Book Review: The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, by Stephen B. Heard
Note: This was originally published on the Canadian Science Publishing blog on June 14, 2016, but was lost during a blog revamp.
Last month I wrote a post about writing scientific journal articles. I mentioned that scientists rarely receive specific training in scientific writing, thus often have to teach themselves this critical skill. Self-taught scientific writers are often constrained, however, by a common communication misconception: if a scientific paper is understandable to a non-specialist audience, the science itself must not be that groundbreaking or novel.
Fortunately, scientific writing help has now arrived, in the form of Stephen Heard’s The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career. An evolutionary ecologist and entomologist at the University of New Brunswick, Heard has written an engaging and comprehensive guide to writing for scientists. He applies his 25 years of academic experience in writing, editing, and reviewing to advocate for more readable, accessible, and understandable scientific writing.
You may worry that a book about scientific writing will be too long and technical to wade through. That’s far from the case, however, and this book is well worth taking the time to read. Heard writes in a conversational tone, sprinkling anecdotes and historical notes throughout the text that relate to the practice of both science and scientific writing. Each chapter is short and to the point, and ends with a summary of key ideas, plus a series of applied exercises to put Heard’s advice into action.
Heard’s book doesn’t just provide a formula for how to write, but starts off by making readers think about how they write: their writing behaviour. When do you write best? What parts of a paper do you find easiest/hardest to write? What are your biggest stumbling blocks? Perfectionism? Fear of criticism? What are the things that you’re best at? Putting together the Methods section? Creating understandable plots and tables?
By asking yourself these questions before you begin writing, Heard believes you can focus on the skills that will help you the most. This will also give you a better understanding of what you need to focus on to improve your scientific writing.
The book contains some innovative approaches that you wouldn’t necessarily find in other books about writing scientifically. One of these is the importance of being aware of your audience and writing specifically for them. While this isn’t a new idea in science communication (see here and here), it’s not often applied to scientific writing. For example, do you have a specialized audience such as the readers of Cell, or is your audience much broader, like the readers of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment? Your word choice — among other aspects of your paper — will differ depending on your target audience.
A second innovative suggestion is to visualize your research as a story, and select those aspects of your research that best support your storyline. Note that this doesn’t mean cherry picking your results! It means reporting only those results — whether positive or negative — that are relevant to the overall story. While scientists often say their research stands on its own and doesn’t need to be ‘sold,’ Heard thinks otherwise. He argues that, when writing a paper, you need to draw the reader in and make extremely clear to them why they should read your work. Given the number of scientific papers published each year (in the 2.5 million range), you’re competing with many other papers for the reader’s attention. You’d better make the most of that opportunity!
Heard also champions writing in active rather than passive voice — an ongoing struggle in a discipline that argues that passive voice is more appropriate for scientific writing because it’s more objective. As Heard outlines in his book, active voice is shorter, easier to read, and more engaging, vivid, and honest. While there is a case to be made for passive voice in a few select situations, active voice will more effectively engage your readers.
The book covers a broad range of topics, from understanding how you write and the psychology of writing itself, to the requisite sections about standard paper structure: Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion (the IMRaD approach).
Heard also devotes part of the book to writing tips that would make a plain language enthusiast swoon. These include sections addressing everything from the big picture of your paper’s overall structure, to the smaller picture of paragraph structure and individual word choice. He also outlines how you can achieve brevity and clarity in your writing, something all plain language advocates support.
There are also several bonus sections that, while they don’t provide direct writing advice, are just as valuable.
These include how to write your acknowledgments, and even how to discuss the thorny issue of authorship when you’re doing collaborative research. Note that, for the latter, Heard suggests addressing this early in the research process. Thus when you write the paper, it’s immediately clear who has made a “substantial intellectual contribution to multiple aspects of the work,” and is therefore granted co-authorship.
Heard also devotes three chapters (Ch. 21–24) to revision of scientific papers, in which he covers self-revision, and both friendly and formal review and revision. These sections are particularly useful because students rarely learn how to revise their own scientific writing until they reach graduate school.
Heard advises writing multiple paper drafts, and taking time away from the manuscript between each draft. Only once you have a solid, good quality draft should you request a colleague review the paper (i.e., friendly review). After addressing your colleagues’ comments, you’re ready to submit for formal review, and Heard provides extensive detail on how to respond to such a review. A good rule of thumb? If a reviewer doesn’t understand something you’ve written it’s likely not their fault, but more realistically an issue with your writing and communication skills.
Though pitched at scientists, the book could also be useful for science writers and communicators. Not only are the sections on brevity and concision useful, but Heard also discusses different types of writing, including science blogging. While he feels that science blogging isn’t necessarily essential for disseminating research results (note that a recent study by Paige Brown Jarreau suggests otherwise), he does think that “the influence of blogs on the way scientists think about and practice science…seems to be strong and growing stronger.”
While I enjoyed the book overall, I did stumble over a few elements.
For example, the section on the psychology of writing in Chapter 5 — particularly “temporal motivation theory” — seemed a bit detailed for the average reader.
Additionally, while Heard uses ongoing examples in the text to illustrate exactly what he means, I felt it would have worked better had he used mainly ecology examples. I understand that his goal is to appeal to a range of scientists, which is likely why he chose an initial example based around astronomy and the discovery of specific cloud nebula. Unfortunately, this example peters out in Chapter 11, as Heard admits he doesn’t know enough about the topic to continue using it. For the sake of continuity, it may have helped to start with — and stick with — an ecology example that could be used throughout the book, instead of switching from astronomy to biology halfway through.
I also found it interesting that Heard only mentioned hiring editorial help for writers who use English as an additional language (EAL). I would argue that, while editors certainly are helpful in this situation, they’re also quite useful for all scientists in helping achieve the clear, concise scientific writing the book champions — particularly when it comes to overall paper structure, individual paragraph structure, and word choice.
Overall I found the book to be immensely readable, with a wealth of practical information and applied exercises that will help scientists write better. The only trick will be juggling your other commitments to carve out enough time to make the most of what this book offers.
