During my office hours today, a student asked me whether, when I was a chemistry student, the people teaching me chemistry also took steps to teach me how to write. (The student’s experience, in an undergraduate major in a scientific field I won’t name here, was that the writing intesive course did nothing significant to teach good writing, and the assignments did very little to improve students’ writing.)
It’s such a good question, I’m going to repackage it as a set of questions to the scientists, scientists-in-training, and educators of scientists:
- Do scientists need to write well? If so, in what contexts and for what audiences? If not, why not?
- 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?
- 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?
- Are scientists better off learning to write from scientists or non-scientists? Why?
- Are scientists better off learning to write in a classroom setting or in a more “realistic” setting? Why?
I’ll say more about my writing education as a scientist after I’ve heard what you all have to say about the issue!
The only meaningful writing education I had:
1) A grants class in graduate school, in which we wrote a mock-NIH grant application over one semester.
2) Going through the actual process of writing, revising, and generating figures for publications with my mentors.
When I was at JMU getting a CS degree, the English department offered a 300 level Technical Writing class that was on the verge of becoming a requirement for all B.S. degrees.
For myself, it certainly improved my documentation and article writing more than writing essays on Moby Dick ever did in high school or English 101 classes.
The real issue with 100-level English classes and non-English majors is that they are being tested on both writing well AND becoming “experts” at the subject matter. This is the flaw as most geeks in the sciences don’t necessarily care about the literature in question or about the types of writing assignments given.
Technical writing, by contrast, allows one to write where one already is an expert. The *confidence* one gets when one can be sure that the meaning is correct and all one is trying to do is get it across correctly is far better than the nervousness one feels when one not only has to present the essay well but also be presenting the interpretation the teacher is expecting.
Most geeks don’t care about trivialities that English classes make you obsess over to get an ‘A’, and learn the hard way that if you don’t interpret a work the same way the teacher did, you won’t get that ‘A’ either. In Tech Writing, the teacher’s opinion of the subject matter becomes irrelevant and that is a major help over a particularly nasty stumbling block.
Or at least, that was my experience.
On the web. By trolling the web, I have learned to keep my writing short and pithy.
2 events had meaningful impact on my writing skills.
1) Trying to learn a foreign language. Although I never really succeeded in conquering the language, I did learn English grammar from a new angle
2)I took a business organization class where the professor would rant about the use of pronouns in students essays. Every since I heard her say that, I always tried to limit my pronoun use which subsequently made me realize I had no idea what I was saying in the first place. Her rant gave me a good focus point for writing future papers.
I didn’t learn to write science any. where. at. all. I never got substantial critiques of my graduate school papers (some checks at certain paragraphs, underlining of a few sentences, and a few yes! and no! comments in the margins was the best feedback I ever got).
I learned to write by deciding my dissertation wasn’t going to write itself and wasn’t going to get better with feedback (since I wasn’t getting any) so I started reading books about writing. I read Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power and Writing Without Teachers, I read Writing your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, I read Effective Grant Writing and a number of other books.
What these books largely taught me is that I needed to be willing to make a mess and then revise. Get all my ideas out that I think are so brilliant, then go back and clean up what I wrote to get a revision that actually presents those ideas. Revise, revise, revise.
Scientists should learn from scientists… but those teachers must actually know how to write with power and present ideas well, not write with jargon, and they have to be engaged and committed to teaching writing. It’s hard to find a willing teacher who knows how to do it and is a scientist. Thus, for the most part, I think it makes sense to at least give the non-scientists a crack at it. At least we’ll learn something that way.
I took an excellent essay writing class in high school. I would definitely recommend such a class for science undergraduates.
Other than that, I wrote the occasional paper in college, for biology classes and for humanities classes, but there wasn’t much feedback on the writing itself or on issues of clarity & structure. I imagine the practice was helpful nevertheless. Also, similar to RobertC’s experience, I wrote a mock grant application in grad school. Again, this was good practice, but I didn’t get any specific feedback on my writing.
Mostly I think I learned to write on the job, when I wrote my drafts of my first papers, and my co-authors ripped them to shreds
I do think that writing is an important skill for a scientist to have, and that most science undergrads should get more training in writing. I’ve read (in Derek Bok’s recent book) that most science and engineering graduates are worse writers when they leave college than when they entered, which seems ridiculous. If I remember right, he proposes that scientists and english professors should collaborate to teach writing within science classes.
