By Naureen Hameed
At every stage of our PhD, we are assigned writing tasks where we must often describe obscure technical and scientific concepts. As trainees, we must consistently write about our work through progress reports, applications for grants, manuscripts, and thesis. A deadline approaches, and the dread sets: How will I get this done? We stare at the blank page in front of us, willing the words out of our minds to form some coherent sentence from whence to start. A few graduate students and I found ourselves attending a four-hour-long writing workshop hosted by iJOBS one Friday afternoon to figure out if there was any way to make this mountain of a task any easier. Dr. Judith A. Swan, the director of the writing program at Princeton, was there to help: “You are not alone.” With her easy demeanor and excellent communication skills, Dr. Swan convinced the room that we already knew how to do our task and motivated us to do it.
The audience shared how hard it is to write well, and Dr. Swan validated our experiences. According to her, planning and disengaging before getting our prose onto a page is a necessary part of the pre-drafting stageof writing. Since writing is also part of “doing” science, it requires adequate time and energy to do it well, hence our shared need for this stage. The following drafting and revision stages need the appropriate setup done in the pre-drafting step, so spending quality time in this phase is recommended. So, what do we focus on when writing?
The biggest takeaway from this workshop was to give in to the idea that writing belongs to readers. It does not matter what the writer intended to write but rather what the reader interprets from the writing. Dr. Swan described this shift in thought as a “breakthrough” in composition, as writing before was not audience-centered. All scientific writing is also made to serve an audience, but trainees are often not trained well enough to write in this reader-centered manner. Instead, we are caught up in the jargon, structure, and flow of our writing rather than the energy it takes to read, and the expectations derived from our scientific prose.
Dr. Swan states that the energy readers put into writing is a consequence of the human cognitive load. From her training as a neuroscientist, Dr. Swan related how our cognitive load tends to be limited. Hence, our scientific prose should be constructed in such a way as to conserve the reader’s energy towards interpretation rather than structure. Appropriate sentence structure with correct usage of punctuation can create the necessary places for information retention, emphasis, and interpretation. Below is a general schematic of how sentences can be structured (taken from Dr. Swan’s information packet) to create the desired effects on our readers. But remember: the one rule of writing is there are no fixed rules!
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TOPIC |
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STRESS |
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Old, familiar information |
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New, important information |
Figure 1: Schematic of expected sentence structure
Energy for reading can also be created by managing the expectations of our readers. Dr Swan highlighted how Western society is obsessed with closure, as seen with popular media, and how whole storylines revolve around it. By satisfying this closure expectation, we can create energy- easing our audience's cognitive load to continue reading our tedious scientific prose. We do this by making a clear buildup that is appropriately placed, leading them to a point of emphasis, and finally providing them with the conclusion- almost like a simulated aha! moment.
Dr. Swan acknowledges that writing well is hard, but an advantage of scientific writing is that it is done collaboratively. With that in mind, why not join a writing group for the next writing assignment? Rutgers Writing Center offers classes and writing groups that graduate students can join that will help keep us accountable for our writing pace as well as give us the opportunity to receive and offer feedback to other trainees. Using this network of readers and writers will ultimately shape us into better science writers who can better gauge how an audience will read our work and, hopefully, help remove that dread that accompanies us when we must write.
This article was edited by Junior Editor Janaina Cruz Pereira and Senior Editor Joycelyn Radeny.