- If you research does not generate papers, it might just as well not have been done
- Interesting and unpublished = non-existent
- Do not, under any circumstances, wait until the collection of data is "complete" before starting to write... No project is ever complete
Writing outlines for papers
- Outline: a written plan of the organization of a paper, with objectives, hypotheses, and conclusions
- Should be done before ou even starts your project!
- Most efficient way to write papers
- If we agree on the outline, writing the text is easy
Starting to write
- why did I do this work?
- what does it mean?
- what hypotheses did I mean to test?
- what did I actually test?
- what were the results?
- Did the work yield a new method?
- ......
- Basically write down as many questions that you can think of!
Other essential pieces
- Hypotheses
- Objectives
- Data
- "Much of good science is opportunistic and revisionist!"
Introduction
- Why did I do the work?
- What were the central motivations and hypotheses?
- Why was it interesting fundamentally?
- Why was it useful?
- What was new?
Results & Discussion
- What were the results?
- What were the main point?
Conclusions
- What does it all mean?
- What hypotheses were proved or disproved?
- What did I learn?
- Why should people care?
- Why does it make a difference?
- How will the world be better with this new piece of information
GO TO THE LAB!!!
- The goal is to try to answer all the questions in the previous sections by:
- Experiments
- Literature search
- More experiments
Back to the office briefly!
- Express your experimental results, analyses, hypotheses, literature results in the form of:
- Tables
- Figures
- Curves
- Plots
START WRITING YOUR PAPER!
- SUMMARIZE YOUR CONCLUSION IN ONE SENTENCE!
- For short paper, you can only make one point!
- For longer paper, you can only make one point and two at most! But the two points have to be closely related!
- Know your point before writing! Every single sentence in the paper should help to serve this point!
Introductions are hard to write!
- One possible guideline: See weitzlab guide
Figures
- Draft the figures.
- Write the figure captions first!
- Discuss the figures COMPLETELY in the text! The goal is that readers don't have to see the figures and can still understand the points you try to make!
- Guide the readers about what to look for in the figures. Don't just let them look everywhere. Thus, discuss the observations first, and then say "..., as shown in..."; rather than "we show that"
A few principles
- Do not simply lay down unprocessed data; instead process the data in a way that readers can easily understand your conclusions and the points you are trying to make!
- One of the WORST habit is to write things chronologically!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- DON'T WRITE A DIARY! WRITE A STORY!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Check Weitzlab guide for a trick to tell a story.
A few writing habits
- Do not use nouns as adjectives.
- Complete all comparisons
- Use the active voice whenever possible
- Generally use the present tense
- Do not use (blah blah blah) in the text
- Do not use "i.e."
- Never use "in order to" ... replace them with "to"
- Never use "on the other hand"...
- Avoid jargon... so even laymen readers can understand
- Never start a paragraph with structures like:
- "we now describe blah blah blah" we don't need a running commentary
- "Such and such has been of interest recently..." Of course it should be of interest; otherwise why should you write it
A few observations from our group
- Avoid long sentences! (less than 20 words)
- No CRAZY nouns! You will be amazed how long a noun some lab members can write! The foxus should be on the verb, not the noun.
- Never Never Never start a sentence by
- "Fig. blah blah describes...."
- "And ..."
- Don't write, "as follows:..."
- Some phrases, such as "speak something about", "in some cases", "in other cases", are quite ridiculous! Always be concrete and avoid "something", "some cases", "some times"... specify what thing, what situation, and when!!!