What exactly do you mean by ‘write well’? I assume you mean “How do you learn to write like a grown up scientist”. If that is the question, my answer is “At grad school.” Although that is a sentence fragment. Which I learned about on The Simpsons. For me, at least, it was only there where you start having daily contact with scientific papers. Before that, I think the high school lab report mentality really predominated how I (and the other students) comunicated science even at university. To me, such writing comes across as closer to ‘What i did on my vacation’ than a scientific paper. Also, having to read and grade reports like this made a good contrast between bad writing and good.
Reading back through this, it seems like I was never really taught writing, although I’m sure I attended classes on it.
As this is the interweb, please ignore any obvious typos inherent in a discusshon of riting.
Get all my ideas out that I think are so brilliant, then go back and clean up what I wrote to get a revision that actually presents those ideas. Revise, revise, revise.
Actually, this I think is the more general problem with “teaching” writing in school. We *know* that we’re supposed to rewrite it regularly, refining each sentence and paragraph ’til it’s clear and concise.
But the typical student lifestyle doesn’t have time for that.
I started writing, or more correctly, I started editing my own writing, when I got out of college. Beyond that point, I only ever had one writing assignment at a time.
But while in school? There was no time to edit a paper since I might have 2 to 5 others all coming due in the same 2 weeks. Some kids are just magical writers (who get it right the first time) or magical editors (who can rewrite something and improve it in an hour), but I was never so fortunate (re: practiced) and didn’t learn how necessary rewriting was until long after my B’s and C’s in certain classes.
I’m a MCDB junior at a major research university. My freshman year, I got tricking into taking a biomedical engineering course (it was cross-listed as “Biotechnology and Human Values”). The course damn near crushed me, but it was the best course I have ever taken. It threw me headlong into molecular biology and advanced experimental design in an interdisciplinary environment. We students were divvied up into groups and given a task within a specific medical branch (for my group, it was cardiovascular health) and told to design an in vivo, minimally invasive assay to diagnose a genetic disease before any of its symptoms manifest. We designed the actual assay, as well as cost-benefit analysis, sensitivity analysis, implementation plans, and QALY analysis. In the end, we churned out a 50 page paper on our system with several appendices. In that environment, challenging and interdisciplinary, I really learned how to write technically well. That we had to sit down with a biomedical engineer several times to critique our writing face-to-face really helped too. So I believe that the best way to learn how to write technically is to have one-on-group critiquing in a scientific context.
I took an unusual path to my phd, a medium-long detour through journalism. I learned to write by writing for a newspaper. My exposure to technical writing (although not so much to academic writing) has convinced me that most engineers simply never learned to write. Most of what they write would be C-level in high school, despite the fact that most of what my community produces is delivered in the form of reports. The only thing that saves them is that no one ever reads the reports. If you hadn’t guessed, I work for a government contractor.
UofT has several writing centres for these purposes, but since it’s not mandatory only students that are concerned about their writing take these courses.
I am going to take this moment to plug a book that has gotten me through a writing slump or two…
The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science by Scott L. Montgomery.
In addition to having a good set of examples to follow, reading the first Chapter alone just makes me want to write and want to do it well.
As for the actual learning process, my thoughts in no particular order:
-I didn’t learn to write a proper essay until grade 12 and even then only because I had a specific teacher who was devoted to the task and felt that it was an important lesson for people to learn.
-Learning to write as a scientist has been a lot different. Lab reports are barely expected to be more eloquent than extended point form and so the writing part isn’t very emphasized. It was in the fourth year lab course that we got our first real seminar about how to write well in science… and that was because the ‘article style’ write up of our first experiment had been so poorly done the instructor took it upon himself to teach us so he wouldn’t be put through that experience again.
-I think that we are expected to learn how to write from all of the reading that we do. That and the corrections we get from advisors and co-authors when it is finally time to do some writing.
-I think learning to write an essay in an arts style is helpful for learning to write in science even if the formats can be very different. Learning how to phrase an argument and use language eloquently is a valid skill even if most science writing tends to be very technical and concise. Understanding word choice is a very important tool in both situations as well
-That said, it would have been nice to have had some introduction to science writing by scientist. We are taught for so long to have very distinct sections with the headers: objective, apparatus, theory, etc… and somehow from this we are supposed to deduce how to write good papers. Scientist are generally intellegent people but I’m sure most of us didn’t go into the field because our greatest talent was writing.
