Tips & Tricks: Unlock Your Inner Writer with Free Writing

Posted by Taylor Roberge

I was reminded over the holidays of how difficult it can be to sit down, write, and be productive. I always feel like I will just get distracted or bogged down in trying to get all my materials out. Really I just come up with excuse after excuse to avoid writing at all costs. Oh you need help baking cookies? Here let me take the trash out. All out of butter? Let me run to the store to get some more. Everything seems to be a better option than to sit down and crank out a couple of pages of text.

A lot of this sentiment, at least for me, stems from the idea that I need to produce a near finished product on the first try. This takes a lot more time and concentration than those short 30-45 minute intervals between talking to your visiting family.

The problem of putting off writing because it doesn't seem like there will be enough time to get it near perfect on the first try is not isolated to the holidays. It has haunted me, and most likely others, countless times. That is until I started free writing. I've found that in relatively short amounts of time I can synthesize quite a bit of information. Sure its super rough, and will definitely need to be reworked, but it gets you started. You only have 15 minutes? So what? That's enough time to get a couple paragraphs down sans references that you can go back through later and probably double once you've actually fleshed out all of your fine detail.

So don't get bogged down by the need to have every reference perfect, or have each idea fully realized on the first draft. Try to get something down on paper to get going, even if it's incomplete. You'll be glad you did.

Research Writing: Getting Started

Posted by Katie Alexander

So, you’re finally ready to publish. Well, ready is a strong word. You’ve completed all the necessary experiments to tell an interesting scientific story, and now it’s time to share it with the scientific community. But, where do you start? You’ve spent months or years collecting data, so every piece of this paper is precious in your mind. You know the data forwards and backwards, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is easy to put together in a readable format. This is where thinking about writing for the general public may come in handy. Sure, scientific papers have a very specific format: abstract, introduction, materials and methods, results and discussion, but they still tell a story. Think about how you would explain your research to a family member that is not in science. Think about the order of events. Chances are, that’s the most logical and readable order for a paper. The results section may not be an exact chronological representation of when the experiments were carried out, but the paper is organized in a way that leads the reader to the final conclusions in a step-wise, predictable manner.

Additionally, I’ve found helpful research writing advice from non-science writers. I recently read Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott. In this hilariously entertaining book, Ms. Lamott muses about life, recalling events that have shaped her as an author and human-being, all the while delivering writing (and life) advice by the truckload. And while the writing process is a little different for strictly scientific papers, there is still plenty of applicable advice. For example, it’s okay to have bad first drafts. First drafts are for getting things on paper, not for others to read. Ms. Lamott also talks about the importance of short assignments, little vignettes in the grand scheme of things that can help keep you on track. She recalls a story about her brother from their childhood, who was on the brink of a meltdown because he had procrastinated for months on a major research paper on birds that was due the next day. Her father came to his rescue, simply saying, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” That’s how papers and stories get written, piece-by-piece. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a step back and tackle it experiment by experiment.

Image used from Flickr user Incessant Flux under Creative Commons License

Research Writing: Form a Writing Group to Boost Your Productivity

Posted by Lesley McCollum

You’re probably in the middle of one right now. You may even be avoiding it by reading this instead. It’s that writing project that's always in the back of your mind. With research proposals, journal articles, literature reviews, and dissertations, writing is a big part of research. It unites all grad students and faculty — whether you study Cancer Biology or Anthropology. Unfortunately, most of us are also guilty of not making it a priority. We like to think we’ll find time for it — in between our experiments tomorrow, or after we’ve read just a few more articles. It can temporarily relieve the pressure to put it off for later, but the problem is, that free time never appears. Too easily, any spare time gets sucked up by the pile of other tasks on our to-do lists.

To increase your writing productivity, you need to make time, not wait until you find it. A great way to do this is to form a writing group. Meeting with others for a designated writing time will boost your motivation and keep you accountable to accomplishing your writing tasks. It also provides a built in team for editing each other’s work and receiving feedback.

Ask around to other grad students or faculty at UAB — you know they will be working on a writing project too. Try mixing up the disciplines in your group. Having colleagues that know your field can be great for providing feedback on journal articles, but having someone outside your field can provide a useful perspective for writing assignments targeted for a general audience. The style of your writing group will be unique to your needs - find something that works for you.

Ready to start your group? Look for the WriteNow toolkit on the FastDrafting Resources page, provided by Dr. Jennifer Greer at the UAB Graduate School. It provides helpful tips for getting started. Also, watch for the WriteNow workshops happening later this Spring to learn about forming your own group and other strategies for boosting your writing productivity.

Have you formed a writing group? Please share how it has impacted your writing success in the comments!

Must See: TED Talks - Communicating your Science

Posted by Stephanie Robert

Image courtesy of polareducator.org 

Communication is critical in science. The ability of scientists to share their work with the scientific community, as well as with the general public is a central aspect of what we do. However, few scientists get formal training in science writing and communication. Fortunately, there are many free resources available online to help teach us how to effectively communicate our science. One of my favorite online resources for discovering new ideas is TED.com. If you haven’t already discovered TED talks, they are short, powerful talks that cover almost any topic imaginable – including science communication. And the speakers chosen for these talks are usually great communicators themselves, so it’s a great resource to learn from some of the best.

 A new find I have recently come across is Melissa Marshall and her TEDtalk “Talk nerdy to me” (see below for link).  This short TED talk is a lighthearted message from non-scientists to scientists about effectively sharing our work. Melissa Marshall, a communications teacher at Penn State University, stresses the importance of scientists and engineers being able to effectively share their work.  As she says, “science not communicated is science not done”. In this talk, Marshall highlights the importance of 1) Revealing why your science is relevant to your audience, 2) Avoiding jargon and making your ideas accessible, and 3) Dropping the bullet points and using illustrations instead to paint a picture and tell your story. The trick, according to Marshall, is to understand that the general public is interested in your work and wants to hear about it, but it must be communicated in a clear and interesting way. She ends with a mathematical formula to solve the problem of effective communication…watch her 4-minute talk to see what it is! She also has a TEDBlog, in which she goes into more detail about getting your audience excited about your work (http://blog.ted.com/2012/10/11/6-tips-on-how-scientists-and-engineers-can-excite-rather-than-bore-an-audience/).

Here are a few others to watch:

Judy Swan: In praise of technique

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/In-Praise-of-Technique-Judy-Swa

Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks

https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks

Melissa Marshall: Talk nerdy to me