What’s your point ?

Finally responding to ecogeofemme’s invite to share our tips for writing, here is my contribution. It’s not so bad I left it until today, because I attended a seminar on… writing scientific papers today.

The seminar confirmed the main thing I wanted to say and added a few more interesting points. I think the major thing when you write a paper – and by that I mean the actual “I write a piece that I will submit to a journal” as opposed to writing reports to remember things – is to know what your point is.

The speaker today expressed it by saying: “one paper, one story”, and insisting that you actually have a good story: with a beginning: what’s the issue? A middle: what have you done to tackle it? And finally a conclusion: the discussion of what you found out. This really boils down to knowing exactly what it is you want to tell people and why it’s worth spending time reading your paper. Once you have that in mind, it becomes easier to know what you need to include and what just makes it confused (i.e. not serving the story).

Practically, the way to proceed is to start with an outline*. Previously I had heard that an abstract is a way to start: in 200 words, what is your story? What is your point? And you can keep on referring to it as you write the paper: am I helping my story here, or getting diverted? However, today’s speaker did not recommend that that abstract be used as the final abstract. He suggested everyone should find their preferred way of preparing that outline: a series of post-it notes you can reshuffle to organise ideas, preparing your tables and figures, or whatever you find suits you. Personally I have used the abstract method a few time and found it helped me sticking to my story’s thread.

This “one story, one paper” recommendation the speaker made today was part of a series of three that also included “keep it simple”, and “use correct language”. The latter is possibly most relevant to non-native English speakers.

One advice he gave that I really liked and will try to remember is that the title and abstract need to be really carefully written: that is what people will read to decide whether to read the whole paper… or not.

He also recommended that the introduction included some very general indication of methods and results used and obtained in the paper, but admitted that was a more controversial piece of advice.

He recommended this book. I haven’t red it… if anyone has an opinion on it, I’m interested!

* Just had a look at the comments over at the Happy Scientist after writing this… nothing outrageously new here, so… but I’m going to publish this (here) nonetheless!

Update: JaneB recommends the book too...