I’ll second a lot of what Joe has said, particularly about being able to focus on writing because you know the subject matter already.
I learned to write two ways. One was by reading, reading, reading, and consequently mimicking the voices of the writers I liked. The other was, after college, doing some freelance sports reporting in my area of (athletic) expertise. It was quite revealing, and since I was working for a very good editor at the time, I learned more than I ever would have in a classroom. (Interesting: one learns more from editors than from teachers?)
I spend a *huge* amount of time with each of my trainees working with them on their writing. My mentors did this with me, and I am carrying on their excellent tradition. The only way to learn to write well is to work with conscientious and adept editors.
A very pertinent and often unattended question indeed.
Perhaps one I would reply to with something like:
1-5) Out of the sheer need and lack of council. Studying plant biochemistry in a non english language country did the trick for me. That and some 20-30 fantasy books (from J.R. Tolkien to Terry Brooks)
Not that fantasy could do the trick, but it can be the answer to most of the questions posted. In my point of view, and in order to write better, scientists should do more of the “reading part” first – and I am definitely not talking about computer game instruction pages, nor IRC chat logs.
I am Portuguese btw.
Funny, I just bought three writing reference books tonight.
If graduate school teaches you anything, it teaches you how to find the answers to any question through research.
I taught a four-hour workshop last week at Yale for science graduate students on writing about science for the lay audience (course page). I think that the skills scientists can develop in writing clearly and engagingly for the public can only help in writing scientific papers. After all, aside from the few other people who specialize in your sub-sub-sub-specialty, other scientists need to be guided skillfully through a description of your research.
You read enough papers and sooner or later you’re going to pick up the standard expressions and textual mannerisms in your field even without being conscious of doing so.
As for actual writing and composition _skill_ – I’m looking at the pile of papers I’m going through in preparation for a paper of mine, and can confidently say that no, most scientists never learn to write at all. Fortunately, the standard format, the common expressions and judicious use of illustrations and math enables you to still decipher the meaning when the prose is lacking.
High school. But that was British-style A-Levels, with 3 essays to write in a 2-hour exam.
I’m reminded of the first time my Ph.D. mentor and I sat down to review an early draft of my first journal paper. I’ll never forget what he said, “Todd, you write really well. Now, I’m going to rip you a new one.” My adviser was essentially telling me that I could write, but I needed to learn how to communicate science. It’s not important who teaches scientists how to write, but they do need to learn the process of science communication from a scientist.
As a teacher, I get kids to read popular science (Sagan, Schwarz, Park) to appreciate scientific thinking. From there, I ask them to do short writing assignments which emphasize clarity and efficiency. It’s not enough, but at least I’m telling the students that, even though I’m not an English teacher, I think effective communication is important
I think that writing well, in a literary sense, becomes increasingly important during the latter part of a scientist’s career. For example it may determine whether his or her papers are accepted to premiere journals (i.e. Science and Nature) and whether he or she has opportunities (or, as some people view them, obligations) to write for non-scientists. Theoretically a liberal arts education should give one a grounding in written expression, but the quality of basic English or technical writing courses is highly teacher-dependent and many of these skills arise (or don’t) naturally.
But mostly the important thing is being able to write according to scientific convention: construction journal articles and grant proposals in the style that editors and so forth expect. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be a concern in most graduate programs. I’ve gained what skills I possess by mimicking my graduate advisor, who is (fortunately for me) a good writer. Recently I was given my first opportunity to referee a paper and, having no idea how to write a review, I had to draw on the reviews of my own papers. Learning to write by imitation is fine if you’re lucky enough to have good models to work from, but a graduate-level course on the basics of being a scientist – including writing papers and grant proposals as well as other issues such as how to develop a research program and select graduate students – woudl be invaluable.
Where I learned:
1. In my suburban NJ high school (Essex County, Janet) every senior had to write a “senior theme” on either a controversial subject or a subject that would require considerable library research — minimum of 20 pages, plus bibliography.
2. College freshman year, every student had to write a 500 word essay every week as part of the English course. The 500 word limit taught us brevity.
3. Every course in college except math had at least one essay question on every exam. I once earned a ten point bonus on a Political Science final for getting all the essays written and correct using one full blue book less than any other student.
4. Junior year biology majors had to choose a topic approved by faculty and then research and write a “review” paper of the major literature on their topic. Meetings of the all the majors together with faculty discussed the topics and progress in writing. Grammar and spelling were part of the grade. This was on top of all course work.
