Hello!
This post will focus on scientific writing. Over the last year, I have been preparing the most comprehensive, ambitious and challenging manuscript I worked on during my doctoral studies. It combines the breadth of many scientific topics with the depth required to (hopefully) represent a meaningful scientific contribution while constrained by the article template from the journal to which we intend to submit our work. This manuscript represents the culmination of years of technical work, which genuinely pushed my skills to learn and implement analysis pipelines, and it is also becoming a test of my ability to communicate it with impact. In this post, I would like to share some thoughts on this experience.
Emotional impact
Writing with impact means getting a clear message across the broadest audience. Balancing attention and excitement while maintaining a critical attitude, being convincing without exaggerated claims, and showing comprehensive data while remaining interpretable and understandable. This ability takes effort to develop, and I believe it is just as worthy as the technical knowledge required to operate a device or software that doctoral students acquire with their projects. I apply two strategies to improve this skill: practice writing and reading more literature I consider a role model. For the former, it means creating opportunities to write structured text, with the simplest example being these blog posts, which I aim to write monthly with a similar length and structure. For the latter, it means reading an article to learn about the content and how it is communicated. As hinted in previous posts, I often use social media to find the latest scientific articles. These can be related to my work or broadly about topics I am interested in learning more about, and I do my best to keep them in a reading list that helps me stay up-to-date. During this manuscript preparation phase, I emphasise papers from particular journals that embody the values of science communication I would like to achieve. Journals where papers present substantial scientific and technical contributions, organised in well-structured stories. Inspiring stories that are so convincing they feel like fiction books. These are the papers I strive to find and study the most.
Creating a word bank
After creating a small set of such impactful papers, I work on identifying the core attributes that grabbed my attention. I consider the figure panels and the textual sections, from types of colours and plots to specific sentences used to convey their message. The latter point is especially relevant as, after a few iterations, some common structures and verbs appear more often across articles. This list of words and sentences can be produced for any section or purpose, and as we review more papers, we increase the options available to incorporate into our manuscript. Similarly, by re-reading each list, we can confirm whether each item recreates that sense of impact that first got our attention.
From writing to rewriting
When writing the manuscript, the previous exercise usually helps to know what to write and how to structure each section. Typically, I will first list all the concepts I think are helpful or needed to the story and progressively write a text in a way that converges to the guidelines collected. Here, I would like to underscore the importance of patience and perseverance when the first, second, or third drafts still do not read as smoothly as we would like them to. Accepting (scientific) writing as an iterative process that takes effort and imagination is, in my opinion, a prerequisite to producing a beautiful text we enjoy reading while keeping the scientific rigour we set to ourselves. Switching to more descriptive parts is another helpful trick I use when struggling with specific sections. Often, these sections flow more easily for me by default, and I hope to shift the momentum to the original section I was struggling with.
As stories grow and figure panels become denser, journals have devised a solution to support authors: Supplementary Materials. These are standard sections in most research journals where authors can add content to a paper that is helpful but not essential to understanding the main story of the paper. More importantly, these are often less strict, if any, in terms of formatting requirements and length, which allows authors to manage their content much more easily. Still, I have realised that even without constraints, this space should be used with intention, providing comforting scientific data and remarks for the specialised questions that the primary target audience may have, rather than becoming a place to dump all the results that did not make it to the main figure panels. Again, studying other articles can help navigate this process, although it ultimately relies on the authors’ judgment to decide what to include. Almost.
Being open to changes
After we finish our draft and believe it is the most fascinating scientific paper ever written, we must remain open for feedback. While co-authors should ideally have been involved in the writing phase, one more group of individuals must be pleased with the work before it can be shared with the community in a journal: the reviewers. Indeed, co-authors and reviewers should and will have recommendations on particular segments, and we must be flexible enough to accommodate them. For the latter, I believe this is one key advantage of the peer-review process where, by providing our manuscript to scientists who are knowledgeable but have not contributed to the planning and execution of the work, we can get a precise impression of how the scientific community within the field would perceive the manuscript, and whether the message received matches the one we wanted to convey with the paper. After a few revision iterations, we hope to have improved the manuscript to an understandable level and successfully convey our message to a scholarly audience.
Conclusion
Writing a manuscript is a demanding exercise that requires practice and thought. More importantly, it helps develop tremendously useful skills to communicate multimodal information in a world with ever-decreasing attention spans. While it has been a challenge to accommodate all the requirements I need to fulfil for my manuscript, I am excited to continue iterating and improving my draft and, hopefully, achieve a successful publication.
Please feel free to share your thoughts about your approach to preparing research manuscripts!
Have a great day!