Writing

Fat outline: put some meat on the backbone of your research

You want to convey your next idea to the world—or your supervisor—but you are lost on the most effective way. Very often, you would fall back to sending a rough table of content—the backbone of your research. Unfortunately, this backbone does not completely convey the motivation of the research, the logic you follow, and is very hard to get direct feedback on. There is an alternative: adding meat on the backbone and producing a fat outline.

Suggested by Josh Bernoff, the fat outline is like the ongoing draft of your paper. It contains (of course) how you will organise the content but also pieces of the actual text, doodles of the graphs you expect to get, keywords, and basically anything you want—or should receive—feedback on. It forces you to think hard on how you motivate your work. You can then more easily convey this motivation to others. And others can also tell you where you are going wrong.

Use the fat outline as the platform to quickly iterate your ideas in the early phase of your paper. You’ll hit two birds with one stone: you check your idea at minimal cost, and you already build momentum towards your next paper.

Anthropomorphism or the art
of humanising nonhuman subjects

Academic writing should be clear and objective. In the pursue of objectivity, some believe that by using the first person and introducing ‘I’ or ‘we’ in their text, the outcome will not sound as rigorous or formal. But attempting to avoid the first person may confuse readers, leaving them wondering ‘who does what?’ as we discussed in our article about the passive voice. Focusing on objectivity may also lead to anthropomorphism.

Passive voice in scientific writing: angel or devil?

For years, we were told that in scientific writing we needed to use passive voice to sound formal, neutral and serious. More recently, the contrary philosophy bursted in: suddenly, passive voice had to be by all means avoided as it forces hiding the agent of the sentence and creates confusion. This paradigm shift left many of us in the doubt… is using passive voice in formal, scientific writing right or wrong?

Not in the mood to write? Why you should still show up, even if the muse doesn’t

Let’s face it, us, scientists, are passionate about our job. We are usually delighted about carrying out our scientific tasks (experiments, simulations, reviews, etc.). But when it comes to writing our findings, the motivation goes down. We rarely feel we’re ready to write and we rarely feel in the mood to write… the consequence: when we sit down and are supposed to write, we rather start doing other things, we procrastinate. And of course procrastination comes guilt and frustration. Until the deadline dangerously approaches: then, in the last minute, creativity pops up. Well, let us break it for you: that’s not really last minute creativity, that’s stress and adrenaline doing their job.

In our Road to Bootcamp series of posts, we’ve already covered how starting writing your work early enough will let you fully benefit from the ‘magic’ of the writing process; therefore, reducing procrastination. In this post, we’ll focus on how creativity can be boosted—even when you’re convinced that you’re not in the mood to write.

Want to procrastinate less and be an effective writer? Start writing your articles early enough

If you ask researchers about their main issues when it comes to writing, procrastination always appears on top of the list. There are several methods that can help you become an effective writer who seldom procrastinates (or who effectively procrastinates—did you know that that’s possible?), so on our Road to the Writing Bootcamp we will be dedicating a series of blog posts to this problem.

Why do we procrastinate when it comes to writing a scientific document? For multiple reasons, but many of them are related to the fear of the blank page, also known as writer’s block.

Effective template to write your answer to reviewers

You have just received the reviews for your article. After a long wait, this is the most painful step. The main issue is that reviewers and authors don’t speak the same language. To speed up and ease this process, authors should address the comments so that reviewers can easily assess how their feedback has been tackled. What is then the most effective way of writing your rebuttal?

Continue reading “Effective template to write your answer to reviewers”

You want to write articles that get accepted? Do reviews.

At the end of my PhD, I started receiving invitation to review articles. At that moment, I felt honoured as if I had received the membership card of a very selective club.

Later, as a postdoc and professor, the number of invitations increased while my time available for such type of tasks decreased. However, I noticed something interesting that I wanted to test with my students.

Continue reading “You want to write articles that get accepted? Do reviews.”

The authorship manifesto

Getting your name on an article is becoming more and more important in the “publish or perish” era. Although I believe writing papers is an excellent objective for doing research, deciding who should be on the paper can become tricky in some cases.

Here is the result of an intense discussion during the team building (with ATM, FLOW and BURN research groups) in 2017. You can directly jump to the summary table at the end if you are in a hurry.

Continue reading “The authorship manifesto”

Does your article address these important issues?

I often need to review articles and give feedback on them. I find my feedback is most efficient when I can focus on the content (results, figures, etc) and the flow of the article. These aspects of the article are what interest the first author most, even if he or she is also happy to get a review of the typos or other secondary problems. Yet, more often than not, many of my comments are about things that can be more or less automatised. This post is a checklist for the common problems I encounter. Continue reading “Does your article address these important issues?”

Clear, accurate, concise writing

I’m writing this post following a very interesting talk of Jean-luc Doumont on “clear, accurate, concise writing”. This was an updated version of his previous talk on effective written documents. Continue reading “Clear, accurate, concise writing”

Are you following these steps when submitting your paper?

As I covered in another post, writing your paper begins when you start working on a topic. At some point, you’ll want to submit it. When approaching the last steps towards that point, it is effective to apply the following timeline. Continue reading “Are you following these steps when submitting your paper?”

Are you lost after the submission of your manuscript?

After submitting your manuscript, the hard wait for the review starts. You could think that everything is handled perfectly on a first-in-first-out basis. But this is unfortunately not the case. It is not an easy job to be an editor, it takes a lot of effort, time investment and organisation. So you have to do everything to facilitate their work and this requires some follow-up from your side. Here are the most important steps. Continue reading “Are you lost after the submission of your manuscript?”

Are you using these time-saving features of LaTeX?

We will cover here some good practice when writing your manuscripts with $\LaTeX$ . To make sure the persons who review your manuscript before submission (more details) pay attention to the content of your article instead of the little problems, it is worth following these tips. Continue reading “Are you using these time-saving features of LaTeX?”