It´s a journey. Similar to any journey, the beginning is important. And the ending. And it´s also important to use effective transportation. Your journey can be a smooth ride.
It´s scientific writing we are talking about.
In this episode of our podcast, we address a topic that is very close to our hearts: how to make scientific writing an effective and smooth journey.
We discuss on how to start. For many colleagues it´s starting that is hard, starting to write a paper, a grant, a thesis. Simon Sinek suggests to start with asking “why”: Why do I want to get this message across? Why should they fund my research? Why should they listen to this lecture?
The next step in writing is planning and preparing. And believe it or not, the tool for this is the outline. But not just a brief and quick outline. No, sfedit suggests to produce an outline that is 70% of the final product! The outline not only helps you in planning your writing. It will also structure your thoughts (at least it does for me). And it will give you a chance to get feedback early – when it is still easy to fix issues even when they´re fundamental. To make it easier to follow for your audience.
Because your audience is key. If it is hard for them to follow your information, they will not like the science. Unfortunately, this not only applies to your talks or your thesis, but also to your manuscripts and to your grant applications. Therefore it is key to have simple and easy to follow text.
Fortunately, there are effective rules on how to improve text. To improve text, it´s all about connection: connecting subject with verb, previous sentence to subsequent sentence, paragraph to paragraph.
We would even argue that if you work on getting your science across, this will improve your interpretation, your hypotheses, it will improve your science!
Because your science is interesting and relevant. But if you don’t get it across, it will not be visible to your colleagues, to the public.
Would you like to try? To make application of these writing tools easier, we will in addition give away 100 free-access vouchers to our learning platform “How to Write Your Thesis” – how cool is that! (https://www.udemy.com/course/how-to-write-your-thesis/?couponCode=75B4799145500648FC4F). If this link takes you to the for-pay access, this means that 100 writing aficionados were faster than you 😉).
