When I was young I dreamed of being a writer. Unfortunately, I became aware that a great deal of literature had to do with the quirks and comings-and-goings of people, a subject of which I had only a passing interest. Nonetheless, my dream and the good advice of Mr. Saperstein stayed with me, so I endeavored to write my papers and books in recognizable English.
Recently, I was included as one of several coauthors on a paper. In this capacity, I was assigned to read the draft and make comments. The expectation that I would spot a few typos was quickly shattered. Even though I had spent over a year working on the project, I had no idea what the paper was describing. The accomplishments of the research couldn’t have been hidden better if they were written by Prof. Moriarty in invisible ink. Regarding proofreading, there were two options:
- Completely rewrite the paper.
- Correct the spelling of my name and move on.
I dutifully changed reys to ries. With this experience fresh in my mind, I thought I would offer a few words of advice to authors of scientific papers.
Acronyms
Old people always complain about acronyms. Is it because they can’t remember what they stand for? No, it’s because acronyms are really, really annoying. The paper I attempted to proofread misused acronyms in every conceivable way, even breaking new ground. It defined an acronym in the title! For anyone who cares to know, here are my rules for acronyms;
- An acronym should be introduced as a replacement for a long, multiword name if continually rewriting the full name would make it harder to understand the paper.
- Avoid defining acronyms in the paper abstract, an independent entity. Define acronyms as needed in the paper text.
- To define an acronym, write out the full name followed by the acronym in parenthesis. Thereafter, use only the acronym. Of course, you should not use an acronym before it is defined.
- There is no point defining an acronym if the corresponding term does not appear again in the paper. Use of an acronym is questionable if the term is only used a few times.
- Just because everyone else uses an acronym doesn’t mean you have to.
Narrative logic
Many researchers view writing a scientific paper as life’s most stressful activity. They view the article as a small closet into which every block of text must be crammed. Just when everything is squeezed in, you find that you forgot the exercycle. The criterion of success is that you can close the door.
A better approach is to think of an article as the story of your work. The story should follow a narrative logic with a beginning (precedents, motivation,…) and an end (conclusions). An historical structure is acceptable if other researchers would benefit from knowing why certain approaches were unsuccessful. A good technique to enforce narrative logic is to try to write the “story” of the work in a single paragraph. The sentences will suggest major topic areas that can be expanded into a full outline. Then, relevant blocks of text and illustrations can be pasted into the structure.
Including everything
In younger days, I (like many) included a great deal of information in papers that certainly was not necessary to represent the core of my work. I had worked so hard to get those results and gone down so many blind alleys. Why shouldn’t the reader share my pain, all the better to appreciate my victory? As the years rolled on, my papers got shorter, mainly because I got tired of writing and proofreading filler. So I offer the following difficult-to-follow advice. Even if material is dear to your heart, leave it out if it doesn’t make the reader a better person. For example, does anyone care if you used “an HP XW8400 computers with dual Xeon processors at 3.6 GHz and 8 GB of RAM”?
Excluding marginal material helps achieve a narrative flow. There is less material to cram into the outline, giving a cleaner organization. Readers aren’t sidetracked by digressions, so it is easier for them to understand where you are going.
Outlines
The outliner was a popular program class back in the DOS days. It was a computer version of the procedure you had to learn in Junior High. The program had lots of options: define main topics, add subtopics, divide, promote, demote or move topics. I loved my old outline program and used it extensively when I wrote my textbooks. Dividing a daunting task into several small steps is a good way to avoid writer’s block. A sense of relief proceeded from the ability to add branches and to correct their relationships. Nothing was cast in concrete. The outliner enforced common sense. You had to start from the most general material and work toward specifics. The program was text based so you wouldn’t be distracted by the appearance
Alas, the outliner has almost disappeared. Perhaps the programs were too good, too innocent to survive in a Twitter world of fragmented information. Fortunately, there is at least one excellent freeware program that allows you to build old-fashioned outlines in a full-featured Windows environment. KeyNote is available at
http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html
In addition to outlines for paper and books, KeyNote is a good way to store personal information (passwords, account number,…) with encryption. TreePad is similar program available at
http://www.treepad.com/treepadfreeware/
The freeware version is actively supported but doesn’t include encryptation.