural—It’s a Skill

Writing was never something I struggled with until I got to graduate school. In college, I recall sitting down at the library and finishing a five-page essay draft in just three hours. With a quick review of what I wrote and only a little bit of editing, I was able to do well on these assignments.

Graduate school is a bit different. I remember sending my first proposal draft to my supervisor, thinking, “Wow! This is so good”. Days later, I received a document back full of red writing, indicating all the things I needed to change. I was happy to receive constructive criticism, especially if it meant helping me improve, but deep down, I was confused. I did great in college - why was it difficult now?

In college, my essays and assignments weren’t being published; no one was going to see them except for my professors. They believed my writing was good and graded it so. But now, as a researcher, my writing can’t just be good; it needs to be great. It needs to tell a story, drawing the reader in and showing them why my research is essential to the conservation of mallards. Then it all hit me - I don’t actually know how to write. I was never taught how to write. Yes, I was taught grammar and how to form a sentence, but no one taught me how to write well. How to write scientifically. In this blog post, I hope you can take some valuable pointers from me and be encouraged in your writing.

First and foremost, do yourself a favor and read Joshua Schimel’s Writing Science: How to write papers that get cited and proposals that get funded. It has changed my life. I’m not just going to repeat the book word by word, but instead, summarize my current thoughts related to scientific writing, including some tips from the book

Up until a few weeks ago, I believed that to be a great writer, you needed to be able to write a perfect first draft (basically ready to publish) the very first time you sat down. Oh boy, was I wrong! I kept getting mad at myself, frustrated that I couldn’t write the words that I saw in published manuscripts. I sat down with a blank Word document open, having no clue how to write that perfectly. Writing to me has been something that you just have to be naturally good at. If you’re not, well, maybe the science field isn’t for you. That statement is 100% false, by the way. Writing is a skill, just like coding, that is developed with learning and practice. Once I realized that (and hopefully you can too!), the narrative is flipped. I get to be in control of how good my writing is.

How do you start?

Knowing that I don’t have to perfectly write a manuscript the first time around, here are the steps that I do to write.

1. Start with a vague outline of ideas. What story do you want your introduction to convey? What figures are you going to create? What tables will you reference in your results?

1. It’s our job as scientists to tell a story in a way that’s easy for the reader to understand.

2. In the manuscript I’m doing now, this was 3 pages

2. Develop the outline further by writing in larger ideas. Think of citations to include and how you can use those citations to prove your point.

1. In the manuscript I’m doing now, I have increased it to 14 pages of information

3. Then, start collating your larger ideas into sentences in paragraph form. These DO NOT need to be good sentences. Just get your ideas out.

4. Go through each paragraph, reminding yourself what story that specific paragraph is telling, and work to make it flow.

1. For me, this looked like carefully reading through each sentence and asking myself, “How could this be better?” and “Is this truly saying what I want it to say?”

5. Then edit.

6. And edit.

7. And edit.

8. And edit.

9. Yay, you’re done!

How do you make your sentences flow and be worthwhile?

Making sentences flow and ideas logically fit together is the toughest part of writing for me. To combat this issue, I followed these ideas from the book mentioned above.

• If a piece of information does not have a specific and concrete role in moving the story forward, it does not need to be included

• I tend to include a lot of FLUFF in my writing, and this tip helped me really think about what was important

• 2-3-1 method

• The 2-3-1 method describes how the stress of a sentence (last part) carries the greatest emphasis, the topic is next, and the middle carries the least.

• Then, make sure the stress of your previous sentence matches the topic of the next sentence.

• Get rid of fuzzy verbs!

• Fuzzy verbs are verbs that mask action and can be confusing. Here’s the example from the book:

• Herbivores facilitate the invasion of exotic grasses by mediating competition between exotic and native plants

• Herbivores preferentially eat native plants, giving exotic grasses a competitive advantage that allows them to invade

• The word facilitate shows that something happened, but doesn’t describe what happened. Take words like these out. Verbs were given a specific meaning, so USE them how they should be used.

• Nominalizations - turning a verb into a noun

• Avoid using phrases such as “conducted an investigation” and “may act as a constraint” when really, you could just be saying “investigated” or "constrained". Again, verbs are important and show the reader action, so use them when you can.

These are just some of the ideas that I took away from the book. Having a new guideline and new “rules” to follow is making writing easier and more fun. In fact, I realized how FUN it is when your brain is working and you figure out how to make a sentence better.

Here’s a sentence that I typed out in my step 3 (just rough writing), and here is how I made it better. For context, I’m talking about different types of bird markers (metal bands, colored bands, etc).

These marking types rarely have a substantial impact on survival, making them great tools to collect information.

When I was writing, I knew I wanted to say something along the lines of how they’re great tools to collect data, but I knew that wasn’t really what I was trying to say.

​Instead, I wanted to communicate that markers are practical to use when studying demography, as they don’t impact survival! So, I changed my sentence to say this:

These marking types rarely have substantial impacts on survival, making them practical to use in demography research.

This still may not be my final sentence, but seeing how my brain understood what I really wanted to say made me very motivated. Writing can be fun. I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the book.

“As a scientist, it is not your job to be right. It is your job to be thoughtful, careful, and analytical; it is your job to challenge your ideas and to try to falsify your hypotheses; it is your job to be open and honest about the uncertainties in your data and conclusions.”