Preface

If you violate principles, your writing will suffer.

Exercises:
The most important is the short article I ask you to write (and rewrite, and then rewrite again).
The second important exercise is to analyze the writing in published papers.
Writing in Science
As a scientist, you are a professional writer.

We all understand that “publish or perish” is real and dominates our professional lives. But “publish or perish” is about surviving, not succeeding. You don’t succeed as a scientist by getting papers published. You succeed as a scientist by getting them cited.

Having your work matter, matters.

You succeed when your peers understand your work and use it to motivate their own.
Success, therefore, comes not from writing but from writing effectively.

They are able to cast their ideas in language that is clear and effective and that communicates to a wide audience.

In many cases, writing is the process through which scientists come to understand the real form and implications of their work.

Improving your writing will help you become successful, both because it allows you to communicate your ideas more effectively, making them accessible to the widest audience, and also because it makes your thinking, and thus your science, better.

Despite the importance of writing, however, for most scientists, it is something we do post hoc. After we get the data, we “write up” the paper. This is an unfortunate approach. Because writing is a critical tool, you should study it and develop it as thoroughly as your other tools.

But our work gets read and cited because we made our points well enough that readers could follow what we were saying. As the author, therefore, your job is to make the reader’s job easy.

Those books are more about publishing than about writing; they treat writing as something a scientist does.

Professionals pay attention to their craft, study it, analyze the work of peers to learn from them, develop new tools, and experiment with new approaches.

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