5. Senior biology majors had to design and undertake an original research project and then write a full “scientific paper” on their project. C or better grade required to graduate. Again, periodic discussions with other majors and faculty were required.
Once out into the real world, more often than not I wound up proofing, editing, and sometimes rewriting papers for both PIs and clinicians who had gone to universities that didn’t require rigorous writing in order to graduate.
I agree with Janne, the scientific papers themselves demonstrate that most scientists have not learnt how to communicate. In fact, I vaguely remember a study that illustrated poor scientific communication skill can be beneficial to the reception of your work.
At some point, we relearn the errors of our predecessors.
I’ll have to agree with Janne and JJ, most of the scientific papers I read are not that well written. I am just about to finish my undergraduate degree and I think I have learned how to write better while at school. The professor of my majors writing class is a very good writer and pushed me to write clearer. The class is also the only geology course (resources and policy) the biology environmental science students have to take and that also helped. One must be clear when one barely understands the subject.
In our ecology class we wrote a scientific paper as a class. Because most scientific papers are not solo affairs he wanted us to be able to write as a team. We also wrote a solo scientific paper for that class and we had to peer review all the other papers twice (the advantage of a 2+2 program at a CC, very small classes, 7 in that class, in upper level).
I know that English 101/102 courses can be useless depending on the professor. I got lucky, my 101 was way back in 1980 and a very good liberal arts college and it was very rigorous. I just took 102 last fall and had a wonderful professor. He was more concerned that you knew how to research and used your sources properly, not that you agreed with the lit crit he liked. But English professors like him are the exception.
As an undergraduate I had the opportunity to take many courses that were an undergrad/graduate student mix. Most of these were fairly small seminar-style classes in which we’d read 1-2 papers for each class and discuss them. Reading that many journal articles taught me more about the science than any cinder-block-sized textbook could have, with the added bonus of exposing me to a scientific writing style. In high school and in my non-science college courses I was always a strong writer and made A’s on most of my papers, so once I established a sort of “style guide” for myself, I was able to churn out a review paper for a science class very easily. The hard part would be the days and days of background research before I could write a single word… I think that those reading/writing journal article assignments, while extremely difficult, were the best thing about my education.
I’ve learnt writing from reading lots – I was a ridiculously undiscerning reader in my younger years, so I picked up a great deal about different styles and voices, and what worked and what didn’t.
Any facility with scientific writing comes from all the papers I read in my later undergraduate years – even if a large number of them were an illustration of How Not To Do It.
Ping.
The most difficult class I took as an undergrad oceanography major was Scientific Writing. It was taught in conjunction with one of our core science classes and it was a requirement. The first things we did was review current literature and dissect some current papers for their writing content and style. Then, we had to write our own. Over the course of the semester I think we wrote 3 papers. One review paper, and two research papers. I have NEVER received a paper so covered in red ink as that first paper I turned in for that class. But the good thing is that I learned a) how to edit and b) how to take criticism of my writing and turn that into a really good paper. Because it was never criticism of my ideas and my conclusions. It was criticism of my communication. And that course taught be more about how to be a good EDITOR of my work than anything else I’ve done since.
I think all undergrad science majors should have to take a truely difficult, time consuming, and rather ego-busting course like that.
Just to add to the noise…
I learned to write during and after my PhD, just by doing. The place I did my PhD (err, best known for its compost) didn’t run any writing courses whilst I was there, so it was just through the application of my supervisor’s red pen.
Now I’m supervising students, I get to wield the red pen. It’s fulfilling to see how students’ writing improves: a lot of it is learning how to structure arguments, and the literary culture of the scientific paper. I think courses can be a big help here: they let you see the whole process in an intensive session, so that when you sit down to write your first paper, you know where it’s going.
Incidentally, because I’m a Brit living in Finland, I get to see a lot of papers for language correction. Finnish is not an Indo-European language, so their grasp of English grammar isn’t as natural as other Europeans’: I often end up doing mass surgery just on the definite articles. To agree with Jorge, One colleague observed that she could always tell the students who read English novels, because they always wrote better.
Bob
P.S. that last sentence should be re-written, shouldn’t it. Anyone have a red pen handy?
An an ESL grad student, my only writing experience has been writing a NIH-style grant proposal for my prospectus. I wrote a few conference publications by mimicking my PIs ‘style’. I have learned a lot by lurking on random blogs.