I’ve been recommended by my PhD supervisor to watch the video Demystifying the Writing of a Scientific Paper. Super interesting and fully recommendable in my opinion too. As a teaser I’ll present a summary here, that I will structure in 3 axis: plagiarism, clarity and revision.

Plagiarism

The definition she gives of plagiarism is ‘using their ideas without explicitely acknowledging the original source’. I guess it’s fairly obvious what it means. Rules are inflexible and it’s easy to detect. The part I used to wonder about was, what to do when something is so well written in the original article, that any rephrasing would make it worse. They spent years of research to distill their ideas into their most compact and clean version. Do I copy paste with quotes? What if I already cited the article above. Do I have to cite it again when I make these references to their text or is it enough citing the article once to avoid adding extra characters to the text that will make it longer.

I liked her suggestion: rephrase everything anyway. You want to work on your communication skills since if you chose to do a PhD, is probably because you want to communicate new ideas, so, you can only gain by taking every opportunity to work on your communication skills. Rinse and repeat.

Clarity

Clarity makes the best impression. It is a mistake to think that you will gain something by making things look complicated: what you write should appear clear. Things can be complicated, but look simple. I liked an idea she stated in relation to this: when you will measure how successful you were, you will measure it by what you did, but as well by what others did because of what you did. Clarity is thus a tool to help others use your work.

She suggests to be precise. Avoid generalities: the behaviour was good, better. Avoid listing the obvious and don’t repeat what is in the graphs. And avoid redundancy, you are going to lose the reader and they are going to think you don’t have as much to contribute. If you repeat something important say why, don’t just repeat it.

Use simple declarative sentences, eliminate all unnecessary words, use paragraphs because they let us catch our breath mentally. Be aware of the tendency to read first line of each paragraph/section, and place there the main ideas.

Tell a story, no sudden ideas, no meandering. Don’t start with the day you were born: chronology of ideas is not usually relevant. Order of presentation is the most difficult part and most important: before you start writing, think on the flow of the ideas, practice it with your workmates, after lunch try a different order. Explain the way you wished you got there, the quickest and clearest. That’s a cool way to put it.

Revision, revision, revision

If to sell a house the three most important things to consider are location, location, location, to write an article the three most important things are revision, revision, revision (RRR). It’s not only about the edits, the grammar, spelling: it applies to the flow of ideas.

There’s no way you will write a good paper on the first try, even having written hundreds of articles like she has. And RRR applies to everybody, not only at the beginning of your career. So, be patient. And interesting observation, RRR applies importantly to self revisions: it’s not enough to readjust it once, and send it to a collegue for an advice, you have to revise it many times yourself before asking for an opinion.

Be as well aware of your writer bias, we all have certain tendencies. Some of us tend to be verbose, other terse, other struggle with their English. I think one of my biases is that at times I tend to over argue things. To defend an argument I tend to write too many things to defend it, and that can cause the reader to disconnect, or lose the flow and the purpose of the read. My advisor calls it ‘noyer le poisson’: ‘to drown the fish’. So in the video she says: know your bias, and compensate for that natural bias.

One observation she made that I liked was that you don’t have to stick to the order of ideas of the first version. And a cool advice about it: make sections, paragraphs as independent as possible so in the revision process you can move them around.