Writing

Good scientific writing is concise, precise, and interesting.

The method that I like to use to structure and write papers follows that suggested on the Conservation Bytes blog, which you can see here. Below is a summary of the post which I have paraphrased.

How to write a scientific article

Steps

  1. Brainstorm with your collaborators about your thoughts for the paper. As the lead author you are the one responsible for deciding what goes into the paper and what doesn’t.
  2. Write down the main message of the paper in 25 words or fewer. ALthough you might have multiple results, there should only be one main message. If you have more than one message then you need to work harder to consense these or you have more than one paper that needs writing.
  3. Write a working abstract. It should answer the following: (i) Why are you doing this? (ii) What did you do? (iii) What did you find? (iv) What does this mean? (v) What is it good for?
  4. Come up with a title Based on the main message and working abstract write your title, or alternative versions of your title if you cannot decide. In most cases it is good to summarise the main result in your title - linking it direclty to the main message of the paper that you’ve already written.
  5. Decide on what display items should go into the paper. Impose a strict limit of 6. If you have more than 6 items, rank them in order of importance and move the lowest ones to the online supplementary material.
  6. Create the figures and tables and write the legends for each. Remember that each legend should allow a reader to interpret a figure/table without referring to the main text.
  7. Circulate the choice of display items with legends to your coauthors. Revise accordingly until everyone is happy with the selection and presentation.
  8. Plan the skeleton of the paper. This requires lots of thinking and can take a long time - up to a day or more depending on what exactly you are doing.
    1. Decide on the length of the main text. This will vary a lot depending on exactly where you are thinking of submitting the paper, but I recommend aiming for around 3000-4000 words of text. If you need to write more it can go in the supplementary materials.
    2. Work out the relative size of each section (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion). A rule of thumb split for a 3000 word article is 600, 900, 500, 800, 200, but it varies depending on how much context setting is required, how many lines of evidence you are using, etc. Yet, despite this, it surprisingly often works out at roughly this ratio.
    3. For each section, plan the paragraphs. Each paragraph should be 100 to 250 words long, but at the moment all you need to do is write out the main message of each paragraph in 15 words or fewer. Each paragraph should only be about one main thing. Now play around with the order of the paragraphs until you are happy with the logical flow of the text.
    4. Add notes to each paragraph These can include keywoods, references that you want to cite, figures to refer to etc.
    5. Circulate your plan Send the skeleton plan of the paper to you co-authors and invite feedback. Indicate that you want critical feedback of the structure now, in order to fix any problems early on.
  9. Write the paragraphs. Because of the structure and flow of the paper is already established you can now write the paragraphs in whatever order you want. This really helps because some sections area easier (for me the methods and results) than others (the discussion) and so allows you to get some text down - helping with writers block.
  10. Revise the working abstract Convert the abstract into a final draft form based on how the paper has changed suring the writing phase.
  11. Circulate the draft Circulate the draft manuscript to co-authors and give them enough time (2 weeks?) for feedback.

Modifications for student disserations

The method above applies pretty well to writing student undergraduate and masters dissertations, but a few tweaks are needed. For PhD theses, you should think of each chapter as a paper, so in this case it’s safe to follow the above guidance to the letter.

The biggest difference between a dissertation and a paper is the length. Dissertations are generally allowed to be longer than the average published paper and in some cases this is a requirement. So when you set yourself a limit for the lengh of the piece of work (point 8) modify this based on the guidance that your institution gives you. The same goes for the number of display items (point 6) - you may want to include more than 6 display items. This is fine.

Resources on writing