Quick: what’s your stereotype of a scientist.  Is it someone wearing a lab coat, looking with awe at some colorful substance in a clear glass?  Is it someone frantically writing on a black board, a la “A Beautiful Mind”?  Someone who might be more interesting in reading comic books than talking with fellow humans?

Those stereotypes don’t have a lot to do with the life of the vast majority of scientists I know.  We do a lot of things, and the balance among them changes with time and with job title.  Yet, there is one thing we must all do: communicate ideas with other people (including future versions of yourself!).  And much of that time, the form of that communication is written (see a later post about other forms of communication).

Now that I am a professor (of physics and astronomy), I spend a large percentage of my time writing.  Email is but a small part of it.  I write grant and observing proposals.  I write letters of recommendation.  I write scientific papers.  I write memos.  I write assignments for my students.

But this was not always the case.  As a graduate student, I did nearly 100% of the calculations for my PhD thesis before I started writing 90% of my thesis.  I wasn’t really into the writing, so I just didn’t do it until I absolutely had to.  And it was a disaster.  I felt totally overwhelmed in a way that I’d never been before (or since!).  Especially if you’re out of practice writing, it feels impossible.  Every word is a challenge.  Eventually, I got out of the (very deep) funk and started writing every day.  But it set me back months and months, as I had to battle my own overwhelmed ness and stress as well as try to reconstruct and write about what I’d done two years previously.  The silver lining was that I kept copious hand-written notes throughout my project, in a series of spiral-bound notebooks that I’ve shlepped across the country as I’ve moved.  But still, writing my thesis remains one of the worst experiences of my life, even though I am proud of the final product.

So, do yourself a solid and write every day.  Keep a lab notebook to keep track of what you do.  Document your code so that it will be easy for you or someone else to come back to one day.  As soon as you finish part of a calculation or experiment, write it up in LaTeX or Word or whatever is the most common software in your field.  Keep a living document for the paper (or thesis) your work is destined for, even if it’s basically just a detailed outline and you keep drafts of, for example, the methods section somewhere else because you want to work on the narrative and framing of your paper before importing text from somewhere else.  Writing becomes easier as you do more of it, and more regularly (just like every other learned skill in life); and by writing as you go, you parallelize the calculation/experiment and writing of your paper.  It’s just a much more efficient use of your time than doing it in series.  And it’s the best way at getting better (side note: getting feedback is one of the most critical steps of writing, and it’s the key to improvement.  Try not to take constructive criticism personally; you have to get feedback in order to get better.  Unconstructive criticism or meanness is a whole other kettle of fish.).

Writing is often the #1 way you communicate your work with other people.  If you don’t communicate your ideas and work to other people, you might as well not have done your experiment or calculation in the first place.  Science is a human activity, a series of conversations.  Be part of it!

One of our OSU graduate alumni has written on just this topic, so if you don’t want to take my word for it, take hers.  If you’re at OSU, you can get personalized writing help for free from the Writing Center.

Happy writing!