Monday, I was lying on my couch (sleep-deprived from a wakeful baby) and decided to do some horizontal work by reading a book I saw on my LinkedIn feed: “A Pocket Guide to Scientific Writing and Publishing” by Martín A. Nuñez. I figured it could have some useful tips, and wanted to see if it was worth recommending.
The title was promising, and the book didn’t disappoint. It basically contains a ton of useful tips on all aspects of writing a paper. I especially liked these little pearls of wisdom: ”[…] people enjoy editing because it’s easier to improve something than to create from nothing”, and “do not be afraid to talk to editors […] you stop being an anonymous author next time you submit to that journal which can help.”
However, there was one piece of advice that bothered me. Nuñez recommends to “write the draft of the abstract first,” because it helps to get a clear sense of what the key messages should be. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain how to do this.
Incomplete advice
I see this more often in academic writing advice: it tells you what to do, but not how to do it – leaving you wondering what exactly you’re supposed to do. Here are some pieces of advice I’ve seen a lot, and why they tend to fall short in practice:
“The methods section should be detailed enough for replication.”
This statement focuses on the outcome, but it doesn’t tell you how to get there. How do you know what’s enough detail? While this is easy to gauge when you’re an experienced writer in your field, when you’re new, it can be much harder to get it right.
“You should start with an outline”
Similar to the “start with the abstract” advice from earlier, this type of advice often comes from peers or supervisors trying to be helpful. They’ll share their process with you – ‘this is what works for me’, but can’t explain why it works for them – or how to do it exactly.
“Write every day”,
Or use the pomodoro technique, or join a writing group. Although I don’t have anything against this type of productivity advice per se (and I’ve even been guilty of it myself), it’s hard to implement if you don’t know what to write about!
“Improve your academic English”
There is a lot of guidance out there on academic English. And yes, it is important to understand academic English and convey your research accurately. However, too much focus on language can give the impression that language is essential for writing papers. It is not – not when you’re still developing your paper. Just write plain English, and edit it later.
You can’t build a chair by sanding the edges alone
So what can you do instead? The key is to shift from what to do, to how to do it. When someone gives you advice, ask yourself: “does this actually solve my problem?” If not, ask them for how, when, and why to implement their advice. If the answer isn’t clear, it’s probably best to look elsewhere.
Think of it like this: if you just joined a carpentry class to learn to build a chair, what would be more helpful: Someone who only tells what the chair should look like? Or someone who also tells you how to build the chair, step by step?
Writing works the same way. You need a process that moves you from raw ideas to a finished manuscript. Here’s a simple framework to guide your paper:
- Researching: capturing your research questions and where they came from, the literature you’ve read, and why you designed your research this way.
- Thinking: making sense of your data – what does it mean for the current state of knowledge?
- Outlining: deciding what information to include in your paper, and in which order
- Drafting: writing the actual paper
- Revising: improving, refining, and polishing your draft with feedback until it’s ready to submit.
Good advice acknowledges that writing is a process. Each of these steps builds on the previous one. Skipping steps makes the process harder and more confusing: it’s easier to start with the foundation first, rather than jumping straight to outlining or writing the abstract.
How to start with the process
It can be surprisingly difficult to start with the process, simply because so much advice focuses immediately on the end product: “Start with the Intro“, “No, start with the Methods!“. Yes, these sections are important, but they only represent the finished product – a journal article with an Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.
I recommend by starting with capturing the research. Often, we skip this, but a lot of writing problems come from skipping this. Feel unsure about your data, or worried that your work is not original enough? Overwhelmed by your many results, and no clue how to write about it? All comes from skipping the research stage of the writing.
If you want to learn more about capturing the research, check out my free mini-course “No More Blank Page”. It teaches the four key elements of a journal article that you develop during the research stage, how you can recognise if you’ve got them right, and what you can do to define them better.