“Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.”
So George Orwell began his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, which is still relevant today as both a guide and a warning. Reading it now (the whole thing is available online courtesy of the Orwell Foundation), it strikes me that the decline Orwell saw in the English language might be blamed on science as much as politics. Three of his “five specimens” of poor writing come from academia (one of them written by a prominent zoologist), and many of the specific writing habits he criticises are ones I see regularly in modern papers. One of our recent “NERD Club” discussion sessions was based on Orwell’s essay and related topics, as we looked for the conscious actions that might help us to write clearly and accurately.
“I don’t get philosophical. Love fish. Love sharks. Keep the water and their habitats as clean and protected as possible” – Eugenie “The Shark Lady” Clark, American Ichthyologist
Early life
In the world of Marine Biology, there are two prominent female figures in my mind: Sylvia Earle, aka Her Deepness, and Eugenie Clark, aka the Shark Lady. Anyone who knows me will already know why they are so special to me, simply by reading their nicknames. I am a marine biologist, a shark scientist, and a woman so it feels special to have two such successful figures to look up to and to follow in their footsteps. You can look out for a post about Sylvia Earle very soon, but first let me tell you about her good friend and someone she looked up to since her childhood. Eugenie Clark was born in May 1922 (a Taurus like me!) in New York City to a Japanese mother and an American father. She became passionate about the underwater world when she was very young and wrote most of her school reports about the topic. She visited the Aquarium in NYC weekly and went on to study Zoology at Hunter College.
When grading assessments as a demonstrator, I try really hard to give helpful, constructive feedback. It’s important for everyone to learn from their mistakes and develop both as scientific thinkers and as writers. However, there are a few mistakes that happen very often and really grind my gears. If you want to impress your grader and improve your marks, avoid the mistakes below like the plague. Continue reading “Top 10 Minor Assignment Mistakes that Grind my Gears (+1 bonus)”
Inspired by the awesome blog, the Thesis Whisperer and under the constant reminder that we must publish or perish, post docs from the School of Natural Sciences have been meeting on a weekly basis, on and off for the past year to sit down, shut up and write. Here is a bit of background on the Shut Up and Write ‘movement’, a little bit of what we’ve learned along the way and a big invite to any post grads, post docs and PIs in TCD’s School of Natural Sciences to come along and join us.
The post docs shutting up and writing. It’s that simple!
One of the most fun things to do while procrastinating on the internet is to read productivity hacks. There is a treasure trove of resources out there telling you how much better you would be at your job if you ate better, slept better, exercised more and bought their productivity app. Funnily enough, none of them tell you to just close the browser window and get on with it. On one of these jaunts through the internet I stumbled upon Dr Inger Mewburn’s, ‘The Thesis Whisperer’ blog and while I have spent longer than I should have trawling through her blog’s archives, it is such a great resource that I now annoy all the post grads in our lab with recommendations to do the same. One of the great ideas I found while procrastinating reading was that of setting up a Shut Up and Write group. These do exactly what they say on the tin, providing a place for interested people to come together and write. For some, this may seem counter-intuitive, going somewhere to meet takes time that could be better spent just getting on with the project in question. However, as Mewburn and fellow Shut Up and Write enthusiasts find, the problem with staying at your desk is one of continued interruption by email and requests for time by those who assume that because you are at your desk, you are ‘free’. Having a dedicated time to write also means that you are less likely to schedule other meetings/activities over it.
So, having met a couple of the School’s post docs and recognising in each other a desire to organise ourselves and meet with some sort of regularity, I proposed that we try out Shut Up and Write. What better group to sell the idea of regular writing sessions to, than post docs? Our group is small and we try to meet every week. We’ve tried the busy coffee house, but as our campus is in the city centre, busy is definitely too busy for our tastes, and we now meet on campus (in very close vicinity to tea and coffee facilities!!). We have also been derailed at times by the changes to our schedules that the switch between term time and holidays can bring. However, having regrouped recently after a bit of a break, I think the key is not to stress out about having spent time away from the group, or from writing and to just get on with it.
Once we’ve all come together, the session works something like this; we all grab a cup of tea/coffee and have a good natter. After about 15 minutes we sit down to our computers/notebooks and write for 25 minutes. We then have a quick breather (maybe 5 minutes) and then work for another uninterrupted 25 minutes (yes, that is the Pomodoro Technique). We currently tend to work on our own writing projects, but new collaborations and assistance with reading and editing manuscripts are all part of the potential a Shut Up and Write group has. Over the year we’ve worked on journal articles, grant proposals, blog posts, book chapters, technical reports and project management reports and the fact that we are still making time in our schedules suggests that it’s been a pretty productive experience all ’round. If you’re a post grad, post doc or PI in the School and would like to know more, please let us know in the comments!
“Writing a [thesis] is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” Winston Churchill
I’ve just finished my PhD thesis and thought I’d share some of my opinions on how best to go about writing one. But before we get there I’d like to express my skepticism of the value of writing a thesis as a means to evaluate a budding scientist. I don’t know of any papers in journals that run over a 100 pages but classically this is what was expected of us at PhD level. It’s rare that a scientist writes a monograph. Instead we compose pieces of research that can be explained in around 10 pages. Scientists use mathematics and statistics to make our points, in that way our numbers do the talking so we can afford to be succinct. This is in contrast to students of the arts who typically draw on argument and rhetoric in their works building to a singular point or thesis! But that’s irrelevant to this topic because you still have to write one and many departments are quite flexible with their definition of thesis.
So my first piece of advice is write chapters with the aim of publishing them. You’re training to be a scientist and papers are your currency so keep that in mind. Three or four data chapters with a general introduction and discussion seem to be the way to go. If you have this approach you’ll be able to finish up parts long before the deadline. If you can get papers published, all the better, a peer-reviewed chapter looks very well and will be an improved piece of work for having gone through the process. The final body should be a coherent whole but these are not book chapters in a story. That said be aware of how you want to frame the whole thing.
Try to be concise; it’ll be easier for you to write, easier for your examiners to correct and more attractive to anyone else who wants to read it. There may be some work you did over the course of your PhD that has to get the chop to achieve this.
There’s no problem in seeking help. Science is meant to be collaborative, even more so today. In 2012 only 11% of all papers were single authored. You’ll be able to get much better chapters if you include people who can add a bulwark to any of your weaknesses. Just make sure you do the bulk of the work and properly credit your collaborators where necessary.
Give some thought to the program you’ll use to write up the project. MS Word isn’t the only way. I found assembling the whole thing in LaTeX went quite smoothly because it’s specifically made for writing technical documents. The downside was it was difficult for others to comment on it. There are ways to do this but I was a novice at the time.
Step back from the cult of the busy too. I found giving myself a break from the write up helped me come up with a much better frame for my discussion.
Start early, don’t write much, aim for papers, and use LaTeX. Simple. How’s that for concise?
(The contents of this post are subject to change after my thesis defence)
Author: Adam Kane, @P1zPalu, kanead[at]tcd.ie
Photo credit: http://centrum.org/2014/08/creative-nonfiction-workshop-nov-6-9/
We’re delighted that one of our regular EcoEvo@TCD writers, Sarah Hearne (@SarahVHearne) has won a prize from the Association for British Science Writers. Sarah won first place in the new Good Thinking student science blog category for her piece, Sea Serpents off the Port Bow! published in November last year. These prestigious awards recognise excellence in scientific journalism and writing from both students and professionals and it’s a great achievement to have been singled out among such stiff competition.
