A scientific paper has to be written in such a way that people will read it. The problem is that very few people are going to want to read it. There is no white-coated scientist who spends her spare minutes voraciously reading not only all the papers relevant to her work but also all the papers that are only tangentially related. Oh, okay, there are a few, but even they don't want to read our papers.
Getting someone to read your paper is like getting someone to eat a cookie with a mysterious gooey center. You need to present your cookie so that it seems palatable. You need to convince the reader that the mysterious center is the sweet, creamy middle of a Hostess Ding Dong and not a clump of spider eggs. Your idea, the central theme of your paper, is that mysterious gooey center.
Your paper has to begin by telling the reader about the sweet, creamy middle. "It's okay!" you need to shout. "It's not a clump of spider eggs!" However, you can't just jump into the creamy middle and then start flinging hunks of cookie at your reader's face. You need to go back to the edge of the cookie, telling them about the creamy middle from interesting different perspectives. After they've nibbled around the edge you can get them to bite deeper into the cookie, into the support structure of the creamy middle.
If you do it right, the reader won't even realize he's eating a cookie. It will seem to him that he's eating an unrolled cinnamon bun, a pretty much straight road with signposts saying "This way to the warm, sweet, gooey, slightly underdone middle that's the best part of the cinnamon bun!"
Hmm. I need to make a run to the 7-11.
7 comments:
What you leave out, though, is that most of us read papers the same way we eat cookies with warm gooey centers: we skip to the good bit, and only later go back and eat the crusty edges if we still want some cookie.
AP, I'd say this is the case for just about *all* graduate papers in *all* disciplines. And Anonymous has an excellent point, too.
And now I'm hungry, too. Thanks a whole lot, AP.
[calling Domino's for Cinna-Stix]
AP, as someone who's written a few coma-inducing papers, I'm going to keep this advice in mind for my next scholarly work.
Agreed. I call this the "vortex of inevitability," it's how one writes effective introductions to scientific papers. Start broad, and then little by little get more specific (talk about the state of the art, certain important open problems), so that by the time you hit the reader with "In this paper, we..." they will be ready to be understand why and how you are doing what you are doing and why it's important.
I want to anonymously leave this in all of my graduate students' mailboxes....
Angry Prof, I am a cookie flinging graduate student! I love this post. But I have a question. What if like me, your graduate students understand and agree that they need to trick other into mistaking their cookie for a cinnamon bun, but don't know how? Sign-posting alone won't do it, and not everyone has an natural ability to conjure used-car-salesman narratives.
Anonymous 7:48, you must pretend that your audience consists of high school seniors. Never overestimate the background or intelligence of your readers.
You must weigh every word, examine every sentence, and evaluate the contribution of every paragraph. Every student I have had and many of my professorial colleagues have underestimated the amount of work that goes into writing. The first thing that goes down on the page is almost never as clear or relevant as you think it is.
Define every term before it is used. Avoid jargon. Avoid acronyms. Don't use $10 words when perfectly good $.50 words are available. Know the difference between effect and affect, which and that, since and because.
Writing clearly is very hard work. And sometimes, unfortunately, the problem lies with the writer and not the writing. You can't write clearly until you can think clearly.
If the writing is clear, you don't have to work nearly so hard to sell it.
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