Monday, July 2, 2018

Writing Workshop: Introduction



[Note: Most of the material from these writing workshop blog posts, plus a lot more never-blogged material, is now available in my book, The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia.]

If you do research for a living, you have to write. Researchers write to tell people about the work we’ve done, and to ask for money to do more. When we are evaluated, it is the things we have written (especially journal articles and grant proposals) that matter. But writing is not only more important than most of our other work activities, it is also more difficult. Reviewing literature, designing experiments, collecting and analyzing data . . . these are all pretty easy things to do once you know how. Not so with writing. Writing is a form of thinking, so it never becomes automatic. It always requires your complete attention.

I love writing. To me, it feels like a kind of meditation: Every day before I’ve written, I feel vaguely tense and anxious. After I’ve written for fifteen or twenty minutes, I feel much better. I don’t just enjoy the act of writing itself; I also enjoy reading about writing, thinking about writing, and talking about writing with other people.

That works out well for me because as a professor, I meet a lot of people (especially early-career scientists like assistant professors, postdocs and graduate students) who struggle with writing and want to talk about it. That makes them different from most mid- and late-career scientists, who also struggle with writing but don’t want to talk about it.

A big problem with graduate training is that students are taught how to conduct research, but not how to write about it. When I ask people why, they sometimes say that students should already know how to write before they come to graduate school. But that makes no sense-- we’d never say that about other essential professional skills, such as experimental design or data analysis.

Another thing people sometimes say is that writing can’t be taught. I disagree. It’s true that the problem is a complicated one, but surely it’s not more complicated than the ones we all tackle in our research. As social scientists, we routinely break huge, intractable problems down into many smaller, tractable ones. Then we focus on solving the small problems one at a time. Why can’t we do that with writing? When someone says, "Writing can't be taught," what they’re really saying is, "I don't know how to teach it."

This absence of training is not working out well for us. Most scientific writing is miserable to read: Boring, confusing, hard to follow. I speak from experience. I’ve reviewed articles for dozens of journals, and grant proposals for the major American funding agencies in my field (the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences), as well as for funding agencies in Europe and the Middle East. Most of these submissions are a punishment for the reader.

It's not that they are ungrammatical or sloppy; the authors are smart, highly trained people who have worked hard on the documents. The problem is that the authors don't know how to communicate their thinking in a way that is understandable to a reader-- even a reader like me, who has expertise in the same area of science. I have to work so hard to understand what the authors are trying to say that by the time I finish reading their submissions, I feel fatigued and annoyed. And that doesn't help the authors' chances of getting published or funded.

The current system of non-training not only produces a lot of bad writing, it also makes people feel terrible. Harvard PhD student Dwayne Evans (@RunDME) captured it well in this tweet:

When people said "grad school is hard" I thought they meant the "pushed outside your comfort zone" kind of hard, not the "sobbing uncontrollably for 20 minutes in a stairwell for the 5th time this semester" hard. I guess I missed the memo...

When faculty members don’t talk about how hard writing is, we inadvertently hide our own difficulties with it and send our students the implicit message that writing should be easy. Then, when students have trouble with writing (like we do), they keep it secret (like we do) and often wind up feeling like frauds in their own profession (like we do). Without wanting to, we reproduce the imposter syndrome in each new generation of writers. It’s the apprenticeship model of graduate training, and not in a good way.

These posts are based on the graduate seminar in scientific writing that I’ve taught for the past few years at the University of California-Irvine. My goal is to capture the experience of our writing workshop in these posts and make them available to everyone. I’ve talked about these issues a lot with social and behavioral scientists ranging from full professors to new PhD students. But I hope the posts will be helpful to anyone who wants to manage time better, to use writing to clarify their thinking, and to convey complicated information in a way that is as clear and understandable as possible.

If you’re organizing a writing workshop like ours, here’s a sample schedule you can follow. But these posts can only give you the recipe for a workshop. The real value is in the social support and accountability that you create with your fellow writers. So even if you’re not part of a formal workshop, I have one request for you: Don’t read these posts alone. Find a friend who is also interested in reading them--someone who wants to sit down once a week and make their writing plan while you make yours; who will join you in keeping an online writing log and rejection collection (I will explain what these are later); who will meet you at a cafe to write on site and give you feedback on the occasional outline. Social support and accountability are free when you have a friend, and they can give your writing a huge boost. I hope you will take advantage of that.

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