Writing Science: What Makes Scientific Writing Hard and How to Make It Easier

Abstract

Writing is an integral part of science at every stage; it is how we outline a project idea, communicate with collaborators, draft a grant application, synthesize our insights into a manuscript, and share science beyond academia. Yet, when training students to be scientists, we often focus exclusively on the scientific method and the work of data collection. We rarely talk about the equally important topic of writing about science (Reynolds and Thompson 2011, Turbek et al. 2016). When we do discuss writing with students, trainees, and peers, we emphasize the mechanics: how to structure a manuscript, the style conventions of scientific writing, and the submission process (Guilford 2001, Turbek et al. 2016). As a scientific community, we rarely discuss the actual act of scientific writing itself. Unfortunately, the writer’s block that plagues most academics has nothing to do with manuscript structure or style conventions (Kwok 2020). Even when we have a detailed outline, know what we want to say, and have the citations bookmarked, we often struggle to turn the outline into a full draft. Indeed, advice columns in Science (Van Bavel and Gruber 2019), Nature (Kwok 2020), Inside Higher Education (Rockquemore 2015, 2016), and many scientific blogs are full of acknowledgments that the act of writing is hard.